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Dharmesh Shah

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2024-04-04
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2024-04-04
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  1. “Yeah, if you just go to darmesh.com, that'll have links to the other places. Probably most often on LinkedIn, as it turns out, a whole topic for a whole other day. But yeah”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Sure. So I'm Garmesh, D-H-A-R-M-E-S-H, everywhere. I'm findable, I'm unavoidable on the internet, as it turns out. Follow me on social media, tell me where I'm being an idiot and when I can learn, and tell me your favorite here's the thing leave a YouTube comment and tell me which Lenny episodes were your favorite so I can go back because I've been binge watching anyway. I'd love to know.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So my definition of success, and I came up with years ago that I kind of still stand by, and the HubSpot actually stands by is success is making the people who believed in you look brilliant. It. What I like about that is it's not like an inward facing thing. This is the kind of customer folk like, oh, all the employees that join your company when you're a founder that were kind of silly enough to join you on this thing, whatever, like you respond, customers that believed in the early product that completely sucked, investors that believed all of that, like do what you can to they reflect back on it. It's like, oh, boy, would I smart to having believed in Lenny and what he's doing? So, yeah, I think that's.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “We cover a lot of territory. I think we did. Yeah, we did. I might do the quit while I'm ahead thing. I'll leave it with this.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “About humor and stand up comedy, I don't think I would have accomplished the thing, but I had a goal in mind, right? Which is like, hey, I need to be able to get up on a stage and hold up a thing and I have this measurable thing. So whatever it is, whatever line of business you're in, whatever you do as a professional, I guarantee you there are ways AI can help you, even with the tools that we have out there right now. So either use the tools, build tools on top of the APIs that exist, very easily accessible right now, very cheap to kind of start. Yeah, just do it and iterate. And I'm a big believer also in kind of learning in public as well. That's why I do it. That's why the culture code is out there. It's like, okay, well, if you accept the fact that culture is a product, we're going to learn about things much better. Like instead of just getting feedback from the employees at HubSpot, why don't we put it out to the world? And because the internet is exactly good at telling you why you're an idiot, right? It's like one of its core strengths. So I would recommend. It's like.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, so, and this is very simple, practical advice. And this is the same thing for engineers and software as well, is don't try to go learn something because you think it's like word for learning. Find an actual problem that you care about and go try to solve it with that new thing, right? Like you have something tangible that you're trying to do. So for instance, going back to my talk.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Really well conceived, really like brilliant idea. It just didn't work, and the technology just wasn't there, right? They just couldn't do it with any degree of fidelity because AI hadn't. And now you can. And that's what kind of caused me to go kind of prove out my theory is like I had a chip on my shoulder, particularly with that idea, right? But I think, and I'm not suggesting that web and mobile interfaces are going to go away, but there are a class of use cases across pretty much all software where we can make things easier for the human by not forcing that translation layer and just make it truly intuitive. So thank you for coming to my TED talk.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “In whatever medium you choose, text, voice doesn't matter. And the software now can actually, so now the technology exists to pull that off. Did I exist before? And now it exists. I know it didn't exist before because six and a half years ago I built this product called GrowthBot. That was a chatbot for HubSpot software and business software generally for marketing and salespeople. It's essentially what ChatSpot is now. Amazing product, GrowthBot, and it had just one teeny tiny small problem, which is it didn't work.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “This and then hopefully you get the output you're looking for to what engineers would call a declarative model. A declarative model is you describe the outcome you want, not the steps to get there. And the closest analogy that most people are familiar with is SQL, the Korean language, right? So before SQL, if you wanted to get data out of a system, you wrote code that says, okay, loop over all my customer records and then filter out the ones that have less than a million dollars of revenue and then give me the result. And SQL said no, just put a where clause on it describe the data you want and what columns you want and how do you want to order it and what filters you want to apply. And it figures out if the database figures out how to get you the thing that you're looking for. Now we have the ability to do that for interfaces for software, right? So instead of saying click here, drag here, it's like, I want you to generate a report that's all my customers in Europe that we signed up last quarter that were more than 100K in ARR. And you just literally take the thing that's in your head and”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, as software companies and product builders, most of us have always called our products like, oh, we build intuitive products. Where's that good? And we say that, right? As it turns out, it's just not true. Because as a user of X product, whatever happens to be, it's like, okay, I've got this mental model, the thing I'm trying to accomplish, and then I have to translate that into a series of clicks and drags and touches and swipes in order to accomplish the thing that I want in the software product that I'm using. And what varies is the degree to which that translation needs to occur. But there is an impedance mismatch, right? There's a translation that has to happen from the what's in my head, like I want to remove this background in Photoshop. I want to create this report in HubSpot. And so the opportunity now is that we're going from what was an imperative model, this is what engineers would call like a step-by-step, you give instructions to the computer. I could do this, do this, do this, do this.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That was not possible a year ago and now is what can we kind of now unlock in lots of great companies were created. I think something similar will happen here. And there's a couple of things that I think that are just tactically that I think are possible vectors that kind of satisfy my spreadsheet of if I were going to choose ideas and this applies across industries is that”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Okay, so if you think about early computers on PCs, that kind of gave us compute at scale, which was awesome. The internet effectively gave us kind of distribution at scale. It allowed us to take information, products, whatever, and get them out at scale because everything was now connected where before it was not. What AI gives us now is cognition at scale, the ability to kind of literally amplify the human brain, right? never been done before look nothing we haven't been trying but now we have demonstrable evidence and products that actually work we've used chat gpts like it and so it's life changing right and so for the product people out there which is a lot of you um ai so by the way the internet unlocked a massive opportunity because um especially for startups right it's like oh we can just reimagine the world with this new thing called the internet”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, it's obviously not alone in my excitement, but I will say this, I'm about to hit the 30-year anniversary of my working in commercial software, right? So I've been at this for a long, long time, and that's all I've ever known. That's all I've ever done. And the last time I was this both excited. Just excited because when the web first came along in the mid to late 90s, I'm like, oh, this literally changes everything, right? And it's like relevant to everything. It's like literally everything is going to be impacted by this thing called the internet. And I was in my early 20s, right? And I've been here for mobile. I've been here for social. I've seen lots of things that people got really excited about. But nothing to me has kind of hit the Richter scale to the degree that AI does. And the reason is.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The way that's this is my diabolical plan to have to skip the lightning round because that's the thing I'm not good at. I just not.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's just not true, it was not true enough for us to kind of like state that as a thing. And so the thing that I did is in the deck, I have what I call these little liner notes. It's like stuff going on right ahead. It's like, oh, this is not really true yet. So it's more of an aspiration. This is how we want it to be, but we're not walking the walk yet on this thing. So I didn't take it out because I wanted to be an aspiration. And here's the thing that I have not thought it through. I cannot take credit for it. What happened over the fullness of time is that those things that were aspirations became increasingly true by virtue of being in the deck because as people join, it's like, oh, that's the thing we aspire to. So I'm going to pretend like that's actually the culture of UpSpot, which is exactly what we want. So it's okay to say things that are aspirational, just call them out. Don't present things that are not true, but don't back off of the things that you would like to be true.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Become self fulfilling prophecies. So in the early This is a big lesson learned. So, when I put the first version, the public facing version of the culture code out there, and I got feedback from the team and like the mesh, like you say this in the culture code deck.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Right? Like we need to have coverage and things like that. It's like, okay, well, that sort of makes sense, right? It's like, but then you sort of have to kind of pick your battles, but then kind of fight back. For instance, transparency, there have been times where individual org leaders like, okay, Darmesh, I know you believe in this transparency thing and Brian believes in this transparency thing, but it's inefficient for someone that is a SDR in the sales organization to have access to the high order financials. It's a waste of time. It's a distraction. That was the argument. It's like, you may be right, but the binary decision, the fact that we value transparency so much, we're going to, yes, maybe it is a distraction. Fine. And the other one is like, oh, I don't want my team to have it because I just don't, you know, we were hiring so fast. And it's like, and once again, that's a lot of trust to put into people or whatever. It's like, yeah, but then there's one of the other lessons is cultures over time.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That says, okay, here are the things, and these are the inalienable rights of all citizens of the United States. These are the things that are at core. But then we have state things, right? It's like, oh, for this particular state on these particular aspects, they can kind of optimize for their particular states. Like, yes, we understand this is the cohort, but for RC, we're going to do this. So we have something similar at HubSpot. We have a core set of things that are kind of part of the culture, part of the things like, okay, here's what we believe. And then there are things that the individual groups are head of engineering can come back. It's like, yeah, I know our overall, the founder's leaning is X, but for my particular group, that doesn't really make sense. We're going to do this. So I'll give you an example. So one of the core things from the early years of HubSpot is we don't care about what hours you work, like from what time to what time. It's like it doesn't matter, like literally does not matter. Since we didn't track it, we don't care. But then over time, it's like, well, we have a support organization. And that organization, as it turns out, does matter to our customers.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You have that are kind of core, and the way I describe it right now, I'm just going to put it out there. I'm ticking myself for not coming up with a better metaphor, is like federal versus state law. All right. So there are federal laws that we have here in the United States.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “But not everything that's part of your product is a core value, right? So not everything that was part of your culture in the early years. So transparency is one that has endured over a long time, right? It's part of our core value. And we preserved it, even though it was troublesome through the IPO. I shared that story. And then there are things that we changed that were part of like, oh, we believe this meritocracy thing in a flat organization. But the manifestation of that was a bud, lack of titles, right? And so we changed that. It's like, okay, well, there are things. And here's the other thing that's a mixed metaphor problem because I haven't been able to come up with a good metaphor yet. But there will be things that”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Bringing it back to product. I think this is an important thing. We kind of let this is the kind of second order lesson learned after you start with the culture's product is that one of the challenges almost everyone will deal with is that you have these things. And so by the way, just because culture's product does not mean there's not a sense of having what some might label as kind of core values. Because we have this in product as well. There are core values that the product believes in, like we believe in about our product that we're going to kind of hold constant through it, right? Like we're building for SMB. We want it to be easy to use. There's constraints that we put on ourselves that are intentional that even though we iterate, we're not going to iterate away from these things that we just kind of that high conviction back thing again.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Is product, it takes away this kind of abstract nature of working on culture and then takes away this thing. I heard this back in the early commentary from the ApSpot team. It's like, oh, well, culture is not something you really build because that seems fake. That seems authentic that you just go, it's like, oh, we're going to craft this culture. No, we craft in the same way. I'm not saying we're going to impose it, like we're going to do this off in isolation, but we're going to work on it. And it's something you actually do manifest. And it's not just up to the founders.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And it's like, okay, so here are the things that we heard just like we would do for a product meeting. It's like, oh, we just, the customer's like, here's what we're hearing back. It's like, here's a bug that you've identified. Here's the ones we're going to fix and when we're going to fix them. We're going to commit like, oh, like you said this was broken. Okay, we're going to do something about that. Here are the things that like, yeah, I know you don't like it that way, but it works as design, which we do in product all the time, right? And you should have the right to do that. It's like, yep, some people are going to disagree. And there may be any number of reasons why we think that needs to stay the way. We're not saying necessarily forever, but as it stands, we are not prioritizing this. We are not fixing that thing that you think needs fixing for whatever reason. The one lesson here is very few things I've learned that I think are universally applicable. That one, I think, is right. And just so much rightness and goodness falls out of that is if you think of the people as customers, if you think of the culture.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Needs of your customers change, the needs of the employees change, right? The culture exists to help the great people do great things for the company. That's why the culture is there. And the things they need later as a company scales are different. And so just like you would never freeze the lines of code of a product, Every single survey response, it's anonymous in terms of who submitted it, we publish it, right? The quant score of the subjective thing everything, and then we will categorize it and we will then at the next all hands meeting, we call them all minds. Anyway,”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Then a bunch of things kind of follow from that postulate, right? That hypothesis, which is, oh, well, just like we would never build a product without talking to customers, we would never build a culture without talking to the customers as a product, which are the people. So we do a repeat of that original NPF survey. We've been doing every quarter now forever to figure out what the NPS of that product is, our culture product. The other thing is like, okay, well. There's no product person in the history of humankind that would have said, Oh, I built this product, it's awesome. I'm done. Would ever say that, and this is the number one mistake, I think I'm biased I think founders make that they say, oh, we have an awesome culture and my job is to preserve the culture. That is not the job. Because”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Original ideas I've had that are any good. One of them is this thing that culture is a product. And that every company builds two products. One is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team. That's what culture is, it's the product you build for your team. And let's say we stipulate that that just happens to be true. Just humor me for a minute. If you assume that's true,”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Which is both good and bad. It's like, okay, well, that's awesome, but that doesn't tell me anything, right? It's like, okay, well, that's like a self reinforcing kind of recursive loop. And so that's what it's like, okay, well, what makes the people at HubSpot the people that are at HubSpot? Let's come up with the attributes that define what it means to be one of these people that makes other people happy. And so we came up with the original kind of set of things that were embodied in that slide deck. And I called that slide deck the culture code deck. And the reason I called it the culture code deck is not because it was a code of conduct or a moral code or this is how companies should be run. It was because if I could write code to kind of define the culture of HubSpot, this is what the code would look like. And since that point, it's like the question I keep asking myself is if we could have an operating system that ran the company, it's the geeky part of me. Not that you could do that, but what would that look like, right? And so, and the big kind of unlock, there are very few.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And the other NPS question is like, why did you give that answer? As it turns out, here's the thing that I learned, which was troubling. Everyone was happy. And the reason they were happy is because the other people at HubSpot. That was the number one reason.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Many companies had done it so poorly and just didn't walk the walk or whatever. This is why. There was a reason why there was this kind of negative response. So anyway. Went back to my thing is I get it. So I'm going to describe what we have, and I'm going to write this truth function. So I wrote the slide deck, which had exactly 16 slides, and that answered this one question, which is, if I could write a Python code, what are the factors? So what are the attributes that we would look for in humans? And the reason I came up with that particular question is that I got this, when I did the survey, I did the NPF survey, which everyone knows that you would send a customers. It's like, oh, I want to feel 010. How likely are you to recommend HubSpot as a place to work?”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I'm just going to be digging into culture. So we're going to send this kind of survey out. I just want to get us an understanding so I can, right? And the negativity and the visceral response to that one email was literally up until that point. It still ranks in top three. Like worst things I've ever felt so negatively and so strongly, and I was not expecting it, right? And I'll tell you the one line that really just was gut wrenching was like, Dermsh. Here we're talking about culture. Next, we're going to have posters up on the wall about excellence. HubSpot is not the company that I thought I joined. And like, oh, it's just like the geek part of me is like, I did not know how overloaded that idea of culture was, right? And so then when you dig into it, it's like, oh, because.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Would the factors be? What are the things that if I could measure if I knew I had a true function that says, oh, a scale of 0 to 10, here's how they rank on this and this and this and this and this and this, I could approximate how successful and how good they're going to be for HubSpot. That's my exercise. Okay. So I did an internal survey. And I'll tell you why this was such an awful experience in the beginning because this is also a good story. So once I took on this task, I sent an email to the company. It's like, hey, everyone.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Culture actually already exists. We have a culture, right? It's like whatever it is. And it's working pretty well. Companies doing well. People seem happy. And so I said, okay, well, what I really try to do is kind of describe the culture that's there. So it's not creating culture, it's articulating the culture. So we know what it is. And so then this is me showing up again. So the question I ask myself is, I literally ask myself this question, which is, if I could write a Python function that would measure the probability of success of a new person coming into HubSpot,”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Don't like people. I just don't like being around them a whole lot, and little I know of culture, it sort of involves people, right? Like that, you know, I don't know, but it seems like I'd be the wrong person. But anyway, I'm team player. I'm like, okay, it does feel like it would be important. And so I took on the task and I didn't really know. When he said, like, Darmesh, can you go do that? Like, what does that mean? And so I took it to mean it's like, okay, well.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I won't say three or four years in. I can check the records because, by the way, even Brian and I, even back when people worked out of offices, most of our communication was over email and async. We've always been big believers in the kind of written form. But anyway, so I can tell you whether the word console is used or not. And it was odd. And so, and he's like, oh, I've heard, because talking to Steve Russell, culture is super important. Darmesh, can you go do that? I'm like, okay, Ryan, like all the people and all the companies, like, I am literally the bottom decile, if not like the worst possible person. It's not that.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I'll say awful. No, the beginning of it. Okay, so I'll give you the very quick story because my co-founder and I were having a lot of our founders meetings or founders dinners as we do. And he had been meeting with his CEO group. And he said, oh, Darmesh, I hear this culture thing is really important. By the way, the word culture had never been mentioned prior to this conversation, the Halls of Hubspot, like ever.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “This is the thing, right? So, yes. If you can find your true calling, this is what you were meant to do in the world and you have the opportunity to do it, great. That's a tiny small fraction of people, right? It doesn't happen. And you may not even know what your patch, especially if you're a first-time founder. It's like, okay, well, I haven't seen the world. I don't know. So, yeah.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I started with passion and I have an issue with passion as a word because it's ambiguous because we talk within startup circles. It's like, oh, pursue your passion. Sure, but it's like you know what? Most of the companies that exist today that are even successful ones with awesome founders. Didn't necessarily pursue their passion. It's like they kind of maybe you're passionate in their particular problem in a market segment or something like that, but it's like. It's okay to become passionate about something as you kind of dig into it or whatever. That's fine too. So I find that anyway.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And then the fourth one is since I need a P word, it's like prowess. Do you have some assets something that makes you uniquely positioned, either if you're building a new product, you have existing lines of code that you can reuse, you have a market that you already have access to, there's something about this particular idea that you have an unfair advantage pursuing, and that impacts your probability of success, right? And this is the other reason. It's like you need to kind of look at all those things. And once again, no one thing is the deciding factor. You're not going to just pick the thing that hides the high expected value. You take the potential times, whatever. It's like you have to sort of look at all of them and look at your own kind of situation. But it helps to kind of think through that, to kind of have the kind of discipline, to say, oh, how big could it be? What are the chances? How much do I care about solving this problem? Is this something I can work on for two years, 10 years, 20 years? And finally, why me? Like, why me? Why my?”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Outcome or a final variable, whatever it is. So mathematically, it's like, okay, well, you should at least consider that other one, even though the chances are lower because the expected value is higher. Okay, so that's thing number one. Anyway, we'll get through the rest. So start with the kind of potential outcome, then look at probability, not the other way around, because then you're going to apply that mental filter and throw out ideas that may not have been worth throwing out. The third thing is what I think of as either passion or proximity. Do you care about this actual thing? that you can actually kind of bring to bear.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Well, if it's a one in 10%, one in 10 chance at $10 billion, it might be worth it, right? Like it might be, maybe not. Sometimes it's based on stage of life and things like that in terms of risk you can afford. But for instance, and so by the way, when I say probability, that's the geeky side of me. You can do it multiple ways, right? You can say, oh, here's the X percent chance you can do in statistics as an inventory that's like, oh, here's path A. There's a Y percent chance that happens and here's what the outcome would be the percent chance or anyway, you're the popular thing, then you come up with what's called the expected value. Anyway, so let's say we just look at two branches. Like, oh, there's a 50-50 chance that I'm going to make $10 million. And she says, well, take over one branch just to keep this shorter. So the expected value of that is $5 million, right? That's literally the expected value. It's like, oh, you got a 50-50 chance that a $10 million outcome. And let's say you have a 10% chance at a hundred million dollars.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “A number on it's like, okay, if this thing were successful, so let's say we're just picking a new startup idea, like I'm considering starting this new business. If it were successful, what could it be? What's the kind of magnitude of the outcome? However, you decide. It could be impact, it could be revenue, it could be market cap, it could be perfolent, whatever it is. It doesn't matter. I mean, it matters, but not relevant for this discussion. So that's the potential. Number two is probability of success. They think through the probability first without actually forcing themselves to think through the potential. And here's what happens is that they apply a filter that says, oh, I only have a one in ten chance to pull this off. It's only a 10% success rate or whatever. Not going to do that.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So imagine the Excel spreadsheet again. So let's say you're a valuing idea for a startup for a new product, a new feature, whatever happens to be. I think this applies. So the first thing you should look at is, and I measure things on a scale of zero to 10 because I like quantifiable things. I like to be able to multiply x by y. I don't like letter grades, Peppe of mine. But anyway, so.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “So, the idea there is that this goes back to other first principles, is time is one of the few kind of constants, right? So every time you say yes to something by definition, you're saying no to something else. And so this goes back to the kind of product heuristic we were using in the early years of house class, like, oh, when you put something in, you have to take something out because we want to kind of keep the complexity roughly constant if we can. Same thing. So it's okay to say yes to things, but then you have to force yourself based on the calories that you're committing to to say, okay, well, what am I going to take out of my schedule, out of my life in order for me to be able to make room for this thing? Because as it turns out time, I have not been able to, despite my best attempts, bend the laws of space and time. So how do I make a room for this new thing I want to say yes to?”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Is this like a first order approximation where I can just identify the factors or it can like And the other thing that helps, by the way, is, and we'll talk about this, so one of is my default position on most things, and I don't mean this in a negative way, is no. It's like, oh, shiny object, should I go do this? No. And then I have to sort of force myself, okay, I need reasons to say yes. I have to kind of force myself because it's easy to say, I love new things, I love new people. I love all of that. So I have a sorry but no post on my blog that life-changing for me.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “He calls them like one way doors versus two way doors, which is a kind of a binary heuristic, which is, I love the elegance and simplicity of that. I'm taking it one level further, which is it literally should be proportionals. Like, okay, if you have a really, really big decision that's going to be expensive to change, really, really put a lot of calories making that decision. You might still get it wrong, but it's worth it, right? Like that's, and it's not just around decisions around activities and bets and things that you're going to do is that the calories you spend should be kind of proportional to the outcomes and what you're seeking and the value of it. And that's one of the things I try to apply to my life is like, okay, like my geeky nature wants me to go nine months deep and start writing code and do this thing or whatever. But I found that that one simple thing is like, okay.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Then number two is okay, we can't assign exact weights, so we can't write the Excel formula just yet or the Python code, but can we at least stack rate the factors? Like this factor is more important than that factor. Now you get a closer sense of approximation, right? You're still not going to use the spreadsheet to make the decision, but the human making a decision has much better information they had than pretty going through that exercise. One of the mistakes people make around decisions, and Amazon has written about this, I'll give you kind of my take on it, is that The calories you spend on a decision should be proportional to the consequences of that decision.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “What would be variables or the coefficients? Okay, let's say you're not. If you were making an Excel spreadsheet to make this decision, what would the columns be? All right. You don't have to decide the weights, but at least decide the factors. Then the next step is like, okay, here are the factors that I think matter in the making of this decision. I'm going to decide between these seven options. Here are the things I'm going to look at, right? You would do this for picking a school to go to. It works, right? And you don't have to take it to the nth degree, but the exercise of going through it, it's like, okay, well, step one, if I can just identify the factors that I think should impact this decision, that's an 80% win right there. Not because it's just in your head. If the team works collectively to say, okay, here are all the factors that I think should contribute to the making of this decision.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The other thing I'll tell you this is partly Hubspot thing, but partly a me thing. This will surprise you at all. I like to think. Systematically around decisions, right? And so I'll give you an example Question I ask myself when faced with a decision or a thing that I'm trying to do is like, okay, if I could write Python code, a Python function to come up with an answer to this.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Hard to do, but so important and so valuable. And I'll tell you why we tweaked the Amazon one. So the disagree and commit. Sounds a little bit harsher than we like, right? Which is fine for you to disagree, but then effing commit, right? It's like, okay, I get that. I'm biased. So the debate is okay. So let's have open debate. Let's get all the options on the table. Let's actually make the decision. And then let's unite around that decision. Not just it's like, okay, let's kind of come together around that. And that sounds more hubspotty. So anyway, that's...”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “They have theirs is called disagree and commit. We have a slight twist that I'll tell you why we twisted a little bit. Ours is debate decide unite. That's our kind of phrase that we use in hubspot culture. But the idea here, the core premise of it is that once you make a decision, getting alignment around that decision, because there will always be any amount of scale, people that disagreed with that decision because they were debating the other side, right? Like they just didn't have picked option A and we ended up picking option B. But it's extremely important that even when a decision gets made and we decide to do something that's contrary to the thing that you believe in would have debated for and did debate for, you lost on that particular one. Fine.”

    2024-04-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source