“I had the same kind of pseudo-religious experience I did as when I started working on Ruby”
On his first drive, Lex Fridman Podcast
How he got in
David Heinemeier Hansson came to racing late, and from a city that made cars hard to own. He grew up in Copenhagen, where, he explained on the Lex Fridman Podcast, the tax on cars ran above 200 percent. “So you pay for three cars and you get one, and I didn’t even have the money for one car, let alone three.” He did not get a driver’s license until he was 25.
In a 2020 post on X he gave the short version: “To be honest, it was mostly a question of money. ... But I also did play a lot of racing video games! 😄”
Le Mans came before any of it. His earliest memories of the race are from watching it on television in the 1980s, and the driver who held his attention was a countryman, the man known as Mr. Le Mans. He told Fridman: “My great hero in racing is Tom Kristensen, fellow Dane.”
He moved from Denmark to Chicago in November 2005. About two years after getting his license, a friend he had met in Chicago took him to the Autobahn Country Club, a track about 45 minutes outside the city, and put him in a single-seat Mazda. It was his first time driving a race car. On the podcast he described what happened in terms from his other life: “I had the same kind of pseudo-religious experience I did as when I started working on Ruby”.
What followed was repetition. He told Fridman: “Every single weekend for about four years, I would go to the track.” By the end of it, he had the skill, and the company had the success, for him to afford what he called real racing.
Early on, he fixed a destination. In a 2024 blog post he recalled setting the goal of racing the 24 Hours of Le Mans only a few years after his first time in a race car, when he was barely proficient enough to compete safely. He could see the trajectory from where he stood. “And have faith that I was going to get there.”
He is careful to separate that kind of goal from fantasy. He wrote: “Now there’s a fine line between goals that are ambitious and goals that are delusional.” Aiming to be the fastest driver in the world at 30, five years after a first license, would have crossed it. Aiming at Le Mans did not.
His first real competition came in 2009, in Porsches. Three years later, in 2012, he was on the grid at Le Mans.
“Together with 37signals, Rails has been my life’s work.”
His blog, 2023
Off the track
The money and the time for racing came from a second career that most of his readers know better. In brief:
Ruby on Rails. He created the web framework, released in 2004. Two decades on, he counts “well over a million applications” made with it, up to Shopify.
37signals. Co-owner and CTO of the company, alongside Jason Fried.
Basecamp and HEY. The project management tool and the email service 37signals makes and sells.
Hotwire, Kamal and Omarchy. Open-source tools he created, the latest a Linux setup he released in 2025.
Books. With Fried: Rework (2010), Remote (2013) and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (2018).
Shopify. A seat on the company’s board.
13
Starts at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, 2012–2026
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Getting there
He reached the grid in 2012, in a prototype, and finished 7th in class. That season he was also named Rookie of the Year in the American Le Mans Series. A year later he was 2nd in LMP2 at Le Mans, close enough to want more.
Even then he had a second kind of car in mind. In April 2014 he told Sportscar365: “I’ve had the goal from the beginning that I wanted to do Le Mans for a very long time ... And if I were to do Le Mans for the next 20 years, I’d definitely want to go there in a GT car at some point.”
That June he did, in the No. 95 Aston Martin Vantage, sharing it with Kristian Poulsen and Nicki Thiim, an all-Danish crew. They led for most of the race and won LM GTE Am by two laps. Afterwards he explained it as restraint, not heroics: “The key to this race is reliability. We’ve not pushed very hard but had a decent pace and made sure nothing bad happened.”
To win is magical. It’s my third time here. The first time I tasted leading, the second time I finished second and finally I’ve stood on the top of the podium.
The same season brought the WEC LMGTE Am title. It remains his only Le Mans class win, and he went back to the cars he loves most. “To me, Le Mans is synonymous to prototypes,” he told 24h-lemans.com in 2015.
The years that followed held as much frustration as reward, and after eight straight Le Mans he came close to stopping. “I actually thought I was going to hang up the helmet after the pandemic. When we finished 2nd at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 2020, it felt like the magic was gone.” He sat out 2020, then tested again, found the feel and returned in 2022.
He has kept coming back since, an FIA Silver-rated amateur among professionals. Before his 13th start, in 2026, he posted: “Going back to Le Mans for the 13th time next month with @RacingNielsen, @jackdoohan33, and Edward Pearson. Let’s go vikings 🤘”
Career, at a glance
The road
- 2005Moves from Copenhagen to Chicago
- ~2007First drive in a race car, at Autobahn Country Club
- 2009First real competition, in Porsches
- 2012Le Mans debut in LMP2; ALMS Rookie of the Year
- 20132nd in LMP2 at Le Mans
- 2014Wins LM GTE Am at Le Mans and the WEC LMGTE Am title
- 2019Wins the WEC Sebring 1000 Miles in LMP2
- 2022Returns to Le Mans
- 2023Wins in LMP2 at Monza
- 2025Petit Le Mans podium with Tobi Lütke
- 202613th Le Mans start
“there’s nothing but you and the next corner. That’s a really addictive experience.”
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Why
On the podcast, DHH began with the physics. Much of the satisfaction, he said, comes from “driving in at the edge of adhesion as we call it, where the car’s actually sliding a little bit. ... That balance of danger and skill is what’s so intoxicating”.
The deeper reason is flow. He loved the flow he found in programming, but, as he put it, “getting flow out of programming is a very inconsistent process.” The car removes the inconsistency:
In a race car, it’s not a lottery at all. You sit down in that car, you turn the ignition, you go out on track and I get flow virtually guaranteed
The reason is load. Going at his speed without crashing takes all of his brain, he explained, which leaves no room for dinner plans, next week’s meeting or a product launch. “there’s nothing but you and the next corner. That’s a really addictive experience.”
He made the same point on his blog in 2024, describing a mind with no spare attention for anything but the next set of inputs:
Everything else simply must vanish for your attention to be devoted to the task at hand: Go fast, don’t crash.
The focus has a price, and he named it in a post about the Le Mans centenary: “You can do literally hundreds of laps across the French countryside with perfect poise, and then you make one tiny mistake, in a split second, and it all goes away.”
On danger itself, he told Fridman that he never thinks about it, and that he doesn’t believe a driver can. “I think the moment you start thinking about being able to die, you can’t do it. You can’t go fast.”
“But above all else for me is to try to become a robot.”
The same corner, many times
In his own words
The closed cockpit
In early 2022 he tested a race car for the first time in almost a year and a half, at Portimão in Portugal. After ten laps he feared he had lost the feel. Then it came back, and after four hours, he wrote on his blog, “the world had once again been completely isolated to outside the cockpit, the flow state was constant, and the smile couldn’t be wider.”
He describes the work in the vocabulary of his day job. He told Fridman: “But what I actually pay attention to most is I run a program.” That means a brake point and an acceleration point loaded for every corner. The aim is to repeat those steps exactly for two and a half hours straight. “But above all else for me is to try to become a robot.”
The two kinds of work sometimes share a race. Of Omarchy, he wrote: “I did much of the pre-release work during the downtime between sessions at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.” And after six hours of conversation with Fridman, he reached for Le Mans to explain why it felt like one. “This is what flow does: it compresses the moment.”
~1,000
Laps of Le Mans by 2022, by his own count
Le Mans as north star
In 2022 he wrote that racing, for him, had always been about Le Mans, his favorite track anywhere. “After close to a thousand laps over the years, it still pulls like nothing else.” It is, he added, “the only track in the world that I can spend hours driving on a simulator all by myself without getting bored.”
Part of the pull is scarcity. A driver never knows if another chance will come, and the circuit itself is temporary. “This track literally only exists twice a year, the rest of the time it’s mostly public roads.”
His appetite there grew in stages, as he told 24h-lemans.com: “First, you want to finish Le Mans. Second, you want to be on the podium, so you are becoming a little greedy. (laughs) Then when I stepped on the podium I wanted to win”.
“It was not about winning a race, but about becoming a racer.”
His blog, 2024
Becoming, not getting
He framed the whole pursuit in a 2024 post: “It was not about winning a race, but about becoming a racer.” The route mattered as much as the result. “But I wanted to take the long road. For what it would make of me.”
The long road was measured in hours, he told Fridman. “By the time I realized race cars is what I want to do as my serious hobby, I put in thousands of hours.”
“then you make one tiny mistake, in a split second, and it all goes away.”
His blog, on the Le Mans centenary, 2023
The margin
Endurance racing rewards patience and punishes hope. Writing about the centenary race, he called that the danger of Le Mans: “The race is so long that it’s easy to start dreaming about results well before it’s prudent.” When a result slips away, something else opens up. In the same post he wrote that “it can be liberating to drive at Le Mans when you’re no longer in it to win it. All the pressure is gone.”
At Spa in 2022, a European Le Mans Series race went the other way. A codriver had spun, and he was close to writing it off. “I was ready to pack up and just go home. Then the magic arrived. That codriver who spun? Took us from P39 to P2 in just over an hour.” They finished 2nd, and on his blog he drew the lesson about expectations: “We started the race with the absolute lowest expectations possible, and as a result, the 2nd place finish felt better than most wins I’ve had before.”
And when it does go right, he told Fridman, the highs are very high. “When you win a race like the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it feels just incredible.”
“Endurance racing is all about sticking with it.”
On X, 2017
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A team sport, and a gentleman among pros
He is plain about his level. He calls himself a gentleman driver, an amateur, and pretty good for that category. “The difference between us and the professionals is the professionals can do it every time, or more or less every time.” Of keeping a professional, Nico Müller, behind him for 40 minutes at the Shanghai International Circuit, he told Fridman: “Yeah, this was probably my favorite battle of my career.”
Mistakes land on other people. “Endurance racing is a team sport. Not only do you have your mechanics, you usually have co- drivers. So when I crash, I just feel like, ‘Damn it, I could have avoided this.’”
The credit goes outward too. After the Petit Le Mans podium, his post on X praised the driving of @tobi and @ollyjarvis and the execution of @EraMotorsport. Replying to @tobi, he joked: “Don’t tell me I don’t practice what I preach by dragging you away from the CEO’s office and into the race car 😂” In June 2026 he wrote: “Tobi showed up at Le Mans with the best pace I’ve ever seen from a first-time bronze-rated driver.”
His shortest summary, posted in 2017: “Endurance racing is all about sticking with it.”
“It’s like having a small startup.”
Lex Fridman Podcast
Money, access and time
The sport runs on a mix he describes without romance. He wrote in 2024: “See, motorsports relies on a curious mix of money and talent.” Being good at driving is rarely enough to earn a seat. He brings some of each, he added, but never enough to make a Le Mans program happen alone. “It’s always a dance.”
To Fridman he put it in startup terms: “It’s really expensive. It’s like having a small startup.” People have to be flown around the world, and equipment bought.
The travel is less than it looks. Outside a few good family trips to Japan, he wrote, it was mostly airports, hotels and tracks. “So the racing itself really has to provide the draw.” The training is functional too. He has worked with a trainer for about 15 years, with no interest in bulk: “I just need the stamina to pull 4G turns for hours at a time at Le Mans and elsewhere 😄”
What he values is the access. “To be able to show up to the Super Bowl or Wimbledon or World Cup finals of our sport, as an amateur, and compete with the best drivers in the world. What a privilege.”
He also knows the clock. “I was 32 when I first drove at Le Mans. Now I’m 44. Drivers don’t get better after forty, that’s just a fact.” After 2023 he wrote that he would probably be wise to stop, but that his pace was still solid enough to make quitting hard. The ending does not frighten him: “If anything, there’s a sense of relief in knowing that none of it -- not racing, not programming, not entrepreneurship -- is meant to go on forever.”
“when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”
Shade not sat in
Planting trees
In April 2025 he posted: “Going back to Le Mans for the 12th time this summer! Keep thinking THIS IS THE LAST ONE; keep getting lured back by Circuit de la Sarthe.” He went back a 13th time in 2026.
Meanwhile, on smaller tracks, there are other drivers. From his 2024 blog post:
Seeing my three boys get quicker in their gokarts, whether they’ll eventually turn it into car racing or not, tastes like the saying “when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”.
The next corner is waiting.