#197 with Dharmesh Shah - Frameworks for Becoming a Billionaire (From a Billionaire's Perspective)

Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) are joined by HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah (@Dharmesh). Dharmesh shares his thought process behind buying the Hustle, how he thinks about time & money, and how HubSpot came to be. They close the episode talking about ideas around a better version of LinkedIn and the future of software. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (0:57) Intro * (9:10) The inside scoop on why HubSpot bought The Hustle * (14:00) What it's like to be a billionaire * (18:54) A framework on the relationship between time & money * (24:50) Rich guy questions * (28:24) Dharmesh on the beginnings of HubSpot * (37:10) Idea: A blockchain version of LinkedIn * (45:35) Dharmesh on BitClout * (50:22) Idea: NLP, the future of software * (53:20) Growth Bot & website graders * (59:25) Dharmesh on GPT-3 * (1:02:55) Idea: A community for remote work * (1:04:41) Deal trophies * (1:06:56) A framework to evaluate startup ideas * (1:13:55) Constructive podcast criticism * (1:18:36) Outro

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

• 0:00Dharmesh Shah?

  Here's what I say. Here's what I even have a seven-figure domain name picked up for you. I will write the $5 million check for you to go do it as far as a seed round or up to 5 million. If you want to let other people in, that's amazing.

• 0:11Shaan Puri?

  This just got spicy. Okay.

• 0:12Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. What's the domain name that you have?

• 0:15Dharmesh Shah?

  I am dead serious.

• 0:19Speaker 03

  I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.

• 0:29Sam Parr?

  All right. We just got done like 30 seconds ago, talking to the guy who we're going to introduce you to now. That was amazing. He's amazing. That guy's Dharmesh is amazing.

• 0:37Shaan Puri?

  He's very cool.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  So we have Dharmesh. I don't even know. What is Dharmesh's last name? Dharmesh Shah?

• 0:42Shaan Puri?

  I think Shah.

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  I just know him as Dharmesh. He's the co-founder of

• 0:46Shaan Puri?

  He's like Beyonce. You know, they just go with the one name at a certain point. Ronaldo, Beyonce, Dharmesh. That's, that's it.

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  So Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. He's the largest shareholder. I mean, we, we got pretty like into it right away. We're like, just tell like, tell us what it's like to be a billionaire.

• 1:03Shaan Puri?

  So I just Googled your net worth and it appears you're worth a billion dollars.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Shaan Puri?

  So how does that feel? And he's like, ah.

• 1:10Sam Parr?

  No, I told him I was going to talk to him about that. So we talked to him about just like wealth, which was

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  Let's rattle off some of the dope things he's done. So started HubSpot. HubSpot's like a whatever 25 billion dollar company or something like that. But he's done some other cool things. Early investor in

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  Coinbase, Dropbox and loads of different stuff.

• 1:26Shaan Puri?

  Right. And then also just has kind of like, he's like us. He's got that itch, that entrepreneurial itch. So he like, we talked a little bit about it. He's got like 20 domain names, some domain names that are worth like, you know, millions of dollars and others that are, you know, just simple ideas.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  I've already got, by the way, hundreds of domain names.

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  Right. But he's like, got ideas loaded into them like, ah, here's what you might do with this idea. And then here's a good domain name for it. And so I think he's, you know, he's sort of like, he's one of our people in that sense. Like he's an idea person. He's a frameworks person. So he shared some frameworks. He shared a bunch of ideas, two, two really big ideas in my opinion.

• 1:57Sam Parr?

  One idea on air, he goes, Sean, if you want to start this, I'll fund you right now for $5 million.

• 2:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Maybe an offer I pretty much couldn't refuse. I just had to sort of, you know, yeah, squeeze my thighs and sit still here. So, so, you know, but I thought it was exciting. I thought the actual ideas were really great. So I think people are gonna like that. We talked a little bit about the, we talked a little bit about wealth. We talked a little bit about kind of like early days, you know, HubSpot and the Hustle acquisition. And then we talked a bunch about ideas.

• 2:25Sam Parr?

  And then we, some of those ideas are about like a new, different type of LinkedIn or remote community. We talked about, oh, he talked about his framework for evaluating if it's, if an idea is good or not, if you should pursue it. That was actually incredibly educational. It was awesome, dude. It was great. So we'll get to the episode. Can you guys do me a favor, though? Click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify. That would mean a lot. Do we have to tell them anything else?

• 2:51Shaan Puri?

  Well, there's a thing going around where if you just post on your social networks and you're just like, hey, you know, PSA to whoever needs this, this podcast, you know, makes my commutes amazing. This is the best business podcast, hands down. You know, good karma comes to you in your next life. So that's just something, if you're interested in having a good next life, I would just do that.

• 3:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I'll reshare that for sure. I mean, because it impacts my ego and we hit, I hit, I share all, I share all compliments. So go ahead and do that. Make sure you share the iTunes or Spotify link with it. Thank you very much.

• 3:20Shaan Puri?

  The thing about me, I like compliments. All right.

• 3:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Shaan Puri?

  All right, enjoy this episode.

• 3:25Sam Parr?

  I don't remember what I was gonna say, but right before you came on, I was asking Dharmesh what he listens to. And he says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days.

• 3:34Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. Has that changed you? Have you, you've probably become a worse person. You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days, there's gonna be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets like corrupted slightly.

• 3:46Dharmesh Shah?

  You know, it's, I think that's true. That's an astute observation. It's, you know, we've just have, I won't say like completely divergent paths. So I'm just a, yeah, it's been good, though. I'm a believer in, like, just these kind of orthogonal things. It's like, oh, this is not stuff I'm like, you know, looking at retail businesses or like, you guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think that. Kind of thing like build a different muscle group. And I think it's been, it's been useful for me. Um, I'll, I'll put it to you that way. It's, I think we're not separated by any stretch. We have things that we have in common, but um, there are things that I'm just, and it'll come out in the pod. So I'm a weird dude.

• 4:25Sam Parr?

  We're, we're on now. So, um, this is the pod, but we, uh, yeah, this might, I have a feeling this might go a little long and I'm okay with that. Uh, Sean, do what you want, but we, um, I like, in my world, so I was just hanging out with Heat and Shaw yesterday and your, your name came up. We were just talking to Nathan Berry the other day. Your name came, came up. Sean and I are this text group where people talk about BitClout. Your name comes up. Your name comes up everywhere. Like you're, you've got, you're like a little, like you got like a spider web. Like you get your hands and all these little things. And I, I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. But do you, so, uh, this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the, uh, you're the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO?

• 5:07Dharmesh Shah?

  Yes.

• 5:08Sam Parr?

  Do you, are you active? Like, are you working really hard at HubSpot? Like, how do you have time to have your hands on all this different stuff?

• 5:15Dharmesh Shah?

  Uh, so the answer is yes. Uh, HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Uh, anything else that you see me doing? Uh, there's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot. Uh, there is, right? Um, so, yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that, uh, I spend pretty much all of my kind of non-family time, non-personal time on. Um, so it's my-

• 5:39Shaan Puri?

  And I just want to describe for people who are not watching. So you should go to the YouTube channel. It's youtube.com slash, I think HustleCon and you'll see the videos. But, uh, so here's what I see. So Dharmesh is sitting there. He's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard to his right. Uh, he's got a, I think a Steve Jobs, uh, piece of art behind him, or is that Lennon or something like that? I can't tell exactly who it is. John Lennon, maybe. Um, and you're in this room. So just, is this where you work on a day-to-day basis?

• 6:06Dharmesh Shah?

  Uh, so this is, well, yes and no. So this is my-

• 6:08Sam Parr?

  You're getting tricked, Sean. You're getting tricked. Listen.

• 6:11Dharmesh Shah?

  This is my living room. Uh, but it's a, like a capture a moment time when the living room was somewhat- Less disorganized than it usually would be, but it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up so I can.

• 6:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay, that's pretty good because usually when you have a green screen, it's like half your head also turns into like the background. And this one's actually pretty good. I'm impressed.

• 6:32Dharmesh Shah?

  I've done like a multiple green screen, so I'm sort of surrounded with it. So if I need to twist the camera one way or the other, it's still.

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  So you're kind of doing the oasis thing we talked about. You basically, you have a virtual background, but the virtual background is not just you on a beach, like a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's like clean and perfect the way you want it or whatever. And you're like, that's what I want my background to be regardless of the reality of the current, whatever your current situation is. I like that.

• 6:56Dharmesh Shah?

  Really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real. That's not part of the background. So if I go here, you'll see the big sound. So it's just kind of cool.

• 7:04Sam Parr?

  So let me, um, let me do like a very brief intro and like an overview of what we're going to talk about. So Dharmesh sent us like a list of ideas. We're going to get into them, but I need to give a background here. So the listeners entirely understand. So HubSpot today is like a 25 or 30, I don't know, whatever the market cap is. So $25 billion publicly traded company. You co-founded it 15 years ago, I think. Prior to that, you had another startup that you sold for a significant amount of money. We can talk about that. Throughout this whole time, you own, I believe millions and millions of dollars worth of domains. Like you, um, you bought your wife like as a gift, humanism.com, which we got to talk about. That's pretty funny. You've, um, you're an angel investor in a lot of different startups, including Coinbase and

• 7:49Sam Parr?

  things like that. You've got your hands on all these different things. Like you, according to Wallmind or WallStreetMind.com, you're worth today 850 billion, a million dollars. So like you, you do a little bit of everything in the world of business. It's incredibly fascinating. And so I wanted to talk today, talk about, you might be, well, you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm going to ask you questions about that.

• 8:17Sam Parr?

  I don't know.

• 8:18Dharmesh Shah?

  It's okay. It's fine.

• 8:19Sam Parr?

  We're gonna, we're gonna ask you questions about-

• 8:21Dharmesh Shah?

  Mark, it doesn't really matter. And that's the one thing I've learned. We can talk about that, too.

• 8:24Sam Parr?

  Well, that's, that's okay if it doesn't matter. We're gonna talk about it. We're also gonna talk about your ideas. We're gonna talk about building HubSpot. We're gonna talk about why you invest and what you invest. And we're gonna talk about, do you ever invest in non-startup stuff? We're gonna invest about, we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff. Sean, what do you think?

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  Well, I would have asked him, okay, so here's my question. My question's actually not about Dharmesh. It's actually about Sam. So, so you, so I've always wondered this. So you acquired The Hustle, and I hope you could be as, as transparent as you want here. I think Sam will not care. So I would say, DNA-wise, The Hustle's kind of a unique company. Sam's a pretty unique dude that you kind of brought into your company. Different DNA probably than the vast majority of employees there. Give me kind of like-

• 9:09Sam Parr?

  Well, and you do. You're part of the deal, too, Sean. So you're in the book.

• 9:13Shaan Puri?

  You don't have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis. So, so we're doing that deal and bringing these guys in, I guess, like, I don't know. Are there any interesting observations, any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post that had to do with, you know, Sam and The Hustle? I'm just curious, kind of like, what's your view on that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on.

• 9:33Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, and we haven't, HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them. Pretty much, most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think, as you, as you observed, is the DNA of The Hustle is different than HubSpot. And, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. So the thing that I was worried about is, and I, until now, I don't think Sam and I have actually, ever had a one-on-one chat, so-

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  This is my therapy session for you guys.

• 10:01Dharmesh Shah?

  Therapy for two people, Sean.

• 10:03Sam Parr?

  Dharmesh and I talk a lot on Slack. We're like buddies on Slack.

• 10:07Dharmesh Shah?

  But the thing I was worried about is that, you know, so Sam is a, kind of what I would think of as a kind of type A personality. Just like, he's out there, he's hustling, that's the name of the company, which is fine, but it's just not, most of the makeup of HubSpot is not that. We're a very, we're a, I don't know what the right, it's kind of overly stereotype us, but- We're not type A. We're like a kinder, gentler, humble, just quieter kind of company. So that's the one thing.

• 10:36Sam Parr?

  Oh, here, let me explain it this way.

• 10:38Shaan Puri?

  So Sam would be described as brash. I don't think anybody would ever describe HubSpot as brash.

• 10:42Sam Parr?

  Well, today, Kieran, the guy I work with, technically my boss, he was like, you should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role for your growth. And I was like, well, why? He goes, I think you're too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot. It's like, that's an example.

• 10:57Dharmesh Shah?

  I think that was good advice, but, um, but it's worked out. It's worked out well. So there have been, um, like the one kind of minor story I can recall, there was a, like a Twitter back and forth that I think Sam had with, uh, Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this, Sam, but there was something that was said about VCs or investment or something. And Rand's been a good friend. It's like, and, uh, but I was like, oh, okay. Well, it's fine. I'm like, okay.

• 11:22Dharmesh Shah?

  Not like either party was right, wrong, or indifferent, but I know them, you know, at least now a little bit, uh, both. But anyway, so it's, but it's been fine.

• 11:31Sam Parr?

  In my defense, I, I, I hope, and even our podcast defense, our goal is we will disagree with people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of like disrespect or trying to like hurt your feelings.

• 11:43Dharmesh Shah?

  No.

• 11:43Shaan Puri?

  But I will say I do put entertainment first sometimes. So sometimes I will poke the bear for the entertainment value of it when, you know, the kinder, nicer, simpler thing to do would be to do, to do nothing or just back away. Uh, so, so I do like to have fun either on Twitter or on the podcast.

• 11:59Dharmesh Shah?

  HubSpot too much, but the one thing I will say, this was as far as the deal itself, it was one of the better things HubSpot has done. In terms of like the strategy behind it, I think, um, is, is strong in terms of like, it gets HubSpot into a thing, which is where I think the future of kind of SaaS companies has, is going to be heading, which is more and more of them are going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people and resources. And there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline, but I'm a believer in companies kind of controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying from, buying audiences and renting them from someone else.

• 12:34Shaan Puri?

  See, this is where you should just say, just drop a one line, be like, you know, and we got it at a fantastic price just to drive Sam crazy for the next seven years. Just leave him constantly questioning himself.

• 12:43Sam Parr?

  Look, I think.

• 12:46Sam Parr?

  There, yeah, could we have sold for more? Definitely, maybe. Like, that always is a maybe, right? I think that when we sold HubSpot, I felt was undervalued. I think when, I think the day the deal closed, it was, or maybe like, what was the stock in January? Was it like, it was worth like $350 or was it even less? $250? I don't remember. Today, it's, today, it's 600 bucks. So like, our guess, my guess was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. And also, I wanted to create a reputation of someone who was like a fair dealmaker and like, like, I think people will know that, like, if I built something, I sold it, that all, all parties got a good deal. And so-

• 13:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay, all right, sounds good. We can, we can switch off the Hub, the Hustle acquisition. So let's do some ideas.

• 13:31Sam Parr?

  No, wait, I want to talk about one thing really quick. Can we, let's talk about money stuff. Okay. Cause I told Dharmesh I was gonna ask him this. So first of all, is it weird that I know what your net worth is today because it's like public information?

• 13:45Dharmesh Shah?

  Um, it's not weird for me, honestly. Like, I'm a, I'm generally like transparent. I believe in kind of the openness of the web. It's, and I'm a, in the sense it's a publicly traded company, like that's, you know, would I want my like bank accounts and all my accounts kind of published on the web? No. But the fact that I'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares, which you can take the number of shares, which is on the public record and multiply it by the current price and get, which is probably roughly 85, 90% of my overall net worth, because that's where all my money is, is in HubSpot shares. I don't find that weird. It's, you know.

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  Has your life changed as this, as this has like accumulated and, and things got didn't different? Or has it basically, so you, you had another company before this. How much did you sell that for?

• 14:29Dharmesh Shah?

  Uh, 100 or 15, in that range, based on how you count it.

• 14:33Sam Parr?

  And has your life changed since that moment significantly? Cause that's a, that's a significant number in itself, right?

• 14:39Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah. So here, here's the thing. It's, um, and I'd like to say, no, you know, I wasn't focused on money or I'm not focused on, at the time when I was younger, I was very, very focused on money. And I had very kind of modest upbringing. And I was like, okay, well, it wasn't like the money and the accumulation of it, it was the freedom. You know, ever since I was little, I, I always want to kind of configure the universe to my liking, so to speak, because I have got my quirks. So like, these are things, the way I like to do things. And having to kind of work in a normal kind of classic job doesn't give you a whole lot of control over your- You're a part of the universe. You don't get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire. You don't have a lot of degrees of freedom. Um, so yeah, I'd been thinking back in then, I had, you know, I'd kind of thought about money. Um, and like the first, I'll say five million or so, um,

• 15:23Dharmesh Shah?

  has a dramatic impact, had a dramatic impact on my life, right? Because that buys you an inordinate amount of freedom, right? You don't have to work again. Um, you can invest in things you can do pretty, as long as you're not out, you know, buying small islands and overtaking countries. I mean, that's a decent amount of money for, for folks, right? Um, and then after that, and there are other kind of, I don't know exactly what the demarcations are where, you know, more money adds on a marginal basis, a little bit more freedom, you can do more things. Um, but you know, like the kinds of things I do, like I enjoy food in restaurants. There's only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being. Um, even if you like the finer things, it's like, okay, well, unless you're trying to make a statement

• 16:05Dharmesh Shah?

  and spend a hundred times with the average of a whatever X is, it's kind of hard to, you know, spend money completely well, even if you have a high end taste, honestly.

• 16:15Shaan Puri?

  The most common thing I've heard, I don't know if you would agree or disagree, is like, there's these levels. So it's like first, uh, in debt, when you're in debt to no debt, that's like the first jump where, oh, freedom. Got this weight off my shoulders. Then there's kind of like, you know, um, uh, what I'll call there's a zero to one million where it's like, oh my God, you know, mentally I'm a millionaire. That's kind of just like a mentally freeing concept and interesting concept. That's why we named the pod what we did. Uh, but also, you know, that'll, that'll afford you a certain type of lifestyle. And then the next jump I've heard is like at 10 or 10 or 10 ish, where it's sort of like, okay, at 10 ish, you sort of, um, you don't have to work, like at a million, you still gotta work. At 10, you don't have to work. You can kind of like have a couple of places to live. You could do whatever you want. You don't really need to check the prices when you go do things.

• 16:58Dharmesh Shah?

  Yep.

• 16:59Shaan Puri?

  And then there's sort of like, A hundred or more, which is sort of like, you know, the ego gets involved. It's like, okay, now I'm keeping score against, you know, in the, in the business Olympics against, against these other folks. And also, you know, I could do some like, you know, like, I can, I can, I can buy an island. I can buy a piece of an NBA team. I can, I can go do these different things that are like, kind of like bucket list. And, and the joy, what I've heard is sort of like, you know, for most people is sort of like, the joy actually like de-escalates from the, from the beginning there. Like getting out of debt is sort of like the most relief, most joy. And then sort of like, it starts to diminish sort of step by step as you go. Like the 10 to 100 feels a lot less impactful and less sort of changes your, your joy and your mood than like going from zero to 10.

• 17:42Dharmesh Shah?

  Yep, just two threads I want to pull on as long as we're talking about money. So one is one thing that's kind of helped me reconcile it in terms of, you know, having to be in the, in the net worth now is, you know, the plan, my wife and I have talked about this. The plan is to donate 90 plus percent of it, right? Like we have one child, we're not going to spoil them. So it's not like we're trying to build a multi-generational dynasty. That is not the goal. And so then like, you know, if I make a really good return on a startup or something like that, it's like, okay, well I'm.

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  Discount 90%.

• 18:13Dharmesh Shah?

  For my wife's foundation, that's essentially what it comes down to, right? So most of the 90% of whatever it is, I mean, I don't, I think it'll end up being higher because I just don't think we're capable of actually spending the, spending the money. But yeah, so that makes me feel better, but just kind of taking it back to the early days. One kind of lesson I learned early, early on, and this is useful, beginning part of my career is the kind of the relationship between time and money. And one thing is that we spend the better part of kind of first half of our lives converting time into money, right? And you're looking for the hours, you're looking for, yeah, you want to get that, you know, rate up as, as you can. And then the latter half of you're desperately trying to buy time back with the money however best you can, right? So that's, and it varies a little bit as to kind of when that turn happens.

• 18:56Dharmesh Shah?

  But the thing that I kind of learned, this was, and I thought about it probably a few years after that. So I was making $3.65 in my first job when I came over as an immigrant. And I worked all the way through school, it took me seven degrees to get my four, uh, seven years to get my four-year degree. I was working full-time the whole way through. Um, and that wasn't a lot of money. And as it turns out, um, I had to do pretty much, I think nothing was delegatable. But then, once I got to the point where I was making ten, twenty, fifty dollars an hour, it's like, okay, well, now, and like all of my time, I can make as much billable as I want to, as much as I'm humanly possible, willing to work, there was someone willing to pay me for that time. I was an engineer, that's how things worked back then, it was. And, and the pivotal point for me is I, I got this, uh, you know, it's in

• 19:39Dharmesh Shah?

  my early twenties, I got this bump to like a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour working as an engineer. And that was an ungodly amount of money. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the, you know, the nineties. Uh, that was like real money, right? And I was working a lot. So I was making a fair amount. So then I made the decision that if there's anything I've been doing with my time, that could be done by spending less than a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour, I'm being an idiot by actually doing it, right? If I enjoy it, that's a different story. But if I'm not, it's just stupid. And so I've carried that kind of idea. It's like, okay, so what value would I place in my time?

• 20:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:12Dharmesh Shah?

  What is occupying my time that I can kind of delegate, or even if I'm paying a premium? It's like, okay, I could, I could pay seventy-five dollars an hour to stop for someone to pay, you know, to mow my lawn. Yeah, I hate it. But it's still profitable, right? Like, why would you do that? It's like, I would do that every day of the week. Um, so the one thing that's changed for me, um, so now, like, I went back and did the math, because I knew I was gonna be on this podcast, and you, you folks like numbers. So if I, let's say I worked on average sixty hours a week, and I've done that for about thirty years, give or take, um, it was my kind of professional career. My average hourly rate across the thirty years would be like ten thousand dollars an hour, right? And now it's backloaded, effectively my hourly rate. And so now, it's like, okay, well, if there's anything, and

• 20:54Dharmesh Shah?

  I would actually pay a premium right now, right, above that, right? Like, so I would not spend my time, even an hour, on anything that wasn't worth at least that. It's like, okay, well, like, the future me would buy for fifty, a hundred thousand dollars, if there's some option value on that time. Anyway, the, the short message is, uh, most people don't value their time enough, and don't think about it objectively enough. And it, like, anything else is a resource, but it's finite. Uh, but put a number on it. And then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not worth that?

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  Right. And Naval has this, uh, phrase in his, like, kind of How to Get Rich, uh, podcast or whatever, How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. He says, um, He goes, you know, put a, put a, I don't know what he calls it, like an outrageously outrageous hourly rate for yourself.

• 21:40Sam Parr?

  Like a super ambitious rate.

• 21:42Shaan Puri?

  Ambitious one, one that's way beyond wherever you're at. He's like, you know, ever since I was young, this is like one of the smart things I did. I just said $5,000 an hour, some like really aspirational hourly rate. He's like, my friends used to laugh and joke like, dude, you bought this blender, you're not even using it. Go return it. And he's like, no, I'm not going to go return it. I don't, I don't enjoy it. And it's going to get me back $30 for the hour round trip, you know, going and returning this thing at Target. So like, I will throw it away. I will give it away. What I will not do is I will not give my time back into that because the hourly rate just doesn't make sense.

• 22:12Sam Parr?

  I love that.

• 22:13Shaan Puri?

  And so I've done a similar thing and it's kind of funny to like pick that hourly mark because it sounds crazy. Like I, my mom will get mad at me. She'll come to my house and then she'll see the way I'm living and she's like, oh my God, like this, this bill is late. They're going to, there's a $75 fee if you don't do it. And I'm like, I'm not calling them and they can charge me the $75 fee. They could charge it to me 10 times. Like I'm not going to use this hour. Like, and I'll tell her like, look, literally my hourly rate is X, right? It's X thousands of dollars. So, so are you, that's my hourly rate. So I'm not going to trade that hour to go do this thing I don't enjoy. Cause her other argument is, well, you go watch TV. And I'm like, well, that I enjoy. So that, that I'm actually spending the money.

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  But Sam, I know you're a little bit different. Like when I went to go visit Sam in Austin, he had like CVS receipts that he had been saving in his like glove compartment of his super fancy car. Like he's a dichotomy, right? He's got, he's got the money, he likes to spend some things, but he's also enjoys being cruel. It's like a fun hobby.

• 23:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that makes me feel good about myself.

• 23:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. I guess the question I had for you is, do you also have an hourly rate? Do you, do you think about that? Or you don't do that, that framework? Sam, this is for you.

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, for me? Um, yeah, I have that framework. Yeah. So like, uh, yeah. I mean, it makes me feel good not to waste stuff. Like I feel good about myself and I feel guilty if I waste it. So I feel, I feel happy when I do that. And I feel, it's hard for me to go to bed at night if I, if I waste something or I don't return it. Um, yeah, I have that hour. I mean, I mean, I have that rate like I just assume that I'm gonna make,

• 23:40Sam Parr?

  I, I assume that I'm gonna make $3 million a year. So whatever that hourly rate is, but I, I think I'm, I'm gonna make $3 million a year. And um, anything that like will make less than that, I don't wanna do it. But that said, like mowing the lawn, I get joy from that. So I have no prob- I don't like put a money thing on anything, but like if someone's like, hey, will you, in fact, Sean, someone asked us to fly to London to come speak at some event or something. And I, um, I'll forward it to you, but they're like, yeah, it's October. And I'm like, I don't wanna go there. I'm like, how much money would they have to pay me to go and do this? I'm like, they have to pay me a lot, like.

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  Right. Cause you also hate flying. Yeah.

• 24:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's like, I just don't, it just, that just is a paper. They'd have to pay me a hundred thousand dollars to do that. And like, that does not make any sense. But I just hate, I just hate it.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  And uh, so Dharmesh, a couple more uh, rich guy questions. And we like these because honestly, um, you'd never get to ask these, even if we were just hanging out personally, I could never ask you this, but for the, for some reason with the podcast, it's like sort of okay for me to just like ask you random ass questions like this.

• 24:36Sam Parr?

  And I told them, I, when he wanted to come on, or I, I asked him to come on, I go, I'm gonna ask you this stuff. And I, and we gave him an easy out. I said, if you don't wanna answer anything, just say you don't wanna answer it.

• 24:44Shaan Puri?

  And, and I'm sort of projecting here where um, you know, uh, I guess like I, I think I put myself in your shoes. What if I had more money than I could ever spend? What would I do? And so my question to you is, what, whether you did it or did, or you just considered it, what's a sort of outlandish use of funds that you've either considered or done? Like, so for example, you know, some people are like, yeah, you know, like, some people like jets, that's not, I'm not buying a private jet, I'm, but what I really care about is I love this sock, so I bought every, I love Jordans sneakers, so I bought every pair of Jordans. I have this closet in my house, just full of these things. And I always wanted it when I was a kid, right? Or if they overspend in some area and they, they're just happy to have done it. Or like, um, it could be like philanthropic. Like, I think if I had a billion dollars, um,

• 25:27Shaan Puri?

  I think like two days a year, I would just wire somebody like a million dollars. I would literally just wire a random person a million dollars and I would just see how that plays out. And I think it would bring me like tons of joy and entertainment. To do that and see how they react and what happens and what do they, what do they do with it? Like maybe some kid who's working on something interesting, I would just be like, look, here, what, check your account, it's there. Uh, you know, so, so give me something that has, is there anything that's sort of non-standard that you either have done or considered doing?

• 25:53Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, the thing that I, I do is I like those kind of um,

• 25:58Dharmesh Shah?

  Kind of micro acts of spontaneity that says, oh, like someone is wants to go to this event or something like that and can't afford it or whatever. It's like, I'll be a sponsor. Like, if you can find people that want to do this, go do this. I'll do that relatively regularly. I've taken this, the sound. So I've taken my average tip amount up to between 50 and 100% everywhere I go. And this is partly because I want to make up for all the time when I was younger that my family did not tip well. So I'm trying to average it out. And that's, as long as I can do it without like drawing too much attention, because I don't want to be that weirdo guy. It's like, okay, no, send sometimes the wrong signals. I want to do it.

• 26:36Sam Parr?

  I do that, by the way.

• 26:37Dharmesh Shah?

  Modesty. It's okay.

• 26:39Sam Parr?

  I typically tip 50%. It makes me feel good.

• 26:42Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah. It's, yeah. And I've worked in the service industry before I know that, you know, those kinds of things matter. So.

• 26:49Sam Parr?

  I'm a cheap bastard, so I'll stay silent here.

• 26:51Dharmesh Shah?

  In terms of like, you know, large things. So philanthropy, the running joke inside the house is my wife and I, and so she's not from the tech world at all. But I'm really, so I want to like own the world. And she wants to save it, right? Like she, so I will make the money. Yeah, that's something I've been relatively good at. And she will be able to channel it to good causes and the philanthropic effort. So she'll be able to do that. So I don't have any like particular specific things. I will say like, I am a, so I'm the guy that's like jacked with the matrix. So if there was a world, it's like, oh, it's like, this is, you know, like, I live a virtual world. So there's not a lot of physical things that I crave or desire, other than a piano, which I've wanted for a while now, now, you know. But it doesn't excite me all that much, right? It's like,

• 27:34Dharmesh Shah?

  it's, and because atoms, there's a maintenance to atoms, right? Like atoms versus bits. Like, if you have it, whether it's a yacht or whatever it is, a plane, like, that takes calories. I could take, I don't care how much you've delegated, whatever. That's something in your life that's kind of attached to you somehow. And I just don't like that. I don't like that idea. It feels more weighty to me than kind of joyful. But.

• 27:55Sam Parr?

  So, speaking of time, we, so HubSpot, 15 years old. I don't know how many people are here, 2,500, 3,000, whatever. It seems like you guys like grew pretty fast early on. But has it always felt like a grind? Or I mean, like when I, when I see you, I'm like, well, you don't have to do this. Like you could delegate this. You don't have to work here. You're set. You're good. Why are you still doing this? And does it still feel like a grind? And when has it stopped feeling like a grind? One of the reasons why I wanted to sell to you. I was like, if I don't sell like in this cycle, I'll probably have to wait another five years. Do I want to put that work in? Or do I want to sell now? Like what, like that's a hard challenge. Did you face that? And just walk me through that.

• 28:37Dharmesh Shah?

  So a couple of things. It's not widely known, but so Brian and I is co-founders. We had a kind of heart to heart co-founder chat, which I encourage all founders to have. And we had this list of questions we're going to go through. And I've published this on my, on my own startups blog. But one of the things was around who's going to be CEO. And we decided he's going to be CEO because I suck at being CEO. You know, I did that with my first startup for 10 years. I'm just not that good at it. So that was kind of decision one. But decision two, which is much, much more unconventional is that I have no direct reports. So when my agreement with Brian was I'm not going to have any management responsibilities in this company. I'm going to be in it a hundred percent, but I'm not a good manager. Now I'm reasonably smart guy.

• 29:21Dharmesh Shah?

  If I spent a bunch of time, I could probably with some coaching, get passively okay at management. Like I, I think I could get there. I don't want to spend 10, 20, 30 years of my life getting passively good at something. I'm a big believer in take your strengths, whatever they are, and put like all your energy into kind of amplifying those strengths and getting really, really good at that thing. And don't worry about your weaknesses all that much. So I don't want, want to worry about my weakness managing people. And so we have over 4,000 people at HubSpot. I have zero direct reports. I've never had direct reports in the 15 years. And that is partly what makes it much, I don't think of it as a grind at all. Like it's completely discretionary and optional for me. Obviously I have a lot of kind of vested interest in the company, but in terms of the work that I do and I've.

• 30:05Dharmesh Shah?

  So to whittle down my life at HubSpot, this has been this way for a better part of a decade. Is I get it down to like three things I'm going to work on and that I will change those every few years. So for a long time, it was like brand, culture, and what I call boldness, which is, is the organization taking on enough risk? Because the temptation is always like, once you start having customers and revenues are growing, things like that is just the kind of what we call drag the spreadsheet. It's like, oh, like here are the numbers, this is how it's growing, we're just going to drag the spreadsheet and the numbers will flow, basically. It's to push the organization so we don't do that. So what I do is I will maniacally focus on whatever those three things are and say no to pretty much everything else. And things will swap in and out. So I've had, you know, product in there, I've had platform in there.

• 30:50Dharmesh Shah?

  But on that thing, whatever it is I'm working on, so when I had culture on my list, it's like I spent 300 hours, you know, on the culture code deck at HubSpot. I'm going to do everything I can to learn everything I can to try and get culture to be a thing at HubSpot.

• 31:06Dharmesh Shah?

  And yeah, so it's, I find it enjoyable. I get to kind of pick the things. So my three things are different, you know, from year to year. I like to dig into the details. I don't like floating at 50,000 feet in lofty ivory towers. I like to, like, if I'm going to work on brand, I'm in there with the marketing team, like reviewing copy and going through the, and this is why I'm taking Sean's copywriting part, like I obsess over details. So anyway, yeah.

• 31:32Sam Parr?

  Did you see, Sean, that he's in your power writing course?

• 31:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I saw that. I was like, how does this guy have time to do this? This is amazing. I don't know.

• 31:38Sam Parr?

  Well.

• 31:38Shaan Puri?

  Have you, how's it been so far?

• 31:40Sam Parr?

  He talks to me all the time. That's why I'm like, what do you do all day?

• 31:45Dharmesh Shah?

  I found it very useful. I'll say that. It's, and I think copywriting overall is one of the most underrated skills in entrepreneurship generally. Like, if people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, 50 hours. And you can learn a lot of what you need just by like reading the top three books on it and just practicing the craft, right? It's a doable thing. And the nice thing about it, and one thing I love about it, it's like measurable. You can objectively measure whether you got better at copywriting or not. You can look at your conversion rates, so whatever numbers you're trying to move as a result of your words. And it's a it's a learnable skill. That's yeah.

• 32:21Sam Parr?

  One more question and we can move on. But and the reason why you were able to do this no direct reports is I think that you were the first investor. And so like, was this was HubSpot your idea or was it Brian's idea? But I think you invested like half a million dollars of your own money to like get it started. And aren't you the largest shareholder of the company?

• 32:41Dharmesh Shah?

  I am. And so so the idea of HubSpot is that you have to decouple the two things. So HubSpot was not supposed to happen. And here's what I mean by that. When I sold my last company, and I had been running it for 10 hours, 10 years and working the proverbial entrepreneurial hours as one would expect. Right? It was self funded, bootstrapped. And I promised my wife that I would not do another startup. It's like, OK, well, you know, the one I'm doing, I'm in, I can't not be in. The analogy, you know, I use is it's a little bit like being at like a gaming table in Las Vegas. Right? And it's like, and you don't know the rules of the game. This is how startup entrepreneurship works if you're if you're self funded. It's like you're at the table and the only real feedback you get is like sometimes the chips go down. Sometimes they go up. You're playing, you're trying to figure out the rules as you go. You don't know.

• 33:26Dharmesh Shah?

  But there's one like cardinal rule is that if you leave the table, whatever chips you have on the table, they're gone. Every now and then the house will come up to you and say, hey, would you like to cash in your chips? They're worth X dollars. And this is the position you were in. So I was like, OK, would you like to sell your company? Here's what someone's willing to pay for it. And if you miss that opportunity, you have no idea when the next opportunity to cash out your chips. And so you keep playing, right? It's like, and so the thing I told my wife was like, I have to keep playing. I did like if I chose to get off the table, it's like, yeah, I have a lot of assets into this. 100% of our net worth is invested in this. And so then eventually, when I sold, that was a decision. It's like, OK, I'm leaving the table cashing in my chips. I don't have to do this anymore. So that's why I went to grad school. And my plan was go to grad school.

• 34:11Dharmesh Shah?

  So I didn't really get a chance to enjoy undergrad because I was working the whole time through it. I'm gonna like actually go to grad school, be a real student, apply myself and not go do anything.

• 34:20Sam Parr?

  How old were you?

• 34:22Dharmesh Shah?

  I was thirty-five, thirty-six, somewhere in that range. Yep, so.

• 34:27Sam Parr?

  So like a thirty-six-year-old college kid, living the dream.

• 34:30Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, I had a great time. It was awesome. One of the best things I did is just go back to grad school for a variety of reasons. But anyway, so I had not planned it. So my plan was go to grad school, then maybe get like a PhD and then go teach. That was my kind of path, my kind of chosen path. And then I met Brian in grad school, and we both had this kind of shared passion for SMB. We both come from tech, different backgrounds. And so the first decision we made, before we even decided what HubSpot was going to be, was that the two of us should do a company together. And if like Brian was not going to do a company, there would be no HubSpot, right? Like I, so I had registered the domain name, I had kind of noodled on kind of variety of things, but then we kind of came together and said, let's do this. And by the way, all through grad school, we were noodling

• 35:14Dharmesh Shah?

  on ideas, right? We're like, okay, well, we'll do this. And we had HubSpot, we went to the business plan competition, wrote a business plan for early versions of HubSpot, just fun to look at. But the idea came after, like we had kind of narrowed it down to two companies. Two, past one was in marketing, which is what we ended up doing. The other one was like a oracle for small business, like an ERP, similar to NetSuite, which you folks were talking about in the last episode.

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  All right, so let's do some ideas, because I think, you know, one of the cool things, what I love about any technically-minded person who has business success is typically when, when people who are non-technical get into business, they go in one of two paths. They, you know, sort of become a financier. They're like, great, still love business, but I don't want to sweat anymore, so I'll invest. And, and lots of people invest, but they make investing the main thing. And what I've found is that a lot of people who are technical that end up being successful, they never stop loving kind of what's new, where technology is going, how behaviors are changing, that sort of thing. And whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live as a user at the edge. And so, so tell me like,

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  I guess, what's, what, give me one or two kind of technologies or ideas right now, spaces that are most exciting to you at the moment?

• 36:26Dharmesh Shah?

  Uh, two. One is around kind of broadly defined cryptocurrency. Um, and we haven't talked about Big Cloud yet, but I'll bring that out. Is a cryptocurrencies as applied to other kind of mainstream things. So the, if I, we're not doing HubSpot, which I have no plans of doing anything else. But, um, this is the idea. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you my pitch, Sean.

• 36:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Dharmesh Shah?

  What you should do, since now you're out of Twitch, um, you should do a professional network, um, that's powered by the blockchain, that, and I'm gonna say this kindly, that, uh, people love, uh, because if people don't love the incumbent right now.

• 37:03Sam Parr?

  Can I, can I say my opinion? I mean, you know, you know, my opinion. Can you cool if I say it?

• 37:07Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

• 37:08Sam Parr?

  LinkedIn sucks. Uh, how about this? A lot of people say LinkedIn sucks. And, um, you're suggesting build it, building a different one, um, on the blockchain.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  Let's catch it out. So.

• 37:21Dharmesh Shah?

  So here's what I say. Here's what, I even have a seven-figure domain name picked out for you. I will write the $5 million check for you to go do it as far as a seed round, uh, or up to $5 million if you want to let other people in. That's amazing.

• 37:33Shaan Puri?

  This just got spicy. Okay.

• 37:34Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. What's the domain name that you have?

• 37:36Dharmesh Shah?

  I am, I am dead serious. I have, uh, and you can, yeah. So, and here, here's why it needs to.

• 37:43Sam Parr?

  Wait, let's play this out. Yeah, keep going.

• 37:45Dharmesh Shah?

  So the issue right now is that, you know, LinkedIn, yes, people don't like it. It was a product that was great for its time, uh, and times have changed now. There's a different kind of need. And the thing I'm excited about is the intersection of a couple of things. One is, um, you know, we didn't have things like Big Cloud or cryptocurrency before. Now we do, right? One of the issues with LinkedIn is like, okay, well, you've got the kind of spam issue. You've got all this like, okay, well, how do I separate all the noise from the signal? It's just, it's just a pain in the ass. Over time, the asymptotic move for LinkedIn is like diminishing utility, right? It's like, it's just gonna become painful. And so then there's, there's a cap on where you can go with it. So imagine, uh, that you, and so Big Cloud ended up doing Twitter with the blockchain. Imagine if there was something else that did LinkedIn on the blockchain, and you have your own

• 38:29Dharmesh Shah?

  kind of currency. And then you could say, hey, you know what? I'm an engineer that's a free agent or whatever. And for $500, I will look at your company and apply for it. I'll do a reasonably good job or for $10, I'll open your email or for X, I'll do this. It's like, okay, there's a right now.

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  And there's an inherent. So the thing, the cool thing about BitClaw is everybody's got a price, right? Everybody's got, every coin has certain value. And so the beauty of a professional one would be right now, when you go on LinkedIn, it is not obvious the level of hierarchy, right? And so you always have people who are either recruiters or people who are at the bottom of the career ladder, trying to keep connecting and reaching out to the people at the top of the career ladder, and they have no real incentive to do it. And so they just sort of ignore LinkedIn altogether. Why would I even go to this site? I'm just going to get inundated with crap that I don't really want. And so the beauty of this is that because everybody has a coin value, you sort of inherently have baked in the sort of like career worth, career value that this person is bringing to the table into the network.

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  And so you know, A, somebody has a way to buy attention. So they buy your coin, which increases your price. So it's a mutual beneficialness right now. If I go pay LinkedIn, I can send you spam in mail. You do not receive any of the revenue from me paying LinkedIn for the right to spam you. In this case, I could say, hey, if you want to spam me, if you want me to read your thing and you want me to respond to it, here's my prices. So it becomes revenue generating for me. The second thing is that when somebody reaches out, I can quickly assess their value in the network based on how much other people believe in this person, how much other people weight this person. And so now it's not this kind of like every node kind of looks the same on the surface. No, they would not look the same on the surface, which is really cool.

• 40:09Dharmesh Shah?

  Correct. And just one more thing. Yeah. So yes, so that there's a kind of crypto angle where everyone's got a price. The other angle is, we'll call it page rank for the professional graph, right? So right now, the professional graph.

• 40:21Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 40:22Dharmesh Shah?

  Including Twitter, it's all symmetric, right? So every person you follow gets an equal number of follow value, whatever. Their count goes up by exactly one. It's not weighted in any single, any way.

• 40:32Sam Parr?

  You got, explain page rank a little bit.

• 40:35Dharmesh Shah?

  So the beauty behind Google, the original idea that made it the powerhouse is today is they said, okay, well, how do we determine what the best set of results are to show for a keyword search, right? And it came down to two things. One is like the overall context of the page. So if you're searching for. Uh, real estate Boston or something like that. It'll look at all the pages that's indexed. It's like, okay, well, this, these set of pages are about real estate in Boston to varying degrees. That's kind of factor one in the, in the function.

• 41:02Sam Parr?

  So which, which people also just say good content.

• 41:06Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, exactly. We'll just call it quality, like the context.

• 41:08Sam Parr?

  Quality content. Yeah. Which is the whole, which is the whole thing.

• 41:11Dharmesh Shah?

  Authority, right? And the authority is where page rank comes in. Do they say, okay, here's this individual webpage that's sitting on the internet. We're going to measure its authority by how many links are coming into that page because that's a, that's a endorsement of, if that's. And the value of those links passed to that individual page, the page rank value of it, the authority that gets passed through is based on the page rank of those pages. Right? So it's a recursive function to say, oh, well, if the New York Times links to you, that's much more valuable than if Dharmesh's blog links to you because New York Times has more page rank. Last piece of the page rank thing, which is super important to know, is that the amount of page rank you pass across the links from your page are proportional to your page rank. So let's say I have two units of page rank, I'm making the number up, and if I link to just one person, it's your blog, Sam.

• 41:56Dharmesh Shah?

  All the page rank I have on that page accrues to you by transference. If I link to 10 different people, it gets distributed across those 10 links.

• 42:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Dharmesh Shah?

  So it's a weighted graph versus just a symmetrical graph where we're not. So now if you imagine a professional network graph where everything was graphed, it's like, okay, well, you know, I endorse Sam and I have a certain authority. I have a certain currency, if we've got a cryptocurrency underneath it, and as a result of which Sam's currency goes up by X amount. So it's not just me buying shares, it's just by that. So I think the, the notion of a follow should go away. It's like, if you really, really like that person, buy a dollar, buy $5 or something like that, right? Like that's, that's the one kind of.

• 42:33Shaan Puri?

  So, so what you're saying is, just to make sure I understand. So what you were saying is, instead of just following Sam, which you have an infinite supply and, um, you know, sort of this is a pretty light signal. You're saying, in this case, you would be able to own some of Sam's coin. That'd be a pretty strong endorsement. And secondly, the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that because you, a valuable person, owns Sam's coin. Sam's coin goes up not just by the $5 you paid, but by some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm, the way the algorithm weights Sam's value now.

• 43:02Dharmesh Shah?

  Correct. So first, if you raise money, if you're a startup and you raise money from Andreessen or Sequoia. Like a million dollars is not a million dollars.

• 43:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:11Dharmesh Shah?

  Is actually has an impact. The same thing like, you know, follow should matter. The fact it's, you know, that you follow me should matter more than someone that doesn't hasn't that just joined Twitter or BitClout or whatever yesterday, right? Like, that's the doesn't make any sense.

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  This is a tremendous idea. I'm having trouble containing myself at the moment. This is, this is one of the more exciting ideas because it.

• 43:28Dharmesh Shah?

  Exactly what I came here for is to put you on the spot. It was like, okay, listen to this idea.

• 43:33Shaan Puri?

  That's insane, you know, because I got excited about BitClout and I got excited about it because I think that we do want a social network that's inverted. So instead of one platform controlled by one company that owns all the data, it's inverted, it's inside out. It's basically no company. All the data is free and you own, you own your own business on top of it. And so I think that, you know, I don't want to say, how do I say decentralized without saying decentralized? That's my way of saying it. Okay. So I think that's exciting. And then a whole bunch of people were like, I can't believe you're endorsing this scam project and blah, blah, blah, blah. Is this, is this going to make me rich or is this not going to make me rich? I was sort of like, well, it's besides the point it might, but it's besides the point. It's more like this is what the, the next Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebooks are going to look like.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  In either one or 10 years, I'm not sure. And in BitClout or the next thing, I'm not sure, but I'm going to play with this one. And I'm going to like, give it a ride so that when the right one does arrive, whether it's this one or the next one, I've, I've know, I know what I'm looking at. I know what's real and what's not. And that's why I recommended people go play with it just to see, just to be on the forefront of it.

• 44:38Dharmesh Shah?

  Something like it needs to exist, right? Whether it'll be the one or not, I don't know. And so I've been spending a fair amount of calories trying to kind of understand the mechanics of BitClout itself.

• 44:48Sam Parr?

  How much money to do?

• 44:50Dharmesh Shah?

  On the top creators list, I've been kind of moving up the, up the curve, so to speak.

• 44:55Sam Parr?

  I love it. Dude, the thing about, how much have you put into BitClout?

• 44:59Dharmesh Shah?

  Uh, it's gotta be a million dollars.

• 45:01Shaan Puri?

  Over a million dollars, yeah.

• 45:03Sam Parr?

  I, man, the thing that pissed me off about BitClout was I got into this, like, I had, I didn't get into it because I had to, I knew I was going to get into this thing I'm about to say, but I, I was getting to, I wanted to get into a pissing match real fast about building clout. And because there was money on the line and yeah, I just like, oh, I don't want to actually want to get in this race. Um, I don't want to play that game. And that so that I kind of had a little like I, one part of me is I actually fundamentally agree with most everything you're saying. On the other part, I'm like, oh, if this exists, I'm going to be getting in a lot of like pissing matches or whatever. And I'm going to be playing more games and that kind of freaks me out a little bit.

• 45:40Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, I'm like, and this is one of the issues with BitClout right now, right? You have a bunch of like founder rewards games and things like that. And this is, this is what happens. This is why we can't have nice things partly, right? It's like anytime something new comes along, there will be people that are trying to game the system, whatever. So even back in the early days of Googles, like the internet wasn't a scam and Google wasn't a scam. But there were a bunch of people trying to scam Google to kind of show up in the results and doing kind of spammy SEO kind of stuff. You see the same thing on BitClout, right? You have to sort of kind of separate that from the platform. It's like, okay, fundamentally, the idea does not feel like a scam to me. Yes, they needed to open it up and have it listed on exchange so you could actually take money out, you know, minor details, but um, it, but they're fixing those. I talked to the, uh, to the founder, like in like one of the few calls I I've had in the last 12 months because I don't do phone calls.

• 46:25Dharmesh Shah?

  Um, but it feels legit to me. And that's not to say it's going to succeed, but it's, I'm relatively confident it's not a scam. That is, that is reason for being is not a scam.

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  So one of the things that happens with like a Google or Facebook is, you know, uh, like you said, there's a big honeypot either of users or money on the line. And so then you get good people excited about it. You get technologists out about, but you also get the sort of scammers and not even scammers, but I'll call them schemers. People who are not doing anything illegal, but they're thinking, oh, this is a game. How do I play it so that I get the highest score? And the score is either money or followers or whatever they're trying to game. And uh, whether this is like, you know, BuzzFeed and Upworthy saying, oh, News Feed, how do I game News Feed to get all this monthly traffic? Or, you know, um, Zynga doing this with games on Facebook or whatever.

• 47:11Shaan Puri?

  With a company, you sort of have the like, you know, for as much as people hate that Facebook and Google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from under you, they are able to like swat down these schemers and scammers so that, you know, they don't ruin the experience for everybody. And one thing that's interesting with decentralized platforms is that there's nobody, there's no CEO, there's nobody in charge to do that. And so I think it's gonna be very interesting how that plays out. Do you have a sense of if that's gonna be a problem? Or do you think that there's a solution to that with the governance?

• 47:40Dharmesh Shah?

  I'm a believer in kind of self governance over time. Like, it all depends on the time horizon. Will it fix itself in a year or two years? Maybe not. I think there's still gonna be these kind of dark parts of BitClap that people don't want to tread into. But over time, I think, um, once BitClap kind of figures out what it wants to be when it grows up, um, and like, what's the actual, right now, you know, the way I think of it is that the kind of Twitter use case is just a way to kind of prove out the protocol. It just so happens they picked that one. They could have picked any number of other ones. But as people kind of build real things using that underlying kind of technology, because it's, um, an open protocol, I think things will settle down. People will find a way that they can implement use cases that concretely solve a particular

• 48:24Dharmesh Shah?

  problem and stay away from some of the kind of dark issues right now, which is, yeah.

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  What's the name that you bought?

• 48:30Dharmesh Shah?

  For, for Sean?

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  You said you bought a, a seven-figure domain name for this idea.

• 48:35Dharmesh Shah?

  I have one, I'm in the midst of negotiating the price on it. I'm not gonna reveal it. I don't want to be outbid.

• 48:41Sam Parr?

  How many, how many letters is it?

• 48:42Dharmesh Shah?

  Seven.

• 48:43Sam Parr?

  Hmm, okay. I'll be very curious to hear what this is gonna be.

• 48:48Shaan Puri?

  You, you had said two spaces. So one is the crypto, crypto social network.

• 48:52Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Shaan Puri?

  What was the other space you're excited about?

• 48:54Dharmesh Shah?

  The other one is so broadly defined, natural language processing, uh, in terms of, okay, so let me, I'll do a, try to keep this a quick rant. So every software company that ever was, has always said, our product is intuitive and easy to use. Like, okay, well. And the reality is every one of them lies. Because here's what happens in order for a human to use software. It's like, here's the thing I want to do. And I have some amount of training and things, whatever. And I'm going to translate the thing my intent. I'm going to translate into a series of drags and clicks and swipes and touches to make the software do the thing I intended to do. Right? Now imagine, uh, if, you know, if I were Elon, I'd be like, okay, well, you should just be able to think the thought. But let's put that aside for now. Let's just say you were like, you're in Photoshop. It's like, I want to remove the background.

• 49:39Dharmesh Shah?

  You should just be able to say, well, remove the background. If you're in HubSpot, you should, I want, it's like, you know, how many new people signed up for our Service Hub product in the last 90 days? You should just be able to type that question in. Cause that's your intent, not like, oh, go to HubSpot's reporting tool, build this dashboard, pull, here are the three columns you want or whatever, and get to the thing you want. You should just be able to say the thing you want, express the thing you want, a better way to state it. And the software should figure it out. Like, we have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand natural language, human English, um, and other languages. And all we really need is a translation layer. And so this is a broad base, in my mind, um, a mega trend to be, which is in my mind, bigger than mobile. So mobile was a, oh, we're good.

• 50:21Dharmesh Shah?

  The, the thing that mobile added for us, which is like, oh, well, the thing that you used to do on your desktop. Now you can do it from anywhere and enabled a bunch of different use cases. This thing is like, okay, well, the thing that, now you've been trying to learn, you're trying to use this software, whatever, that you never really got good at, you never had the time. Now, but a billion people can use that piece of software that wasn't even possible before because they don't have to learn the clicks and drags and things. They can express the thing they want and the software can do it. And then what I would do if I were an enterprising VC is I was like, okay, let's, so pick the categories where this thing will have the biggest impact. Uh, like, you know, business intelligence, reporting kind of stuff. B two B software is a natural fit, uh, but I think can go elsewhere. Yep. And, uh, we've seen the beginnings of this on the consumer side with things like Alexa, but

• 51:03Dharmesh Shah?

  like the B two B world, I think is open for just make the software actually intuitive, um, make it do what I want.

• 51:08Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen anyone besides, I was gonna say, besides Alexa, have you seen any hints of what I call a magic trick? It's when you see somebody build a piece of software and then they're like, yeah, so you just do X, Y, Z and boom, it's done. And you're like, holy shit. You got that, you know, you, you just wove your magic wand and got that. And it's like, when you see a magic trick, you, it's very hard to unsee and you kind of can't look at the old software the same way anymore. It's like Instagram filters or something like that. It's like, oh, what, your photo looks like that? Oh shit. Okay. Well, now all my photos in my camera roll look like shit in comparison. Like, I can't even look at these anymore. So have you seen any cool magic tricks with conversational or natural language processing?

• 51:46Dharmesh Shah?

  Close as I've gotten. So I built something myself called Growth Bot a few years ago.

• 51:51Sam Parr?

  Ah, I remember that. I remember Growth Bot.

• 51:54Dharmesh Shah?

  And it was for, it was built for marketers to be able to get marketing data out, both of your kind of marketing system, something like a HubSpot or a Mailchimp, but also just other data sources. Like, oh, what are the top three keywords that Uber buys on PPC? Like, that data's out there, right? Like, we wouldn't know to kind of ask that. And so, or like, when was this domain registered? Or like, just a bunch of, and I would go through every night and look at all the questions people asked of this thing, because there was a blank canvas. They had no idea what the thing was capable of. And then I would go back and it's like, okay, well, here are the repeating patterns. Wouldn't it be nice if I could go update the software to kind of do that thing? So that's, it came close. It was, I think, a little early. I think we're further along now. People are more used to that notion of being able to express.

• 52:35Sam Parr?

  That's so funny that you do these. I'm looking at the growth. I, I remember Growth Bot. Like, people were sharing it. And I just, you just made this, did you, so you just whipped up this landing page and you made this?

• 52:46Dharmesh Shah?

  I made the whole thing. Yeah. Like, I spent a bunch of like, time just learning about what's possible, coded the whole thing myself.

• 52:53Sam Parr?

  God, that's so funny. Can you, um, gosh, this is so funny. You see that, Sean?

• 52:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm on it.

• 53:00Sam Parr?

  It's great, right? Like, it, it's just cool that you do this stuff. And you have, uh, within, like, everything you do is kind of related to HubSpot, right? It's all in the same world. Do you also, like, you're, you were, it seemed like you're really into website graders. Is that right? That business of web? So I was talking to a Heat and Shaw the other day. Heat and Shaw,

• 53:22Sam Parr?

  started.

• 53:22Shaan Puri?

  Kiss me tricks.

• 53:22Sam Parr?

  He did everything.

• 53:23Shaan Puri?

  You've got to start up Nira.

• 53:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Nira, he's got, uh, which.

• 53:27Shaan Puri?

  Crazy Egg, Kiss Me.

• 53:29Sam Parr?

  Crazy Egg.

• 53:31Sam Parr?

  Quick sprout, all types of shit. I mean, he's like you. He just fucking has his hands in everything. But he and his partner Neil have nealpatel.com/ubersuggests. And then they also had nealpatel.com/rateyourwebsite or something like that. Why are you so into these website rating businesses and products? What the hell is going on with that?

• 53:52Dharmesh Shah?

  I'm into, so the original thing was called Website Greater. It's actually a funny story. So back when we first started HubSpot, it was just Brian, my co-founder and I, and we would go look at people's websites and to see if they would be a good fit for HubSpot the software or not, right? And so we would go and I would look at their, like I'd do a view source in Chrome and then look at their source codes. Like, okay, do they, do they have the right meta tags? Do they seem clueful, right? There's a bunch of signals you can look and look Alexa ranking, stuff that you do, you folks do all day long right now when you research companies.

• 54:22Sam Parr?

  Like a, like a similar web type of thing?

• 54:24Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah, yeah. And this is 15 years ago. And so we, it's like, okay, well, when we were all doing it, we were doing it manually. There were no tools. So it's like, okay, so I built something. That's what I do. It's like, oh, I'm going to write this tool that does the automatically goes looks and things the APIs. We'll bring down the source code for the HTML and see if the tags are right and kind of give it, for us, give it a score. And then I had this, had not planned it this way, was built as a tool for just the two of us. And it's like, oh, I'm going to put this on the web because I think this is useful. And so like, okay, well, what name can I give it? Well, it grades website. I'm going to call it websitegreater.com. The domain is available. It's 15 years ago. And so I put that out there and it, like it was on fire, like that, like all of the early leads, like tens of thousands of people, right?

• 55:09Dharmesh Shah?

  Would, and then we, like, so they had a desire to kind of grade their website. And so for your, for the listening audience, one thing I will say is the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense, right? This is the thing that, so Website Greater was not the solution. So it's not like a freemium thing. It's like, oh, we're giving you a lightweight version of HubSpot. It was a thing that made you realize you needed HubSpot. And that was super valuable and that can be done in any industry, whether you're in software or not. It's like, okay, I'm gonna help you determine whether you have a problem or not, because the natural thing when we do a website, it's like, oh, I got a 23 out of 100. That sucks.

• 55:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:43Dharmesh Shah?

  HubSpot can help. Like, here's what we do. Or even just like, read these blog posts. I think you can watch these videos. So it's work. So I'm obsessed with kind of grading and assessment. And you folks, you guys had a, an episode, like 10, 20 episodes ago, around like quizzes and things like that. So one thing people are, so if you do build a diagnostic tool, the one thing, and this is, I've learned in several lessons, but one of the key ones is that relative scores work. So Website Grader from its early days, like, okay, so if I give you an 87, what that 87 actually means is that whatever calculations we're doing behind the scenes, this particular score, you graded better than 87, 87% of the 800,000 or whatever the number was websites we've graded. People love that. It's like,

• 56:28Dharmesh Shah?

  oh, that's just that kind of relative score versus an absolute one makes a big difference. A percentile score matters a lot to people. It's like, oh.

• 56:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:35Dharmesh Shah?

  Like, I'm in the bottom 10% or the top 10% of them are awesome. But anyway.

• 56:39Sam Parr?

  Are you, Sean, do you see his list of ideas? Let's just start banging them out. I want to, I like.

• 56:43Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, so this is two things. So first, I think the thing you just described is like a growth hack without saying, yeah, I did it to a growth hack. You like solved your own itch, but like, that's such a, we've talked about it for quizzes, quizzes, same thing, lead gen. This is an amazing lead gen tool where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads, people who self, you know, they self-assess, I might have a problem, they go get it checked up. Your digital doctor said, yep, you indeed do have a problem. And then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called HubSpot. You know, here's a little, I've got a little bottle for you.

• 57:12Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah. I would tell you how coolist I was back then. So I put this thing up there. And at the time, we, we had a meeting set up with Gail Goodman, who was the CEO of Constant Contact at that time, and she later joined HubSpot board. But we met with her, we're like, oh, we're working on this company called HubSpot. It's kind of related to Constant Contact space. We want to get her advice. And I showed her website graders like, oh, here's what we do. And we can kind of look at websites, whatever. And she loved it. But then she was, you know, you might consider putting like an email address box on because we had no way of knowing who these people were. They were not, they were not leading for us. We had like a hundred thousand people like use the tool.

• 57:45Shaan Puri?

  Unintentional growth hack.

• 57:46Dharmesh Shah?

  I had never thought to collect an email address like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to anyway. Fix that. But.

• 57:52Shaan Puri?

  So I like that. And then also for this conversational thing, I think what you just said, like, we kind, it's kind of like, sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing that I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's actually a really big idea. And I think you actually said two, I think the crypto LinkedIn one is a big idea. And I think the second one is this idea that if you think about one of the biggest and what some people say is the best business they've ever seen is Google, right? People come in there, it's just a search box. It's magic genie. If you go ask a question and it tries to give you some answers. And the way I view this is if somebody could actually do this, this is sort of like next level Google where I ask it any question and it doesn't just give me like a list of pages where the answer might be. It's like, it actually gives me the answer. And so this might be, you know, in the business context,

• 58:36Shaan Puri?

  might be like a business Google, but there's many versions of this. I don't know if you've seen this. Have you ever seen dBuild? Have you ever checked out this website?

• 58:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we talked about dBuild.

• 58:45Shaan Puri?

  My friend Sharif, there's a perfect example of a magic trick thing. He was messing around with GPT three. So GPT three, new technology comes out, he gets access right away, drops his whole startup, starts hacking on this thing at night, right? And he throws up this, he has this idea of like, dude, you know, Squarespace, Wix, these website builders been around forever. Great. Everybody wants to be able to code without having to code. But like, even now, it's still so complicated, even after Webflow, after all this stuff. And so he's like, why can't you just describe like, you know, I want a website that's got like, kind of like two columns. And on the left, I want pictures of like, places you can stay. And on the right, I want the price of the other thing. And you could literally just type that in and it'll build you a website

• 59:27Shaan Puri?

  that looks like Airbnb. Like, it'll build you a website that does that. He posted on Twitter, a gif. He's like, you know, I'm messing around with GPT three and watch this like.

• 59:38Shaan Puri?

  You know, build a website with a photo and then add a PayPal button, but then make it where the PayPal button can only take $5 max and like that's it. And then send, send the payments to this. And then it like spit out a website that was, that did that, like the HTML and the CSS that did that. And he posted that GIF and I think off basically one tweet with one GIF, he raised like $2 million instantly from like really smart people when that tweet went viral because they were like, oh, you just showed me a magic trick. And I don't know what the company is here. And I think he still doesn't know what the company is, but go, go down this path and see what you can find.

• 1:00:10Sam Parr?

  It was pretty amazing. I remember when that tweet went live. I mean, I, it went viral right away.

• 1:00:16Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah. I played with the GPT three, played with it for a while across multiple things. It's, it's like the closest thing to like magic that in, it's weird because it's, it's kind of a different vector, right? Because it originally is like a text generation mechanism to be able to write, you know, prose based on, because it's got this corpus of data behind the scenes. And it's, and I talked to, you know, Sam Altman, the CEO of Brian, I had a, he's gracious enough to give us some time. It's like, okay, well, like, where is this headed? What's going on to see the impacts on HubSpot in the world in general? And it's like, that's one of those things that I, right now, I don't think quite there to be able to like implement like practical use cases to actually do the thing that people are trying to do. And I've played with it on

• 1:00:59Dharmesh Shah?

  kind of multiple fronts, but it's one of those that it's going to go from a, like from a zero to a one very, very quickly. It's like, all of a sudden, that wasn't really possible and didn't really quite work well enough. And then it's gonna be like, holy crap. Then there's like the kind of post GPT three world.

• 1:01:14Shaan Puri?

  What's that phrase where it's like, you know, slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden or something like that? Yeah. It looks like it's gonna be that. Sam, you said you liked some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics. Let's just.

• 1:01:24Sam Parr?

  You know, we, we just talked about something huge. That was a huge idea. Let's talk about something small, but still cool. So it looks like, did you buy RemoteCulture.com?

• 1:01:32Dharmesh Shah?

  I did.

• 1:01:33Sam Parr?

  Okay. So that's a no brainer. There's a business that will make a million dollars a year. Remote Culture, online community for those building remote cultures. Easy, right? That's a no brainer. What would you do there?

• 1:01:45Dharmesh Shah?

  I would start a community for remoteculture.com. This is okay, I'm gonna do a blog, I'm gonna do a paid community, and it's gonna be targeted at people ops and HR people around the world that need to kind of figure out the new kind of new world order, right? We're not gonna try and sell them software, we're just gonna connect them to each other. And I'm a big believer in these kind of communities and network-based businesses, because they're efficient in terms of it doesn't take that much. You gotta get the critical mass, that's fine, but I think this one would work. It's a community that's necessary at this moment in time that hasn't existed because it hasn't needed to. Now it does. And I'm sure there's people out there doing it, but branding helps, money helps, you can actually build something.

• 1:02:24Shaan Puri?

  There's one on here that I really like, Speed Round. So, by the way, these are domains that like you don't have an idea for?

• 1:02:32Dharmesh Shah?

  By the way, when I have like an idea that's enough in my head, that's like, okay, well, this is kind of cool. I don't like write it down in a notebook, I go find a related domain. It's like it costs $15 if it hasn't been taken yet, or maybe I'll spend more if it's, you know, something really kind of strikes my fancy. What's the most expensive? Ideas. What's the most expensive domain you own? Well, I haven't had them valued. I don't really sell domains. I own BirminghamAlabama.com, I live there, I think that's probably a good seven-figure domain. Just bought Humanism.com and Humanism.org. You also bought one for me? Bought one for you. I bought the Hustle.com for you as a gift that I was gonna give to you on the podcast. So, like- You learned that you don't care about domain names all that much?

• 1:03:17Shaan Puri?

  No, no, hold on. It's like a deal trophy, right? Whenever you get acquired, they have this little trophy. I don't know, Sam, did you know about this? Deal trophies?

• 1:03:24Dharmesh Shah?

  No, I want a deal trophy.

• 1:03:25Shaan Puri?

  So, when we got acquired, they gave us like, it took like a few months, but it was like, hey, sorry, I meant to get this to you like, you know, when the deal closed, but I guess it's like in the deal-making world, I'm not like a mover and shaker of biz dev and like corp dev and things like that, but I guess it is sort of a tradition of when the deals close, it's sort of like the champagne, what you do is you get sort of like a little ornament that has some meaning to the deal. Like, in our case, our code name was like Project whatever, and it was like, let's just call it- Um, project sharp. It wasn't.

• 1:03:57Sam Parr?

  We're, I think we're a project H or something.

• 1:03:59Shaan Puri?

  And so then they got like this, like, kind of like cool looking knife, uh, you know, cause it's like project sharp, whatever. Here's the, here's the, the deal trophy. So I think your deal trophy is this domain here.

• 1:04:07Sam Parr?

  Well, and, and, and for the record, Darmesh, if you like gift that to the hustle company, we would love it. And I actually do like domain names. My whole point about domain names was it's.

• 1:04:18Shaan Puri?

  Don't let it stop you.

• 1:04:19Sam Parr?

  Ninety nine percent of people are not like you or not like me, like we do shit. Like you, you're killing it and you just made this little rinky dink project called growth bot. Like that doesn't, we do shit. Ninety nine percent of people don't do shit and they have stupid excuses. Like, well, I don't have the domain name. It's taken, or I do have the domain name, therefore I should do that. My point is don't let it stop you, but I still think it's sick and it's awesome and I love it. It's like saying like, just cause you don't, just cause you don't have a sick gym, doesn't mean you can't go out there and walk and lose weight.

• 1:04:47Shaan Puri?

  I think, uh, you know, like Justin was on the podcast last time and he was like, um, there should be a dating app that matches you on like, kind of your credit card spending history or something like that. Uh, for me, that's what it's like with this podcast where it's like, if I just, if you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually you bought, but you, you don't have like a live project on, if that number is, you know, greater than 10, uh, we're going to be, we're going to be thick as thieves. And like, you know, how many tabs do you have open right now? If I just knew those two things, I can kind of tell you if this podcast is a fit for you or not. If you're somebody who owns zero domains, then you probably aren't going to, you know, really connect with this podcast in a major way. I don't think.

• 1:05:22Dharmesh Shah?

  And I'd like, I'm going to pull a biology here. Uh, I'm going to push that conversation on the stack, but one thing I want to make sure I can get out there. Cause on the list of things, just talking about ideas, um, it's like, how do you assess ideas? How do you think about ideas? I know Sean, you love frameworks and you do too, Sam. Here, here's a simple one, um, in terms of like assessing whether you're doing it for yourself or you're investing, whatever it is. And they'll tell you the common mistake. Um, so. The three things I look at are like profit potential, like if this thing went exactly as planned, as the founders envisioned, what could it be? Like, let's just assume all things, like all the stars align, everything works the way you expect it to, and it goes, what could it be? What's the overall potential for the project? What kind of like passion do you have around it?

• 1:06:05Dharmesh Shah?

  It's like, okay, are you excited about it or not excited about it? And the third one is around probability of that success that you that you want, right? And I am a quant-based guy, so I'll take each of those factors, a zero to 10 square, and multiply them together, and I'll get a score out of a thousand, right? And you can put the weighting differently. It's like, oh, I care more about passion than, you know, the profit potential or something else. But the common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first, and almost exclusively as a high-order bit filter. It's like, oh, I had this idea, but the likelihood is like 0.01% that that's actually going to work. And so I'm not even going to think about what the potential could have been, or how passionate I may or may not be about it. And then they just kind of discard the idea. I think that is statistically unwise and an impractical move.

• 1:06:50Dharmesh Shah?

  And here's why, is that the way you should be looking at ideas is you kind of take the profit potential, like here's the possible outcome, multiply it, it's the EV, the expected value statistically of this thing. It's like, oh, I have a 1% chance at a billion dollars. The expected value is 1% of a billion dollars. That's the value of that particular thing. And so you shouldn't discard something just because the probability is low, because it may have a disproportionately high potential that makes it more interesting than it would otherwise. So that's the, like, be a little bit more structured about how you assess things. People throw things away too easily, because, and the second note, I'll put in a hard one lessons. Good ideas are dangerous. And they're dangerous because what you want to find are the great ideas. That's the thing you can kind of get behind. You don't have to find them before you start the company, we can talk about that.

• 1:07:37Dharmesh Shah?

  So bad ideas are easy to spot, that's just a bad idea. Good ideas masquerade as great ideas and it's hard to tell them apart and they're the ones that end up kind of spinning a bunch of cycles for you and it's like, okay, well, it ended up being good, but just it's, um, yeah, failure is not a problem. Mediocrity is the thing everybody should be fearful of. It's like, just get it out there, try it, see what happens. But anyway.

• 1:07:56Shaan Puri?

  And mediocrity is the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource. It wastes time, right? Because it's not going to die quickly, nor is it going to take off. So it is a slow, long burn at a mediocre level. And so you're sort of locking in over a period of time, a mediocre outcome. And that's why mediocrity is the biggest risk.

• 1:08:14Dharmesh Shah?

  But I think the hardest about bootstrap companies, especially tech companies that have a low kind of capital need, is they can actually live forever and not go anywhere, right? Because it doesn't take that much to, it's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you, it doesn't really cost that much. And you don't have investors pushing on you to say, oh, we need some sort of outcome. And so you can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you could have done was sitting right behind it, right? Like I have, I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs by this point. I have never, ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur that had just one idea. It's like, oh, you will have more, dude. It's like, okay, and, you know, try the thing. If you can sell the thing, sell the thing. If you're not that excited about it, or, or you just want to cash out, take some chips off the table, there's no harm

• 1:08:59Dharmesh Shah?

  and no shame. But yeah.

• 1:09:01Sam Parr?

  Did you, but you guys didn't raise a significant amount at HubSpot, did you?

• 1:09:05Dharmesh Shah?

  A hundred and five million private money before in public. Yeah. HubSpot's a classic venture-backed playbook company. It's like, there's, and intentionally so.

• 1:09:15Sam Parr?

  But that seems interesting to me because you don't seem, you seem like a guy who likes freedom and knows that he's, knows what he is and knows that he's a little-

• 1:09:25Shaan Puri?

  He seems like he might have been a bootstrapper, is what he's trying to say.

• 1:09:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Dharmesh Shah?

  I'll tell you the exact conversation we had. So when Brian and I started this, one of the things we were firmly agreed on is that we didn't want, I'm not a baseball or a sports person, but like, we didn't want a single or a double hit, right? Like, we wanted to like swing for the fences and either this, we do this and we're good. At every point that we have a decision to make, a fork in the road, we are going to take the one that gives us a higher chance of being the spectacular outcome. Even if that means we're possibly gonna go down and crash and burning flames, right?

• 1:09:56Sam Parr?

  But was Brian, was he successful like you were?

• 1:10:00Dharmesh Shah?

  He didn't like need, he hadn't had like an exit because he was, he hadn't done a startup before. This was his first one. But he also was like, okay, this is my last swing at bat, right? This is not, this is it. This is the one that's either gonna do it or not gonna do it. And so that, that was the reason. So we weren't worried about diluting, you know, we negotiated the fairest value we could. We made sure the terms were meaningful, had good investors, but we were not worried about what our percentage stake in the company was and how that moved over time. We're like, okay, if this thing does what it needs to do, the valuation and all that and the equity valuation will not matter. Like on the margin, it just, it's, we want it to be a binary outcome. Either it's gonna be this huge massive thing, which will change our lives and have a massive impact, or it goes down and crashing, burning flames, which is highly likely.

• 1:10:44Dharmesh Shah?

  But we weren't looking to hold on to control. We weren't looking, it's like, we wanted to be, we didn't wanna be king. We wanna be rich, I guess.

• 1:10:52Sam Parr?

  But when, when you're doing like ideation and stuff, though, you, you either, I think you wrote, you wrote it here, you're down with starting a project with a bad idea because you're quite confident that you'll, you can figure out, you can make it great as you get into it, right?

• 1:11:08Dharmesh Shah?

  And my, my general advice is, and this is not just, you know, my personal kind of lived experience, as the new folks would say, having talked to entrepreneurs and kind of looking at the history of them, so many of them, the thing that we know them for now is not the, the idea they originally started with. Like there are a handful of cases where, yeah, when exactly the plan, this is what it was. And, and often the case is that you will not find the great idea until after you start your company, until after you start having, you know, contact with customers and actually try to do the thing. If you sit on the sidelines trying to assess ideas and look at market metrics and things like that, and it's like, you're just never gonna get started. That's the kind of wannabe entrepreneurs that will kind of analyze it to death. It's like, you wouldn't even know what, what a good idea was. It's hard to tell these things until you actually try something. It's, uh, yeah.

• 1:11:53Dharmesh Shah?

  So my advice is just do it and try it.

• 1:11:55Sam Parr?

  Where do we go from here, Sean? We got.

• 1:11:58Shaan Puri?

  I think we got to wrap. There's this, I think we have to have you on again if you're down because here's five topics I want to hear about. Why I don't play golf and what I do instead. I want that one. Why I hate inefficiency in markets. Why I don't believe in karma, but I believe in extended feedback loops. Sometimes faking it is making it. Introverted engineer's guide for public speaking. Like I need, I need all of these. So we may have to do another one. I have one question I want to wrap with in this one, which is you seem like a pretty astute guy, like very, very good observations. And I think you, you, you know, kind of who we are and what we care about and that we would value honestly. So I'm curious.

• 1:12:35Dharmesh Shah?

  You can ask me the intro question, aren't you? You can ask me the intro question.

• 1:12:37Shaan Puri?

  No, no, not the intro question. That, that Sam, Sam's trying to get all the intros. He can ask you that one. I want to know, I'm, I'm trying to make the content great. So what would be the most fair criticism you could give us on the podcast? What's your critique of the podcast for you as a listener?

• 1:12:52Sam Parr?

  And there's like, you can offend.

• 1:12:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. That's kind of what I'm tying you up for. Say whatever it is, whatever you truly feel.

• 1:12:59Dharmesh Shah?

  All right. So partly, I think you have to recognize that you guys are multi-channel. So you're kind of solving for the audio format. I know you have the YouTube videos and things like that. But the one tactical thing that you should fix like next week or the week after is you should apply the Sean 25 headlines thing for headlines for every podcast episode. Like what's the one nugget that's going to cause people to want to listen to that episode, even if they're not subscribed? When they see it in their YouTube feed and YouTube recommends it's like, oh, like why this successful entrepreneur never played golf and you shouldn't either, whatever it is, right?

• 1:13:30Sam Parr?

  Exactly. I'm, I'm, I'm taking notes. Keep going.

• 1:13:33Dharmesh Shah?

  If you do that, my, my guess is that the click through rate goes up because you can't not. Right now you just kind of identify the episode number and who the guest is or whatever. But there's no real, maybe the topic area, but.

• 1:13:45Shaan Puri?

  Right now me and Sam don't even.

• 1:13:47Dharmesh Shah?

  Want people to click.

• 1:13:48Shaan Puri?

  Me and Sam don't even touch the headlines. Dan does it. I don't even know. I see a notification, it goes out and I think to my, I judge the headline myself. I'm like, ah, that's not going to give very many clicks or oh, that's a juicy one. That'll work.

• 1:13:58Dharmesh Shah?

  I say give Dan a free pass to the, the Sean copyright.

• 1:14:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I did. I put it in the course yesterday.

• 1:14:05Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 1:14:06Shaan Puri?

  What else? What else you got? Anything else?

• 1:14:09Sam Parr?

  Of course you have more.

• 1:14:11Dharmesh Shah?

  Who, me?

• 1:14:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah. What about more? That was a weak criticism.

• 1:14:15Dharmesh Shah?

  Oh, yeah, that was an easy one. Okay.

• 1:14:18Dharmesh Shah?

  This is a hard one, right? Is around.

• 1:14:21Sam Parr?

  He's gonna say like, just change your voice.

• 1:14:24Shaan Puri?

  It's like, your face isn't great, but I suppose it's yours.

• 1:14:30Dharmesh Shah?

  So it's around the, it's around the brand. And this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to kind of reconcile with. So a couple of issues that I have as a amateur branding person is that anything that can be reduced in acronym will be, which my first million is often reduced to that. And then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym, anyone that comes like in the media, it's like, they're not gonna know what it is if they don't know what it is.

• 1:14:53Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 1:14:53Dharmesh Shah?

  And there's some value to that, but it doesn't compensate for the kind of opportunity you have. So that's one thing is that acronyms not good. But the other one is that we kind of my first million, there is a cadre, cater, however that word is pronounced of people that will directly resonate, that topic will resonate with like, oh, I want to learn about that. But I think your reach is much wider now. And there are people, there are probably more people outside that sphere that that particular like, okay, well, it's fine that it's about that. But really the reason I'm here is to hear folks psychology, right? Like that. And that episode, which is, I think, one of the best episodes you've had, had nothing to do with the first million, anything. It had to do with big ideas.

• 1:15:33Sam Parr?

  We, I actually agree with you. And we've had this conversation. The problem that we had was like, fuck, we're pretty deep into it. We can't change.

• 1:15:40Dharmesh Shah?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:15:41Shaan Puri?

  For what it's worth, I think we should change just because I hate the name. So I don't really care about the brand equity. I'm just sort of like, I don't want to have a thing that I dislike.

• 1:15:50Dharmesh Shah?

  I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't love it. I really don't. It's.

• 1:15:54Sam Parr?

  I don't, I don't love the name. I don't love the name of the hustle either.

• 1:15:58Shaan Puri?

  If you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future, which I do, then 90% of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet. And so we're, we're only offending a very small, we're only changing on a very small population of people for the good of the long run. That would be my, my.

• 1:16:13Dharmesh Shah?

  And by the way, if you think it's hard now, you realize the direction you're headed, it does not get easier, right? It's going to get harder and harder than like a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, it's like, ah, like, should we have changed this? Like, what would have been? It's like, not that it's going to have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything, but on the margin, these things matter and they kind of accrued accumulates. And here's what I would do to make life easier for yourselves.

• 1:16:37Dharmesh Shah?

  Don't decide to change the name, decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives like, okay, am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better. If something clicks for you, great, but make an honest concerted effort to come up with those alternatives and options. And then you can still decide it's like, yeah, these are better, but they're just marginally better. They're not better enough to go through the headache of trying to change it. That would be my advice.

• 1:17:02Sam Parr?

  Okay, that's great. Sam, you want anything else before we go? We're gonna follow up with some intros, my man. Dan, Dan, do we have an update? Are we reaching out to guests? We gotta use Dar Mesh, she knows everyone.

• 1:17:13Shaan Puri?

  Well, I'm curious. I see you do know everybody. Who's awesome? Who's like particularly awesome that you're just like, either kind of underrated, or you're just like, you know?

• 1:17:23Dharmesh Shah?

  I don't know as many people as you think. Like, I'm kind of on the internet, I do things, but I don't, like, I don't leave my house, right? It's like, you have, in order to kind of be that person, you have to sort of, like, interact with carbon-based life forms in real life, right? Like, I don't do that. That's not a thing I do. So, it's hard to kind of build those kinds of relationships, but I would, on your list, I would have, so I'm not gonna be good at intros, but I, like, Naval would be awesome to have on the podcast. He's like a, like that kind of biology level thinker. I think he'd be awesome. The audience would love him. So that would be great.

• 1:17:53Shaan Puri?

  Great. We'll take that intro. Thank you.

• 1:17:56Dharmesh Shah?

  Yeah. He doesn't know me. I mean, he knows me, like, loosely.

• 1:17:59Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna start calling you, we'll call you Uncle Dar Mesh. You gotta hook it up, my man. Come on.

• 1:18:05Dharmesh Shah?

  I'm willing to try. Don't, don't get me wrong. I know qualms about trying to make the intro, just don't, just manage your expectations. It's like, wow, I thought like Dar Mesh actually could like swing things and make shit happen. I

• 1:18:18Sam Parr?

  Anyone else?

• 1:18:19Dharmesh Shah?

  Someone I do know that I think would be good on the podcast, Drew from Dropbox, I know really well. So that's an intro I could make.

• 1:18:25Sam Parr?

  What's up?

• 1:18:25Dharmesh Shah?

  Dropbox.

• 1:18:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Dharmesh Shah?

  That would be a good one.

• 1:18:28Shaan Puri?

  I heard he's an amazing singer. Is that true?

• 1:18:30Dharmesh Shah?

  He's, he's a He's a good singer.

• 1:18:35Shaan Puri?

  For a founder. Amazing for a founder is what I mean.

• 1:18:38Dharmesh Shah?

  Legit. He's legit.

• 1:18:40Sam Parr?

  So Dharmesh, Dharmesh Shawn was pretty nervous coming up to this because he was like, well, I just like to over prepare and I don't think good on my feet or sorry, you're like, I, you know, I prepare and I don't love like just making shit up. I think you did an excellent job. Dan has been texting me saying, Dharmesh is so awesome. I told you Dharmesh, I go, I told you this yesterday. I'm going to predict the future. You're going to come on and then you're going to start wanting to come on like once a month, maybe. I have a feeling that that we have just accomplished that and that's going to be true. You're freaking awesome. What's your Twitter handle? It's just Dharmesh. So D H A R M E S H. You're, you're really active. So if you want to get in touch with you.

• 1:19:17Dharmesh Shah?

  Everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, pick your thing.

• 1:19:19Sam Parr?

  Anything you want to.

• 1:19:21Dharmesh Shah?

  Dharmesh.org, Dharmesh.net. But yeah.

• 1:19:23Sam Parr?

  Anything you want to, you want to pimp out or promote?

• 1:19:25Dharmesh Shah?

  No, I'm not a promoter kind of guy. That's not my thing.

• 1:19:29Sam Parr?

  Well, thanks, man. This is awesome. We, I talked to you a lot. I got to set up, I want to set up like times to just holler at you because I want to learn about you more. I want to learn about HubSpot.

• 1:19:38Shaan Puri?

  Sam wants to be your first direct report in 15 years.

• 1:19:41Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no. I don't want to. I don't want that. But this is great. Heaton was like, you got to learn from Dharmesh. Just learn what makes HubSpot tick. So thanks, dude. This is awesome. We're going to have you back on. Did it, did it turn out as good as you thought?

• 1:19:55Dharmesh Shah?

  I love you guys. This was, this was fun. This was, I, yeah. And I say it's more importantly, I hope it's ends up being useful for the audience. That's the thing I'm solving.

• 1:20:02Shaan Puri?

  Honestly, I'm looking at this doc. I feel like we left a lot on the table. We have a lot more that we could do. I'm sort of regretting, you kind of have to, I always feel this way with a guest, by the way. I'm like, the first 20 minutes were slow, but it's also like, I've never met this person and like, you know, the audience doesn't know all about this person. So there is a certain context building that has to happen.

• 1:20:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you got to date.

• 1:20:21Shaan Puri?

  I got to figure out why every, every single guest, I'm like, oh, the first 25 minutes were slow, but then it got really good. And yeah, I don't know if that's just my own, I'm just kicking myself for, for no reason, or if other people feel that way. And maybe we should actually do something different and like, sort of pull the future forward. Like just pull, just start at the, start at that 25 minute mark, basically.

• 1:20:40Dharmesh Shah?

  This is fun, folks. It's, yeah.

• 1:20:42Sam Parr?

  All right. That's a wrap.

• 1:20:43Shaan Puri?

  All right.