HubSpot's first six hires after the co-founders were all MBAs
Dharmesh Shah · HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah: Build your culture like a product | Masters of Scale · Jul 13, 2023 · at 21:38
HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah explains how HubSpot inadvertently built a monoculture in its earliest days by hiring classmates out of convenience.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And then employee number three, employee number four, employee number five, employee number six, employee number seven, employee number eight, all MBAs.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot designated every employee an insider before its IPO
“The decision we made was we were going to designate every individual employee at HubSpot a designated insider when we went public.”
HubSpot rejects consensus decision-making to avoid appeasing everyone with terrible compromises
“Everybody in the company has a voice, but not necessarily a vote. We don't make decisions based on consensus. Some middle row that tries to appease everyone is probably the worst of the possible options, and so we try to avoid that by having a single person th…”
Employees often view culture initiatives as toxic or useless posturing
“What I came to learn is that people have this preconceived notion that the only companies that talk about culture are the ones that have already lost their way. They take fancy-sounding words and fancy-sounding quotes and put them on posters and put them on co…”
Failing to apologize during outages is customer experience's cardinal sin
“Nowhere in this email did they actually say that they were sorry for this outage. And that's like the cardinal sin of customer experience. Even if it's not your fault, maybe it was a partner or something outside of your control that doesn't really matter to th…”
Direct customer interaction best teaches engineers the pain of software bugs
“Nothing helps an engineer appreciate the pain they're creating when they have a bug or a missing feature that just needs to be there than actually to feel that pain directly from customers. So we're very encouraging, sometimes draconian about pushing engineers…”
Putting customers first means solving for the collective over vocal individuals
“When we say putting the customer first, we really mean putting the collective of our customers first. We will have individual customers on certain things that are less than right. It's like, okay, well, I know you're asking for that, but what we're solving for…”