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 of my biggest lessons is that's about right. I used to beat myself up when we'd turn someone over, but I think most scale-ups aren't that good at hiring. And I think there's a fair amount of luck involved. They don't have a great hit rate. I think 50% within the first year and a half is close to what most companies are in scale-up mode. It sounds a little high for where you are, you're a smaller organization, but it helps out if we turn someone over a year and a half in, we definitely beat ourselves out in like all that. When I talk to our peer companies, it's kind of high. Like there's a lot of turnover.”
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 it was up fire. And then there were a bunch of other CEOs of other kinds of random companies. But I really like those two guys. And seven of the CEOs were hired gun CEOs from the outside kind of been there, done that. And two of them, Russ and Colin were founders. I remember at the time 20 employees in, I wanted to seem like a CEO. I wanted to act like a CEO and I wanted to be, you know, central casting. And what I noticed in those meetings was two of the companies were incredibly successful. seven were kind of going sideways the two were successful were founder CEOs and those founder CEOs were really freaking quirky like super quirky guys and they're great and the other guys acted like CEOs and I was like I'm quirky inside maybe I can just be quirky like these two and so I tried to start being myself after that and it paid off trying to be somebody else has a lot of overhead to it those two had a big influence on my career”
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
“This is what a CEO should be like. I'll tell you another story, Harry. When we had about 20 employees, I joined a CEO group. By the way, if you're a CEO, CEO groups are incredibly helpful. And I joined one in Boston. It was called the High Grow CEO group. And there were nine members of it, and they were looking for a tenth. And I interviewed to join. And I largely wanted to join because one of the members was a guy named Colin Engel. You wouldn't have heard of Colin, but he started iRobot, the Roomba vacuum cleaner. And I would describe my relationship with Colin in two words, Man Crush. I really thought he was amazing. He was an MIT guy, started a company. It was public. It was a high flyer at the time. And I just wanted to learn from him. And there was another guy on there that had started a company called E-inc. called Russ Wilcox. And that was another high flyer that you wouldn't have heard of, but they made the screens for the Kindles when the Kindle was first out.”
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 still don't, Harry. One thing I've learned about CEOs, they're all very, very different. And there isn't one model or one formula or one background. I've tried to look at different CEOs and come up with a rubric of like, this is what you look for. Here's the five questions you should ask a founder to tell if they can scale as a CEO. I haven't come up with that yet. I had three CEOs prior to starting HubSpot that I work for. One of them was an inspirational sales leader. One of them was a very detailed finance venture type person. Another was a product visionary. They could not have been more different in background and demeanor and leadership styles. I tried to take the best from all of them, but I was just struck as I look back at how different they all are. So I don't think there's like a playbook or criteria 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
“Think it's really underrated. I spent a lot of time with startup founders or CEOs. I want to go from startup to scale up. And I think a big leap for HubSpot was when we got on this vector bandwagon and we got into a planning cycle where we can be like, here's what our mission is. Let's not change that or change it rarely. Here's what our strategy is for this year. Here are the main initiatives we're going to work on for this year. Here's how we're going to track them. Here is the infinite number of initiatives that are proposed and people are kicking around and talking about and want to do and their pet rocks that we're not doing this year and we're just going to ignore them for another year. Once we got some discipline around that, then the vector's got aligned. The company worked a lot better.”
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
“Certainly not everything. He's CEO of X number of companies. I can't remember five, six companies. He can't be completely in the details and everything. But it's in the details on systems thinking types of things like 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
“And I remember his presentation, he probably would forget it. And he spoke about vectors. So he's a physicist and he thinks about vectors and their power and their strength. And he talked about how organizations have all their people are different vectors. And in most organizations, you have some strong vectors, really strong employees and some less strong employees. In most organizations, your vectors are pointed all over the place. And he's like the one thing he focuses on, if he's detailed about, it's just trying to get all those darn vectors pointing in the same direction. Small vector, big vector, but all pointing in the same direction. And I kind of think about it as inside of HubSpot, there's 8,000 people. And if everyone's pointing in different directions, you add, let's say 8,000 is each value of one. And they're all pointing each other, you get a value of zero. But if you get them all pointed in the same direction, you know, the value is 8,000. How do you get as close to 8,000 as you possibly can? I remember that clearly from him. So I think he's in detail on certain things.”
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 will tell you the one thing I learned from Elon. So, Sequoia has an annual, I call it a glamping event. Darmesh and I, I would describe this as indoors, he not outdoorsy. And so they invited us to the glamping event. We debated it. Like, should we go? It's fucking glamping event, but great speakers are going to be really good. So we went. And I'll tell you a funny story, Beth's first glamping event. We went. And the first night Harry was freezing cold. Freezing cold. And it was freezing and we're intense. And I'm like, God, why did I come here in my tent mate was John Collison from Stripe. And I just remember I was so darn cold that night. I was tempted to be like, hey, John, should we just cozy up here so we don't freeze to death tonight? I fortunately resisted that temptation, but I've never been as cold. Anyway, the next day, Elon spoke.”
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 was the scene. One of the things I worked on was getting more diplomatic over time. And the other thing that I didn't realize is how much, Harry, people really listen to everything you say. So you have merge as the founder with the company. Everything you say, people pretend like they don't listen and they push back at you, but they remember what you say. You run into something, you'd be walking down Newberry Street in Boston, bump into an employee. You'll have coffee with him. They'll say something. Remember when you said this four years ago at a company meeting? No, I don't remember that at all. So people really, really listen and over-index on what you say. And so I do think getting better and more diplomatic over time did help me and help the company.”
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
“Tried to give kind of negative feedback from private and public praise in public. I think Jensen might be on to something on that. I think I could have delivered more diplomatically, but that was when I was thinking about as I was thinking about this interview, that I wonder about.”
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, kind of. Yeah, reading that was a little upsetting, yeah. So I've been reading about Jensen Huang in Elon because they've got such unusual CEO styles that completely fly in the face of everything that any CEO, coach, or anything you read about being a CEO will teach you. Jensen Huang's really got a very different playbook. He's a CEO of NVIDIA. One of the things he does is he criticizes in public. So he's got his team. He's got 40 direct reports, which is pretty weird, or 50 direct reports. And if somebody says something disagrees with or does something that he didn't like, he will in front of everyone. I think he does it in a very nice way, but admonish them or criticize them or give them feedback so everyone can hear it. And I remember back in the day getting feedback that I used to do that people really did not like it. And I probably didn't deliver it as diplomatically as Jensen does. And that has popped into my mind and I sort of fix 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
“I'm going to try to hire people who map perfectly into those weaknesses. So I'm the type of person who's, okay, great. I've got all these weaknesses. I try to hire around them and I try to advise my folks to hire around them. Can I lean into my strength? So if I have a strength that's like a 10x strength, how do I make that a 100x strength or I've got a weakness that it's a minus 10x strength? Just leave it at minus 10x because I'm never going to get it to plus 10x. That's kind of 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
“I would say the biggest one that just I couldn't put to bed and we come up year after year after year was my thinking is the control freakedness of founders is an amazing strength in startup mode in that amazing strength of founders turns into an amazing weakness as you scale You're more prepared than everyone. You're overthinking and you're basically doing everyone else's job and that just came up over and over and again and I do think I improved on that over time. Like the same weaknesses would come up year after year. And some of the weaknesses or some of the bugs are like, you know, at HubSpot, if there's a bug, sometimes it's like, actually, that's the way we designed it worked as designed. Some of the bugs were actually, I thought, features and they'd show up on both sides. So I would pick a couple things I would work on improving. And then a lot of them, I would just be like, you know what? I'm never going to get better at 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
“Okay, I mentioned reviews earlier. One of the best things my coveta Darmesh has done, he owned doing my annual 360 degree review. And he did it in a remarkable way. And we started doing this like five, six years in. The way Darnesh does her reviews, Darmesh is very introverted and does not want to talk to anyone. It really doesn't. So he does a net promoter survey on me. And so he sends a net promoter survey on a scale of one to 10. How likely are you to refer Brian as the CEO of HubSpot and then why? And he sends it to 30 people, the board members, executive team members, frontline members, customer partners, and people score me. And then they write a novel.”
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 it's a non secretor, but in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the day before, there's an article about Elon Musk. And Elon had an amazing quote about vacation. So he works a crazy amount of hours. And he said, oh, yeah, a vacation. That's email with a nice view. I thought that was pretty funny actually.”
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
“Person, I still go to the office. I think I'm not totally disassociated with it. And I think that's okay. If I had just left Harry, I think that would have been tougher for me. I think you're right. I think my identity is pretty wrapped up in UpSpot. And there'd be some sadness around that, I think.”
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 a really good point about that. I remember looking at my review, maybe five, six, seven years in and seeing comments in my review about how Brian doesn't understand that he actually is HubSpot. It's embodied in him in that every action he takes and every decision he takes is really HubSpot and how those things came together. I was quite surprised at how much those things had merged together in the employee's mind at least. That was actually some useful feedback and a useful revelation. It made me think more carefully about my actions and my decisions I was making because I hadn't realized those things and kind of merged together. And I think that probably happens with CEOs or founders of all companies as they scale. And it took me by surprise how much those things came together. I'm still involved, so it totally hasn't happened. Like I'm still the chair.”
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
“Like the Boston Red Sox didn't win a world championship for 84 years. Very frustrating. And they won four in the last 20. And when I look at the teams that won, they were a nice combination of people they drafted out of high school and kind of came up through their system and really got it. Mix with some free agents or a little more expensive from other teams who had seen success before. And that mix really works. And I think that has worked for HubSpot. We've got a mix of people who kind of grew up through our system and we hired people from the outside. That's proven to work pretty well, I think. I think that's a good formula.”
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 right. I didn't think so when we started the company that the crew we hired in the early days of HubSpot were terrific, very bright. And I thought, you know, if we ever make it to the size we are now, which, you know, I would have put a very low odds on that, it would be the same crew. And where I think on our third or fourth generation of leaders at HubSpot, and there was nothing wrong with that original crew. In fact, they've gone on to do amazing things. But I just don't think they were interested in that next phase. And so I think it needs to evolve in your team needs to evolve over time. And when I look at our team, and we'll probably get into this, but we've always had an interesting mix on our executive teams of people who we've hired kind of been there down that from the outside and the people who kind of came up through the system. And I like it and I know you're from the UK, so you don't know about it. We have a thing in the United States. I don't know if you heard it's called baseball.”
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 didn't love the work of a big company CEO, and I don't think it was that good at it. I like it earlier. Smaller team, where I know people, I'm really viscerally in touch with the product and the customers. I'm not worried too much about governance, about enterprise risk management, about things like that. I don't spend much time at all speaking with lawyers and law firms. I like the scale-up phase of 20 to 2000, I think, was where I was at my best. I don't think I was meant my best from two of us to 20 or 2000 to where we are today, but I think I was kind of at my best between 20 and 2000.”
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
“If I make it alive, if I make it out of here, what should I change? And one of the things I thought about on the bottom of that cliff was I don't want to be the CEO of HubSpot anymore. You know, I started this thing. It's got 7,000 people. It's a big company. It's going great. But I don't think I'm necessarily well suited for the next phase from 7,000 to 70,000 or whatever it is, from 20 billion mark gap to 200 billion mark cap. I didn't necessarily enjoy the work at that size as much as I enjoyed it, you know, in an order of magnitude smaller. And so I really made the decision in my head on the bottom of that clip that night that if I make it out alive once I recover, I'm going to hand the reins off. And that's exactly what happened. I was out of work for seven months and seven months in a day. We gave the job to Yamini. She's terrific, who's CEO of HubSpot now and I'm chairman. And that turned out to be a very good decision for me. I'm generally quite a bit at 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
“Ghana was going to die, like, went off a cliff, was in the cold, dark of night of Vermont, freezing cold night. No one knew where I was. I got very lucky and was saved. But while I was sitting there, I was thinking a lot about my life in that moment. And I'm fairly reflective about my life. And we're just coming off the New Year, so I've been thinking a lot about it. But in that moment, I thought.”
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 never worry that much about it. I always thought I'd have some measure of success, and I would be fine. I just always sort of had a confidence in that somewhere deep down inside. And so, yes, I'm financially secure, fine. But I think I worried a little bit less about that than everybody else. There was something down deep inside of me that wasn't that worried about that. I knew I had the ability to create something, even when I was very young, just back to my youth, I had that paper out. But I was that kid who always had a job. I worked at a gas station. I worked at a fish market. I was a barback. I was a waiter. I did like every job you can imagine. It started a painting company. Every summer I painted about 5% of Cape Cod and just worked my way through every summer, painted another 5%. And so I always knew that I would be, I would be fine financially. I just had that feeling deep down inside.”
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 so I hired Marilyn, I don't know, a year and a half ago, and she's terrific. She's a warm presence in my life and my dog's life. And she just does so much stuff. It just avoids. I don't have to do laundry. I don't have to clean. I don't have to cook. I don't have to think about so much stuff because she does it. That's the only thing of like real value that's been created from the wealth I've created with HubSpot”
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
“Home held mate named Marilyn from the Philippines. I loved Marilyn and she took care of my mother for years. She was almost part of the family. And then my mother sadly passed away, sort of loosely kept in touch with Marilyn. And then a couple years later, Harry, I had a brutal snowmobile accident. I was in the hospital for a long time. I was in a wheelchair for a long time, six months in a wheelchair. And I needed help. So I reached out to Marilyn and I said, Marilyn, could you take care of me the way you took care of my mom? And she said, sure. And so for a couple months, she didn't move in, but she was in my house all the time. And she was wrapping that up. And then she was resigning. She basically said, I'm done. You know, you're fine now. You're out of the wheelchair. I'm going to move on. And I said, wait a sec, wait a sec, wait a sec. Can you cook? She said, no. I said, can you clean? She said, I can clean. I said, what if we changed your job and you just took care of me? You took care of my dog. You cooked, you cleaned, you ordered.”
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 as much about things that make me happy as about being devoid of sadness or unhappiness and avoiding things that irritate me or I don't enjoy the passage of time of. And so I'm trying to shed in my life. People, I hate to say that in things I don't like to do as much as I possibly can. I don't think, I'm quite sure money doesn't buy you happiness. I have a bunch of it now. I never had it. And I'm no happier or less happy than I was. I would give myself like at my MPS score on my happiness is like between an eight and a nine. Pretty happy. I've been an eight and a between an eight and nine forever. Bunny buys you convenience. It's really the only thing it buys. That's valuable. It enables you to do less things you don't like to do. I'll give you a very good example. The one thing I've done with some of the wealth I've created is I've hired back to my mother. My mother was dying. She had a”
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 know. I'm trying to run two though happiness. I'm a huge music fan, big Grateful Dead fan. There's a song that James Taylor, I know people roll their eyes with James Taylor. He's a little bit of an eye role, but he's from Boston. And, you know, I appreciate that. He's got a song that says the secret of life is about enjoying the passage of time. I don't think he's totally wrong about that. And I'm trying to enjoy the passage of time as a look forward over my next 20, 30 years. And so I think that's kind of what I'm running towards.”
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 was a product company. I learned how to think about the future, think about products, think about technology, craft awesome solutions for customers. And I learned a lot in that journey. So for me, joining a scale up twice really informed HubSpot in like PTC and Groove are very both of those companies and their DNA are very much in, I can look at things that happen inside HubSpot point back to those two companies.”
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 super hard to generalize because there's people come at it from different angles and are very successful. My personal journey was I joined two scale-ups, not even startups. Like it joined a 200-person company that was growing quite fast. That was PTC. And I ended up being their first basically inside sales rep and sales and channels and marketing. I ended up doing lots of different things. The movement Asia to start Asia. And, you know, if you're on a very fast growing scale-up, you get a lot of exposure, you get a lot of opportunities. So that really paid off for me. My second job was at a completely different company, but also a scale-up called Groove Networks that eventually got acquired by Microsoft or those kind of middling outcome. But same thing I learned a lot. But instead of it at PTC, I learned a lot about selling. How do you build a sales organization? How do you hire reps? How do you open international offices? How do you build a lead gen machine? How do you build that revenue engine? It groove totally different. The founder was very different. The orientation was.”
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 Cheryl was way off on that, and that was very much the case for me. So I remember this is really 100 years ago, but I had three offers. One was from PTC. And really, my first job, Harry, was I was what they used to call a secretary. I was a secretary to the head of sales in this company. And that was the offer. It was $20,000. And then I had two other offers for kind of sales positions in these two other companies with higher pay. And I chose the lowest paying job with the company that had the most upside and with somebody in there that I thought just might champion my career in this guy, Richard Harrison. That really paid off. I don't know what happened to those two other companies, but PTC is still around. It's a 20 billion market cap company. It's done quite well. And so I don't think Cheryl is far off in that hop on the rocket ship quote.”
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
“Lot of luck. So my first job was at a company called PTC. It was a CAD software company and I was employee number 200 and 100 years ago in 1990. And I stayed for 10 years. And by the time I left, there were 5,000 employees. I had a great run there. And it just got very lucky landing in that spot. And I think it was Louis Pasteur who said luck favors the prepared. And if I were to do sort of a correlation of prepared versus luck, the r squared on that is quite high. So I've always been over prepared for everything. And after that first job, I give preparation a fair amount of credit. Maybe it's half preparation, half luck, half right place at the right time. But people who are well prepared tend to be at the right place in the right time I've noticed.”
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
“Harry, it wasn't just the paper route, it was my mom. So, Mrs. Harrison was very, very close friends with my mom. And my mom had lots of great friends. And so a little bit of it was my mom actually deserves a lot of credit for it. And my mom's not interested in technology or careers or something. It just wasn't her MO, but she turned out to be a central player in my first job.”
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
“Were and I used to play like nerf basketball with them in the living room and kind of get to know them. And I was one of those people I always had a job. But the reason that really paid off for me, and I think this is what you're referring to, is Richard Harrison, Pat Harrison's oldest son, gave me my first real job out of college. And it turned out to be a really good spot to start my career. So that paper route really paid off 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
“You really did your homework, Harry. I think I was 11 years old. There was a low point on the root and a high point on the root. The low point was house numbers four and five. House number four had a German shepherd that didn't like me coming on the front porch every day. And house number five had a Doberman pincher that didn't take kindly to me coming on the porch every day. And so they would really give me a scare. And I had the paper for years. And every, they never warmed up to me. So I got a good scare that was four and five. And then how's 16 was the Harrison's? And the Harrisons were a very fun, very successful family. And I would come in, I'd deliver the paper to Mrs. Harrison. It was the last house on the root. And she would invite me in. And she was terrific cook. And I would help her cook dinner. And she was super engaging. And she had four kids that were all a lot older than I was. And let's just say they were hyper overachievers, much more overachieving than the Haligan.”
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
“When we did our Series A, it was a $5 million round on a $6 million pre money valuation. So we sold 470% of our company on Series A. That was standard, Harry. We had half a million dollars in revenue growing fast or maybe even a million. It was doing all right, Series D, our last meeting was a guy named Jim Getz. Jim Getz is kind of a legendary VC at Sequoia, sitting in a conference room. And I was nervous. And Jim walks in and as him's 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 own a piece of HubSpot? And I said, really not much. Give me ready to go. I had no other options.”
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