DHH: Apple acted like a 'greedy dick' during HEY launch
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) · $100M+ Advice That'll Piss Off Every Business Guru (ft. DHH) · Mar 17, 2026 · at 1:08:01
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) looks back on 37signals' public clash with Apple over App Store fees and distribution rules when launching HEY in 2020.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I'm so happy. Apple chose to be such a greedy dick about it.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
DHH: Young people are smarter when it comes to liquid intelligence
“Well, it's not wrong. In a certain category of intelligence, this form of liquid intelligence, smart fast signups, firing stuff. Young people are smarter. Like, just like they run faster, right?”
DHH: Basecamp would never have created Ruby on Rails with venture funding
“If we had raised, I don't know, twenty million dollars and hired a hundred people, we would just use the same shit as everyone else, and we would never have come up with Ruby on Rails.”
DHH: Surveillance advertising monetizes low-intent traffic by targeting identity over context
“Surveillance Capital flipped it on its head that it did not matter whether intent was there. If we know everything about everyone at all times, all that matters is eyeball time, because now we can pinpoint whether an ad should be shown or not shown on the basi…”
DHH: 37signals ignored its data scientist for a decade, trusting intuition instead
“And after trying that for over a decade, Jason and I finally came to the conclusion in honesty that we never did what the numbers told us to do. What we would do was, we would do whatever the hell we wanted to do, and then if the numbers supported that, we'd g…”
DHH: Tech companies now reserve upside for VCs unlike Shopify's IPO
“Shopify didn't do as so many other companies do now, which is essentially reserve all the upside to insiders and their VCs, and then go public when it's already kind of plateaued, right? Like, from where they were to where they are now, an amazing ride for the…”
DHH agrees with the Silicon Valley consensus that AGI is imminent
“Like the herd, certainly out of Silicon Valley is like AGI is imminent. And even between now and AGI, we're going to go through such an intelligence explosion that hold on to socks, right? Yeah, I'm actually now in the consensus on that, which I'm always a lit…”