David Heinemeier Hansson

At some point DHH made a conscious decision to stop working on his homework so that he could instead find the time to play with computers and learn something new.

Of course it is, but you have to fill your scale with both. Challenging and rewarding work can be incredibly rewarding, and you can balance that with meaningful activities outside of work that make you happy!

DHH says he did not work harder than most people, but he ended up creating something that many people found valuable, and the economic system rewarded him for it.

David has a suspicion that most spoiled kids end up that way not because they had access to money, but because their parents brought them up to be spoiled.

If you have the means, it would be wrong to pretend that you cannot afford certain luxuries for your children, but money should not be raised on a pedestal as the ultimate prize.

Instead, teach your kids lessons on how to live a good life.

DHH says that if you are fortunate to make authentic choices about the way your life should be, it is your obligation to do so. Yet, he knows a lot of people who can, but don't do, and that's just sad.

Early on in life DHH realized the importance of intrinsic motivation. He wanted to do what he wanted to do.

In his third year in high school, for example, DHH realized he did not want to do math homework, so he stopped. He failed the class, but passed the year, and all the extra time allowed him to spend time playing video games and programming.

Survivorship bias aside, it's worked out pretty well for David.

On Rework, David Heinemeier Hansson tells Matt Mullenweg that benevolent dictator for life is a bad way to govern open source. Wikipedia lists Hansson for Ruby on Rails and Mullenweg for WordPress, and Hansson says the label asks people to trust that a dictator will keep making good choices. He points to Richard Stallman and the free software movement as a case where that title hid real power that was later misused. He wants power in open source named and limited, not excused because anyone is allowed to fork the code.

We are living through an era where a small handful of big tech companies are exerting a completely undue amount of power over the internet, over discourse, over all sorts of things. And that’s something we should try to recoil from and, at least learn from.

You get venture capital to the tune of half a billion dollars because you tell a compelling, extremely rapid, exponential growth story, but that desire to own the space does not lead to anything good, and only leaves the consumer with an illusion of choice.

Matt Mullenweg tells David Heinemeier Hansson that W3Techs looks at the top 10 million domains and finds about 34 percent running WordPress. He says that is about ten times the next open source platform, and he is not sure whether second place is Drupal or Joomla. Each year, he adds, WordPress gains roughly as much share as a couple of Drupals. Shopify, by his numbers, has about 800,000 merchants and only 1 to 2 percent of those domains, with Wix and Squarespace also in the market. A big WordPress share, he says, still leaves room for page builders such as Elementor, Visual Composer, and Gutenberg.

David Heinemeier Hansson finds that so much of the internet has been captured by the top ~10 companies, they get to dictate everything that happens on the internet. Blogging and podcasting are the last strong hold of the open internet, and he believes that by taking venture investments, WordPress will make blogging into the next thing to be dominated by one of these companies.

Matt Mullenweg introduces himself on Rework as the co-founder of WordPress, which he started in 2003, and as CEO of Automattic, the company he founded a few years later. Talking with David Heinemeier Hansson, he says he had been CEO for about five years. The conversation followed a funding announcement: Salesforce, the enterprise CRM company, had just bought 10 percent of Automattic for $300 million. Mullenweg says he and Hansson had been arguing on Twitter and that Twitter was the wrong place for it, so they moved the discussion to this unedited Rework call.

If you define your self-worth by outcomes defined as "successful" by the society around you, chances are you end up unhappy. If on the other hand, you pursue what you care about, it won't matter whether those things turn out successful or not, as long as you are happy doing them.

Let your kids have as much screen time as they want. Restricting screen time creates scarcity and builds desire for it. Let them manage their own time, and eventually kids get tired of screens. One they are tired, be there to help them find something better to do.

DHH just recently learned that in comparison to his peers, his family was actually quite poor growing up, but thanks to his mom's efforts, he's not realized it till this day.

Now that he is able to afford to spoil his kids with abundance of things, he does not think that is actually a good idea, but not for the reasons you might think. DHH lets his kids have any toys they want, but he is also teaching them about the value of passion, as opposed to the value of a reward.

The society tends to teach kids that had work is important, even if you do not like what you work on, all in pursuit of material goods. David says that all the toys in the world are not going to make a happy kid, at least n

David's mom never associated his self worth with the grades that he was getting at school, which encouraged him to optimize time for doing what he truly wanted to achieve, instead of following the path everyone else was on.

While growing up, David's dad was fixing electronics for people, and DHH realized that a service job was not going to yield much more output than effort put into it. This and similar life lessons have encourage David to put himself in a position where 1 unit of work in, would yield 1000 back out.

The amount of influence you can have from the bottom of an organization is very limited. The only way to make sure all the things you want changed are in fact changed is by being in charge, by running the whole organization.

David says everyone should work jobs that they hate for a short period of time to gather appreciation for work they would want to pursue.

If you become a CEO of a company without having had any experience working for someone else, you might make a ton of first-time mistakes, and be a bad boss.

Having worked in non-glamorous jobs had prepared David for what it takes to be a good manager, and he can now make decisions that are better for his employees, and therefore his company at large.

David says that in order to create a high multiplier on a single card, you have to apply the same techniques that salespeople use in business; you have to figure out how to turn something of lesser value and present it as something worth much more.

Around 13 years of age, young David Heinemeier Hansson started with a small collection of Magic the Gathering cards and traded up to a collection of cards worth 50x more than his original deck.