Episode 1288: The Science Behind Scaling Revenue with Mark Roberge

Scaling is not just about selling more. It is about knowing when the business is truly ready to grow. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Mark Roberge, Co-Founder & Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital, who shares lessons from helping HubSpot scale from its earliest days to IPO, including why founders often mistake early sales traction for true readiness to scale. He also discusses the role of product value, go-to-market strategy, venture capital, AI, fast-follower opportunities, and his decision to donate the book's proceeds to support mental health. Key Takeaways: → Product value should take precedence over aggressive revenue growth. → The startup ecosystem needs greater discipline in revenue growth. → AI is creating major opportunities and societal challenges. → Fast followers often outperform first movers in the long run. → Founders need frameworks for scaling, not just ambition. Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder at Stage 2 Capital, the first venture fund supported by over 1,000 top sales and marketing executives. Stage 2 has invested in more than 100 startups, helping founders with proven revenue growth strategies and experienced go-to-market leaders to accelerate their growth. He has also been a member of the teaching faculty at Harvard Business School for over a decade, designing and leading courses on sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship, mentoring thousands of student entrepreneurs, and engaging deeply with the challenges of early-stage growth. Before these roles, Mark was the fourth employee and founding CRO at HubSpot, where he built and scaled the go-to-market organization from zero revenue to a successful IPO, pioneering a data-driven, buyer-centric sales model that has since influenced go-to-market teams worldwide. Connect With Mark: Website: https://www.stage2.capital/ X: https://x.com/markroberge LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host, Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to be joined by Marc Roberts, co-founder and managing director at Stage Two Capital, former founding CRO at HubSpot, Harvard Business School lecturer,

• 1:21Speaker 01

  and author of The Sales Acceleration Formula and the brand-new book, The Science of Scaling. Marc, thanks so much for joining us.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yes, Seth. Thanks. Thanks to be on.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. Let's go back in time. How did you get started at HubSpot?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Total luck. Sat next to Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder, when we were both students at MIT. I was starting a business in the advent of the social media arena, a social network for pets that he invested in. And as part of that deal, I worked for him one day a week when it was just him. And eventually, I was recruited on as the fourth employee. Never applied there, never intended to go there, went there to collect a paycheck for four months. It pivoted me into the career of sales, and nine years later, we were running the bell on the stock exchange. So it was a crazy story.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I bet. And again, you helped scale HubSpot from employee number four to a major public company. What do you think were some of the most important lessons you learned?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  One that's still a first principle today that a lot of entrepreneurs mess up. And that is the first sign that you're ready to scale is not that you can sell.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  And that you can acquire customers and revenue. It's that the product delivers the value that you've been pitching.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  And I think that like, it was okay.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  30 years ago, like in a world that you know and your partner knows with like, the product market fit was in a way the infomercial. You know what I mean? Like, not that it was cheese, like this is such a good way to distribute things, products for certain types of products. It didn't matter if the product worked.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  You know, it just mattered that like people saw the infomercial and bought. Um, because if it didn't work, they couldn't tell anyone besides their neighbor. Now they can tell the world. And I think we've like realized that in the last 20 years, but haven't completely pivoted. Our operating execution accordingly. I would say the first North Star that most CEOs, most founders and most boards and investors use to guide whether they're ready to scale is whether the thing is selling. But it needs to be the value creation of their attention. That was a big lesson that we took away in the early HubSpot days.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  And I am sure there are a lot more that could probably fill a one of your books if they haven't already. What inspired you to go from HubSpot to State to Capital?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Tiredness.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  It wasn't a direct leap. Um, it was a nine year slog like any, I mean, it was enjoyable, but like, I don't know if anyone scaling a software business from zero to IPO lives a very healthy life that you can sustain. Um, and so in full transparency, I wanted to take a break for a year or two. I was very fortunate that during my six month notice of moving on, without them knowing, I was contacted by Harvard Business School to become a full-time professor, which Felt like a good in-between, a little bit of a blessed opportunity because I wasn't on a plane, you know, all, all week, all over the world chasing revenue.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  But it was a great platform for me to, I guess, give back in a way. And continue to stay very curious around evolutions of tech and entrepreneurship. So it was, it was a blast. I did it full-time for five years and then, nothing I applied for. Again, like, these are just things that like arrive. And then similarly with Stage Two Capital, I had been writing quite a bit around just the fact that like, there's so many classes on how to accrue and recognize revenue in college, but no classes on how to scale it, which seemed absurd. And it seemed like it was contributing to a much higher failure rate in the entrepreneur ecosystem that was necessary. And while I was writing about those things and speaking about those things, a talented investor at Bessemer Venture Partners

• 5:31Speaker 02

  reached out with the idea to co-found the first VC firm running back by all the sales and marketing leaders in tech. And it was just like one of those things like, oh my gosh, like, that's a glaring hole in the ecosystem that can really improve the success rate of all startups. So we went at it and, you know, eight years later, we're at four funds and a thousand of these sales and marketing leaders from, you know, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databreak, Snowflake, Zoom, LinkedIn, Salesforce Workday have all been part of the ecosystem and invested.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. So now, being backed by so many people, who's an ideal candidate? Who are you looking to invest in?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you could imagine that given the people we're backed by, we're pretty concentrated in B2B software leaders, AI leaders, right? So we don't do consumer, we don't do life sciences. And we also are, we like to be a hundred million dollar fund, just like, it's a longer story, but the fun math in terms of returns for investors is, we think, most advantageous from a mathematical standpoint. So because of that, we, with each fund, we invest about 20 companies. And they're anywhere from just getting started, writing the first line of code, all the way up to about the Series A. I would say, three quarters have been in the North, in US and a quarter overseas. So anywhere in the world works.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  And what is your, you went from HubSpot to Harvard Business School to Stage Two Capital. What inspired you to write the books?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, um, both of them were just like, the first one was a top author at the time, asked me to write one with her after hearing my story about scaling HubSpot. And when I told her I didn't even clear 500 on my verbal SATs and English, the English language was not one of my strengths. But she encouraged me anyway. And then when she wrote, read one of the chapters, she was like, oh, this needs to be its own book. And, and that was cool. I'm glad she inspired me to do that. And I donated all the proceeds to this other organ. Um, I think it helped as part of a work that helped make sales more of a science.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  And then over the last decade, I, you know, like you, I continue to like be invited to do various speeches. And when I, you know, get larger venues, whether it's South by or Saster or whatever, I try to come up with something unique that I'm seeing in the ecosystem. So once or twice a year, I'll do something really clean. And I've probably done like 20 or 25 of those. And this one I did in 2019 and it just went viral. I think I did it at Saster. It was one of the top watched speeches for many years. People kept asking me to talk about it, write more about it. I published an ebook about it. It became the methodology for Stage Two Capital.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  And then Stanford asked me to write it up and I had a cause with mental health that I was really motivated around. So basically this was a reflection on like, since operating full time 12 years ago, and now seeing thousands of startups, many go bankrupt and a couple go IPO. This is the number one pattern I see, which is.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  When they chose to scale and how fast. And that's what the book's about is it tries to bring the same rigor of frameworks and science that we use in recognizing revenue to scaling, which is very haphazard today.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  What is your definition of scaling?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  In this case, yeah, good point, you know, to that because this could be like people and culture and all that kind of stuff. It largely is scaling the revenue. And admittedly, my, a lot of my research and experience is more on the B two B software side, think AI company in Silicon Valley. Although, one of the reasons I wrote the book is I have used these methods to sell tractors in Brazil and pharmaceuticals in Japan. And even on some of the consumer marketing side, many of my students have launched like sweatshirt companies and my wealth manager uses this to like acquire his companies, so his clients. So that's another reason is it's fairly abstract, but it, the definition is scaling your revenue and customer base.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  You have helped so many companies grow now. What's your biggest challenge?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  My personal scale.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  I, in the last decade, I suppose, if I can flirt into a little more like first principles, non-professional side, I don't often have like a deep plan, but I often try to reflect on my unique gifts and how I can use those to make the world a better place. And those blessings have been plentiful in the last like five or six years to the point that it's embarrassing the number of requests I get from people that I can't get to. Like, and I know you experienced this as well, and that's, that's the hardest part. Fortunately, carving out 20% a week to AI, my life and Claude and in chat GPT has been helpful.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  But yeah, that's always the biggest challenge is like, you can't, you can't get to everyone, unfortunately.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing now?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  I love entrepreneurship Seth. When people ask what are you? Are you a CRO? Are you a VC? Are you a professor? I'm a tech entrepreneur. That was like my passion. I was fortunate coming out of, you know, my undergrad studies in the late 90s. I have to remind my students that entrepreneurship wasn't even a thing. It was like kind of a thing that rich board people did. I didn't have a single entrepreneur class in my college. I don't remember a single peer that started a company. It wasn't until like the 99 to 2001 craze that it really launched it as a career path for everyone. And so I discovered that in the year 2000 and never looked back. And I'm just like pinch my, you know, pinch myself every day to wake up and be able to

• 11:53Speaker 02

  express that craft every day.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  You've with the folks backing stage two capital and the companies that you're investing in. You're certainly on the cutting edge. What kind of trends are you seeing that have you excited over the next couple of years?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Oh my God, this AI thing is crazy. This is the invention of fire. I mean,

• 12:16Speaker 02

  we're not zooming out far enough to understand the implication. This is not like, this is not the internet over again. This is when we progress from nomadic to agricultural. This is when we progress from feudism to democracy. This is like enormous as a society.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  That's a lot to take in.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  The iterative aspects are extraordinary as well.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And it's just like really fun to be in the middle of that. There's some massive stressors and worries about it and then massive excitement that like make you lean in and work harder. I would say just from my standpoint. Being a hundred million dollar fund that has the opportunity to 10x to a billion in outcomes, where some of the larger firms, they're just playing a different game. Like if you're managing five billion, if you can just two or three acts, like people are psyched. And those are the ones that are investing in like Anthropic and Perplexity and like some of these like defense ones that you read about that require a hundred million dollars of capital. You know, we're doing more of the application software layer that many folks probably use in their day-to-day jobs.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I would say an area that we're excited about, there's two areas as opportunities for us is non-tech verticals.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Today's software entrepreneurs have the challenge that we have had forever to fend off the big incumbent who has the billboard and the distribution and try to squeeze in and take market share. The even bigger challenge they have today is fend off Claude.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  So many companies are just like, ah, I'll just like replace everything with Claude. And I do think that most tech companies with a sophisticated CTO office will pull most of that off in the next five years. I don't think a 200-person manufacturing plant in Nebraska will. And I don't think a regional bank in Minneapolis will. And I don't think like a 10-person dermatology office is going to. And so I see a lot of longevity in application software in those non-tech verticals to provide the entire tech operating system for those types of, like to specialize in it. And that's a great opportunity. So we're leaning into that.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  The other one that I'm excited about is the fast follower.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley, VCs, entrepreneurs historically have overweighted the advantage of first mover. First mover has some advantages. You hit the press first, you get the best engineers first, you get the product out there first, you raise the big round first.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  It comes with massive challenges because you have to burn a ton of money trying to figure the product out and burn a ton of money evangelizing the category. And that's why every rigorous research study over the last 50 years shows that the fast follower wins two thirds of the time and the first mover wins only a third. And that's a massive opportunity for conviction against the consensus where everyone's obsessed with the first mover. So I like fast follower plays. I like, I like, I like investing in a couple of young, super smart techies and just tell them to copy this product that raised a ton of money and is way overpriced.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  That's awesome. For our folks watching and listening who want to learn more, where is the best place for them to go learn about stage two, to learn about you and to get a copy of the book, The Science of Scaling?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Buy the book on Amazon. Let me get back to that. Let me retract back to that. First off, I'm very active on LinkedIn. If you're 22 or 23, please follow my abysmal profile on TikTok. I'm trying to align with the next generation because that's just my job. But I'm super active on all of them, very active on LinkedIn. Stage two, we put out a ton of content. We see it as a responsibility for us, not just to help our portfolio, but to help the entire startup ecosystem with their go to market strategies. We're leaning in very heavily on Claude skills that can replace a lot of your admin work within the go to market functions. So we publish those publicly and GitHub and on our blog, you can check that out.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  The book, buy it on Amazon. I want to make sure that I say that I'm donating 100% of the proceeds to mental health. And there's two personal reasons for that. The first one is there's still a stigma. We've come a long way since my parents' generation, but there still is a stigma. If you find out that someone you're interviewing survived cancer 10 years ago, you probably elevate your perception of them. If you find out that they struggle with mental health 10 years ago, you might have concerns. And I always speak out and tell people I've been a caregiver directly to loved ones. I've also been a patient. I can bravely say that transparently because I have certain blessed gifts on my resume

• 17:21Speaker 02

  that people respect and I can be probably more vulnerable than most who have to suffer in silence. So that's my personal reason. And the other reason is as we enter the AI era and we look around, there's 100 times more capital, talent and skills going into building AI and not helping society adapt to it. And it's like, that's a huge problem. As a tech community, we can't delegate this to Washington or academia. They just aren't close enough to it. We have to diversify our efforts to building and helping society adapt. Every technical evolution, as a species, we come out more evolved, but there are scars along the way.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Those scars are still very evident of the internet and social media era. We could have done better. The scars are set up to be worse with AI. And we just find, need to find our little ways to mitigate them. And this is my little way for now. I'll do more as the time unfolds.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  All right. Well, we know your time is incredibly valuable. We greatly appreciate you spending some of it with us. This has been Seth Green with Mark Roberts. Go check out Stage Two Capital. Go check out the book, The Science of Scaling. Mark, thanks again for joining us.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Thanks, Seth. Pleasure.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Thanks, everybody, for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.