David Heinemeier Hansson, 37 Signals - Unlearn Your MBA (Audio) | Hacker News Reader

David Heinemeier Hansson, 37 Signals - Unlearn Your MBA (Audio)

ecorner.stanford.edu

77 pointshbien35 comments

Uh-oh...MBA in the title. Cue edw519 popping in to tell the tale of how all he remembers from b-school is his professor telling him that a degree in business is a degree in nothing :)

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%22...

Actually, I remember 2 things from business school. Thanks, ryanwaggoner, for reminding me of the other.

Oh, don't be stuffy. I'm just giving you a hard time :)

To be fair, I don't know if you can spend that much time on a forum and earn that much karma without repeating yourself now and then and then again.

As I have no doubt said before [1], the idea that forums will be run like code, in which everything is DRY and after the first day nobody posts anything but #includes pointing to their former words, is crazy and has always been crazy. Forums are conversations.

Teaching is all about saying and doing the same things over and over, with variations depending on the local audience and the immediate issues at hand. So it most of the rest of life, really.

---

[1] Yes, I meant to do that.

> Forums are conversations

Yeah, and if you're like me, a conversation means you're repeating yourself all the time because you don't have a hash table in your head keeping track of who you've said what to.

Actually I once saw a neurologist talk about how the brain and computer science might be related and he basically said that an oversimplified explination of the brain is that it's a hasH table. Now if only I could remember who it was that gave the talk.

Haha nice one. That's hilarious.

This recording contains explicit language and is not appropriate for all viewers. Sometimes you've just got to go with the brand, you know? ;)

Edited to add: This talk is very, very good -- much of it is what you've heard from 37Signals before, but it is well delivered and there are unique insights too. (In particular I like how people are socialized into maladaption to the preferences of professors. Oh, and I agree with this: "Our most important competitive advantage is good human writing" -- it is probably my most important skill that I talk the least about.)

I attended this talk in person, and have to say it was easily the most entertaining of the series I've seen all year.

The most interesting take-away was that DHH wants to build scalable companies in the sense that profits grow non-correlated to the workforce, ie. you don't hire 2 more people for $500million more in profits. Someone asked, wouldn't it good to employ 100k of people and create 100k jobs to which DHH said, no it's better for my personal wealth (which is the point of all good business) if I keep the profits to the smallest number of people possible - those 100k people should actually go out and make shit instead (his words). Food for thought.

It is interesting to consider how many jobs (globally) have been created, or shall we say, how many people's professional life has been shaped, by the software framework that DHH released to the world. So in a way, he has created jobs. Without ever diluting his revenue from 37signals. (comments?)

Personally I really enjoyed this talk. As a business school grad who taught himself to programme and now works for a bootstrapped web startup, I still value what I learned at business school. I think DHH is a bit harsh with the 'unlearn' label. I consider the core principles learned at b-school to be very important to shaping my everyday thinking. It is the specifics (DHH's example of Porter's five forces applies here) that can be forgotten. But those specifics were a great tool for developing the overall business mindset that he also describes. I don't regret my time there whatsoever.

"how many people's professional life has been shaped, by the software framework that DHH released to the world. So in a way, he has created jobs."

This suggests that were someone not using Rail they'd be unemployed. But, really, if there were no Rails then people would have been using (say) Nitro, or sticking to some Java or PHP framework.

I don't consider a job to be the absense of unemployment. I consider a job to have attributes, that is, my job is my role. So when I say 'created a job', I am talking about his influence in shaping a role and hence affecting somebody's life significantly. I thought about mentioning that explicitly in my comment but decided to leave it out. Again, just a thought.

Or like lots of people who are/were new to programing an exiting, creative and forward thinking framework to allow anyone to learn and create functional web apps inspired them to learn and to create when they were not programming before.

That was part of my point. Rails got massive attention, but it wasn't unique.

I enjoyed the talk very much, especially the part towards the end about management and how people whose sole job is to manage are a large problem because they start making shit up to manage because they need to fill out an eight-hour day. I think he does make a logical error about b-school, for example, in saying that because customers don't care whether you did the 5 forces analysis or not such analysis is irrelevant. B-school probably has tools such as 5 forces that may help you build a better product or position it better and just because your customers don't see or care about that analysis does not make it irrelevant. Kind of like building a web service on ROR.

Can you share some of those core principles that you use daily?

I think his quote was a little more inspiring than the Gordon Gecko version: his comment (in response to a question from an Indian gentleman as to whether a company with 100,000 employees wasn't more socially beneficial because it provides 100,000 people with jobs) was that if you desire to make a positive influence on people, rather than employing them you can teach them to "go out and make shit". Then you're both better off.

And, hey, I've never gotten a buck from 37Signals but in terms of job creation DHH only has maximum 99,999 to go :)

That's awfully different from a "little Italian restaurant", which is never, ever going to grow beyond a certain size.

The chain was founded in 1958 by Dan and Frank Carney. They chose the name "Pizza Hut" since the sign they purchased only had enough space for nine characters and spaces.

From Wikipedia.

> Pizza Hut

We were talking about Italian restaurants though. Pizza Hut fare is about as Italian as Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Also, I think that his whole point was about a "nice little Italian restaurant", not about a franchise.

Gordon Ramsay started with one restaurant.

So did Batali with Po, Lupa, Esca, etc. Italian!

So did Colicchio with Craft.

The talk was done at 5:30, in the following four hours it was trimmed down, intro voice & music added, uploaded w/ a photo taken at the event, found by someone here, and posted to HN. Got to love the internet.

yep! DHH thought the same too :) http://twitter.com/dhh/status/8015012471

Definately a good talk, and really inspires me to try and finally get something built and released in my spare 10 hours a week. I have been messing around with various projects over the last year or two, but it takes a long time to get anything decent done in 10 hours a week with one person before the motivation runs out.

One thing that just occurred to me, is that while DHH was working 10 hours per week on Basecamp, I'd bet that Jason Freid was putting in at least 10 hours on the design side too. For me, the programming side of things isn't the big time sink - its getting the application to look and flow correctly. I would guess that for every 10 hours I spend coding, I spend at least that trying to get the UI to look even half professional.

Thats not to take anything away from the achievement of building Basecamp in spare time, more an observation of how much more productive I would be if I had someone doing the UI elements along side me.

I've got to point out too that wrapped up in those 10 hours per week were 1000 lines of a little web framework in Ruby.

Yea, well Rails was born out of Basecamp - certainly an impressive achievement.

Only after this talk did I fully understand the difference the company he is trying to make / building (37 Signals) and the path that so many others follow.

Great advice that should be considered before any company brings on VC money.

My take-away: 1) Goal: "Make a dent on the universe" 2) Don't take VC money, which is a "time-bomb" 3) Don't be a workaholic. "Greatness comes from well-rested minds". Constraints force you to do less and different things. 4) No overnight success. It takes time.

For those that wish to see a video of roughly the same talk given by DHH at Startup School '08:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...

I found this really inspiring. It reminded me why I put myself on my MicroISV path. I've heard him say many of the same things before, but this was a nicely distilled 20-minute version.

I think it's funny that he referenced Domino's pizza CEO as an example of a lame MBA. Because just within the last week he resigned to coach college football at Michigan. Bizarre.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=4797284

David was great as usual. I found Steve Blank's questions/demeanor toward him to be a little condescending.

"this audio contains explicit language" haha, funny dave.

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