The Ledger
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Tech equity granted in 2022 could reach eight figures in a decade
“I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid a 102 103 100,000 dollars a year in equity, and that could be worth potentially eight figures in 10 years.”
Parr orchestrated fake engagement for HubSpot's CEO during acquisition talks
“One time when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Halligan, the then he's the founder and then CEO of the company he joined and I messaged like 80 people and I said, Hey reply to Brian, here's the message to say to him. And so many people commented…”
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…”
Dharmesh Shah: Big-name press release hires are wrong for early startups.
“If we felt like we ever hired someone that was worthy of a press release, we did it wrong. Right. That's not the kind of person we were looking for because they may have done amazing things at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, pick your company of choice, but the s…”
Brian Halligan says the era of giant enterprise sales forces is over
“With ye olde giant outside sales forces it just feels like the time has passed to build that kind of thing, and I've predicted that before and been wrong. But it feels like there's a new breed of company that sells in a new way, and they start with small busin…”
Shah has zero direct reports at 4,000-employee HubSpot
“We have Over 4000 people at HubSpot. I have zero direct reports. I've never had direct reports in the 15 years”
Parr: Small businesses will not build custom CRMs to replace HubSpot
“Like everyone talks about like all the nerds on Twitter, which I'm one of them are talking about like building their own CRMs. Maybe, maybe the nerds are doing that, but a roofing company with 20 employees in Tennessee, they ain't gonna be doing it anytime soo…”
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.”
Galloway: Wealthy individuals should sell concentrated single stocks and buy index funds
“Like you're, quite frankly, you should be selling down your Airbnb and your HubSpot stock and just letting, you don't need the needle in a haystack. You just need to buy the whole haystack because you've got enough capital.”
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…”
Walling: First-Time Non-Technical Founders Should Build Plugins Before Full SaaS
“If you're, if you are non-technical and you've never started a startup before, I would say don't build a SaaS app. It's too hard. Like go, I have this thing called the stair-step approach to bootstrapping, which is like start small with like a WordPress plugin…”
Brian Halligan suggests building profitable vertical software applications on HubSpot APIs
“There's an infinite number of opportunities for people to build stuff on top of HubSpot that's vertical specific. And so, someone should build a legal spot on top of HubSpot. Someone should build a hospital spot on top of HubSpot. Like, whatever they want. And…”
Pat Walls' Sale of Starter Story to HubSpot Closes Tomorrow
“The deal is supposed to close tomorrow. But you know, it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired. Otherwise I cannot take myself to that place yet.”
Parr: HubSpot canceled millions in booked ads after acquiring The Hustle
“Dude, when we sold the company to HubSpot, one of the reasons we went into the year with millions and millions of dollars booked of advertising, and we were probably going to do twenty million dollars the next year. And they were like, yeah, just cancel all th…”
Shah: I spent $500k on ChatSpot and will transfer it for $1
“So I spent like half a million dollars. Plus like freelance developers and open AI license fees and all the things that need to go into launching a product like that. And I'll end up giving it to HubSpot for a dollar, right?”
Shah: HubSpot is bringing his ChatSpot.ai side project in-house
“And so, but now given the relevance to HubSpot, we're going to transfer that project, chat spot.ai to be a HubSpot staffed core team.”
Wilkinson: Would pay $10k monthly for hyper-targeted executive ad service
“So I would pay 10,000 dollars a month to be on Dharmesh's radar everywhere he goes. And so I don't know how it gets done. It's like a advertising sniper rifle, essentially. But I really like the idea of something like that.”
Dharmesh Shah: 20-30 HubSpot employees made over $10M from equity.
“Probably somewhere in the 20 to 30 range, if I had to guess, of people that have made that much you know, over 50, maybe even a hundred, like, millionaires in the seven-figure range.”
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…”
Dharmesh Shah bought over $3M of HubSpot stock during a dip.
“It was over three.
Forgot the exact amount is, but it was millions of dollars.”
Dharmesh Shah: Output quality depends on iteration volume over early perfectionism.
“The quality of the output is almost I won't say always, but frequently a function of the number of iterations, not the quality of the, you know, the people's.”
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.”
Parr: The Hustle reached 2M subscribers, generated $20M ad revenue before sale
“I started this company called The Hustle, which was a daily email that reached about two million people a day for business news. We just sold it to HubSpot for many tens of millions of dollars. And we are making, you know, twenty million dollars on ads.”
Brian Halligan avoids management chores to focus entirely on HubSpot product
“The other thing I would say is I'm still involved with HubSpot. So I'm still like, today I've had four HubSpot calls. So I'm not, I'm very much engaged with HubSpot. I'm just not engaged in stuff I don't like to do. Like, I don't like doing one-on-ones with pe…”
Dharmesh Shah built the first HubSpot prototype with freelance Egyptian developers
“The first version of HubSpot was built by Dharmesh and these two guys in Egypt that he found through found online. Put a test out there. And Far Maui, and I forgot the other guy's name, and they built, like, the prototype of, those three built the prototype of…”
Sam Parr predicts Trends will reach $10 million ARR in 2021.
“At the end of this year, Trends will potentially be a ten million plus a year recurring revenue business.”
Parr: Portfolio Is 90% Public Equities and Index Funds
“I'm looking at my portfolio now. It's basically 90% index funds or includes HubSpot stock, which is not indexed, but it's 90% publicly traded stock, most of which is, is, is, is index funds.”
Shah predicts SaaS companies will increasingly control their own distribution
“Where I think the future of kind of SaaS companies has, is going to be heading, which is more and more of them are going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people.”
Sam Parr reveals 90% of his net worth is in S&P 500
“Well, no, I own way more just S&P 500 than I do HubSpot and Airbnb. But I would say that 90% of my net worth is in the S&P 500.”
Puri: Frictionless software wins when unconventional app platforms reach critical mass
“Like, once these platforms reach a critical mass, somebody's gonna build something that's frictionless on top of it that is able to generate revenue. So I think there's money to be made in the unconventional app platforms that you don't really think about firs…”
Parr: HubSpot stock jumped from $350 to $460 after acquiring The Hustle
“When we sold to Hub, when we sold to HubSpot, I think the share price, I think it was 350 dollars, And then, like, the week they announced it went to, like, 460 dollars, or something like this. Anyone can go back and look at it. It was February of 21.”
Wilkinson: Tiny's acquisition offer for The Hustle would have been lower than HubSpot's
“I think your deal with HubSpot, though, is better than what we would have paid. Well, and it was like, we got to the numbers, and we would have been cheaper than HubSpot.”
Parr: My portfolio is 80/20 index funds plus HubSpot and Airbnb
“And then I own HubSpot stock still, and then I own Airbnb stock. That's basically, basically my portfolio.”
Sam Parr: Non-compete blocks launching business newsletter for another year
“I do have a non-compete, so I can't start like a business news email for another one year, I think.”
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…”
Dharmesh Shah: Seven of HubSpot's first eight employees came from MIT.
“Because of the first eight people in the company, seven of them came out of MIT Sloan, the same school that Brian and I went to and we met in class.”
Dharmesh Shah: No marketing software company had reached $10B when HubSpot pitched.
“In the history of software, no one has ever really built a 10 plus billion dollar household name global brand marketing software company had never been done. Omniture was the greatest one at the time with a billion and a half dollar you know, price tag at the …”
Parr: Personal portfolio is in HubSpot stock, Vanguard index fund, and real estate
“So I own HubSpot stock and then the rest was just mostly a Vanguard total index fund and some real estate and real estate funds.”
Smith: Companies Would Pay for Competitor Job Posting Intelligence
“I also think that companies would pay for this, right? As in like, Companies that have competitors want to know what their competitors are doing, and so, like, we're launching something at HubSpot soon, and I've already gotten an email from someone who works a…”
Noah Kagan actively invests in public software companies that AppSumo utilizes internally
“So when we were building Shopify apps five years ago, I was like, I don't know if our Shopify apps are going to work, but I'll put 10,000 dollars in Shopify stock when it just started. So if our apps suck, I think the Shopify thing will probably work. And that…”
Parr: HubSpot gave My First Million a $1M annual marketing budget
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars a quarter. So hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe, maybe we could say like in the range of a million dollars a year.”
Parr: The Hustle reached 2M daily readers and Trends made millions
“This podcast was owned by my company called the hustle. We just sold it for a lot of money to this company called hubspot. And before we sold it, thank you. And before we sold it, we had a daily email that reached around two million people a day. And then we o…”
Brian Halligan says HubSpot began as legal software called LegalSpot
“The first pivot was about six months in. We were building kind of a general purpose platform for legal firms. We call it legal spot.”
Shah keeps 85 to 90 percent of his net worth in HubSpot
“Which is probably roughly, 85, 90% of my overall net worth because that's where all my money is is in HubSpot shares.”
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…”
Shah says free diagnostic tools are immensely powerful lead generators
“The power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense, right? This is the thing that, so website grader was not the solution. So it's not like a freemium thing. It's like, oh, we're giving you a lightweight version of HubSpot. It was the thing t…”