David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), Co-founder of 37signals

**David Heinemeier Hansson** (0:02)
I have a mild skepticism about my own ability to just talk at length about most topics that I care about, because I remember Getting Real from 2006, the brevity. We were so brief. All the chapters in Getting Real, most of them are half a page. Some of them are three paragraphs. And I actually have a deep appreciation for our former ability to be that succinct.
And it wasn't like we were trying to, it was just, here's the distillation of this idea down to these three paragraphs and that's it. Now, what's funny about that is when we wrote the later books, we didn't have that straight from the gut brevity. In fact, when we wrote Rework, the initial manuscript that we submitted was, I think, 50,000 words. That was what the publisher got to see, right? And they were very excited, great, this fits, this is like just the size of the book. And then Jason and I went through it and cut it in half.
And it was down to 25,000 words, and the publisher freaked out. They're like, we can't publish a business book that looks like this, that looks like a pamphlet. So we had to pad it with spacing and margins and illustrations to get to it. But it was really that process cutting it from 50,000 words to 25,000 words and taking some essays from two pages down to four paragraphs that really made it all happen. So I want to retain that ability to distill and sometimes just being able mechanically to talk for 20 minutes about a topic is not always the best thing.

**David Senra** (1:38)
I would say, obviously, we talked about this at dinner last night. I woke up like my abs are sore because I was laughing so much. But I told you this yesterday, I've been reading your writing for like 15 years. So yeah, you're writing, I think, brevity is the right thing to optimize for there, getting across your point in as few succinct ways as possible. But the art of conversation, the best conversations that you've ever had in your life, you're not like, oh yeah, I talked to this guy for five minutes, it's great. It's like, I talked to this guy for five hours.

**David Heinemeier Hansson** (2:06)
That's spot on.

**David Senra** (2:07)
And so this is why it's so important, why I wanted you on the show immediately. And we were working trying to figure this out for a few months together. It's like, dude, I remember watching like startup school in Y Combarrier, you probably did it in like 2008 And there's like lines from that because you were unfiltered. And I think that's like an hour long of just like, this is what's in my mind right now. And here's how I think about things that I still think of 15 years later. Let me ask you a question, the brevity, you've built so many different products.
I lost count of how many of them you have made millions, multiple millions of profits, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of profits.
Do you apply that like this like ruthless edit, like Rick Rubin's idea was like this ruthless edit, started out with 10, I'm gonna cut down, I think I need five, no, I'm gonna cut all the way down to three. And then we'll like be so judicious about what I add back. Like how do you think about that when you're building products?

**David Heinemeier Hansson** (2:58)
It's even more on our minds now than it used to be. And it was always on our mind. Our initial spiel, our tagline was less software.
When we launched Basecamp back in 2004, it was often contrasted with Microsoft Project and other kind of enterprisey heavy tools. And our pitch was always, it's really good, but one of the reasons why it's really good is it's just less. There are fewer features, there's less to learn, there's less to teach, there's just less. And we focus on making the few things it does do, do very well. Now, in this new age where using agents and AI has made it so much easier to implement things, it becomes that much harder to stick to those principles because we used to be granted these constraints simply by the fact that it took a long time to build things. And especially in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week to build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you can do anything because you can waste 10 hours really quickly just chasing things around or focusing on the non-essentials if we want to get that product out. And we got it out in 380 hours. And the reason I remember this was at the time, I was a contractor for 37signals. Jason had hired me at $15 an hour when I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and he was in Chicago. And by the way, I got paid in Apple Gear. That was the other laugh. It was like, don't even send me the money. I will just come to Chicago and you'll give me an iPod and a MacBook and whatever. Anyway, that's how it got started. And therefore I know exactly how much time we put into the first version. And the first version was awesome.