Dharmesh Shah
50 statements across 8 episodes · 22 bullish · 5 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jul 7, 2021 by Dharmesh Shah · said 113 times in 29 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Dharmesh Shah's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Sam Parr (72), Shaan Puri (12), Nader Al-Naji (7), Andrew Wilkinson (5), Rob Walling (3), Jason Lemkin (2), Jason Cohen (2), Balaji Srinivasan (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2025 13 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
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- Five $10M+ Ideas (from a guy who's done it 3 times)
- Investing Wisdom from Nassim Taleb, plus ChatGPT Questions That Will Change Your Life
- He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 35 mentions in 7 episodes 5 per episode
- Q&A: Gut punches, favorite guests, plus advice for life
- 10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo
- How Gary Vee Predicts The Next Facebook (Every Time)
- Elon Musk SUES Sam Altman
- $20M In ONE Day?! (#544)
- This AI Startup Idea Has 500 Million Customers Waiting For It
- Marketing Lessons from Jingles, Candy Crush, and Betting Sites
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 14 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- Ranking The Best And Worst Businesses To Start w/ Billionaire Investor Andrew Wilkinson (#386)
- Saas Companies that Anyone Can Start with Rob Walling
- Asking A Billionaire Investor How To Prepare For The Economic Collapse (#371)
- Our Producer Had A 90-Minute Phone Call With Mr Beast…
- Drunk Business Ideas That Could Make You Millions
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 41 mentions in 7 episodes 6 per episode
- The Next Big Social Media Network Will Be On the Blockchain. Nader Al-Naji Tells Us Why.
- Near Death Accidents and Hitting $1B ARR with Brian Halligan, Founder and Exec Chairman of HubSpot
- The Milly Awards 2021
- MFM #165: How Jack Butcher is Selling his Art for $76m & How to Research Wealthy People
- Why Dunder Mifflin Should Be a Real Company & A Look Inside MicroAcquire | My First Million #203
- A Discussion on Sam & Shaan's Recent Investments | My First Million #195
- Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Communities & Crypto | MFM #178
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
Everything said about Dharmesh Shah, oldest first
Jul 7, 2021 neutral
Jul 7, 2021 bullish
Shah says every outside project he does connects back to HubSpot
“HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Anything else that you see me doing there's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot. There is, right? So yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that I spend pretty much all of my kind of non-famil…”
Jul 7, 2021
Jul 7, 2021 neutral
Jul 7, 2021 negative
Shah warns that brand names reducible to an acronym lose their punch
“Anything that can be reduced in acronym will be, which my first million is often reduced to that. And then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym, anyone that comes like in immediate, like they're not gonna know what it is if they …”
Jul 7, 2021 positive
Jul 7, 2021 bullish
Jul 7, 2021
Jul 7, 2021 negative
Shah warns against discarding startup ideas solely due to low success probability
“The common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first, and almost exclusively as the high-order bit filter. It's like, oh, I had this idea, but the likelihood is like .1% that that's actually going to work, and so I'm not ev…”
Jul 7, 2021
Jul 7, 2021 positive
Jul 7, 2021
Shah advises assigning an explicit hourly dollar value to your time
“Most people, Don't value their time enough, and don't think about it objectively enough, and it, like anything else, is a resource, but it's finite, but put a number on it, and then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not wo…”
Jul 7, 2021 neutral
Jul 7, 2021 neutral
Shah advises evaluating rebrand alternatives before deciding to change names
“Don't decide to change the name, decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives. Like, okay, Am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better.”
Jul 7, 2021 negative
Shah argues physical luxury assets drain mental energy regardless of delegation
“Because atoms, there's a maintenance to atoms, right? Like atoms versus bits. Like if you have it, whether it's a yacht or whatever it is, a plane, Like that takes calories. I could take, I don't care how much you've delegated or whatever. That's something in …”
Jul 12, 2022
Dharmesh Shah operates as HubSpot CTO with zero direct reports.
“I have done everything in my In my power to reduce the time I have to spend on things that I'm not good at, right? Which is the things that are kind of non-creative, not a part of that. So I don't have any direct reports, which is unheard of for a company that…”
Jul 12, 2022
Jul 12, 2022 bullish
Jul 12, 2022 positive
Dharmesh Shah: Acquire rare skills that reinforce your existing strengths.
“And this is one of the reasons so my advice here was, as you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare, but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at that, that will kind of drive that kind of that rarity, and that's what d…”
Jul 12, 2022
Dharmesh Shah: Early-stage recruiting requires non-monetary upside or undervalued talent.
“And so, you know, one of the things a founder has to kind of get good at, it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing, which is join you in your startup, right? And if you can't do that, if you can't make that sale, which is the most import…”
Jul 12, 2022
Dharmesh Shah: People are creatives, completers, or collaborators.
“They're like three kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people. One is that you have the creatives, and these are people that start things. They have ideas. They have a 180 mile, you know, ideas an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. T…”
Jul 12, 2022
Dharmesh Shah: Founder keynotes and earnings calls cannot be delegated.
“There are things that are non delegatable that one of we should probably talk about. It's on my list of things. So one is earnings calls. Another one is getting onto public stages, right? So for instance, we have an annual conference called inbound that, you k…”
Jul 12, 2022 positive
Dharmesh Shah: Wordplay generated roughly $90,000 monthly via Google AdSense.
“So I put Google AdSense on it, which is the easiest thing to do, and discovered that, like, if I weren't bothered by the fact that there would be two ads on the main game board page, if I were solving for monetization, it was like 90,000 dollars a month.”
Jul 12, 2022 neutral
Dharmesh Shah: Wordplay will remain an unmonetized project tested by my son.
“It's like, I'm not going to try and monetize and hire employees. I'm not going to do any of those things. Right. It's going to be, and my son will continue to act as head of product because he's the one that tests the thing every morning.”
Jul 12, 2022 bullish
Jul 12, 2022 neutral
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot paid its founders and first hires $5,000 monthly.
“So when we started on this compensation thing you know, Brian and I had to pick salaries for ourselves, something more than zero. And so we picked 5000 dollars a month, right? It's like, okay, well, that's, it's a number. And obviously below market value, we'd…”
Jul 12, 2022 positive
Jul 12, 2022 neutral
Dharmesh Shah lost over $500M during the tech market downturn.
“How does it feel to lose half a billion dollars, is what you're asking me.
Sean Puri: Yeah, and how do you deal with that, and like, yeah, go for it.
Sam Parr: Is that how much you lost, do you think?
Dharmesh Shah: It's more than that, but yeah.”
Jul 12, 2022 negative
Jul 12, 2022 positive
Dharmesh Shah: Wordplay reached 9.5M visitors and 45M games played.
“And since then it's had like, forty-five million games have been played. Nine and a half million people have come through it. Any given moment in time right now, if I were to look at the Google analytics, it'd be two, 3000 people playing like right now.”
Jul 12, 2022 neutral
Jul 12, 2022 positive
Dharmesh Shah: Economic downturns are net positive for early-stage startups.
“So my position is I lean more towards kind of Paul Graham and the spectrum, which is, I think it's either neutral, that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a kind of downturning ec…”
Jul 12, 2022 bullish
Dharmesh Shah: Wordplay could sell for between $2M and $10M.
“Right now that let's say the ad revenue would go down to like 50,000 or something like that, because I haven't turned Google AdSense in a while. That's 600,000 dollars a year. Apply a five X multiple. So somewhere between two and ten million dollars would be m…”
Jul 12, 2022
Dharmesh Shah never met the founders in 80% of his angel deals.
“I've made roughly, I think a little over a hundred investments now across my angel investment. I won't call it a career, but my activities and 80 to 90%. I've never actually talked to the founders or ever met with them. Over Vast majority of my deals, I make t…”
Nov 17, 2022 positive
Mar 30, 2023 bullish
Mar 30, 2023 positive
Shah: Balaji Srinivasan has top-five raw intellectual horsepower
“He's like quite nearly one of the top five people I've ever encountered, like even on the internet in terms of raw, you know, what I call wattage, just raw horsepower. And he, he's like an AI unto himself, right? Like just the knowledge that he has.”
Mar 30, 2023 positive
Mar 30, 2023 neutral
Mar 30, 2023 bearish
Shah: Short-term AI 'tourists' are missing out on much larger opportunities
“There's enough real problems to solve where real money can be made. And yes, this technology can now be used in creative ways by lots of people and you should use those. But don't use as an excuse just to kind of be like an AI tourist that comes through, makes…”
Mar 30, 2023 bullish
Shah: Sam Parr's Hampton could be a $100M revenue business worth $1B+
“Hampton's a cool idea with actual utility. And Sean, you said this in the last thing, like this Could be a hundred million dollar business worth anywhere from three hundred million dollars to a billion plus dollars. And I think you're right.”
Mar 30, 2023
Mar 30, 2023 bullish
Mar 30, 2023 bullish
Mar 30, 2023 bullish
Mar 30, 2023 positive
Shah: As HubSpot CTO, I have zero direct reports and no one-on-ones
“I've kind of crafted a role for myself within HubSpot that allows me to do Exactly the things that I want to do and not do any of the things I don't want to do, which is one-on-one meetings. I don't have to manage people. I have no direct reports. I've never f…”
May 22, 2024
Parr: Dharmesh Shah paid eight figures for Chat.com
“He's like, dude, I bought chat.com, or, yeah, chat.com today. I'm like, why? He goes, because it was available. I was like, well, what are you gonna do with it? He's like, I'm not sure, but I'm gonna figure something out, but I paid eight figures for it.”
Oct 30, 2024 positive
Jan 3, 2025 neutral