I said no D culture is how people make decisions when we're not in the room culture is how Hub spots going to scale it's Unique relative to the competition it's high quality and adds value it's like a magnet that pulls in employees and retains them completely lost gravity went straight down off a cliff and smashed at the bottom the snowmobile was in about a million little pieces confident I was going to die life can be very short and
don't waste it I think consensus is really the enemy of scale and so I used to say whenever we're making an important decision there should be winners in the room and losers we shouldn't find like that negotiated settlement that everyone's happy I think consensus is the enemy of greatness I think what happens as the company scales is you hire for a lack of weakness not for spiky strengths and I think that's mistake my analogy for being a CEO is
like you're an ice climber going up the ice and it's Treacher and you could easily slip and what you're looking for are executive members who have been up that same sheet of ice but in the last 3 or 4 years what you
don't want is somebody [Music] who's Brian I want to start with the role of a CEO in the journey from startup to scale up to public company it's a remarkable journey and I was on that that Journey for about 17 years and a couple of years
ago I stepped out of that Journey Shane in a relatively dramatic way and you may have heard of the started before I was snowmobiling up in Vermont and I was taking a snowmobile from rwater Vermont to Woodstock Vermont coming to the hairy
part of the trail and went up over a lip and went down on the other side and just completely lost gravity went straight down off a cliff and smashed at the bottom the snowmobile was in about a million little pieces I was passed out
for a long time and then I woke up it was about 4 in the afternoon it was quite cold and nobody knew where I was confident I was going to die and I sat there for a good hour thinking about you know if I do make it through then what um and I never bring my bone when i s because Vermont there's no signal the whole darn State there's no signal but an hour in I'm like maybe I brought it it turns out I brought it like a [ __ ] and I checked it
I dialed 911 Shane have you ever dialed 911 I have yeah it's an amazing service if if that was a startup I would be thrilled to invest in it it's amazing the the woman was sort of very very good and she said I remember she said sit tight and mind you I have I'm a mess many many many broken bones and so I was like of CH yeah I'm not going anywhere and then she called those two local fire stations and they're volunteer and there there's no
one there and so then she has to track down the mobile phone numbers of all the firefighters and the rescue people calls some at home they hop in their snowmobiles and they come and find me by the time they found me you know it's
pitch bike it's really cold out and basically they went to work on me and kind of put Humpty Dumpty kind of back together on the side of the mountain towed me to a flat area which is a few miles away helicoptered me to Dartmouth
University and there they really put Humpty Dumpty back together over lots of surgeries a lot of time and uh I remember that because that was the end of my CEO journey I had been quietly saying to myself that I didn't love being CEO up spot frustrated with just the core work and I remember saying to myself at the bottom of that Cliff I make it out I'm not coming back and so I was out of work a terrific woman took over for me it's kind a funny
story about that while I was gone and as I got back on my feet everyone just assumed I was telling that like no no no I'm not coming back you're doing a great job you got this and I actually think a lot of CEOs of be a lot happier if they
did something similar like that not mobile part I assumed yeah what went through your head when you you sort of couldn't move you're stuck in the snow and and you couldn't contact anybody like what what are the thoughts that
were going through your mind I'm not super comfortable telling everyone all my thoughts on this but a lot of thoughts around if I make it out of this somehow someone finds me randomly um what's going to change but then I mean the net net of all of them is life can be very short very short you never know what will happen and don't waste it don't waste time doing something that doesn't make sense for you you know refactor your
life and I refactored my personal life and I refactored my professional life pretty dramatically and these days I really don't do anything I want to do and I wanted to do this podcast it's a really good podcast thank you tell me about what the changes were like were they all at once were they slow like be specific sort of I always wonder this because I had a a near-death experience too a couple years ago and I remember pondering life and
thinking about oh man if this is the end like did I spend the time the way that I wanted to and if it's not the end like what is it that I really want to change in life and what impact will that have and I've done such a better job of sort
of taking care of my body and my mind and sort of self-care if you will just as a big word to encapsulate that I changed a lot of relationships in my life I sort of invested in some and then uh I wouldn't say broke off some but
definitely stopped investing in some and so I'd love to hear about the specific things that you you did that you sort of were like okay well this is this is the realization it's exactly like that when I say Factor relationships I tripled down on family relationships I wouldn't say ended relationships but I certain people that didn't give me energy in certain ways I just stopped engaging with and it's a much smaller group I engage with these
days uh professionally I stopped my main job I mean I founded HubSpot 17 years earlier it was kind of my life and everything was sort of wrapped up in it and now I'm chairperson so I'm still involved but uh not in the dayto day I
got obsessed with maybe similar to you with longevity I'm like well if I'm going to live to 8590 I want to be very strong living to 8590 so basically anything Peter AA or Andrew humorman said to do I did except they drink a
little um but I basically do everything they do lost a lot of wheat got much better shape and so lots and lots and lots of changes but I think the macro one was just love your f family tell your mom you love her hug your kids at
one more time today and don't waste time you know do things that really are rewarding to you one of the big things for me was like just being home for the kids every day after school I just made a commitment I was like I'm going to be
here every day when they get home uh I'm not going to push it at the office a little longer I'll find other ways to do that because I'm also sort of balancing ambition and all this other stuff uh but it wasn't going to come at the expense of the time with them that I know inevitably I'll look back on be like man I just wish for you know a little bit more cookies and milk they say the dying wish of every man they just want another
day and I think about that a lot like what am I going to wish I had found at the end of my life so Shan while we're on this why don't you tell us what happened to you I didn't know for a long time what was happening to me I just had symptoms and they kept getting worse and worse and worse and so like I I had a fever then I had an earache and this was during Co so everybody thought it was Co so I went to the doctor and they were
like oh you don't have an ear infection you're fine you don't have covid go home uh suck it up and then I woke up on a Saturday and I remember just making a latte and then I was drinking it and it spilled down my chest okay and I was
like what the heck I've been drinking out of cups and so it's like to you know rarely do I spill something and I I went I I went to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and the the left side of my face was 100% paralyzed m
and so I had no movement whatsoever I felt like I was moving things but like if I raise my eyebrows like you can see now on YouTube if I raise my eyebrows this it was actually kind of beautiful in hindsight it was freaky when it was happening uh because this and it just didn't move and I was like oh God like I got to go to the doctor my first thought was actually not to go to the hospital which is a little weird so I show up at
my former family doctor's office on the weekend and they're like you need an appointment it's Saturday and I was like well I can't move my face so I think that qualifies as like maybe I get an appointment today yeah and she's like oh
my God yes you see the doctor right away I go to the doctor and she's like I think you're having a heart attack and I was like well this doesn't make a ton of sense right like maybe uh I don't think that's the case however you're the
doctor I don't know what I'm talking about and she's like you need to drive to the hospital I was like well if you think I'm having a heart attack why are you telling me to drive to the hospital yeah it's was like these two things don't align anyway I go to the hospital I see a doctor right away I mean for all of the knocks on Canada's Health Care System uh there's certain things in triage that they they definitely see you
I saw a doctor probably within three minutes of getting to the hospital and you know he's like you're not having a heart attack I was like thanks and then it's like go sit and wait for like 12 hours while we handle all the other
urgent people which is fine and so he sees me and he's like I'm going to give you some pregn Zone and you'll be fine and I remember going like wait what like you're just going to give me some steroids and like send me home like
nobody cares about how this happened I'm a healthy at the time 42 year old male I'm not overweight you know I don't smoke I don't excessively drink I have nothing that would sort of indicate this when I was in the waiting room for the
12 hours I started talking to a whole bunch of neurologist friends and they were like you should get tested for these four things and it was like uh HIV Lyme disease mono and uh something else and I was like can I just get
requisition to get tested for this and he's like no it's just like a waste of the medical system oh man and I was like wait what like that doesn't make sense he's like go talk to your family doctor uh they they'll figure that out I gotta
go help other patients how's your case at this point well it's still paralyzed right so he's like you're going to recover he's like you you have a 99.8% chance of recovery I'm like I'm not worried about recovering I'm worried
about what caused this right like before we figure out uh the future we have to figure out like what am I doing something and need to stop and I went to my doctor on Monday and I was like hey can I get a requisition for these blood
tests which in in the States you just show up and do it and in some provinces in Canada you can just show up and do it too but in Ontario where I live uh they won't allow you to do that you need a requisition anyways she says no for
whatever reason she's like if the ER doctor thought you needed it he would have given it to you you know please please [ __ ] off politely is is sort of what she said and I was like well this is so weird and I'm like thinking about this and then I wake up a few days later and I can't stand oh man so the backs of my knees like if I'm moving I'm fine but if I stand still for like 10 seconds I'm literally crying there's tears coming
out of my face I've never been in so much pain it's like somebody stabbed the back of my legs with a knife and I was like wow this is like so crazy and up like emailing my doctor again I'm like I really think I I should get tested for a whole bunch of stuff at this point like I don't know what's happening and she's like slow knowing me she's like it'll get better just give it some time and then like three or four days later I
wake up and I can't open my mouth uh like I have lock job basically I can open it like a centimeter and luckily to cut a long story short I end up talking to a close friend of mine who happens to be an eye surgeon she's like I'll give you the requisitions uh she gives me the requisitions I test positive for Lyme disease I start the treatment for Lyme disease because when you test positive you can actually uh you can fix it and so I start taking I
think it's doxy cycling uh the antibiotic which is the treatment for that and instant Improvement the cool part of this is I saw a neurologist in Ottawa who tested me for like 200 different things uh you know I went down
to give blood and the lady's like this is the maximum amount of blood we're allowed to take out of you and I was like oh this does not sound really good and uh I I came back completely normal aside from the Lyme disease so I'm glad
we caught it glad we solved it you know made a made a lot of changes after that I I want to go back back to to you and HubSpot though so like you been on this journey for a long time from startup all the way to scale up to now public company sort of chairman walk me through the different phases a CEO goes through I personally break them out like two to 20 employees 20 to 200 200 to 2,000 and then 2,000 plus and I kind of grate
myself in these Seasons like I give myself a b in 2 to 20 like 2 to20 I was doing customer development I was the lead user of the product I was marketing it but I'm a crappy coder um and so the heavy lifting was really done by my
co-founder 20 to 200 I was kind of in my element I loved it I was an a 200 to 2,000 maybe a b and then 2,000 to 8,000 maybe a d I really didn't like the work uh and I think that's the case with a lot of of CEOs and a lot of Executives
and a lot of people like um people have a season that they enjoy and they get good at it I think that's very much the case for me which was the one where you felt like you had to grow the most to fulfill the role really through the whole thing I felt underqualified to do it and I don't know about you but I still have imposture syndrome here on the podcast and I had it throughout I think one of my superpowers actually is I'm a learner
and I try to get better and I listen to other people and I take feedback pretty well and we had a mechanism that was quite good for giving me feedback really good actually my co-founder was responsible for my annual 360 review he's super introverted so he didn't want to go around and talk to other people so he sent a net promoter survey out to the board the exec customers whole bunch of people 30 different people he got a lot
of responses maybe 25 responses and there were two questions Shane one one was on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely you refer Brian as CEO HubSpot and two why did you give that answer and people wrote no like novels about it and it's
hard for CEOs to get feedback very hard very few people give straight feedback to the CEO so this was a good way to get the end was big enough that people gave very very strong feedback and he summarized to give me my net promoter
score and then I started reading my review and and each page was different so the first several Pages were my features and he's a software develop it's like here's your features so page number one you're very good explaining hubspot's vision and then he pulled out quotes from the novels people wrote Peach two page one through 10 were features and they were great and I was pretty confident that I was the best CEO ever invented after
reading for that and then the bugs came page 11 was the bugs and there were 12 pages of bugs and I was pretty convinced I was the worst CEO ever invented by the end of the 12 pages and I remember when I finish it I'm not a Scott Stricker or
remember I poured a glass of scotch but that mechanism for getting feedback was we still use it so the current CEO gets the same type of a thing and it's very very very useful I think founder CEOs often have this
problem that like founder CEOs like to make decisions like to be involved with the detail like to drive things like to be in the middle of things and that's a great strength when you've get 10 people but that great strength you have turns into your greatest weakness when you have a thousand people you're trying to manage everything trying to manage every know everything that's going on and so the consistent feedback was like how do
you get yourself out of the details how do you stop working in the business how do you start working on the business that was kind of a common threat that I worked on across all 17 years was that feedback enough for you to walk away go
going like okay I see this people are giving me feedback I accept it there's some truth to this or was there a part of you that was like no they're wrong it was it pretty accurate and I'm shaking my head through most of it in
the software business sometimes there's something that someone thinks is a bug but it's a feature to somebody else right so some of my bugs I actually thought were features um like I can be really passionate about something and
Brian gets so passionate it's like a little little scary sometimes I'm like fine if if like two out of 30 of you think that and the rest think it's a good thing I can live with that so there were several things I was like that's a
bug that I can liveit and every year I try to work on one or two of the bugs if I put 10 calories and try to improve a feature I get like a thousand out and so I more paid attention to the features and tried to get better at the features and this took me a while to figure this out and over time just tried to hire people around my weaknesses and I have plenty of them I really looked at hiring the best I could in the areas where I
was weak rather than trying to become an expert at it and I'll give you one area where I made a mistake on this in the early days of hotspot I fashioned myself like a great product designer I don't know why I did I think basically because I followed Steve Jobs everything he did read every book about him watched his Keynotes as obsessed with them as CEOs are my era and I was like I can do that I I figure it out I took classes I
really dug in and for years I was convinced I was a great product designer I'm not I I just don't have that genetic code I was actually quite bad at it um and it it took a while before that feedback sort of hit me between the eyes
and we started hiring people really good at it and enabling me to let go of it what are some of the lessons you took away from your sort of studying of Steve Jobs if you will that you used effectively one of my favorite things on
the interwebs it's his keynote at his commencement speech at Stanford I think is quite good and once in a while I'll look back that he was faced with cancer and the way he approached that was really interesting and he says it in a
different way but he didn't waste any time that's for sure and then HubSpot a lot is based on his work we started the company out of Sloan while we're at business school and at Sloan they did field trips and we did a field trip to
the West Coast and I remember this one day was a really good day in the morning we visited Apple it was like a year after the iPod came out and it was on fire and I remember Steve walked into the auditorium was about a hundred of us and he was in a bad mood uh and it was pretty intimidating and I remember he looked he looked out and he basically was like what are you people doing here for business school like he wasn't into the
whole business school thing and one of my classmates JP Gorski raised his hand up high and he said we're here from Sal School management and we're studying Innovation and disruption and we thought we'd learn from the best and I Steve just melted he liked that a lot and then he talked about how we came up with the iPod and kernels of this very much made it into the way we thought about HubSpot and the iPod the way he described was
really simple there were mb3 players before but you had to be a real geek to use one and very few people were buying them and you had to burn music to him it's a pain in the ne to do it and he said I really wanted something simple so
I wanted to take an MP3 player build a Premium app iTunes and then work with the record companies enable you to download a song for 99 cents a song and he said that's a 1 plus 1 plus 1 equal 10 for the consumer and that was how we
originally came up with HubSpot like a marketer in that day and age putting Google analytics and a Blog and social media tracking tools and SEO tools marketing automation CRM and all this stuff and it was complicated was big
hairy problem and so we use that analogy very much Stevie it's like how do we make an all one system where the 1 plus one plus one will equal 10 across all the systems so the morning was really influential and then that afternoon and
we're kids we're in business school we visited a little startup called salesforce.com and their CEO Mark benof and so that day was really formative and thinking about hpot oh that's crazy had you guys just taken your tuition and
invested in both of those companies I know that's a good point that's crazy so you started it in school H how did you learn how to hire and fire people like how do you know you have the right fit how do you know when it's time to move
on from somebody you know I think about that as somebody who went from school to a large corporation and they have all these policies and procedures in place and then now as an entrepreneur I'm dealing with CEOs all the time who've
never really hired and fired and uh I'm curious as to what wisdom you can sort of pass on to people most CEO including myself are quite bad at this um and I've identified some things that maybe useful hacks may not be useful
hacks this is also a season thing if you're hiring someone when you're 200 employees I see the mistake everyone makes and we made the mistake over and over and over and over and over again that if you're hiring someone that that
you want to go from 2 to 2000 you're just really attracted by that person who came from Google or Microsoft or whatever huge company a huge resume and all that stuff and once a blue moon that'll work but generally that's a
failure condition if you hire the press release higher that's at couple phases over you I don't think it normally works same thing for board members my analogy for being a CEO is like you're an ice climber going up the ice and it's
treacherous and you could easily slip and what you're looking for are executive members who have been up that same sheet of ice but in the last three or four years what you don't want is somebody who's 20 years over you or
someone who spent their whole career on top of the hill looking down on the Ice Climbers you want somebody just a little bit ahead of you on that ice climbing Mission but that's one thing I think people get wrong I also think I think most people are bad interviewers including myself like I've missed a bunch and I think the core reason for that actually isn't the interview it's interviewees interviewees are so good in interviewing you're
interviewing a VP or a c-level person for a company like HubSpot they're good at interviewing and if they're not they've been coached they've looked on YouTube like I just think everyone including myself overvalues their ability to select talent in the interview process I see that as a over confidence I think also like I see it with the CEOs I work with and I see it as companies get bigger like you've got a panel of four people
evaluating Shane as a potential VP if all four people like Shane versus two people love Sheen two people are like I'm not sure about Sheen you almost always go with the person with the least amount of weaknesses and that lowest
common denominator higher I think that's a failure conditions we've noticed that over time I take two loves and two Mez over three likes uh I think that's a best practice practice that people should be doing and I think people
should be obsessed with reference checking uh yeah calling the references getting good at that getting good at finding people in your network who work with them I would guess I coach tons of CEOs on average for every director VP SE
level person that's hired within 18 months they're gone how do you know when it's t to move on from somebody or I guess in a way you've either made the wrong hire or it's the wrong environment for that person to succeed or however
you want to phrase that but how do you re recognize that I I had a CEO the other day tell me he like the moment you start thinking about it that's the moment to act on it I've never seen anybody changed their mind from that
initial thought H how do you think about that and what's your reaction to that unfortunately that's I feel like that's conventional wisdom and I think it's largely foots with what I've seen I rarely change my mind on people in that
kind of context and everyone says when you know you should move quickly I never have they call me weak um have you ever regretted not moving quickly it's sort of interesting to contrast that to sort of like Jensen who's been
talking recently about you know he doesn't really fire people he sort of like berats them into being better uh in in a public way B is probably the wrong word but he he sort of wants to pull you towards Excellence rather than uh fire
you but I don't think that's practical for most people or most organizations so you and I both sat through the same Jensen presentation so I spent a lot of time thinking about CEO ISM and coaching CEOs and there's sort of like a set of best practices for being a CEO it's almost like a CEO unofficial School what's confusing about the CEO school that's been around for a long time is arguably the two I'm not going to say
best but two amazing CEOs are Jensen at Nvidia and Elon at SPX and that's and they completely ignored almost everything about CEO School CEO lessons CEO best practices and I find that fascinating talk to me about that right where maybe
there is no model we hold up this model we teach it it's easy to do uh we say the right things but in reality the people that end up changing the worlds are often the opposite of all of the points that we teach Berkshire hathway
for example if you looked at their board of directors I don't think they pass any of the the sort of like standards that Business Schools would set for what a an independent board looks like and constellation software is another
example of that so with Shopify all these companies that have sort of done these remarkable things they don't look anything like what we taught in business school when H was maybe like 50 employees Shane I joined the CEO group
and I largely joined the group because I respected one of the CEOs and a guy named Colin engal and Colin made the room of vacuum cleaners that ioot and I I my would describe my relationship with him in two words man crush I really was
a fan of Collins and I remember this first CEO group we met all day once a quarter and I there's a couple funny things about the the CEO group um but I joined and I just remember spending some time with these 10 CEOs and two were
kind of they're quirky as the way I would describe them they very unique personalities and the other were like Central casting a blue blazer tan pants like really Central Casting uh backgrounds and everything and they acted what I thought CEOs were supposed to act like and I kind of acted like that back then and when I looked at the numbers we all showed each other your numbers the two quirky founder CEOs were crushing it and the eight Central
Castings were with me and I was like enough with trying to be Central Casting I'm going to be exactly who I am and we're going to make everybody else work around who I am and it's a lot easier being who you are than somebody else everybody else has taken that was when I was like I'm quirky too I don't care that I'm quirky I'm just going to lean into my quirkiness and be myself and I've sort of been that way ever since
and I don't think there's a profile of CEO you're talking earlier how you'd love to hire somebody with two I love this person and two mat is that because of that because the person who says all the right things everybody's going to be
okay with but the unconventional person you're going to get really two extremes you're going to get love or hate I think what happens as the company scales is you hire for a lack of weakness not for spiky strengths and that's
institutionalized in the scale UPS interviewing panel and process and I think that's a mistake and I think that's one of the few things that leads to really mixed success in hiring ex X in these companies who do you think is
the most underrated public company CEOs I think the guy running Uber has done a nice job that was a very very very difficult thing he took over he got it profitable I think he's done a really really nice job very quietly done a very
good job how about you oh gosh um I think Toby is massively underrated we were sort of talking about him during the break here what are your thoughts on Toby Toby reminds me a lot of Colin Engle actually just whip smart one of
the things I like about and Colin is their very first principles thinker they don't care to receive conventional wisdom they're going to think it through from scratch and sometimes they're going to get it wrong but a lot of times
they're going to get it right and do something really Innovative and smart Toby's got so much right he's got some big stuff wrong but for the most part he's done a really really good job he's certainly not Central Casting yeah
certainly not but I think he's brilliant and a great CEO he's a great I like that term Central Casting another person who stands out to me uh most people are probably familiar with now but 10 years ago nobody would have ever
heard of is Mark Leonard from constellation software he's not really on my radar yeah exactly I think they only issued Equity at the IPO and they're I don't know must be 50 to 60 billion dollar company now amazing I see I wouldn't put Toby in the underrated because I rate him so highly and I feel like people in my circles rate him highly yeah I rate him highly too I I still think I underrate him okay got it yeah yeah totally there's one other
interesting thing that's I think relevant out of that CEO group I remember going to the CEO group meeting the first meeting chain and what I didn't realize is is there was a topic for the whole day and one of the quirky things about HubSpot up into that point is we didn't have any HR people we didn't allow anyone to talk about culture because we didn't think we can measure it was too squishy and I remember I arrived there in the first
day first thing that got put up was the topic of the day and sure enough it was culture and I remember thinking that's gon to be a big big waste of time at least I get to know um my M crush the whole morning I was pretty disengaged
and then Colin at lunchtime I remember he said to me he's like why aren't you engaging you don't like the topic to you I said nothing I think it's a waste of time he said Brian culture culture is how people make decisions when you're not the room
culture is how companies really scale okay okay okay okay got it and then the afternoon sort of Engagement it and then the next day they go to the office and my co-found dares says how's the how was it how's Colin like how did it go I said it was really really good there's there's one they do one topic a day he said oh what's the topic I said it's culture oh [ __ ] what waste of time I said ' no daret culture is how people make
decisions when we're not in the room culture is how hubspot's going to scale and he said okay and it's very hard for me to assign work to my co-founder to this day somehow I assigned him to be the culture Zar HubSpot and he did an
excellent job and still is doing an excellent job of marshalling the culture from you know 5050 employees 8,000 employees and he did two clever things first thing he did is big on net promoter survey so he he surveyed all
the employees SC went to 10 How likely you refer hub spot as a place to work and then why again people wrote novels about it and he kind of broke it all up into you know different topics and then he wrote a PowerPoint presentation called the hubs by culture code that basically described the relationship between employes and Company and just sort of outlined how we thought about culture and then he posted it on the
internet and it blew up on the internet but we continue to do that nepom motor score once a quarter for the last 15 years and we've tracking our nepom motor score per quarter and that's been very very useful then we post every response
to the neom motor survey on culture on the wiki and then we address the issues that come up that best practice to served as well every six months we refactor the PowerPoint deck it's a living breathing document and we
basically treat culture like our second product like our product hpot if it's Unique unique relatives of the competition it's good quality product and it delivers value it's like a magnet that pulls customers in and retains them same thing with a culture if it's Unique relative to the competition it's high quality and adds value it's like a magnet that pulls in employees and retains them and so we put a lot of thought into that culture
stuff and I think a lot about how do you take how do you go from startup to scale up I think a key part of that is getting your culture right and writing it down and institutionalizing it I'm gonna make a statement about culture and I'd love
for you to argue take both sides of the debate if you will so I'm going to say that culture is the only sustainable Advantage I disagree why let's take Uber they had a certain culture Dar the new CEO came in I'm quite sure he made
massive changes to the culture the founder put together and he thrived I don't I think some of the benefit of course is his culture but they had major sustainable competitive advantages in they had a fleet of drivers and customers and the
network effect and software that works and he's probably been there 10 years and I don't think it's all culture oh that's interesting so in my mind I would sort of think of that more like they had a Advantage like an operational
advantage that came from the network effect and the scale I don't know if that would have been enough to sustain it going forward without the culture fine I sort of agree with that I think the best example on the other side of
this is Saia Saia is on my Mount Rushmore CEOs a lot of people push back on me it's like oh he wasn't a Founder you shouldn't be on there he's on there for me because Microsoft was going very very sideways for a long time and he
stepped in and really did change the culture in a massive company and and couldn't be more impressed with him in the culture change and and how well that worked so that's that's my flip side of the argument is SATA okay who else is on your Mount Rushmore Jerry Garcia is on my Mount Rushmore great CEO the aformentioned Steve Jobs on there why Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead really why Jerry Garcia that's the most obvious one on there why
no I'm curious I'm I'm not a grateful de I've never I don't think I've ever really sat down and listen to the Grateful Dead so you're GNA have to walk me through this one okay um J Garcia was the CEO cut in the cloth of Colin Engle
and Toby luki really dislike conventional wisdom and kind of re thought everything from first principles starting with the music so they started that band in the mid-60s and at the time there was all kinds of rock and roll
music and there was jazz music country music and bluegrass music and they didn't do any of that they created a new genre of music people referred to as jam bands now but Garcia himself was a Bluegrass player and the base player was a jazz musician and the keyboard player was a blues guy and Bob Weir the singer was kind of a country rock and roll guy and they Blended them all together and they infused this Jam ban mentality into
it and they really stretched the songs out with improvisation so they sort of rethought the genre and made a new type of music the product was unique and the go to market was exceptionally unique if you think of like when I was in high
school if I wanted to go to a Rolling Stones concert I would call Ticket Master and I would wait till whatever it is 1:30 on a Tuesday when the Rolling Stones tickets were on sale and I would you know dial away be five minutes later
to dial away and her may may not got through the people who ended up buying most of the tickets were the scalpers the scalpers had a whole bunch of people buying the tickets then sold the tickets in a markup and so the front row of The Rolling Stones concert was a bunch of Bankers of venture capitalist people who could afford the tickets and the great didn't like anything about that Shane nothing about it they particularly didn't like a
bunch of bankers and and veter capitalists in the front row of their concerts they wanted their hippie crazy fans in there they also didn't like the distribution setup so it's grateful then and then Ticket Master took their slice
and then scalpers took their slice and then the fans so they said we're going to disintermediate just like the internet did to so many things we're going to disintermediate those two layers and we're going to sell tickets
directly to customers the way they did did it was you listen to a 415 recording that explain what was going on and the way Shane you would buy the tickets was you have to put a 3x5 C which concert you want to you can only buy four tickets per concert okay so the scalpers are less incented and then you had to go to the post office to get a postal money order so just a total pain in the backside to get a postal money order and
then you had to put a self address down envelope and then you put it a regular envelope and mailed it in now how would the Great dead sheine decide who gets the front row seats I have no idea the way they sort of did it was that self-
addressed St envelope the more beautifully you could decorate it with dancing bears and mushrooms and sprinkles I love it yes so they solved a bunch of problems that's not the end of it when was the last concert you went to
sh oh God I it's been a long time did you go to Taylor Swift no I have I am a Taylor Swift fan okay let's just say you went to Taylor Swift in yeah and you showed up with your giant camera and your boom microphone and you showed up there what would have happened at the at the gate they wouldn't let me in why why doesn't she want you recording it it might affect other people's experience if I have a boom mic I mean you can't prevent people from
recording on their phones so at some degree they're accepting it the MBA actually went through this a couple years ago they were trying to like really block people from posting Clips on social media then they actually embraced it and it changed the whole
league Mar it got way more people in uh sorry this is like a Sidetrack to this but like that change in the NBA really changed the NBA okay pre iPhone if let's say you were going to a Rolling Stones concert and you had all
that equipment you're walking of course they would block you and the reason is you see the Rolling Stones in Boston then New York and then Philly and then Miami the exact same concert like they don't miss a note they're fantastic same thing when you walked into the Grateful Dead with your big boom mic and your big camera they put you right in the taper section the perfect spot to watch the concert they in saided you to tape it
and you taped it and then you went from Boston then you went to New York you taped it you went to Philly you taped it then you went to Miami then you get back to your dorm room and you copied as many tapes as you could of the best concert not the worst concert and you gave them out to all your friends and that was how they Market they gave away the content they were the first first inbound marketers to really nail that they were the first real
premium model they were the first viral marketers and the way they did it was PR and it worked for them because every concert was quite unique they were jam band so they never played the same set list twice and so there was an incentive for Knuckleheads like me to go from Boston to New York up and down the east coast in fact I did that last week I was at the sphere and I saw them uh Friday Saturday Sunday Garcia was a genius he's
a marketing genius actually and I think he a music fun that's fascinating uh I'm going to have to listen to the Greatful Dead now I'm like I'll send you some stuff yeah please I wrote a book on this called marketing lessons from the
Greatful de we started talking about inbound marketing there I'm curious as to you guys pioneered in Bound marketing to to a big extent and definitely got the momentum rolling there how is that Chang in the past few years and where is
that going in the next few years ironically I think it kind of went out of favor a bit over the last few years and I think it's about to come back in favor the things that change about it aren't that different instead of like
cold calling people and spamming people and advertising it people in renting space on YouTube or renting space on your podcast or your blog or renting space on the New York Times create your own New York Times your own podcast and
become your own publisher and then pull people in through Google and search and other social Outlets it works very very very well you're you're living proof of how well it works the things that have changed are the social media networks have changed when we first wrote about this before we started HubSpot we started writing about in that marketing dig and Reddit were the two big uh social media sites I don't think bigs
around and Reddit gone through all these iterations but obviously with Facebook and now it's Tik Tok it's Instagram um it's all these new social media sites it's YouTube you know people live in YouTube It's podcast and so the medium isn't necessarily a long form blog like it was back when we started hpot it's videos a lot of short form videos and so that's changed quite a bit I think what's interesting about what's going on now is today you go to
Google and you get your 10 Blue Links if you look across our customers that 62 63% of the inbound traffic is by Google and most of it's organic I think over the next five years that's going to change a lot I think Google's going to
have to change a lot and I think people are going to spend more and more of their time inside chat GPT and they're all chat gpt's competitors and I think when you're engaging in that way and you do a search and chat gbt for let's say
HubSpot it will tell you about HubSpot and then you'll say well how does HubSpot compare it to Salesforce it'll tell you about that how much subbot cost it will tell you that like people will know a lot about HubSpot one of the brilliant things about Google is they're blow links and they didn't mind sending off their website it's a very counterintuitive idea I think that's going to start changing as consumer Behavior changes and uh I think it' be
really interesting to see how it develops do you think content is just going to get overwhelming I mean you can create content with like two sentences now you can create blog posts that would rival probably the best people were
putting out maybe 10 years ago with almost no effort whatsoever I think you're right and I think it's not just that but it's going to be emails like I think the the robo emailing and the bdrs I look at lots of startups in the CR
spases might imagine but there's I counted about 48 startups building automated AI agents I still think having a unique perspective and a unique personality is going to work I I don't think your podcast goes away because I
start something that sounds like you and I use an avatar to deliver it I think something what you're doing will last the test of time and I think a lot of people particularly in scale UPS run away from their personality they make it
generic and like you have a certain Vibe and a certain personality I think that kind of works for you and it's going to be very hard to replicate quality and uniqueness never go out of style and I think are going to be increasingly important as the internet just fills content that's AI generated it's almost what you said before like lean into your individual quirkiness and your tribe will sort of find you and then go around
with you although you have me worried we're almost a million people on our newsletter now I'm like oh God if this is going away I got problems I also think we're going to see the trend and I'm certainly not the first person say
this but I think you're going to see a lot more small big companies and you're going to be able to get a lot more done with a lot less people um I don't think in a billion dollar company you're going to need three four 500 person marketing
organizations I think the new tools are coming out including HubSpot TOs and the CRM Suite I just see how incredibly powerful they are I think you're going to be able to scale in a whole new way and I think the AI Revolution like when it comes to inbound I think top of the funnel gets more difficult I think middle of the funnel gets easier the really high quality personalization on your website on chat on everything that gets much more
powerful top of the funnel gets more difficult yeah I think in mound's going to change but I also think in Mound GNA kind of make a comeback how do we do Outreach in a world of AI and in a world where people are bombarded with is it
going to be premium and then pulling people in through that and like the Outreach is letting them know about the premium stuff gotta get good at the branding thing again it turns out because getting into your or my inbox is
going to become exceptionally difficult with all the changes Google's making to email that's getting harder as it is but the robo emailing is going to go wild and the robo content's going to go wild so it's a little more around branding
you have to kind of be good at everything it's like a baseball 52 player you have to be getting found in YouTube you have to be getting found in all the social sites chbt is going to understand you perfectly well Google's
going to understand perfectly well and you need people tripping over here all over the place I think people have to get comfortable with the fact they getting have less new visitors to their website because chachy BT and their ill are going to know so much about you and not have those list of Blue Links they're just going to live on there and learn so much about you and then when someone's quite serious they end up on
your website and you have to get very good at personalizing that website experience I also think people are going to end up keeping more information behind the pay wall or the login wall on their websites because they want to keep
a little bit back from chat gbt because chat gbt is going to understand the public stuff so well it's going to change in a good way though I guess the baby step that Google made on that was like when they would just show you sort
of the excerts yeah if you asked a question it'd be like basically giving you a link but it's like really hard to find it's like here's the answer to your specific question YouTube is fascinating because unlike voice podcasts YouTube
has virality to it so like when we do a an in-person recording the YouTube reach is larger in some instances not all than our podcast reach and so we get like 300,000 people sort of listening to a podcast episode but on YouTube we'll get
300 to 500 to a million nice people but it's YouTube's algorithm picking it up it's like people watch this uh but what we can't do is like send people off that platform so it's really good for like stats like I I was at the the gym the other day and this guy's like I got two million Tik Tok followers but I can't do anything with them yeah so so I can keep them on this app and I'm really famous in this localized environment but Tik
Tok is 100% in control I don't own that relationship same as YouTube I don't own the relationship with the viewer YouTube does the minute it doesn't like me and wants to cancel me or doesn't like my content anymore or wants to promote a different message whatever that algorithm is that's doing that can just like you're gone think you're right I thought Google was going to roll over and play dead there for a little while like I moved
most of my search traffic to perplexity really like it Google's kind of started and stop a whole bunch of stuff but recently they're making noises like they're not going to roll over play Deb to complexity that's such an interesting
company right now and to watch their moves will be very very interesting it's challenging time for them but it looks like they're going to they're not going to let perplexity just Hoover up a bunch of their users hopefully not we all want
some competition here I I have a couple random questions I'm curious what you've learned about making decisions that you think other people Miss on my CEO Journey for a long time I would kind of look for consensus I think consensus is really the enemy of scale and so I used to say whenever we're making an important decision there should be winners in the room and losers we shouldn't find like that negotiated settlement that everyone's happy
somebody should be unhappy three or four people should walk out unhappy and one sh walk got happy and we're all we're all going to be good with it as you get bigger this gravity pulls you towards consensus and I think consensus is the enemy of greatness how do you fight that I write that on whiteboards I talk about that inside of HubSpot I try to make an example of that every time I'm in a room I've written a bunch of blog articles
about that Wiki post about that at one point in Son of hubs we had a terrific too I love and he had a lot of great qualities one of his qualities I didn't love was he was a consensus person and we have a lot of confli over that and so
we talked about that a lot the management team talked about that a lot but I sort of had this thing like there's going to be winners and losers in every argument and if no one walks out a little bit sore we probably made
the wrong decision so go deeper on that for a second though so put me in the room at one of these meetings where there's four people on one side there's four people on the other side how do we come to that decision is it the highest paid person in the room is it the person closest to the problem who actually makes that call let's just say it's my call which is rare and two people in the room room are saying black and two
people in the room are saying white I think that the majority of CEOs are walking out of the room with the decisions gray trying to please everybody yeah try to thread the needle and I think that's a problem it creeps
in more and more the bigger you get the worse that problem gets and I always tried to walk out of the room it's like we're going to pick black or white if you lose this decision you might win the next one let's not get all pissed off
about it we'll all survive and I think that's the right way to scale it is there anything else you've learned about decision making that you're like oh I wish I knew this sooner I would say one thing I've learned about scaling a
company like from the outside went from company with an idea and two employees to you know it's worth $30 billion and uh 8,000 employees and couple hundred thousand customers it looks like a smooth graph from the outside but I'll
tell you what it It's a Grind on the inside building up spot it's very much two steps forward forward one step back two steps forward one step back two steps forward one step back the whole way and there was no silver bullets
along the way there was no one hir that completely changed the game no partnership that changed the game no customer no investor it was all kind of two step four one step back two step four one step back and the other thing I would
say about the journey is kind of related to that there was definitely wartime and peace time when you're halfway through it two steps forward it was peace time when it's one step back was war time and I love wartime I'm definitely a wartime CEO I hate peace time I really need to sit on my hands and just let it go like it's going great leave it alone I have a hard time doing that and I think certain CEOs are peacetime and certain CEOs or
wartime I'm very very very much a wartime person like Co wartime we made so many changes during Co I hated Co and I hated being back in society but inside of P about that was a fun chapter what is time mean for you is that like we're
fighting for our very survival does it mean we can just move faster and sort of ignore some of the bureaucracy what what does it mean I think peace time is bottoms up and more consensus and War time more top down it's like hey it's
war time I don't have time to build consensus on this this is what I think we should do we're going left um uh and I like that about wartime and wartime is like okay I remember 2010 the economy was shaky back then we were a
very young company maybe it's 2009 and our retention statistics were horrible everyone was canceling our product wasn't good back then and we lost I remember of the Thousand customers we had in the beginning of the year we lost
like 700 of them like just horrible turn rate in 2009 and that was existential and it was like let's just stop the music and start over everything we're doing going forward has nothing to do with signing up new customers is like how do we Delight every new customer we have let's stop obsessing about how do we turn a prospect into a customer let's obsess about how do we turn a customer into a delighted customer and so that
was a crisis that really worked we changed the culture of the company we changed the center of gravity from prospects customers never waste a good crisis that was a really good crisis while you're building this how did you manage and I don't want to say balance it's the wrong word but it's the word everybody understands how do you how did you manage work life Harmony or balance uh especially during the high pressure periods with uh young
family I didn't I did it very poorly what would you go back and tell your younger self now I'm really proud of it I think my grandkids will be proud of it um and I think it took a big effort on my part to pull it off and if I said oh
man I wish I just put in 40 hours a week back then I wouldn't be sitting on this podcast with you we wouldn't have pulled it off and I know that's not the popular answer I'll probably get pillared on Twitter for saying that
I I think that's the reality of spot it was it was a full context for I've noticed this thing and I think people don't like talking about it but when you find exceptional people who've done exceptional things like yourself they're not always the most well-rounded people in every aspect of their life and yet we sort of expect them to be right it's like we we we love Warren Buffett but we want him to also be a better family man right the weird
thing is the minute Warren Buffett starts doing that he's no longer somebody we're talking about as Warren Buffett and it's so it it goes back to those sort of like strengths and weaknesses and my hypothesis is that people at the tail end of the curve have incredible strengths and incredible weaknesses and by try to address those weaknesses whether it's School Society nudging people we actually limit we put a ceiling on the strengths that those
people can actually deliver to the benefit of the world you'll probably pill it on Twitter for saying that but I agree with you on that I will give I'll give an example I've never been married I want to get married it's on my it's
actually on my too list this year I don't know it's G be this year but I never did it and every time I had a relationship like came first um and do I regret it I don't know I've had a really good life I've really enjoyed the
HubSpot run I'm super proud of it I think when I'm 85 and looking back on my life I'll still be super proud of it I think my grandkids will be proud of it so yeah I made some sacrifices I'm okay with it we always
end the podcast with the same question I think you'll have a really good answer to this what is success for you I think it's a really cheesy James Taylor song named the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time I think he's very right
about that uh and think about that post my Act I very much try to not do anything that I don't want to do or if I'm doing it not to do it very long and I try to live in the present and stay out of the past too much and stay out of the future too much I think the secret of life is about how do you set your life up so you're really enjoying that passage of time that's a beautiful answer thank you so much for coming on the show Brian thank you sir