YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Halligan

lines on the record: 85
first: 2024-01-15
most recent: 2024-01-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Okay, one thing I like to do is I like to spend time with founders, CEOs, startup CEOs that want to be scale-up CEOs. They want to go through that journey I went through. And I like helping them avoid all of the mistakes I made along that journey. And I do that with my climate fund. I do it with like Sequoia. I'll do that with Sequoia founders. And I enjoy it. It's sort of a hobby and I feel like I'm giving back to that founder and giving back to the universe a little bit. So I want to do more of that. I think it's quite enjoyable and a good thing for society.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a brutal one. And I think people will talk about that a lot in Twitter. And I do think Jeff was a good CEO. But that's an exception. Like the number of companies where there's activists crawling all over them, there's a lot of public tech companies out there. It's not that common.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just correlated with Nasdaq. There was this weird bump that happened in Q4 and it's come down a little, but Nasdaq's up. You look at stocks like HubSpot. Like it was running along kind of in a normal path. The market cap went up to 40 billion back down to 10. It did 28 now. We're not NASA suction, but the tech public valuations are decent. So I think it's a decent time if your Stripe or your, I don't know, any number of companies read it. I think you get a decent valuation.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they get blocked. I think you're doing acquisition under $10 billion unless it's super strategic. I don't think it gets a long look from the regulators. I think those flow through and they happen pretty quickly. We just bought a company. It was a couple months. It was fast. It was $200 million-ish deal. So I think more of those happen. I think VCs, I think they'll be very happy to sell their company to a hubspotter in Lassian or Dropbox or you name it or even a bigger company. I think Microsoft can buy companies or Google that are $5 billion or less. I think those go through.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It killed part of it, I think. Let's say you're a scale company and you're looking to buy business for 20, 30, 40 million dollars. It's not just that it might not get approved like Figma didn't. It's a 15-month cycle to find out. And so it used to be you're doing an acquisition is three or four months. Now it's like a good 15 months to get through the US, get through the UK, get through the EU. And so all that time, a lot can change. So I think you've got to think long and hard before doing a good size acquisition. Having said that, I think the smaller M&A market is going to be wide open.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economy got better, which helped. I would say one of the things I would criticize about HubSpot and myself is I think oftentimes companies reflect their CEOs. And I grew up in sales and marketing and we overinvested in sales and marketing. We overinvested in our hockey stick curve. We overinvested in the process of turning a prospect into a customer and get really good at that conversion rate. We should have overeinvested in turning a customer into a delighted customer. So through all that, we went from being kind of a sales driven culture to much more of a product driven culture from turning prospects into customer culture to customers into delighted customers. So it sort of changed the culture, changed where we put things in the P&L. It really changed a lot.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started in 2006, 2009, it was the rate in the teeth of the recession. Our retention rate was really, we were losing 7% of our customers a month. Is the only time I thought that we're not going to make it. This is going to go out of business. I thought that was it. It was about three or four months I mean, all their companies were going side-based, but we were going really sideways. I don't remember. I don't remember what the invent. That wasn't, doesn't stand out to me. I just remember being in the company talking to customers a lot, working on that retention, working on the product.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm going to give you a snobby answer. I got three things from my MBA. I got a lot of knowledge. I had a great network, including a co-founder and all our angel investors. And I got some pedigree. The truth about an MBA is you can get the knowledge from any MBA. It's the same stuff they teach at every MBA program. You can even get it online now. You only get the pedigree in the network from top tier MBA programs. So I think it's worth it if you go to a top tier MBA program. I would also say, I don't think NBA programs are breeding grounds for founders. It's a relatively like if you're doing the decision tree on your career and you decide to do an MBA, it's a pretty risk-averse move. It's not a risk-seeking type of a move. And so I don't think MBA programs are breeding grounds for great entrepreneurs necessarily.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called me, which is unusual, and he said I saw the term sheet, and I was like, Yeah, how's it look? He's like, Did you see the pool? And I said, I didn't really take a look. Remind me what the pool is again. This is our series A. He said, oh, yeah, it's the mount. You're holding aside to hire people. He said, did you see the size of it? I said, no. He said it's 22%. And I said, okay, is that normal? He said seven or eight is normal. 22 is a lot. He said, why don't you call him and ask him about that? Hung up the phone, called Jeffrey, and I said, thank you. By the way, thank you for the term she's very surprised. We got it after the room fell asleep. But thank you. Just out of curiosity. Why is there such a large pool? He said, well, just in case we need to replace the CEO. I was like, I'm the CEO. When were you going to tell me that you were planning on replacing me? He's like, well, there hasn't been a good time up until now, but why don't we talk about it? So that was sort of a bad experience.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's with a firm here in Boston, a storied firm, it had a storied founder. We had pitched one of the partners several times, Guy Jeffrey, and he was interested. So we came in for the full partner pitch. And the founding partner was a little rough. Anyway, he sat next to me. I hadn't met him. He's kind of a legend. And I've done a lot of venture pitches. I had it down. Let's just say I'm lively in the pitch. And he fell asleep. He fell fucking sound asleep during my pitch. And they sat next to him and I kind of nudged his chair, woke him up. And so we finished the pitch and I remembered our mesh and I look at each other and well, I guess we're not a term cheap from these folks. And then ironically, they went away and came back and gave us term sheet. That's strange. And then we got the term sheet, Harry. It came through facts as a long time ago and we got it. And I quickly looked at it and I was like, oh, it looks decent, send it to my lawyer. And within five minutes, my lawyer.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even think that's enough in the angle. Like, if I were to go in and try to compete with Andreessen Squiel with all those folks, I don't think that's a good enough angle. My angle is I start a climate fund investing in ocean startups. And the reason I did that is because the oceans absorbing much of the carbon dioxide today and it can absorb if you're careful with it much, much more. And there wasn't like a real ocean climate fund out there. And I wanted to have an impact. I'm like, that's where I'm going to spend my money. And so we become like a magnet if anyone's got an ocean tech startup, you know, they come to us.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think this tendency to grow the AUM because you get management fees on the AOM and limb off those management fees and there's such a long timeline on where the returns are coming in. I think this is just incredibly tempting to general partners and venture firms. And that's led to there's just too many firms. There's too much money. Let's say you're going to start a venture capital firm in tech right now. Oh my goodness, you better have a good angle on it because it's so hard to compete.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I know we've had a bubble in 2021 and whatnot, and it's popped. But even today, you're doing a series A, the product is much better. You're raising $5 million on a for it. I mean, you're not diluting 40% on your round.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Half a million dollars in revenue growing fast, or maybe even a million. It was doing all right. You know, it was in a whole new category that no one really understood like market.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is. I mean, at the end of the day, they're selling a product to their LPs. The customer's kind of the LP, actually. 5% of the VCs are incredibly successful and 90% are meh. Very few are really successful, but they're so successful that the category writ large does pretty well. So from that perspective, I think it's a good category. I continue to invest in it. If you look at it, though, the small VCs are the ones where the alpha is not the big ones. And VCs, this tendency to get bigger. But in terms of the offering to their other customer, the founders, when we did our Series A, it was a $5 million round on a $6 million pre-money valuation. So we sold 47, 70% of our company in Series A. That was standard, Harry.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But building a team, raising money, how do you build a category? How do you build a go-to-market machine? Like all of that, that transcends across from the friggin' 1990s to today so much of it. So I don't think things are totally different from pre-COVID to COVID. I don't think things are totally different than pre-AI to AI.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's important if your VCs haven't built companies before or their pattern matching is light, they're new. Having a great independent is worth his weight and goal. So we were early. We had two founders on the board. We had two VCs on the board. Our first independent woman named Gail Goodman that people wouldn't have heard of. She was the CEO of Constant Contact, which at the time was a real high flyer. And she had real operating experience that was relevant, timely. She was a couple years up the icy list from us. And the thing she had that was useful is the VCs would get on me, like really grinding me about something, not growing fast enough, burning to me, whatever it would be. From time to time, if they were being too aggressive, she would sort of back them off. They were a little bit intimidated by her. And that was very, very helpful. She gave us great operational stuff. So having other people in the room who have seen the movie is useful. And I would push back a little, yes, everything is different post COVID. Yes, everything is different post AI.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been there done that CEOs who have built big companies. There's very, very few of them. I don't think you can have that criteria anymore.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I remember when we were starting HubSpot, we wanted VCs who had been CEOs. And by the way, most startups don't have a choice of like 20 term sheets. We certainly didn't. If we had the option of having a VC who was the CEO before, we would go with that. It was a plus if the terms were the same. In our A and our B were VCs who had been CEOs before. Pat had not. And he did the D and he had an observer seat. And I would say Pat was relatively quiet, but Pat figured out ways to add value that were super useful around benchmarking relative to every other tech company in the world, network with every other tech company in the world, and really geeking out early on unit economics for SaaS companies. So he found ways to add value where we didn't stick his nose into operational details per se. So I think both can work. I think the reality is there's very few VCs today who”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There really weren't. We had very, very, very little interest. We've never had like an offer. We had very, very little interest in acquiring. By the way, that surprised me. I just assumed people would be knocking our door down back in the day. Almost no interest.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would do it for exactly those reasons. It's going to give you a little personal cushion, which is useful. It aligns your incentives with your venture capital investors. We never built HubSpot to sell it. We could have easily built HubSpot on top of the Salesforce platform back then, and we would have probably grown faster. We decided to build it separately and kind of integrate in, which made it less convenient. But we always thought we'll build a standalone company that will last for many decades.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About it like a million dollars then was so much more valuable to me than today, let's say. And so it was very valuable to me. It was very valuable to Sequoia and they were smart of them because they were nervous. We were going to sell to Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com made an investment. They were not thrilled about that idea at the time because there were worried Salesforce would come in and buy us at whatever at 2x. And, you know, it's quite a while to make it 10x. And so they came up with that clever solution. I think it worked for them because it gave us a backbone. It moved our horizon from like two years out to like 20 years out and really let us plan for the long term and have a strong backbone if someone did commit and want to acquire it. It worked for both of us.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was her series D. It was, I forget how much they invested $40 million, $250 million valuation. Like I said, if they didn't do it all 17 other VCs had said no. And so we were very grateful they did it. Okay, it was a complicated round because Salesforce.com invested in Google invested. This is before they had like big venture arms. So there just wasn't a lot of room in there. And they came up with, I thought a clever solution, which was we'll buy some of the mid-sec team and founder shares, which is very common today, of course, buying secondary. It was in back then. And so they bought it. And if you think about that, I sold some shares at a $250 million valuation. Now the company's worth 100 times that. But I would also say I don't regret it. At the time, I don't know how much it was. Call it a million dollars. Relative to my current net worth, it was very much a life-changing. And so people think by the time value of money, the time value of money, and they think about, okay, you can get up 10% return on it. That's not how I think about it.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think they kind of dwell on their failures and they don't want to repeat those failures. I think there's something in the culture there that will sustain that competitive advantage, at least through this generation. The current career is really good.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know them quite well. I think there's a network effect in the venture business, of course. So they have an unfair advantage in that they did LinkedIn, they did Apple, they did all these companies, so they have that network and they have all that knowledge and they have that brand. In some industries, brands more valuable than others, it's very valuable in ventures. So that, of course, is given where I think they're special is they don't take any of that for granted. So there's a whole new crew over there that runs it, Pat and Ruloff. And they're paranoid. They don't want to lose that mantle. They know they have something fantastic that Moritz and the rest of the game Doc Leone gave them. They work much harder than any other VCs I've come across and they're absolutely paranoid that they're going to lose it. There's something in their genetic code where I think this works for them, but it can be depressing if this is in your company. They don't celebrate their successes. They beat themselves up for their failures, really beat themselves up for the failures.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, it was huge. It was needle moving. It was one of the biggest needle movers. It was the brand was huge for us. They helped us with our business model a lot, pricing model too. Their network, they do something or they did something cool back then. They called the Sunrise Tour. So once they make the investment, they invite the leadership team to come just meet everyone in the Sequoi community, all the right people at LinkedIn, at Google, you name it. And so like, bam, your network gets three times bigger when they become an investor. They were kind of huge for us”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, No, I'm tied up at 10. How about 11? He's like, No, I can't do 11. He said, How about nine your time? So I can't do that. He said, I was like, Pat, do you have a life? Anyway, we had that meeting. Pat was incredibly helpful, and Scoy was incredibly helpful. So rethink our pricing model and our unit economics and really got us on a good path. They were really good. But that was the process with Sequoia. Handshake with GETS really was engaged. Pat dragged us through the mud, eventually got to yes, and then we did the deal.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Piece of HubSpot. And I said, Really, not much. Give me. I had no other options. And so Jim kind of shook my hand. We spent a bunch of time with Jim. And then he handed me off to an up-and-coming partner named Pat Grady, who I think you know. And I thought we would have a term sheet and would be done in a week. And Pat spent the next three months going through unit economics through just every line of every spreadsheet. And I'll tell you one funny story about Pat. So we're in Boston and he wanted to talk about how we calculated CAC or something. By the way, during the time he dug through all that, he figured out we were calculating unit economics wrong and he got our head straight at our pricing model. He fixed a bunch of stuff during that. But I thought I was going to say no as you went through all this. But my pack Grady story is, and I think this is part of why Sequoi is successful, is he texted me and he said, hey, you got time tomorrow at 10.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sequa was a big help by this. So we're a Boston based company, and Boston based company is like, no one gave us a hoot. I mean, we would go out to the West Coast and raise money. I remember the fundraising trips where Darmesh and I would get on the plane. We're all fired up like we got this. We got 20 meetings on Sandhill Road, up and down Sandhill Road. And then I remember getting on the plane on the way back. We're both just get crushed up and down Sandhill Road. In this one particular trip, we had like whatever 17 meetings with VCs and got 17 notes in a row. Our last meeting was a guy named Jim Getz. Jim Getz is kind of a legendary VC at Sequoia. So remember, Darmesh wasn't with me this time, sitting in a conference room. And I was nervous. You know, Sequoia's like the center of capitalism, sweaty palms sitting there waiting. Jim's kind of a legend. And Jim walks in and adds him shaking his hand. Like my hand is moving up and down like this. He says to me, hey, Brian, what's it going to take for Sequoito?”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Be sneak in. You got to keep the C's out. And I think companies need to have good review processes and good feedback. And they have to move people out if they miss the hire. And I think good companies do that.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, our mission is enabling millions to grow better, so not grow in a crappy way like creating spam in Colt College and advertising at people, but like, how do you market and sell in a really match the way you market and sell with the way humans actually want that to happen? And so I like our mission, really like our mission. And I personally motivated by it. And I think some percentage of the employees are. But like, are all of them? Definitely not. And it's okay, you know, that's okay. I do think a decent percentage of them are. I don't think though, like, okay, let's say 7,000 employees and X percent are very motivated by the mission. Let's say where it's 70,000 employees is that 7x? I doubt it.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's okay I think most of your employees are mercenaries post 20 employees, largely mercenaries. And I think it's fine. I think missionarian companies have unfair advantages in that they're able to attract better talent, retain better talent. I think people today have lots and lots of opportunities like the unemployment rates are quite low. Generally speaking, very talented people have lots of opportunities. Humans are quite mission driven these days.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it always breaks at 100 people. If 100 people you go from knowing everyone in the organization, knowing a bit about their background, you interviewed everyone to gosh, you just don't know some of the people. It goes from very flat, like there's no layers or there's one layer to like, there's two layers in there or two layers of management in there. It starts slightly to go from everyone's missionary to their submercenaries. There's something about 100-ish people, 150 people where most CEOs I talk to something kind of changes in there. And we started getting very serious about culture around that time. It was shaky in there. And then we started getting quite serious about writing down what our culture is, trying to embed that in our interviewing processes, tracking it with Nepromotor scores, being very transparent about what those scores are, what feedback is working on all that stuff. We got very serious about culture.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been wrong, but generally that process of having the whole organization weigh in on it. Like me individually, I've been wrong. The organization's usually right.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely get feedback on. Another thing I would say this is a little depressing, but we do net promoter surveys for the whole company. We've been doing this for 15 years, where once a quarter we ask every employee scale, it went to 10, how likely you refer HubSpot as a place to work, and then why people write novels on that too. And we track it and then we track it by department. And the scores move around. By departments, they can move around a lot. And so let's just say you've got a VP of marketing and their net promoter score for marketing is like 55, 65, 58, 59, then boom, 30, and some feedback on that VP. And so we package all that up. We give feedback to the VP, oh, you're solving for the team over the unprepared. And they work on it. What I found, and it's a little depressing, is you put somebody on a recovery plan. More often than not, they don't recover. And we end up parting ways to that person. Once they've lost their team, they almost never.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most frequent reason I let someone go and the most common failure condition is I kind of think of this equation of are people solving for themselves, for their team or for the enterprise In the failure condition for people scaling up in their careers, your VP, your first time VP or whatever it is, they don't solve for themselves. Almost never do they solve for themselves. They're solving for their team and they're optimizing for their team. And while they're optimizing for their team, well, by the way, they're suboptimizing for their neighbors team. That's the number one failure condition where as we're scaling up a VP or a director or whoever just isn't doing well and their team's giving them feedback they're not doing well, their peers are giving them feedback. That's the failure condition. Solving for their team over the enterprise.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super helpful actually. Yeah, maybe you're right. It's super helpful. I started doing it a couple years ago. It's been huge.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sometimes do it. Sometimes I kill them. Sometimes they become habits. So some of the things I put on my to-do list are habits are informed. So last year a lot of them were about workout every day. Now I work out every day. It's a habit. I do it every morning. I don't have to put it on my goal list or eat in a certain way, that kind of thing. That's take certain supplements. Some of that is all kind of baked in now. I don't think people really care about that kind of stuff. Like why would someone care about my quarterly plan?”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every morning I look at my quarterly thing. I'm like, I'm actually working on the important stuff, or am I working on the big stuff or am I working on the little stuff? Am I working on every else's stuff? Or am I working on my own stuff?”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you one. I absolutely crushed my back last quarter moving a couch. It was like I had a knife stuck in my back and I don't want to do that again. And so I go to PT. I'm doing yoga like I'm obsessed now with my back and it's much better. But I want my back to be, it's like, okay, I think of it as like you're redoing a house. You've got the crappiest room in your house. You want to go in the crappiest room and make your crappiest room your best room. And same thing with your body. Okay, my back is the worst part of my body. How do I make it go for the worst part of my body to the best part of my body? So like that, for example, is on my list this quarter.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never been married. I'm tired of being single, and I want a life partner. I think it will make me happier. A lot of mine are health related. So I'm a little obsessed with, like everybody who comes to your podcast, obsessed with my longevity at Andrew Huberman, all that shit. So fair amount of it is health related.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My list today or this quarter? So this quarter, I have some things I don't want to tell you about on there. I do want to get buried. I've never been married. I don't want to get married this quarter, but I want to get married.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spend enough time, like, well, what am I trying to get done this month or this quarter, whatever it is, and like have their list? And like, I need to make progress on my list today, not just be responding to everybody else's emails. I think the way email and Slack and text works is you're just very reactive.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this is the Irana part because I'm not that good at this. So we were just talking about reflection, and I don't do New Year's resolutions, but every quarter, I do a quarterly plan. So I kind of grew up in sale. So the sun rises and sets on the quarter for me. So I just wrote my quarterly plan. And I typically get about half of my quarterly. I've got like six or seven items on there. And so I sit down and do those quarterly plans. Now, the tricky part with working with me is if something's not on my priority list or my quarterly plan, it could be weeks or months before you get an email response from me. But if you happen to be engaging me on something that's on my quarterly plan, I'm back to you in half a second. If I were hiring me, I would have some red flags on that. Here's another thing I would say about prioritizing, Harry, is I think too many people run their life through Slack and through their email. And that's everyone else's priority list imposed on you. And so you're really just spending your whole time working on everyone's dos. And you have to do some of that, of course. And people just don't.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I get pretty irritated though. I do think it's a signal that people take three days to respond to your email. I think that's always been a big red flag for me.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jane, who's got eight, three out of fours. You always hire the Jane. That's just always happens. You always hire the Jane. I think you're better off with the Mary. And you want kind of spiky team with some people who have great strengths and great weaknesses. And you want to spike in different directions. I think you want to avoid that lowest common denominator type of hiring.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you have to be yourself, you have to shave off a little of your hard edges, probably. I had to definitely shave some of mine. I was very much myself. And I think it attracted a certain type of people and it definitely repelled a certain type of person. Like you spent your career at McKinsey. You come in and interview with me. You're probably not that interested in working for me. You're probably not. And that's fine. Now, I think you've fallen into trap where everyone's similar, but I would be surprised if anyone you hired didn't have some red flags. Everyone I would be hired is like, well, they've got some strengths and some weaknesses. Scale ups fall down on hiring and founders fall down on hiring is you've got a panel of people who are interviewing a VP from whatever of product. And you've got eight people interview them. First candidate, Mary, gets four out of fours and gets four, two out of fours. And so it's mixed. And then you've got.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was three years ahead of us on the ice cliff. And, you know, HubSpots, whatever, two points something billion revenue there for something. There were a few years ahead of us on the ice cliff. He had just seen everything already. So he's on the board. We're having an issue. He had just solved that issue or just dealt with that issue. And so that recent relevance was incredibly valuable. And so that's what I would encourage. And so like HubSpot's hiring today, we're looking for a board member. I'm pretty skeptical of hiring someone who's been in Google a long time or Microsoft a long time. But I've been looking for someone who said ServiceNow or into it. Yeah, that's pretty interesting to me. So I'm looking for somebody a few years ahead of us.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's okay if you hire someone from a much, much bigger company if they have climbed up that ice cliff and they have seen the lessons. And I'll give you a great example for HubSpot. We hired a board member a long time ago whose name is Jay Simons. And Jay was the COO at Atlassian. He had the Atlassian founder on your podcast.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I would kind of frame it a different way from the logo per se. My analogy for being a founder, CEO, trying to go from startup to scale up, it's like you're climbing a mountain and it's very icy and there's like an ice cliff in front of you to get to the top. I think when you're trying to, you've got your pick and you're going up the mountain and it's treacherous. And most people fail. There's a reason they fail. It's really hard. And where I think people fall down in hiring and they when they're hiring board members, they're hiring a tech team members, it's not just the logo. What you want is somebody who's three years up the ice cliff from you, who's struggled through that same path. What you don't want is someone who's 10 years beyond it. Or even worse, somebody who's never really climbed that ice cliff, they started their career on top and stayed on top. And so it's not just the logo like.”
2024-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source