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.
Nate Kontny is a Chicago-based serial founder, engineer, and writer who went from chemical engineering at UIUC to co-founding two Y Combinator companies (Inkling W06, Cityposh S11), running Highrise as CEO for Jason Fried, writing prolifically across Medium, HuffPost, and Fast Company, and building a suite of solo products - most recently AlliHat, a Safari extension embedding Claude AI directly in the browser. Currently Staff Engineer at Fivetran (post-Census acquisition), he is known for his radical transparency about failure, his 250-words-a-day writing discipline, and a philosophy that shipping imperfect work beats endless polishing.
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.
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.