The Exchanges

Q What does wartime mean for you? Is that like we're fighting for our very survival? Does it mean We can just move faster and sort of ignore some of the bureaucracy. What, what does it mean?

A I think peacetime is bottoms up and more consensus, a wartime more top down. It's like, Hey, it's wartime. I don't have time to build consensus on this. This is what I think we should do. We're going left. Um, uh, and I like that about wartime and wartime is like, okay. I remember 2010, the economy was shaky back then, and we were a very young company, maybe it's 2009, and our retention statistics were horrible. Everyone was canceling our product wasn't good back then. 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. And that was existential. And it was like, let's just stop the music. And start over. Everything we're doing going forward has nothing to do with time to have new customers. It's like, how do we delight every new customer we have? Let's stop obsessing about how do we turn a prospect into a customer? Let's obsess about how do we turn a customer into a delighted customer? And so that was a crisis that really worked. We changed the culture of the company. We changed the center of gravity from prospects to customers. Never waste a good crisis. That was a really good crisis.

AI assessment note: “peacetime is bottoms up and more consensus, a wartime more top down.”

Q Why? No, I'm curious. I'm not a Grateful Dead. I've never, I don't think I've ever really sat down and listened to the Grateful Dead. So you're going to have to walk me through this one.

A Okay. Um, Jerry Garcia was the CEO cut in the cloth of Colin Engel and Toby Lutke. Really disliked conventional wisdom and kind of rethought everything from first principles, starting with the music. So they started that band in the mid sixties. And at the time there was all kinds of rock and roll music and there was jazz music, country music and bluegrass music. And they didn't do any of that. They created a new genre of music. People are referred to as jam bands now, but Garcia himself was a bluegrass player and the bass player was a jazz musician and the Keyboard player was a blues guy and Bob Weir, the singer was kind of a country rock and roll guy. And they blended them all together and they infused this jam band mentality into it. And they really stretched the songs out with improvisation. So they sort of rethought the genre and made a new type of music. The product was unique and the go to market was exceptionally unique. If you think of like when I was in high school, if I wanted to go to a Rolling Stones concert, I would call Ticketmaster and I would wait till whatever it is, one 30 on a Tuesday and the Rolling Stones tickets were on sale and I would, you know, dial away, it'd be five minutes late with a dial away and it may or may not come through. The people who ended up buying most of the tickets were the scalpers. The scalpers had a whole bunch of people buying the…

AI assessment note: “Jerry Garcia was the CEO cut in the cloth of Colin Engel and Toby Lutke.”

Q We started talking about inbound marketing there. I'm curious as to, you guys pioneered inbound marketing to, to a big extent. And definitely got the momentum rolling there. How has that changed in the past few years? And where is that going in the next few years?

A Ironically, I think it kind of went out of favor a bit over the last few years, and I think it's about to come back in favor. The things that changed about it aren't that different. Instead of like cold calling people and spamming people and advertising of people, In renting space on YouTube or renting space on your podcast or your blog or renting space on the New York Times, create your own New York Times, your own podcast and become your own publisher and then pull people in through Google and search and other social outlets. It works very, very, very well. You're, you're living proof of how well it works. The things that have changed are the social media networks have changed. When we first wrote about this before we started HubSpot, we started writing about in that marketing. Dig and Reddit were the two big social media sites. I don't think Dig's around and Reddit's gone through all these iterations, but obviously with Facebook and now it's TikTok, it's Instagram. Um, it's all these new social media sites. It's YouTube. You know, people live in YouTube. It's podcasts. And so the medium isn't necessarily a long form blog like it was back when we started HubSpot. It's videos, a lot of short form videos. And so that's changed quite a bit. I think what's interesting about What's going on now is today you go to Google and you get your 10 blue links. If you look across our custom…

AI assessment note: “The things that have changed are the social media networks have changed.”

Q Do you think content is just going to get overwhelming? I mean, you can create content with, like, two sentences now. You can create blog posts that would rival probably the best people we're putting out, maybe 10 years ago with almost no effort whatsoever.

A I think you're right. And I think it's not just that, but it's going to be emails. Like I think that the robo emailing and the BDR is, I look at lots of startups in the CRM phases might imagine, but there's. I counted about 48 startups building automated AI agents. I still think having a unique perspective and a unique personality Is going to work. I don't think your podcast goes away because I start something that sounds like you and I use an avatar to deliver it. I think something, what you're doing will last the test of time. And I think a lot of people, particularly in scale ups run away from their personality. They make it generic and like you have a certain vibe and a certain personality. I think that kind of works for you and it's going to be very hard to wrap up. Quality and uniqueness never go out of style. And I think we're going to be increasingly important as the internet just fills content that's AI generated.

AI assessment note: “I think you're right. And I think it's not just that”

Q What are some of the lessons you took away from your sort of studying of Steve jobs, if you will? That you used effectively.

A One of my favorite things on the interwebs is his keynote and his commencement speech at Stanford. I think it's quite good. And once in a while, I'll look back at that. He was faced with cancer. And the way he approached that was really interesting. And he says it in a different way, but he didn't waste any time. That's for sure. And then HubSpot a lot is based on his work. We started the company out of Sloan, uh, 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 I remember this one day was a really good day in the morning we visited Apple. It was like a year after the iPod came out and it was on fire. And I remember Steve walked into the auditoriums about a hundred of us and he was in a bad mood. Uh, and it was pretty intimidating. And I remember he looked, he looked out and he basically was like, what are you people doing here for business school? Like he wasn't into the whole business school thing. And one of my classmates, JP Gorski raised his hand up high and he said, we're here from Sloan School of Management and we're studying innovation disruption. And we thought we'd learn from the best. And as Steve just melted, he liked that a lot. And then he talked about how we came up with the iPod and kernels of this very much made it into the way we thought about HubSpot and the iPod we described was really simple…

AI assessment note: “kernels of this very much made it into the way we thought about HubSpot”

Q Which was the one where you felt like you had to grow the most to fulfill the role?

A Really through the whole thing, I felt under qualifying to do it. And I don't know about you, but I still have imposter syndrome here on the podcast and I had it throughout. I think one of my superpowers actually is I'm a learner and I try to get better and I listen to other people and I take feedback pretty well. And we had a mechanism that was quite good for giving me feedback. Really good, actually. 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 got a lot of responses, maybe 25 responses. And there were two questions, Shane. One was on a scale of one to 10, how likely would you refer Brian as CEO of HubSpot? And two, why did you give that answer? And people wrote not like novels about it. And it's hard for CEOs to get feedback. Very hard. Very few people give straight feedback to the CEO. So this was a good way to get the end was big enough that people get very, very strong feedback. And he summarized to give you my net promoter score. And then I started reading my review and Each page was different. So the first several pages were my features and he's a software developer. It's like, here's your feature. So page number one, you're very good at explaining HubSpot's vi…

AI assessment note: “Really through the whole thing, I felt under qualifying to do it.”