You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

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I'm delighted today to welcome to you, a global entrepreneur who's created tools that have changed many of our lives.

How many of you have used Ruby on Rails in building apps?

Cool! And the rest of you, it's in your future.

So, David Heinemeyer Hansen is the person who created Ruby on Rails, and he's a serial, global entrepreneur. You've had a chance to look at his bio on the web. He'll tell you more about himself. But right now, we'd like to welcome. David, here at Stanford, we're really delighted to have you with us. David.

Thank you. Thank you.

So just a brief bio on myself, David Hiramah Hansen. I'm originally from Denmark. I moved to the U.S. about four years ago.

And I'm a partner in a software company called the 37 Signals.

37 Signals makes simple collaboration tools. We've been around for 10 years, and even though

we're often lumped in with the rest of the Web 2.0 world, there's sort of a quirk in our setup

is that we've actually been profitable

for the duration of the company's lifespan. So we're a little bit of a misfit at times,

but that's sort of in part what I want to talk about here. The other part is that I'm the

creator of a web framework called Ruby on Rails that I heard some of you guys been using.

We use that for all our products.

It's free, it's open source, and it's gotten quite popular, and we give it away for free.

So that's sort of the tech side of what I do, but tonight I'm mostly going to talk about the

business side of what I do in terms of 37 signals. And I want to talk about just, I think I have

three or four topics, main topics, of things I have observations on currently, and we're going to

have a lengthy duration at the end for a Q&A.

...