Out of Hours: The Podcast

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DHH: Building Basecamp and Ruby on Rails as side projects, with David Heinemeier Hansson

Season 2, Ep. 7

Brought to you by Out of Hours- the community of people with side projects.


If you enjoy this episode, consider buying me a coffee to show your support! ☕️ We currently make a loss on the show and your support means the world!


Today on the podcast is David Heinemeier Hansson: the co-founder and CTO of Basecamp, a NYT best selling author, and creator of Ruby on Rails.


Ruby on rails is a free open source web application framework. and some of the biggest companies in the world were built with it: Airbnb, Shopify, Twitch and Square to name a few. 


He’s also built hugely successful businesses: Basecamp - which started as a side project for him and his cofounder Jason. It has since made him a millionaire, and served millions of users.  


Alongside all of this, he is also an author. He’s written three books, including New York Times Bestseller Rework. He’s also a Le Mans class-winning racing driver.


Even though he started all his biggest projects as side projects, this is not a traditional podcast episode - we talk much more about the other meaning of ‘out of hours’ - the fact we are running out of hours and life should be meaningful. We talk about everything from:

  • open source
  • why intrinsic motivation matters
  • why he was a terrible employee
  • how to build your internal sense of control
  • why he doesn’t set goals
  • how he found out money doesn’t make him happy
  • whether he’ll ever go into politics
  • climate change


P.S. If you enjoy this episode, consider buying me a coffee to show your support! ☕️ We currently make a loss on the show and your support means the world!


More Episodes

3/2/2023

Allbirds: Building a sustainable shoe brand, with Tim Brown.

Season 4, Ep. 5
If you enjoy this episode, please buy me a coffee to show your support! ☕️Today on the podcast we have Tim Brown, co-founder of Allbirds.  Today Allbirds is a public company, with an IPO in 2021, and almost one thousand employees. But it didn’t start that way. In fact for many years, Allbirds was just an idea, a side project for Tim Brown - who was a professional footballer for the first part of his career, even playing in the world cup. Tim was bored of the branded shoes he had to wear as a footballer, and started to wonder if a better shoe could be made. For years, he experimented. Tim is a New Zealander, which is the home of merino wool, and he started experimenting with creating a new shoe material with his homegrown merino wool. After he had a prototype shoe, he launched a kickstarter - which proved the idea was popular with others. In 2016 - Tim officially co-founded Allbirds with his cofounder Joey Zwillinger - who helped shape the sustainability focus for the company. They are now a carbon neutral company, and were termed the ‘world’s most comfortable shoe’ by time magazine.We talk about tall poppy syndrome, why he thinks a sense of humour matters in entrepreneurship, and why he thinks the 85% rule of effort is so important. I hope you enjoy.  Join the Out of Hours newsletter here! If you enjoy this episode, consider buying me a coffee to show your support! ☕️ Your support shows me it's worth continuing!