HubSpot

“One of the quirky things about HubSpot up until that point is we didn't have any HR people. We didn't allow anyone to talk about culture because we didn't think we could measure. It was too squishy.”

“I think you're going to see a lot more small, big companies, and you're going to be able to get a lot more done with a lot less people. I don't think in a billion dollar company, you're going to need three, four, 500 person marketing organizations.”

“And then HubSpot a lot is based on his work. We started the company out of Sloan while we were a business school and it's Sloan, they did field trips and we did a field trip to the West coast... And then he talked about how we came up with the iPod and kernels…”

“And if I said, oh man, I wish I'd just put in a 40 hours a week back then, I wouldn't be sitting on this podcast with you. We wouldn't have pulled it off. And I know that's not the popular answer. I'll probably get pilloried on Twitter for saying that. I think…”

“I think what happens as a company scales is you hire for a lack of weakness, not for spiky strengths. And that's institutionalized in the scale ups, interviewing panel and process. And I think that's a mistake. And that's one of the few things that leads to re…”

“20 to 200. I was counted in my element. I loved it. I was an A. 200 to 2000, maybe a B. And then 2000 to 8000. Maybe D. I really didn't like the work.”

“If you look across our customers, that's 62, 63% of the inbound traffic is via Google, and most of it's organic.”

“I think consensus is really the enemy of scale. And so I used to say, whenever we're making an important decision, there should be winners in the room and losers. We shouldn't find like that negotiated settlement that everyone's happy. Somebody should be unhap…”

“My co-founder was responsible for my annual review. He's super introverted, so he didn't want to go around and talk to other people. So he sent a net promoter survey out to the board, the execs, customers, a whole bunch of people, three different people. He go…”

“I had been quietly saying to myself that I didn't love being CEO of HubSpot, frustrated with just the core work.”

“But we continue to do that net promoter score once a quarter for the last 15 years. And we're tracking our net promoter score per quarter.”

“And there was no silver bullets along the way. There was no one hired that completely changed the game, no partnership that changed the game, no customer, no investor. It was all kind of two step forward, one step back, two step forward, one step back.”

“And we lost, I remember, of the thousand customers we had in the beginning of the year, we lost like 700 of them, like just terrible churn rate in 2009.”