#80: David Heinemeier Hansson, Co-Owner of 37signals— Creating with first principles, acting with courage, and working in a world with no managers

From Start-Up to Grown-Up

David is the creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-Owner of 37signals, best-selling author, Le Mans class-winning racing driver, antitrust advocate, investor in Danish startups, frequent podcast guest, and family man.

He writes regularly on HEY World and speaks on The REWORK Podcast.

Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have built amazing applications using Ruby on Rails, an open-source web framework he created in 2003, and continues to develop to this day. Some of the more famous include Github, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Coinbase, and Zendesk.

For my newest episode of From Start-Up to Grown-Up, I talk with David Heinemeier Hansson, Co-Founder of 37signals, to explore his journey of innovation, remote work, and unconventional management.

David is passionate, opinionated, unconventional and funny. And so is this episode!

Some of the things we talked about:

➡️ How to give yourself permission to think unconventionally.

➡️ When to follow traditional practices and when to invent your own.

➡️ Acting with courage by accepting the consequences.

I also appreciated David’s unconventional thinking:

➡️ The value of mentorship over management - 37signals doesn’t have managers since they believe that everyone at the company should be actively engaged in the work.

➡️ Disconnecting so your north star isn’t thrown off by too much information - young entrepreneurs should trust their guts and not rely too much on external consensus.

➡️ One-way doors versus two-way doors - we’ve all heard that concept from Jeff Bezos, but founders aren’t always rigorous in defining what a real one-way door is.

Learn more about DHH | Website
https://dhh.dk/

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