Near Death Accidents, Hitting $1B ARR, and Selling Like the Grateful Dead with Brian Halligan, Founder & Executive Chairman of HubSpot

Brian Halligan (@BHalligan), founder & executive chairman (and former CEO) of HubSpot, joins Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) to discuss what he learned from nearly dying in a snowmobile accident, how he took HubSpot from nothing to $1 billion in ARR, and what he learned about marketing from the Grateful Dead. He also discusses what he does day-to-day, why he has always preferred inbound marketing, how to manage creatives, and much more. --------- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. --------- Show Notes: * (1:37) Brian’s snowmobiling accident that nearly killed him * (7:18) How Brian’s life has changed since * (13:07) What Brian actually does day-to-day * (28:39) Why has always Brian preferred inbound marketing * (32:00) Businesses that can be built on top of HubSpot * (33:34) Org chart business opportunities * (36:14) Climate Tech Opportunities * (50:50) How to Manage Creatives * (55:35) What the Grateful Dead can teach us about marketing

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  It's this is kind of like a movie, right? So like guy builds huge tech company, becomes billionaire, has life-changing, life-changing accident, changes everything, gives it all up, explores the world, it becomes like a monk.

• 0:27Sam Parr?

  You've never met Sean, right?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:29Shaan Puri?

  If you say something you don't like, you could just fire Sam and that pretty much takes care of the whole thing.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I love that. I've always wanted to fire Sam.

• 0:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  And, okay, so you, you listened to the first, the very first episode or just like a random episode?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  I ripped, I ripped through like a couple of little random things. I heard you guys talking about Wright Brothers and some random shit.

• 0:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay, and from that random stumble, describe what you heard. What, what kind of podcast is this?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Um, it's a podcast for entrepreneurs to get inspiration and ideas. Uh, yeah. It sounds like it sounds, by the way, I, I'm not being condescending. I thought it sounded, sounded great. What I heard, it sounded great. Kind of like something I would, I would listen to.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  That's what I was gonna ask you, you know, is this something you would have earlier in your entrepreneurial career?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  Cause now you, now you're, now you're Mr. I made it. You're, you know, you don't need that inspirational juice anymore, or maybe you do. I don't know.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  There were enough inspirational juice.

• 1:30Sam Parr?

  Look, he doesn't listen to podcasts like ours, Sean. He just buys them.

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  Most people listen, I purchase.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  So one thing we, I don't know what you plan on talking about, but one thing we could talk about that might be interesting is my snowmobile accident.

• 1:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So like we're live now, so we're, we're, we're recording now. So, so yes, we let's, we could do it. So what we'll do, I'll, I'll ask you about that. I want to know about that. And then also we're going to talk to you about some different business ideas and I've got a few that I want to ask your opinion on, but, um, so.

• 2:03Shaan Puri?

  Let me do, let me do the super short intro. This is Brian Halligan. He's the CEO, was, you were the CEO of HubSpot, now the chairman or exec chairman or something very fancy like that?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Something fancy like that, yes.

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  Alright, cool. And you, um, you basically like, like, I think like two weeks. So basically, uh, HubSpot bought the Hustle, my company. And like, two weeks after, you got into a really bad accident, right?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26Sam Parr?

  And you like broke like dozen, a dozen bones. I mean, it was pretty serious.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32Sam Parr?

  I was like, I hope Ryan's okay, but also I was, I was like, if this deal, if this would have happened like two weeks before the deal closed, I wonder if that would have changed anything.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz I was a big proponent of the deal. I was really happy we did it. Um. I tell you the whole story. I'm just gonna go. Uh, I was snowmobiling up in Vermont with my son Luke and we were, we were right, you know, we're right in the middle of nowhere, right square in the middle of nowhere. And we were cruising along and he was, he was cruising along. And I asked him to slow down. He just kinda got confused between the gas and the brake. And, um, he put his, jammed his finger on the gas and he just panicked a little bit. And we basically flew off a cliff and landed on a tree.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And I don't remember, neither of us, actually, he's seventeen, neither of us remember the accident at all. And we were both passed out before the, we hit the tree and passed out after. So we're both lying there in the snow, passed out. I wake up first. I wake him up and we are banged up, like, it's like a cartoon and our arms and legs are, you know, we're a mess. And I thought, this is it. It's four thirty in the afternoon. It's freezing cold. We're in the middle of nowhere. No one knows where we are. We're gonna die tonight. Um, and I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone, thinking, there's no way there's signal and I

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I had three, I had enough signal. I called nine, I never called nine one one in my whole life, called nine one one. Uh, she picked up, I roughly described where we were, right square in the middle of nowhere. And um then they call in the troops and the troops in Vermont are volunteer firefighters. Um they're not, you know, professional EMTs and ambulances and stuff. And it took them about an hour and one interesting thing that happened is they kind of came, but one guy who found us came from below us. And he marched up the hill and he's yelling, kind of yelling for us and we were yelling back and he finally got to us. He's starts to ask those questions. He says, wait. Are you Brian Halligan? I'm like, yeah.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  He say, hey, I'm Joey. I'm the guy who plows your driveway.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Like that's a volunteer firefighter and they are bad asses, these volunteer firefighters. So they strapped us to sleds. Pulled us straight up out of the, you know, ravine, back onto the trails and then, you know, helicoptered us to the hospital and. When you're laying there, are you just in an incredible amount of pain? What's broken? Incredible amount of pain. What, what, what, what broke? What, what was broken on your body? I broke like 12 or 13 bones, but, but my, I could show the pictures, but my left knee, like my left knee, my tibia, my, my uh femur and tibia broke.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  My right wrist broke, my left elbow trashed, my right left shoulder trashed and then my, I already had a lot of loose screws up top and now the screws got even looser. Well, just like, you had like a concussion or something? Yeah, I had a concussion. And your son? I broke my, my, I hit the tree so hard, it broke my helmet. Oh my God. And your, what about your son? He was banged up too. He broke his femur, which is a terrible bone, bone to break and he broke his knee and he got a concussion. So he was banged up. Then you had to like, you had to cut him out of the will. I mean, after that, after this accident. He's doing great. I mean, he's seventeen, so he bounced back fast like he was at soccer practice today and stuff. So he's really, really bounced back.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  You're sitting in this chair. It looks like you're not in a wheelchair, just for people listening.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. I was in a wheelchair for three and a half months, though, a good, long chunk. I can walk. I can drive. I can do like a light hike. My brain is a hundred percent. I'm fine. I think my brain's actually better. And

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  And what percentage of you, you know, sort of attributes this to the hustle deal, the timing? It's coincidental. I mean,

• 6:44Speaker 01

  It was the adrenaline from the hustle deal that's the whole, whole thing.

• 6:48Sam Parr?

  You, um, and like, so basically, you know, I don't know. So HubSpot at this point is like a, maybe I forget the market cap today. Maybe in the thirty billion range, revenue north of a billion, employees at like, what, twenty five hundred or three thousand? Like, so this, we're talking like a really big company at this point. You had been the, the CEO from the beginning. And after this accident, you, you know, removed yourself, you replaced yourself, and now you're the executive chairman. Did the accident, when you're having this like near death moment where you're like, what am I doing with my life? Like, what, what, did it, was it like a crisis like this, like when you're done, like recovering?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  It's a perfect question. Lying there in the snow, thinking I was gonna die, I thought to myself, self, how is your life? Are you proud of it? Are you enjoying your life as you're thinking about it a second time? If you live, what do you want to change about your life? Um, it was sort of a reset button for me. And I think over time, as I look back at the accident, it may be the best thing that ever happened to me is I've made a lot of life changes since then that, um,

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  Like what?

• 8:02Shaan Puri?

  What, what, what sorts of changes?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I broke up with my girlfriend of a couple of years. Um,

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I, you know, my whole life was HubSpot. It wasn't, I really didn't spend any time on any other causes, like I'd write a check. And so I went on a kind of a broad search for a cause that I could put my energy and, and some cash into. And I found one that I fell in love with. It's called the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It's like the Harvard of the ocean.

• 8:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I've, I've hung out there a bit, right next to Coffee Obsession, the coffee shop down

• 8:37Speaker 01

  there. Exactly, exactly. And what got me about the institute, and besides the fact that I live near it is, and knew nothing about it despite living near it for 10 years, was a blatant optimism amongst the scientists on their ability to slow and reverse climate change, leveraging the ocean in a sustainable way. Like, it really caught me by surprise as I was walking the halls and getting to know them. There's a lot of optimism and there's a lot of stuff on the lab there that they think can scale on a global level. So I picked them and I'm on their board and I'm doing a lot with them these days. That's been very exciting. So, yeah,

• 9:19Speaker 01

  I've done a lot of different stuff. Like now, it used to work out sort of casually. Every day, I'm like, get my heart rate up into the 160s daily. Like, I'm not screwing around anymore. I want to, I want to live a long, healthy life. Like, I'm 54. I'd like to live a long, healthy life. And I don't want to be an old man when I'm 70. I want to, want to be a very vibrant 70 year old.

• 9:40Sam Parr?

  What have you been reading since your accident? Is there like, did you, did it put you down this different path of learning? And you're like, okay, I want to explore this path or this spiritual thing or this giving thing? I don't know. Like, a, a, a, a different trajectory?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Initially, it was like, lock yourself in a room and keep it dark and don't read and don't, uh, don't see anything when you've got a, uh,

• 10:02Sam Parr?

  Concussion, yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I read random stuff, but I, you know, I'll tell you one thing that surprised me is, uh, when you have a concussion, like I had a neurosurgeon helping me, I had a shrink helping me, I had a shaman come and visit me, I had all kinds of people consulting me on how to recover from a concussion. And from the neurosurgeon to the shaman, they all said to do one thing. What do you think that thing is?

• 10:36Sam Parr?

  Sleep.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Meditate.

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  Meditate.

• 10:39Sam Parr?

  Meditate.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they all were just like, you gotta meditate. That's the way you're gonna get through it. And what I, what

• 10:45Shaan Puri?

  Were you a meditator before?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I was not. I never really meditated, or I tried and I was just so bad at it, I gave up. And so, yeah, I'm a pretty big meditator these days. So like, I'm just looking right here at the books I'm reading. Like, one of the books is Becoming Supernatural. Um, I'm not sure about it yet. I'm only through chapter one, but it's basically a meditation book. I'm taking a class on Vedic. I'm not even sure I'm saying that right, meditation next week, because I want to get better at it. Just seems like it unlocks a lot. Um, so

• 11:19Sam Parr?

  This is, it's, this is kind of like a movie, right? So like, guy builds, like, I have no, I don't know if this is true or not, but guy builds huge tech company, becomes billionaire, has life-changing, life-changing accident, changes everything, gives it all up, explores the world, it becomes like, uh,

• 11:38Shaan Puri?

  Saves the ocean, starts to meditate.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  But I will like, yeah, like I, this is like, this is like, uh, this is a movie, right? This is, this is how it's gonna

• 11:47Speaker 01

  And I can become like, the other thing I would say is I'm still involved with HubSpot. So I'm still like, today I've had four HubSpot calls. So I'm not, I'm very much engaged with HubSpot. I'm just not engaged in stuff I don't like to do. Like, I don't like doing one-on-ones with people and doing performance reviews and talking about your salary and stuff like that. I really, I'm not great at it. And but I'm able to work on the product stuff and the vision stuff. Um, the stuff that really motivates me. So it's, it's, it's really worked out, but I'm still very busy with the HubSpot stuff.

• 12:18Shaan Puri?

  And I always wondered this, like, uh, when I was at Twitch, Emmet is the CEO, he was the original founder, right? So he's like 10 years in. And, um, and he basically went from like, you know, starting the thing with two, two or three, you know, buddies, basically. To, okay, 2,000 employees and, you know, whatever, millions and millions of users. And for a long time, his thing was like, you know, yeah, I'm not the professional CEO manager type. I'll get coaching there so that I'm not like awful at it.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:49Shaan Puri?

  But, you know, I'm great with product and growth and I'm gonna like, there was like this perpetual candidate search for a chief product officer that somehow was never getting filled. And it's like, everyone knew it's because Emmett loves to do it and it's great at it.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  I had a little of this.

• 13:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it's pretty common to do for this to happen where the CEO is like, well, that's the thing I like. Don't, don't take away the one thing I like when there's like, the rest of it is just firefighting and politics. Like, you know, I'm not, not super into that bit. And then, you know, eventually found, when I was there, found somebody who was, you know, really good product leader and engineering leader and basically over, you know, over that year, I saw that person take more of that role. And then I was like, all right, Emmett, what are you gonna do now? And he was like, I'm gonna work on like, you know, the vision and the long trip strategy. I was like, yeah, but like, you know, when you wake up, what do you, what do you do? You just sit there and I'm gonna think about the vision right now. It's like, that's such a weird, what do you do day to day? And I never really understood what that meant.

• 13:44Shaan Puri?

  And so like, when you say, I think I was, I work on, you know, the vision and strategy now, you wake up, what the heck do you do?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so today, there was a bunch of emails back and forth between Dermesh and I about what some spot looked like five years from now.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  So literally, I woke up thinking about exactly that. Turns out.

• 14:07Sam Parr?

  And so you're doing like, it's like long form writing. So you're just like writing out, you guys are, it's like a basically an email brainstorming session.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't even that long form. It was emails back and forth and just different product ideas in different areas we could go into. And then I read a lot and so you guys probably saw that Amazon came out with like a billion new products yesterday that looked kind of interesting, actually. It's just amazing how much new stuff they had and how well it tied together. I think that started the thread, like, holy crap, is there a lot of innovation coming out of that company? And yeah, there's a lot of R and D in there, but it's amazing the amount of innovation coming out of there. And I think that sort of started it.

• 14:48Shaan Puri?

  By the way, did you see this Infinit dash thing that came from Amazon? Did you guys see this?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  No, it isn't.

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  So, so AWS, so Amazon launches all these different products and uh, somebody said, somebody basically on Twitter goes, they go, oh my God, um, you know, AWS Infinit dash looks like a game changer. Um, and I think, you know, Werner Vogels, who's like one of their kind of like

• 15:15Speaker 01

  CTO.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  Scientist, yeah, CTO types. He tweets out like, you know, at the, at the hashtag Infinit dash event tonight, blah, blah, celebrating. And then, um, and it's a fake product. There is no product called Infinit dash. It was like, just like a meme. But people started kind of memeing it into existence. So someone immediately responds. They go, I'm buying open dash.io. So I don't get locked into AWS as an, as an open source alternative to Infinit dash.

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

  And then Signal, the big messaging app that has like 50 million users was like, um, you know, we're hiring an engineer with an emphasis on Infinit dash lifecycle management. And um, there's like YouTube videos with Infinit dash demos. And like, people were like, I'm an Infinit dash consultant. And it just like took on a life. And if you knew it was fake, you knew. But everybody kind of played the part and a whole bunch of people thought it was real.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  That's awesome. That's awesome.

• 16:07Sam Parr?

  Brian, you, um, I saw this like, I saw this graph. I think it was from Dharmesh, uh, at a talk uh, at Saster and the graph was pretty amazing. It was like, it was like maybe HubSpot's first five years of revenue. And I'm almost positive, I was trying to like read the graph and it wasn't all marked out clearly, but I'm almost positive. It said something like in year three, you already had like six million in ARR. Is that accurate?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I doubt it.

• 16:34Sam Parr?

  It's too low or too high?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Too high, too high. I would say the thing about SaaS businesses that's fascinating is it takes you approximately forever to get to five million in ARR. Uh, but once he gets to five, 50s like bam, you know, it's tomorrow.

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  Well, that's what I thought, but like.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  It took us a long, no, no, I think you're, I think you're misreading that graph. It took us a long time to get to five million in ARR. It took us, it took us a long time to get to a million.

• 17:02Sam Parr?

  How long did it take?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I forget, but it's, we had a lot of churn or pro, you know, we've turned into a product centric company, a design centric company and a customer centric company. But it took us a long time to get there. And so we had lots of customers coming in, but we had lots of churn in those early days eating away at our growth. So it took us a while. It took us, it took, it felt like forever to get to a million, I remember, and then forever to get to 10. And then all of a sudden bam, 100, then bam, two, you know, it started happening fast. And even now, like we got to a billion and you know, it's starting to happen really fast now.

• 17:41Sam Parr?

  And, and like your first, there was like the joke was like.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  No, I, I actually disagree with you. I think you, I think Dharmesh maybe squished that graph a little.

• 17:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I, I could have read it wrong, but for some reason I was like, wait, they hit, they hit something, they hit like 15, like something like.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  We didn't break any records on that shit.

• 18:00Sam Parr?

  Well, and, and he made a joke. He was like, the first five people on the team were like Brian, who was like an MBA salesperson. And then like another marketing guy, another like salesperson, and then another operations person, and then me, who was a technical person and I actually had to build the thing. And they're like, this combination is a horrible combination for the early, an early team, yet somehow it kind of worked.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I actually, I think his point on that was the early team was a bunch of people we knew from Sloan that we got MBAs with, like people we thought were super sharp. They started them as contractors, then we hired them. And that in a lot of ways, that was good and a lot of ways that was bad. Um, in the early days of HubSpot, there was a lot of pluses to it and minuses to it. The first person, the first, very few people know this, but the, the, the, the first version of HubSpot was built by Dharmesh and these two guys in Egypt, uh, that he found through, um, found online.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Put a test out there and Farmaoui, and I forgot the other guy's name. And they built like the prototype of those three built the prototype of HubSpot. And here's how HubSpot worked in the early days. All day long, I would be using the product, demoing the product, pitching the product and using it to run our marketing. And then at the end of the day, I'd write up, you know, here's the 10 most important bugs I found. And then at night, Dharmesh is a night owl and those guys were obviously working at night because they're in Egypt. They'd fix all 10 and create like 50 more.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  So it's just a constant whack a mole that first year. And then we hired a guy, a kid from Yale who was a, he was a poly side major, but he was a computer scientist on the side. And he was really good named Patrick Fitzsimmons. And he joined the team and then we started getting going. Um, and then we hired a guy from MIT who ran engineering. And then we ran, and then we hired a guy that ran Dharmesh's last company who was an engineer. And then we really started cooking, but that first version was written in Egypt of all places.

• 20:15Shaan Puri?

  Wow. And you know, when we think, uh, like I, I think back about.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  It was Upshot. What's the, what's the name of the company? Upshot, Upshot, what is, when you can outsource your dev projects, not Fiverr, what's the other one?

• 20:27Shaan Puri?

  Odesk or Elance or Upwork.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Upwork, it used to be called.

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  Elance, yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he found them on that and that's.

• 20:36Shaan Puri?

  You're kidding me.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  No. No. That's crazy.

• 20:40Sam Parr?

  You know, that's like, um, I, I think I heard stories about a friend who was early at Uber and they used to like, this was like a secret that they didn't tell a lot of people, but one of the co-founders of Uber is Mexican, Oscar, like he's from Mexico. I forget his last name, Oscar Salazar, or something like that. And they used to make jokes that like, some of the early code was in Spanish and they couldn't fix it. And I was like, why? I was like, why? What's, what's going on? He's like, well, apparently, you know, just like, you, you don't think about it, but Uber was just like any other small business that didn't have any money. And one of the co-founders was Mexican and he lived in Mexico and they had their peers or friends, like, it was like contractors that they could only afford and code, make the early Uber code. And there was this joke that like a lot of the early stuff was in Spanish and they couldn't fix it.

• 21:26Sam Parr?

  And so it's kind of funny to hear that.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's right. It's funny you say that. You don't, you don't ever think of Uber as like a struggling little startup with no money, but everyone starts that way. Except for today, there's so much money sloshing around. People don't start that way. They start with like five million bucks in their bank account.

• 21:41Shaan Puri?

  Well, the Uber guys had money. They just thought of it as a side project. They, they didn't think of it like this is going to dominate the world. They thought of it like, this would be cool. We'll roll around in black cars in San Francisco and not have to worry about taxis.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:55Sam Parr?

  I don't think they had that much money. I know Travis had had an exit, but I don't think that they were like rich.

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  Garrett threw stumble upon, right? He had done well, like he'd done enough.

• 22:03Sam Parr?

  But I don't think they were rich enough that they could like, put three or four million dollars into a business before it really was, they knew it was going to be worth it. Like, I don't, I don't think they had total.

• 22:12Shaan Puri?

  I mean, those guys are hyper connected, right? Like they can, they can raise a seed round if they needed to. Um, so we, we were talking last episode about this company called Nerd Wallet. And the Nerd Wallet story, the, the part that's relevant is basically, it's a big finance, kind of like blog, basically. And, um, and they make a ton of money because they rank at the top of the search engine for, uh, best credit card, best credit card for business, whatever. And they get a bunch of, they make like a hundred million dollars off that referral essentially at the end of the day. But they got there by making great content and like, it was like tortoise and the hare. Everybody else was like, You know, just trying to farm as much content as it could. These guys are trying to do quality content. And for two years, they're sitting in their apartment, just banging away at blog

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  posts. And like, the traffic really wasn't, it wasn't impressive. And I was telling Sam, I was like, if I had started this company, I would have pivoted 10 times by then. If I was advising them, I'd be like, guys, look at the data. This is not working. But they had a lot of faith and they sort of kept going. And there's these like perseverance stories. And then here are these other stories that are like, well, we, we, we tried this thing, we saw the signal, and so we made a shift in strategy. And these like inflection points are the hardest thing because as an entrepreneur, you never know which, which one, is this one of those moments where I should be persevering in spite of the data? Or should I be taking the signal and making a dramatic shift in what I'm doing, pivoting in some way? And I think everybody has, like, I look back at any startup I started, and I see multiple

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  moments where maybe I made the wrong decision, maybe I made the right decision. It's very hard to say because you never know what would have come out the other side. When you look back at early HubSpot, was there, are there any moments like that where, you know, either it was not, when it was not working, and you decided either to persevere or shift in your strategy, shift in your, the way you guys were doing something?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there've been two big pivots in HubSpot's history that people don't talk about. The first pivot was about six months in, we were building kind of a general purpose platform for, for legal firms. We call it LegalSpot. This is probably something where we're still in business school, but we were spending time on it. We had a prototype of it. And we would go to law offices and we'd demo it and try to get people excited about it. And they weren't super psyched about it. But there was a little piece of it that was around grading your website and around SEO that the law firms got excited about and got excited about the lead gen piece. And we stuck with this LegalSpot idea for

• 24:37Speaker 01

  a really long time. And we're just getting very mediocre feedback. And finally, Mitch and I were like, why don't we just work on that one thing they keep asking us about? And so we killed LegalSpot. And we built Website Grader, and we built the Lead Generation system. And then we killed the idea of verticalizing it and went horizontal and sold it to all our friends in startups. Basically, uh, so that was the first huge pivot we had was giving up basically on the original idea. And the reason the original idea was there was when we were in business school, they put you in little pods for uh, for stuff and there was a woman in our pod who was terrific, who had started a company in the legal space and convinced us there was something really there.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Um, and she might've been right if we stuck with it, but uh, we ended up pivoting away from that and she ended up not joining HubSpot. Um, the second huge pivot we had is we were a marketing app software company. I mean, we built, we started with, we started as a web two point O company back a hundred thousand years ago with SEO and blogging and social media and we were good at helping people get a front page of Dig and Reddit and stumble upon shit like that.

• 25:44Sam Parr?

  Wait, that, that, that, that was the service was that you were good at getting people on top of Dig and Reddit?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  We, we were good at helping people get turned strangers into visitors on their site with no advertising money. So start your blog, get good at search engine optimization, start a Twitter, get going on Dig, get going on Reddit and start building credibility there. And so create these channels into your business, basically. That's, that's how HubSpot effectively started. But we were SEO geeks at, at heart. And then we moved into marketing automation, which was an obvious move because everyone was buying HubSpot, but then they'd buy Marketo or they'd buy Par Dot or they'd buy one of these other platforms. You're like, they'd spend a lot of money on it. We're like, you know, we're making into that business.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  And so we moved into that business, but the big pivot was when we said, we're not a marketing apps company anymore. We're a CRM platform company. And then we've really turned ourselves on our head and we made that decision about seven years ago and that turned out to be a very, very good pivot for us. And we're still in the middle of it. Like we have so much more work to do on our apps and so much more work to do on our platform. Like it really works well. Our customers love it.

• 26:55Sam Parr?

  You, you were talking about, um, oh, I know I was gonna ask, when you guys were early on, when did the company launch? Oh, five?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Oh, six.

• 27:03Sam Parr?

  Oh, six? Yeah. What, what?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't even know we launched it. That's when we officially started it. I actually, we never really launched the company. We just kind of started it.

• 27:13Sam Parr?

  When you were doing that, what, I mean, you know, you're a behemoth now, but what percentage of it do you attribute to, you just picked the right idea in a huge market and had fantastic timing and it kinda, you got pulled to success compared to you're just, you know, you made the right decisions and you're smart and talented and skilled. I mean, what percentage of that came down to, it was just, we got lucky that we saw this early on and it kinda worked out that we just stuck with it versus we're really good.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Healthy, healthy dose of both are a very healthy dose of both. The thing we saw, and the thing that anchors me is I, I just watched the way people shop in the way they buy and the way they evaluate products. I'm sort of like a little bit of an anthropologist of watching people buy stuff. And I noticed two things were going on. First of all, all the marketing stuff that I had done my whole career, whether it was emailing, you know, doing email marketing, or it was advertising, or cold calling, or any of this, didn't work because people had caller ID, they had spam protection, they had ad blockers,

• 28:29Speaker 01

  like, it's broken. And at the same time, people no longer were going to like IDC and, you know, Gartner and all this stuff. They were reading blogs and they were reading articles on social media and they were going to Google. And so, those two things just kinda clicked inside our head and like, there's a transformation that needs to happen from this very old school outbound interruption-based marketing to this new school inbound marketing. You have to match the way you market to the way people actually want to shop and buy. And the nice thing about it is your success in that new type of marketing was much, much more about the width of your brain than the width of your wallet. You didn't need a lot of money.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  And so, we initially sort of targeted small businesses. We moved up to some, to larger businesses these days, but that's sort of how it got going. And we, it turns out we were right about that and we were early On that thesis and I remember there was a decision point in the early days of HubSpot like we were starting to get traction. It was starting to go and we were unsure, you know, is this going to be a big company? Is this going to be like the two of us are going to fund this? We'll do some angel thing or is this going to be a go big or go home? And I remember looking at it was at some point in time and it was like, we're right about inbound. And other people are noticing we're right. We gotta like raise a lot of money and go fast because some people are going to start copying us and people did copy us like crazy.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And so at some point we sort of flipped the switch from, you know, we got a little business. It's going pretty well. We may have 50 people. We might end up doing a lot of services to know we're building a big software company. And it was the realization that we were early and right about this idea of inbound.

• 30:09Shaan Puri?

  And, and the, uh, go ahead. One of the reasons people love the pod is because we, we started off with kind of like what we're doing a little bit now, which is interviews with people who were successful. Say, hey, how'd you do it? What, what'd you do? What was it like? And somewhere along the way, uh, he just said, hey, Sam, let's record an extra episode on a Friday. What I really wanted to do was help them promote trends and I was like, let's just talk about trends. Let's talk about what, what are some opportunities your, your research crew has found? And let's just shoot the shit about it. It'll sell some trans subscriptions and it'll be, I think, interesting. Like it's like how we talk offline, let's just record it. And, um, what that started was a lot of the podcast now is basically brainstorming and just shooting the shit about, well, today, here's what I see as some opportunities.

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  Maybe I'm not going to do them because I'm already doing two businesses and my hands are full. But if somebody's out there looking, you know, I think this is really interesting. This is where I would be sniffing right now. And so I don't know if that's hard for you because you're so consumed by a large company.

• 31:08Sam Parr?

  Let, let me ask it a little bit differently. So earlier you, you had this thing called LegalSpot. Now you guys are just your HubSpot, which is, you know, the, the CRM for like, you know, any business ever. But I see a lot of companies pop up that say they are the HubSpot for X. So you said you started as LegalSpot. Now there probably is like, we are HubSpot just for the legal industry. We are HubSpot only for dentists. We are HubSpot only for doctors, whatever. What do you think about those? And if you, if you, if you're not a fan, or you don't think that they like are necessarily going to have legs, which industry do you think could have legs where you could have a HubSpot for X that you guys just simply can't meet because their, their needs are so specific?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  As soon as you brought this up, I was like, there's an infinite number of opportunities for people to build stuff on top of HubSpot that's vertical specific. And so someone should build a legal spot on top of HubSpot. Someone should build a hospital spot on top of HubSpot, like whatever they want. And it's all sort of there. The APIs are there. Like there is incredible low hanging fruit for entrepreneurs to build and then just sell and tour and solve, sell the new customers as lots of channels you can sell through HubSpot. That is, it's, it's, it's probably the upside on it. You're probably not going to build a hundred billion dollar company, but you're, the beta on it's low. You can build a good company, make good money by doing that.

• 32:32Shaan Puri?

  Are there any success stories of people doing this so far?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of them. There's these kids in, um, in, um, the UK, not kids, they're in their twenties, but, um, they built something called Org Chart Hub on top of HubSpot, which was, hey, I'm working on selling to Procter and Gamble. And they pulled in Procter and Gamble's org chart. And then as a team, you can go and change that org chart around as it changed. And it became wildly popular inside of HubSpot for sales reps using the product. And now they've built this series of different apps inside of HubSpot. That's worked out. That's, that was the first of them. Now there's a whole bunch of them popping up.

• 33:11Sam Parr?

  Have you seen, um, have you seen the org? A company called the org? Okay. So it's, I think it might be theorg.com actually. Uh, is it? Similar idea. Something like that. Yeah. And so all they do is it's a database of org, org charts and they recently raised, I think they've raised two rounds, but a recent raise was a $20 million round from Founders Fund. Or something like that, like a tier one VC. And so this org chart thing actually like it's.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  There's nothing to it. Yeah.

• 33:41Shaan Puri?

  One of the very first brainstorms when Daniel Gross joined, we had brainstormed this because I had said, it's so hard to know who the heck is who inside companies.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  And LinkedIn, LinkedIn has become impossible to navigate.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  And we said, this is a wedge to build a new style of LinkedIn. LinkedIn basically took all, said, we'll take the resume. And then we'll create, you know, basically like the social network on top of this database of resumes. Well, why don't you create this database of org charts, get people to crowdsource? Cause I think people like to say, here's my hierarchy. Here's where I am in the hierarchy. So people are willing to fill it in for their company and you can crowdsource that and then use that as like the basis of a new style of LinkedIn. I think that's what these guys are doing almost to a T.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  I think, I think LinkedIn is, there's certain companies that I think are ripe for disruption. I think they're, um, that org chart hub thing is, is cool. The company who I bet is kicking themselves is the, it's the, you know, the information. Do you guys subscribe to the information? Yeah, they have an org chart thing. They have an org chart thing. It's awesome. By the way, I bet they're kicking themselves. They didn't spin that out into a company and raise venture for it and crowdsource that. Cause it's very good. Um, I, I refer to it often, actually.

• 34:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's the media, media company DNA though. Um, all right. So what about non HubSpot related? What, if you were 21 today and you're thinking about business ideas or you just graduated business school, like when you started HubSpot, what do you, what would have your, your fascination, your curiosity? Where would you be building? What opportunities have you seen that you're like, okay, if I had a clean slate of time, here's where I would go, what I would go for?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Okay. I like to think about like the big trends and then sort of zero in on, okay, what's an idea on the big trend? So I just think just the most ginormous trend that's going on, and I saw it in HubSpot's board meeting last week. So I've been out for six months. I went to the first board meeting. We had an hour and a half discussion about the environment and we have this whole chart on how we eventually want to get to a zero carbon footprint. Every board meeting in the world is having that same conversation and that's a hard thing for companies to pull off. And that's just the beginning. At this point, you know, Europe sort of taxes carbon. The US doesn't tax carbon. Eventually the US is going to figure that out and tax carbon. I just think clean tech, ocean tech.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  There's, there's gonna be trillions of dollars made in that industry.

• 36:05Sam Parr?

  Explain that from a big company's perspective, because I've never, you know, our business was much smaller than HubSpot. And so like when I thought about climate change, I'm like, yeah, that's important to me as a person. But like my business, I'm just trying to make payroll. Like I can't even think about that at the moment. Like, you know, how my company fits into that. You guys are much bigger. What, what do you, like, from your perspective, what does that mean? You're, you're willing to spend money in order to do.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Oh, we are. We're spending huge money.

• 36:33Sam Parr?

  So yeah, tell me like, well, how much are you spending and what are you spending that money on? And what's the motivating factor there? Uh, is it like a dollar and cents thing? Is it to look good? Is it to feel good? What, what, where's the, what's the motivating factor there from a, from a buyer's perspective?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  I think fundamentally, it's a moral issue for HubSpot. It's board and it's leadership team and we all are behind it.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Even if you didn't moralistically believe in that type of stuff, your employees are gonna force you to do it. Your investors are gonna force you to do it. Uh, your customers are gonna eventually force you to do it. So you don't have a choice if your company HubSpot size or even a little bit bigger than where you are. Sam, eventually your employees are gonna be like, you know, what are we doing about this? You know, they were actually asking you about it in your group meetings. Um, and so what HubSpot's done is, you know, we've tried to lower our carbon footprint as much as possible. Get our energy now through wind, fund, uh, sustainable projects like, um, forestry projects, river projects, uh, renewal projects out there to offset some of the energy we consume.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Changing policies to consume less, uh, carbon dioxide. So at this point, you know, we're at zero from the beginning of HubSpot, but we want to consume far, far less. We don't want to be buying offset.

• 37:53Sam Parr?

  How are you tracking how much, how do, how do you track that? Is there like a dashboard? I mean, I'm.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  It's very hard to track and in the companies who are trying to track it are the same. Or like your auditors, like the price water has some people like that. And there's no great way to track it. So it's a big business opportunity for. Companies that can figure out how to track that stuff well.

• 38:13Sam Parr?

  Have you heard of, um, what was the thing we were talking about, Sean? Was it LEED? LEED, L L L E E D. So it stands for Leadership and Energy and Environmental Design. Have you ever, have you ever seen a building, um, that has like a LEED scored? Yeah, or something like that. We were looking it up on the show. We were talking about that. We're like, it's kind of interesting. And so it's a nonprofit. You could actually see their sales. Um, and their revenue is like 36 or 38 million dollars and it's something, I think it's highly recurring. And, uh, it was kind of a shocking business and it was weird. It's like, what on earth made all of these people believe that LEED is like the thing?

• 38:51Sam Parr?

  And, you know, it's like J D. Power for cars. It's like, I don't actually, or Gartner. It's like, I don't know. I think they just kind of said that they're the experts and everyone kind of bought into it. And, uh, and I'm like, I think I see similar.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yes. I, I think even beyond that, like carbon sequestration is going to have to become a thing if we're going to solve it. And people are investing in ways to pull carbon out of the air that are really expensive right now. I'm optimistic on our ability to pull carbon out of the air with the ocean in a more effective way. But at some point, you're going to need to be able to say to HubSpot, to Microsoft, to whoever, hey, you purchased a certain amount of credits around carbon sequestration. Is it legit and have a true measurement system that's quantitative? Not just like a, most of the stuff out there is, is survey based. Did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  And you sort of self-certify it. Uh, there needs to be a more, more like Nielsen than J D. Power. You know?

• 39:52Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Uh, and there's, there's a huge opportunity there.

• 39:55Shaan Puri?

  So let's say, so let's say you're right. Okay. So that's the, that's the mega trend. And you say, okay, I could, I could see the world is moving in this direction and it's, it's going to need some catalysts, some companies that help accelerate it in that direction or pull the future forward. Where's your inclination when, or how do you approach something like that? Cause I think for most entrepreneurs to say, okay, climate change. Well, okay, that's daunting, like. I gotta save the planet. All right, that's a sort of a big idea here. I don't really know where to start. And then there's all sorts of frameworks you can use, like picks and shovels businesses. Like, how do you sell tools to the people who are going to be trying to fix this problem? Or investing in a portfolio of companies that are all doing this. There's deep science where like, you know, would you go find a partner like Dharmesh, who's got an idea around some technical solution to pulling second carbon out of the air?

• 40:41Shaan Puri?

  How would you actually go about approaching it? Once you decide, okay, this is where the puck is going. How would you, how would you actually tackle that as an entrepreneur?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so we just rolled the clock back to, I'm an MBA at Sloan, and I'm looking for a partner and a business opportunity. And back then, it made sense. Dharmesh and I made perfect sense.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  We were both super passionate about small businesses and Web 2.0 and disruption. And we took all the same classes and we liked each other. At this point, I wouldn't be looking for Dharmesh. I'd be looking for somebody from the other side of the university, most likely, that could help me figure this, like, how do I get more plastic out of the ocean? Or how do I, once I get that plastic out of the ocean, turn it into products in a much more efficient way? How do we get really smart about carbon sequestration? How do we get kelp to soak up all the carbon in the world? And then drop that kelp into the bottom of the ocean and sequester for thousands of years? I'd be looking for scientists and engineers who are working on that type of stuff.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And I think it's endlessly fascinating. I think it's, and I think the answers are there. I actually am confident that the capitalist system, the startup environment, can solve some of these problems. Like, you read the news and you just think, oh, it's never, never, never gonna fix it. Like, it's the end of the world and we're never gonna get that 1.5 degrees Celsius or it's gonna blow up. Actually, I think startups and entrepreneurs and that same gusto that went into the biotech ecosystem, the same gusto that went into the software ecosystem. I think that's gonna happen in clean tech, in ocean tech, and I think it'll work.

• 42:22Sam Parr?

  Did you see, Sean, did you see the, I think you're friends with this guy, the old CEO of Reddit, who has a new business and it's like, he's like Johnny Appleseed. It's like only planting trees or something like that, right?

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  Terraform, I think is the name of it.

• 42:36Sam Parr?

  What is that? Do you know what that is?

• 42:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so this guy Yi Sean Wong and he was, I think, early kind of Facebook. And then he ended up becoming this, he was hired as CEO of Reddit. He was like, basically kind of like a user of Reddit that just ended up becoming the CEO because he had the right tech background. And now what he's doing is, he's got this startup, I'm trying to find the name real quick.

• 42:59Sam Parr?

  I'll find it.

• 43:00Shaan Puri?

  Terraform or Terraformation. And yeah, what he's doing is basically he's, he, he was, started thinking about climate like at last, I don't know, or I don't know when he started thinking about it, but he started really like making that his next project over the last, you know, five years. And I think what he decided was like, oh, I think one way we can attack this is to find large plots of land and we need to plant like millions of trees in this area. And we need basically re terraformations, sort of like re, you know, resurfacing of the way you use land. And, and that's what we're going to do. And I think it's called Terraformation Inc. is the name of his company. And he found this plot of land, I think near Hawaii or something like that. And, and he's basically published his idea of like, here is a full solution to climate change

• 43:45Shaan Puri?

  that can be done in under 30 years. And, and you know, he's got kind of like a bold view of what that, what that looks like. I don't know all the details. He hasn't really said all the details just yet, but he's been revealing more and more over time. It's, it's one to watch. It's one to kind of keep an eye on.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the climate tech VC community is going to explode in the next couple of years.

• 44:05Sam Parr?

  I think Chamath said something like, like this is the number one thing that I, I want to invest in. But the problem is, and he actually just made an investment, they launched it, announced it today, I think. It's called Drone Seeds. And I was reading about it. I was, I think it's like these custom drones that basically.

• 44:25Sam Parr?

  Is it, they do it before a fire happens in a, in a forest. They go and they map out where they think fires will happen. And I don't know exactly how it works, but somehow they can guess where they think a fire is going to happen and they'll help fix it before it happens. I, I believe that that's what it is called drone seeds. Chamath just invested into it. But the, but he basically said, he's like, this is the main thing that I'm focused on for, you know, the next few decades. And when he said that, I was like, okay, that's, that's cool. Uh, in theory, I'm totally behind this, but I was thinking, I'm like, but I'd have no idea how to solve it. Like I, it's such a grand, huge thing that like, so you're now investing in or working with, um, you know, scientists at a, uh, uh, I forget what, what was it called the?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Oh, Woodsoil Oceanic Graving Institute.

• 45:12Sam Parr?

  Yes. And I'm like, well, that's just like incredibly intimidating. Um, and then I think like, I think like, cause I mean, like it's so much, that's so much more challenging than just sitting in your room with Darmesh and just coding something and then calling someone asking to buy it. Um, both are hard, but one seems like way more.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  You, you can get to market a lot quicker building software, that's for sure.

• 45:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I was thinking of other ideas in this space. Cause I'm like, well, like I'm behind this. I like money. Like what's this huge trend? Like let's, if I can, if you can build a huge company and help the world, that sounds like a win-win. Um, but I was, I was, I was struggling to get my hands on something that is actually interesting. Uh, that can actually be attainable.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  There, there's a bunch of people working on, um, measurement systems. Like our measurements are horrible on global warming beyond just the aggregate temperature of the globe. Like measurement systems of the tides. And you tell that measurements, that measurement to the insurance companies. So they know when the, you know, big storm is coming. Um, and getting really precise about that kind of stuff. Systems to measure the salinity of the oceans, the temperature of the ocean, the temperature of the atmosphere. And using all that information to input to the carbon exchanges that happen in Europe and hopefully globally someday. Like there's going to.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Be a whole stock market. You think there's a, there's a stock market, there's a commodities market, there's NASDAQ, there's the New York Stock Exchange. That's going to happen for carbon and think of all of the businesses that happened around that marketplace.

• 46:48Sam Parr?

  There's this company right now that I, I see being advertised everywhere. It's called, I think it's called aspiration. And basically, have you, Brian, noticed that there's like all these new credit card companies coming out? Basically what they do, I'm, I'm kind of dumbing it down, but I believe this is exactly how it works. They just partner with Mastercard. Mastercard typically takes 1% of the purchase price from the merchant and makes money that way. Mastercard then says, hey, if anyone starts a new credit card system and you're able to convince these people to sign up, we'll split that with you. And that's kind of how they, that, that's kind of dumbed down. And there's this new company called aspiration, I think it's called. And we predicted this on trends, shockingly, like this is something that like we nailed way before this company came out.

• 47:32Sam Parr?

  And it's called aspiration. And what they do is, and I have no idea how they do this, but whenever you make a purchase, it tells you on your phone how, how much carbon it used, or you know, what, what the impact on the environment was. And it, and, and when I heard about this, I'm like, I don't buy this. I can't believe someone, like I care about this stuff, but like, that's just amazing that someone's willing to switch credit cards just for this reason, because switching credit cards is a pain in the ass. And these guys, I think they've raised over a hundred million dollars and they've attracted so many new customers just on this idea. And it was shockingly interesting. I, I, I'd never in a million years would have thought that that would take off like it did.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yep. I think this is a huge, huge trillion dollar industry. It's going to be the, like, software industry is a huge industry, biotech's a huge industry. This is going to be a giant industry. And there's lots of ways to get at it. Um, but it's, it's a different, it's a different model. You can't, it's not just, you know, hacking together something on the weekend, testing it and then iterating on it. It's a little different.

• 48:32Shaan Puri?

  So if climate is a trend, a big trend, a big wave that you believe in. What are some things that you see other entrepreneurs doing that you are less excited about or you you're not a believer in? Is there some trends? Because there's there's sometimes head fakes or things that are too early that there, you know, the time is not now. I'm curious, what do you see?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Or the time has passed.

• 48:53Shaan Puri?

  You're not a believer in, you're not interested in that sort of thing?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  You know, ye olde enterprise software companies with ye olde giant outside sales forces. It just feels like the time has passed to build that kind of thing. And I predicted that before and been wrong. But it feels like there's a new breed of company that sells in a new way. And they start with small businesses, whether it's Shopify or it's Stripe or it's HubSpot. Like, there's a new way to build a company and it's not targeting Fortune 500 companies. Like, when I see these companies starting like, yeah, we're targeting the Fortune 500, like, take the technology piece away, just all the compliance

• 49:38Speaker 01

  work you have to do to be able to sell to those companies and all the boxes you need to check to get in there. And then the sales model is just like, oh, good luck. It's a it's a that's a tough road to hoe.

• 49:51Shaan Puri?

  And I want to read a couple of tweets that you had put out. And I want to hear you kind of elaborate on a little bit. So one is, you know, you need to manage your something along the lines of you need to manage your creative people with loose reins. And that's from Lorne Michaels, the the sort of, I think, is a producer or the creator of Saturday Night Live for a long time. So what was, what struck what struck a chord with you about that?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Okay, you brought out something, you actually brought up something earlier that was really interesting about the Twitch CEO.

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  So in the early days of HubSpot, I'm not a product guy, by the way, by training or by DNA for that. I think someone described you, I believe it was Kip. I'm a sales guy. He said, you're the best, you're the best salesperson he's ever met. Yes, I'm a salesperson. And I grew up in sale, I grew up in enterprise sales, which is ironic, because I just said, I think that industry died. But

• 50:47Speaker 01

  I tried to convince myself that I was a product guy in really days of HubSpot. So I read everything I could about it, design books, I read everything about Steve Jobs and you name it. And I just tried to get really smart on it and I was, the truth is, I just was not good at it. And we hired one product manager, didn't work. We finally found a product manager that I liked and we sort of built around.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, I see. I don't actually have that DNA. I'm not good at this. And it took me a while to, it took me seeing someone who's actually really good at it to, to understand that I'm actually shitty at it. And I was like, oh, I get it. And then, then I had to figure out, well, how do I manage this type of person? And the way I managed this person and the team was by really giving them a lot of free rein, like giving them very wide boundaries and just saying, hey, you guys figure out and gals, what's inside this box? This is what the box looks like.

• 51:48Sam Parr?

  And what was that box? Like, we need to attract this type of customer. We need to grow by this. We need to, like, we need to, we, we can't have these people churning out.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  I'll show you, show you the box.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  It's a box I've drawn on whiteboards in the product organization a million times. Like, here's the CRM platform.

• 52:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, so Brian's literally drawing a box right now.

• 52:12Shaan Puri?

  By the way, he's got like a professor style chalkboard.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Oh, you guys, right. So I'm right, so on the board, I'll describe what I'm drawing. I drew a big-

• 52:18Shaan Puri?

  This is good. We have a YouTube channel.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  A big fat box on the bottom. It's like the HubSpot CRM.

• 52:23Sam Parr?

  Keep drawing, by the way. We have a YouTube channel. This is gonna be on there.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Okay, it's a, this is CRM platform on the bottom. And then on top are apps. Like, we got a marketing app. We have a sales app. We have a service app. We have a content management system. We have an ops app now. And basically, I would draw that on every board. And what's it, what's interesting about the dimensions of it is the vast majority of the space in the drawing is in the big box at the bottom, which is a message to the developers, the product people, like, hey, the power inside of HubSpot isn't a whole bunch of applications that we're gonna- Buy and glue together and cobble together. We're going to build a killer platform and that platform is going to have workflows as part of it. It's going to have social media as part of it and messaging. It's going to have a set of shared services and then

• 53:11Speaker 01

  the apps themselves are actually quite a bit smaller, but they're all just woven together pieces of the underlying platform. And they got it. And, uh, and actually they, they extended it in big ways. And then I said, I want a marketing business. It's going to be a billion dollar business, growing X percent. And this year I want a sales box. And in that sales box, I want that to be a whatever 300 million dollar business, growing Y percent. And I just draw out the numbers and draw out the boxes. And they would decide what to put in there based on what they thought and what customers were saying and where they thought the world was going. So I, I managed them very, very, very loosely. I manage other parts of HubSpot very, very tightly, but the product work very, very loosely.

• 53:53Sam Parr?

  But I heard, I've heard that you, you are like that most of the time. And then when something isn't going well, you get down and dirty and you're hard ass and you're like, we, we have to, we have to nail this.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  I do. I will do. I'm either at a very high level or I go very, very deep.

• 54:07Sam Parr?

  And, um, one of the first things that you said to me was like, um, keeps, you know, I, you didn't, you didn't mean it this way, but you're like, keep being you, keep being crazy.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:19Sam Parr?

  And if anyone says anything to you about what you can and cannot say, you let me know.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Stay weird.

• 54:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what it was. It was stay weird.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  And you're in Austin and Austin's a stay weird town. So I just naturally thought stay weird because what makes you, you is you're, you're fucking dude, you're weird.

• 54:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Well, dude, so I, Chad, Brian has a book. So if you Google Brian Halligan guitar, he bought Jerry Garcia's guitar and you could like see the price on there, um, which I was like, that's weird that like, I know that you bought a $2 million Jerry Garcia guitar. That's crazy. And also he has this book called like, what the grateful dad can teach you about social media.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  About marketing.

• 55:00Sam Parr?

  About marketing. Um, so.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  A lot. By the way, a lot, a lot.

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  What can I learn from the grateful dad? Give me that.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Oh my God. We're going to have to do another whole other podcast about it. It's just too much.

• 55:12Sam Parr?

  I, uh, do you know, so there's this company called, I bet you definitely know what it is. Nugs.net. You know, Nugs?

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  So Nugs is this, okay, so the reason I know about it was the hustle started in this small apartment that I rented for really cheap, but it was Craigslist's old office. So Craigslist was doing like $900 million a year and Craig Newark basically owned the whole thing. And he was based out of this little shitty apartment that I ended up renting right when he moved out. And we shared it with nugs.net. And it's, yeah, and it's nugs.net is this company that it started out basically, I think only for Grateful Dead. But basically, I remember as a kid, Sean, I don't know, you probably, you didn't have an older brother. So you probably didn't do this, but like you would meet people on the internet and you would get their address

• 56:04Sam Parr?

  and you would mail them a tape and they would mail you a tape back. And you would have a live recording of a particular concert. And nugs.net was the, the platform or the message board, kinda where you could like meet other people who went to a Pearl Jam or a Grateful Dead concert and you trade tapes. I don't even know what they do now.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Now it's cool. Now it's a live broadcast for concerts. It's awesome. So you want to see a, you want to see a Dave Matthews concert tonight? You know, they, they're probably broadcasting it. Uh, it's awesome now. They've really come along. That's an awesome app now.

• 56:38Sam Parr?

  And they like, so they started as this like, uh, this like the exchange, I guess now they have like a thing. And we were talking about the Grateful Dead and we can learn of, these people have the most like, it's, you know, there, there's like a few things like moms are like really culty about like products for their babies. Dog lovers are kinda like this. Um, health nuts can be like this and like Grateful Dead fans. Like the people who are into like fish, Grateful Dead, this type of stuff. It's, it's their engagement is off the charts. Uh, when you, if you go and look at it.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Uh, so I'll give you a non secret tour. Give you, in a weird way, the Grateful Dead inspired HubSpot. And here's what, here's how. So Sam, let's say you're going to a Rolling Stones concert. And you show up with the like, your big camera and your giant like, recording equipment. What happens when you get to the door?

• 57:31Sam Parr?

  They say, bounce, you know.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Bounce. And what are they, what does the Grateful Dead say?

• 57:36Sam Parr?

  I think they have a section where you can sit.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Special taper section for you, like, come on in, sit right here, put your microphone up, like, get your gear all set up. Come early, you got like VIP access, and you go and tape. And, and then you listen to the concert, and one of the things about the Grateful Dead that's interesting, like, when you see the Rolling Stones, you see them in Boston. They play a certain setlist and they play it very precisely and they're very good, then they go to New York, and what do they play?

• 58:09Sam Parr?

  It's, it's totally different.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  It's exactly the same thing, like.

• 58:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the most bands do the same thing, but Grateful Dead, it changes every night.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  It's totally different every time, and sometimes, by the way, sometimes it's terrible, but usually it's quite good. And so you tape in Boston, and then you go to New York, and they do, you know, Giant Stadium for two nights, then you go to Philly. And you follow them around, and by the end of the show, you've got like, you know, fifteen shows on, you know, of your tapes. And you pick the two or three real good ones, and you make copies for your friends, and you send them around to your friends. And then you're at some fraternity party or whatever, and somebody's playing this tape, and the person next to you is like, hey, what's this crazy gypsy music they're playing? You'd be like, oh, it's the Grateful Dead, why don't you come with us, we're going on, on the spring, on the summer tour this summer, come along with us. The Grateful Dead were the first and best inbound marketers, they gave away all their content.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  And they used the best content to spread the word around the internet, they were, they were very inspirational. Behind inbound and content marketing and all that stuff, they were the first ones, they were the really first ones to really embrace. Uh, viral marketing in, in a, in a super, super modern way. And back then, there wasn't email marketing, and there wasn't like, uh, social media, but they were. Big on message boards and the message boards were on way go.

• 59:26Sam Parr?

  I think the the live music space is interesting to me and there's a few opportunities that I've seen. So there's this company that is streams live concerts on Apple TV. Uh, I forget what it's called. Um, but they

• 59:38Speaker 01

  By the way, that's exactly what's Nugs does.

• 59:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And this company, they just built like a, uh, they don't stream live ones, but it's like a, it's like a, it's like Netflix for concerts. And they were doing like

• 59:47Speaker 01

  That's a cool idea.

• 59:48Sam Parr?

  It was pretty cool. They're doing about $20 million a year in subscription revenue. And I think they bootstrapped it. They're based out of England. I'll look, I'll look up the name in a second. And then the second thing that I always thought was interesting and it totally bombed was Songkick. Sean, did you know Songkick?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 1:00:03Sam Parr?

  Okay. So Songkick, what it did was they basically, you would say where you're living and it would tell you all the, all the concerts happening that day or for any other day.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Email. I still get

• 1:00:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So they have this huge email. It's basically like an email marketing business. And they raise a little bit of money and it completely, I think it went, I think they, it failed and was sold for nothing. But the thing about the, the live music space is like, a lot of people have tried to build stuff in there because it's fun, right? It's like you're passionate about it, but very few companies have been able to pull it off and make money. Another one was, um, like, um, something FM. What was that called? Uh, I forget what it was called. It was started in San Francisco.

• 1:00:41Shaan Puri?

  Turntable FM.

• 1:00:42Sam Parr?

  Turntable FM. And it, that bombed too. It didn't work out. Nothing.

• 1:00:48Shaan Puri?

  There's rights problems. There's rights problems. That's one problem for music. And then the other thing is the trick in business is I think to do what you're passionate about, that not every other human is also passionate about. You want to follow your passion, but you don't want to follow everyone's passion. That's just competition. Right? Like Brian nerds out about inbound marketing. He's passionate about something that 99% of other people don't even know or care about. So that's the beauty of HubSpot and how you can build a giant company like HubSpot, cause you're going to go further than everybody else. Live music? Okay. Yeah. Great. Here, here you go. You and every other

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Really good point.

• 1:01:21Shaan Puri?

  20 year old wants to do it.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  I'm not a huge Peter Thiel fan, but he said, he said something interesting in his book. He said, in order to be successful, you need to be right about something that everyone else thinks you're wrong about, and they think you're wrong about it for a long period of time.

• 1:01:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  I, I, I think that's rightish.

• 1:01:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, somebody said something like that. They go, investing is, is, uh, being a great investor is investing in things that everybody agrees with you about later.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:52Sam Parr?

  Yes. It's called Quello, by the way, Q E L L O. And they claim that they have two or three million subscribers. Uh, very interesting business.

• 1:02:03Shaan Puri?

  All right, we, we gotta wrap. Uh, we got another pod right after this, actually. Brian, this is great. Things are coming on. Uh,

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. This is fun.

• 1:02:10Shaan Puri?

  You're a fun hang. I, I like this. I didn't know anything about you before this. So this is cool.

• 1:02:14Sam Parr?

  I want to have you on again. The things next I want to talk about is like the evolution, how you go from like just being scrappy to now you're like very corporate CEO. That's a, that's a, it sounds like an insult. That's not an insult. I mean, like you're able to like manage thousands of people and like very few people have been able to pull that off. So I want to, I want to.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  We can talk, we can talk about the, the CEO journey and how it changes over time. It's interesting, but we definitely have some more grateful debt.

• 1:02:40Sam Parr?

  Down. I'm down. Well, thank you, man. This is awesome. Uh, this is, it's, it's kind of your podcast now. So anytime you want, come on, let's do it.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Okay.