Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the bootstrapped software company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. A contrarian voice in tech, he has spent 25+ years arguing that smaller is smarter, calm beats hustle, and profitable beats funded. He co-wrote Rework - a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller - and his TED Talk on why work doesn't happen at work has millions of views. Along with co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson, he has built one of the most influential (and deliberately small) software companies in history.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is a Danish programmer, entrepreneur, and racing driver best known for creating Ruby on Rails - the open-source web framework that powered GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, and thousands of other companies. As CTO and co-owner of 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY email), he is one of tech's most outspoken critics of venture capital culture, cloud computing excess, and hustle-culture mythology. A 12-time Le Mans competitor with a class championship in 2014, DHH is also a bestselling author (REWORK, Remote) and a prolific open-source contributor whose side projects routinely reshape developer culture.
Eoghan McCabe is an Irish technology entrepreneur born in Dublin in 1984, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Intercom — the AI-first customer service platform he founded in 2011 alongside Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. After building Intercom into a $1.3B+ unicorn over its first decade, McCabe stepped down as CEO in 2020 due to a neurological autoimmune disorder, then dramatically returned in October 2022, just weeks before ChatGPT launched. Within six weeks he had a prototype of Fin, Intercom's AI agent, and proceeded to cut roughly 40% of staff and redirect the entire company toward AI — a bet that paid off: Intercom hit an estimated $343M in revenue in 2024 (+25% YoY), raised $125M from Kleiner Perkins and $250M in debt from Hercules Capital (March 2026), and recorded its largest-ever quarter by net new ARR in Q1 FY2026.
Ryan Singer spent 17 years at Basecamp (37signals) evolving from UI designer to Head of Strategy, where he invented the product development framework that became Shape Up - a methodology that replaced sprint cycles with six-week appetite-driven building cycles. After leaving in 2020 he founded Felt Presence, a consultancy operating from Portugal, where he works as a fractional CPO and teaches teams how to stop running in circles and start shipping work that matters.