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In the world of business. What's going on in entrepreneurship? And how you could be the best parent and entrepreneur that you could be? So, listen to parents, making profits podcast wherever you get your podcasts? I think, you know what question I'm trying to ask, even though I don't have the
words filled, half a billion dollars is what you're asking me
or how do you deal with that and like yeah we go. Is that how much you lost? You
think it's more than that but yeah, who's
counting? I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what
What I want to
travel. Never looking back.
No housekeeping. No, - go. Do you think you think that when they're when The Chainsmokers Go on stage? Their manager says, wait before you guys do this first song, let's do some housekeeping about the tour. That's how I feel reference. You gotta let the talent work and we're as talented as the chain smoke.
So on the Pod right now we've got dark mashed. Our message is the founder of
HubSpot. He's a, what are your technical title CTO, right? That is
correct. I see you, morons, that, that you have to do the ad reads for your own company today. Why are we talking about Hope side? You do the ad reads, you tell people why the bar talking
about, because you guys do a much better job. I am terrible at that. I'm terrible at the promotion side of things, but the Sean do you, you're renting a house right now. Yeah, and duress. You do not rent though, right? Not anymore. I did for a long, long time.
A big believer in rentals as it turns out, but I I'm staying in Brooklyn for the summer and I rent a furnished house and it or apartment, and it is so much better than owning a place that having to worry about stuff all the time, it is so much better II. Think I bought the renting trade, I think. Now like I've kind of been there but like I'd actually love it more. Do you like it? Because Sean, you owned a place in San Francisco for like four years and then now, you rent?
Again, way better, in fact, every time something breaks I now just have joy.
I like to be like, let me call somebody else. It's their problem, their cost to fix, they have to arrange it. They have to do, whatever. And I don't have to think about it. Plus also in California property, taxes are like insane, or like it's a Francisco because the, the house prices so high. So, you know, even if you try to do the calculation, it's so hard to beat just this annual property tax every single time on
rent.
Wait. So dumb ass if you if you had the choice again, I mean I think maybe perhaps you bought because like your wife wanted to or your kids wanted to but if it was up to you even with the family, would you be a renter?
if it was up to me, yes, because
Just the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one psyche and soul that ownership. Yeah. Bestows upon you is just not worth it. If that's my that's my thing. It's just like like I don't want to worry about those things I want to. I want to get as close to like living in the Matrix as I possibly can. Right renting is a step closer to being in the Matrix. We do have to worry about physical things in Adams and things like that is like that's somebody else's problem. Are you sure? Aha. How many people in your socio and economic like ballpark like you know, founders of multi-billion dollar companies or
People like you do you think also rent because I think that'd be a shame if it were a fair amount that would be fairly shocking to a lot of people but do you know, a bunch of people that are similar to you? That still rent? I know people that are similar to me in terms of that they would prefer renting exact talk to them about this, but almost everyone, I know. Now once you get a family and once you have like other things, you're trying to factor in for instance, you know, one of the things, my wife loves gardening and let's loves having a yard and that's kind of hard to do in a rental, not that you can't do it, but it's
Right. What one thing that a guy told me who's similarly was, you know, I think he's probably got like a Tanner ten or Twenty billion dollar house, he was like it, he's like renting his amazing until you want that until your wife wants a specific house and it was your wife wants a specific house or in a specific neighborhood that neighborhood like like higher and neighborhoods have no rentals so you just can't get into that neighborhood. Which means you can't have whatever. So then you're forced into a different path and so I thought, you know, it's a version of good problems to have. So
Count it that way. All right, what are we? What are we talking about? Where should we start?
Well, you do many things left over from the last episode. Sean, I don't know if we want to jump into some of those very one
blast. Let's do one because I think you will have a take on this. So, so have you ever read? I don't know. Do you know, Paul Graham? By the way, I do
not best buddies or anything, but I do know of him. I've met him.
Yeah. So he's from Boston, right, or
Cambridge Cambridge? Yeah. Yeah. So you guys know one another
He wrote a blog post back in 2008. It was October 2008. So this is like right after the crash and it's it's just a few go to Paul Graham.com. Bad economy is the name of the blog post and he makes this case or he goes, the economic situation is apparently. So Grim that some experts fear, we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid 70s which is when Microsoft and Apple were founded and as those example suggests like a recession may not be such a bad time to start a start-up but he which you've heard before but I thought there's one interesting part.
He goes, I'm not saying it's a good time either. The truth is more boring. The economy, doesn't matter much, either way for a Founder, starting a start-up. And I actually thought that was a really good point because I hear the so much as like I'll talk to kind of young Founders and they listen to Twitter and they listen to podcast and they list, you know, they listen to kind of these like a lot of it's like, you know, VCS who are, you know, also pandemic experts and also it, you know, macroeconomist as well. And so they hear and then they sort of start to adjust their
Plans and their mental models and like their room for everything. It's like, dude, if you're a startup, you're like an ant in this world is the ant care what's going on with the presidential election. Like, you basically just need to build a product. You need to carry a little piece of dirt. It's like build a product. Get a customer get 10 customers like, it doesn't matter. If the economy is bad, if you can't get 10 customers, it's not going to work anyways. And so I thought it was a great little blog post talking about like kind of starting a start-up during the downtime which is where I think we're about to
We just officially entered a recession again. So as curious dermis to have any thoughts on that. Yeah, so my position is
I lean more towards out of Paul Graham, end of the Spectrum which is, I think it's either neutral that it doesn't matter. It's one of things you're suggesting towards positive and the positive elements of being in a kind of downturn economy or recession, is that Things become available, that would not have been available to a start-up before like Talent. It's like, oh, well, there are people sitting at Meadow Facebook or sitting at Google right now, that may be re-evaluating their
Lives or they may have just been let go from a venture-backed company that raised 200 plus million dollars, right? So now you've got this Talent that's coming on the market. That might not have come on the market before things that were super expensive, like buying Google AdWords or certain marketing channels, because you have this glut of money and a lot of venture capital. Yeah, I think of venture capital is a very efficient machine of turning like money from LPS into Google AdWords rep, be right? At that's they're just a conduit between the two and as in a downward economy you're going to get less of that kind of glut of money.
Going in which drives the cost overall down for certain things that I think are important entrepreneur. So, I'm, I'm journaling that positive that in down economy is actually a relatively good time to start a start-up for, like, the last 18 months, or, you know, whenever like last 24 months when everything's been booming, I've, my wife works at Airbnb and, you know, I've got a lot of friends at work at, huh, obviously I was fine. All these and Sean was at twitch. So we have like, some some perspective on how on the salaries of big companies and I've seen some of these salaries and they are crazy.
Crazy crazy crazy crazy. As the as like a leader and the biggest shareholder of husband and you like see these, see these numbers? Are you thinking to yourself like this? Like we can't afford to pay someone like an entry level person 250,000 dollars here. I don't know how this is gonna work like, what's your perspective on that when these salaries are going so high and now it's like a little bit normal more normal. Yeah. Because it has a start-up. I mean, you can't afford those salaries anyway, right? Unless you were one of those kind of rare exceptions that has 50 plus million dollars going out of the gate, which is
Very rare. And so, you know, as one of the things, the founder has to kind of get good at. It's convincing, really smart people to do this irrational thing was to join you in your startup, right? And if you can't, if you can't do that, if you can't make that sale, which is the most important sale you'll make, is being able to attract people and then its customers, it's not going to work. So you have to do one of two things either recognize kind of super star talent and give them something they can't get because it's beyond competence level. You'll learn more here. Well, you can do your own startup someday. This is the place to get your startup MBA because
Cause you'll be exposed to a bunch of things, you'll meet your future, co-founder of the company, those kinds of things. Either, you have to do that or you have to say, I'm going to be really good at identifying Diamonds in the Rough people that have not made it to the 200 plus 3 and thousand plus dollars to our yet, but they will someday I caught them early in their kind of evolution and so I can get them. There's that's the house me. One of the other form of Arbitrage otherwise you can't play the game. That's just not like it's
viable. I'm doing when you're saying that it's like resonating so much because it's basically
All the three things we just talked about, I'm doing it's like I started the milk Road in January this year and so it's, it's been, it's about to be 6 months or spend 6 months and it's like here, let me start a crypto company, right? When crypto crashes, you know, like 72 percent and at the beginning been even my co-founder been and he was like, you know, the only thing I can see going wrong because of crypto goes in a bear Market. I go. Well script is gonna go to a bear market like that's like one of the few certainties of crypto is that it goes up and down and when it does it is
Dramatic and I'll both ways it goes from. The elevator is dramatic and both ways. And I was like, you know, so it's just a question of like, do you, what do you think that, kills it or do we just make it through? Like there's no that's really all we have to think about here so that was the first part of starting in a bad economy. The second one on Talent was I recently hired this guy and he quit a pretty well-known venture-backed company that I think it just raised maybe 50 or 100 million dollars and he join and I talked to him a little bit before.
He joined, like, he was thinking about doing his own startup. He had, we traded a couple of emails. Nothing serious. Just he he was wanted me to use his product. Then you take a job at this place. All right. Whatever I forgot about him. Then he emails me and I share this on Twitter. He emails me subject line. I have made an irreversible decision and I was like okay I gotta click this what's inside and he's like I just quit my job and I think you should hire me and I was like okay direct and to the point and he tells me why I've all of them. And so I was like, all right, but am I'm sold very bold approach. I already liked your hustle before.
Or this because when you were hustling to try to get me as your customer, I was like this guy's good. So okay, let's do this and I made him a job offer which was not like, you know, a Silicon Valley job offer but the guy lives in San Francisco he was working for a Silicon Valley startup. So he was like dude that's like a 50% pay cut and I was like and I didn't say this out loud but in my head what I what I felt I I told him I was like, that's what I could afford to pay right now. And like, you look, you come crash at the sky's the limit but like that's what I can.
Right now as I done seen and I said in my head I was about to tell him the line that I had heard from Warren Buffett and you guys probably heard the story, but when Warren Buffett goes and tries to work for his, you know, kind of hero or whatever Ben Graham. And he's like, you know, I'll work for you for free and Ben, Graham goes your price is too high sir which is which is the truth which is the idea that you got to Shadow, Ben Graham at work side-by-side with him every day was you should be paying for that if you really want to be like a successful investor, that's how I felt.
I didn't want to say it because it's kind of arrogant. But like, dude, if I take you under my wing, my team is like three people. If you're become one of those three and you're working out of my, he came by my house yesterday, you're sitting by me working out of, you know, side by side every day. Like, really, I'm providing more value to you than you are providing to me at that point and like, there's still a, you know, I appreciate the value bring. But let's like the dollar amount is like, the salary dollar amount is not what not the value you're getting. And I think he knows that
Rev Li and that's why you said yes. But like that Ben Graham story oldest and about family.
No, no, he's a young guy, just graduate from college, but
here's the thing, I think people have a couple of thoughts on that one. Is the salary. / compensation is just one vector of value that you get from a company that you join. Write, another one that you get is you get the learning, whatever, it is that they get expose you to another one that you get is a network that you build while you're there, right there. So there's all these other things that also in kind of an Aggregate and maybe, and I think it's common for people to over-index on the compensation or the kind of current compensation and under index on other things that and they're just lie, just Raw.
Valued you like being around the people that you're around, do you enjoy the idea that you're working on? Like, is it, you know, those things matter? As it turns out, I have a fun top spot story. So when we start on this compensation thing, you know, Brian, I had to pick salaries for ourselves something more than 0 and so we pick five thousand dollars a month, right? It's like, okay, well, that's it's a number and we obviously, well, below market value, we've been out in the market for a while and at work in our lives. So, when we hired employee number three, we had to decide what we were going to pay them, five thousand dollars hired.
Point number four, five thousand dollar. And so we just build it. Okay, if you're here for the salary, you're here for the wrong reason, right? That's not why you're going to join this Motley Crew of folks and that lasted for like a while. It's like we and then we, and then it kind of has this inertia built-in was like, okay, well, all of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join. The company are all paying each other. I'm paying ourselves five thousand dollars a month. Now, what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making five thousand dollars? Of course, that doesn't last forever. And you have to what was
the pitch at that time. So it's not
You know, no offense to help swap is not the sexiest idea. You're not saying we're building the electric car here, you know, like you didn't have that going for you. You know you might have had like a you know your own magnetism which is like you know like for me I get this cheat code because like this guy he listens to the podcast. And this happens at this podcast is a great talent pipeline for us because people will listen to it over time. They just, they decide for themselves either. I think this guy's a dummy and he annoys me or I take this guy's smart and I really like the I'd love to be hanging out with these guys. I think I could learn about
Bunch from them and so it becomes an unfair Advantage, but you didn't have that back in the day. So what was your, how did you convince people to do this? Five thousand dollar, you know, like a block of salary building.
So we cheated a little bit, right? Because of the first eight people in the company, seven of them came out of MIT. Sloan the same school. The Brian. I went to and we met in class. It was kind of in network kind of thing. It's like, okay, well it's just a bunch of friends. That's what I know each other in network or whatever. Let's, let's go do this thing, right? And it's also and they were kind of far, nothing.
Going to a career that they were not missing meals or anything like that, right there, just gone to business school and relatively good business school and and so that was it s. Then the other thing and this is the part there's Equity. But there's also the like this is not that risky dude. Like let's say this doesn't work out and we end up being chunks of the ideas. Really bad 36 months from now. You will basically be able to pick up where you left off, right. There's not there's no loss other than the opportunity cost of those three to six months. This is not like a irreversible lifetime decision that I've made this call. And that's all I'm going to have to be able to do for the next.
For 10 years and that was enough. It's yeah. What did things change? How many people do you think? How many people do you think at HubSpot have made like eight figures because of their equity? And once you work with those people for a long time and you're like oh shit like we are the company went public and like you don't need to work anymore which and does that change the dynamic?
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It hasn't so to answer your question so I always have to there's this little it only takes like a second half of me to translate eight figures into what is that actually? So that's 10 million plus. Yeah, I'd like maybe that maybe five or ten million is like the number of where you're like, I don't need this job. Probably somewhere that 20 to 30 range. If I had to guess of people that have made that much, you know, over 50, maybe even 100 like millionaires in the seven-figure range.
JH. But even when that was happening right now, well, a couple of things one is it distorts it a little bit because it's a private company, even though the valuation from the last round or whatever is X, the shares are not liquid, right? So they're worth it. But they're worth it on paper. They can't go out and actually sell their shares. So, that's kind of thing number one. And so doesn't even if they wanted to, as we can't really change Behavior, you can't go off and buy something with the with the, with your shares. So that's the number one. The thing number two, it's that we did have
Like this kind of spree decor, right? It wasn't really about the money. It was about winning. It was about kind of building something together. And I like to believe that it wasn't even really. The idea that if we had taken that same early group of 20, 25 people and parachute them into some other company, and some other industry, the still software in SAS, that we would have likely done reasonably well, as well. I think it came down to the people have good chemistry, they were focused on the right thing. I think we are early hiring policy was to hire
Kind of smart people that get shit done. That was kind of the thing, right? We want people that have high, what we call High wattage, they were like measurably smart. If you have to get have them take an IQ test, we didn't do that but measurably smart but there's lots of very, very smart people in the world that have this kind of predilection to action like they could not help but like if they found a problem they're going to ghost try and start solving. They're gonna jump in feet first into just going to do it or have first one of the phrases and that was enough. So we had we made a deliberate decision not to hire what we call Press
S release hires press release hires when you hire someone and then you feel compelled to issue a press release. A oh, how spot just hired? The VP of sales from such and such company. Whatever. That is a 30-year background in doing X. 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 startup is such a different context and you're paying for these kind of specialized set of skills that may or may not be relevant. Arbitrage is
You really hard. So we're bigger on the identify Diamonds, in the Rough people that are going to be big, you know, it's like you're buying the stock early versus going after the folks that already were pressed. Press, release worthy. So I think I, that's been my skill. Shawn, you've kind of seen my journey. I think my skill has been finding the diamond in the rough Diamonds in the Rough. So we've had like, well, Sean and I kind of discovered one another. But then, like there Steph Smith is now at a 16z. We had trunk, who's popular. We've had a bunch of
People who went on to found a different companies and what I've always looked for like I purposely have looked for these diamond in the rough because I was like I can't afford you know to pay x y z. So I gotta hide this 24 year old who I know will be a boss and like five or ten years when I
would Sam, it's not just that you can't afford them. I remember once the hustle got to the point where you could afford them, you were just kind of disgusted by the concept of somebody making that much money. I remember, you were just like, how much do you how much does this kid over here worked as an engineer at my office? And I'd be like, I don't know, like whatever.
150 170, you're like 170. Oh my God. Like this is, you know what, if this person left with the company failed now? No, not at all. Well, it was like, this is crazy.
That was ten year. That was the year of pictures, really like? Yeah. So things have changed a little bit but also like your people would show up to work at like noon. And I'm like, what the hell? Did this guy? Like just waltzed in and like you're gonna get he's like, he arrived right with him. They're serving lunch. But we've like
Discovered some cool people and I always look for a couple things. The first thing is actually, this is from Paul Graham. He goes, I Look to hire animals like, people who like, you're a little bit afraid of and they're like, just like freaks it where they work a lot. I also work look for people who are like weird. So I always want like, weird people who have like fairly extreme opinions even if I totally disagree with their opinions. I really like that someone's like, well thought, well, while research and has a strong opinion on something, but I love like, weirdos and eccentric people, and I have found that if you can add our
About at the hostel. We did a really good job of like accepting weirdos and letting them be odd. And like, we like embraced it, and I always found that to be kind of like a used to say, you know, let your freak flag. Let your freak flag fly and we're like, you know, I don't like will have, we had all types of different people. We had just every type of like person we worked at a company and they liked it. We like Embrace their odd, they're kind of like them being different. Yeah, we have something simple. So we have, you know, five kind of core values.
As part of our top spot culture, one of them is remarkable t or being remarkable. What we mean by that is there's something noteworthy. They've done in their past or something, quirky, something, different, something that's an outlier about them. And it doesn't have to be specifically business or whatever even roll out there in but there's like they're just kind of like off the kind of main beat and that we've done well with those kinds of people, we give them a home kind of let them do their thing and they tends to work out. Yeah.
So Sam had weirdos and kind of like Let your freak.
Fi you have the, the remark ability. You have you done something remarkable. We had one at Bebo that was the same as we used to say, we hired degenerates. It's like intentionally a word. That's usually - right, like, we hired two genders and what we said, we would always ask me to work on. We noticed this in each other. We were like, dude, we've gone through these phases in our lives, or we just got really obsessed with something that didn't have a clear payoff. Like, it wasn't the popular thing to be obsessed with. Like it wasn't the like Cookie Cutter. Good thing to be obsessed with like it wasn't like great.
As in school, it would be like, you know, for kind of got really into, you know, this video game. And he's like, yeah, became like a top hundred ranked player of this game and like, it was a total like, you know, and one hand. I I knew it was like a waste of time but like I couldn't help it. I just loved it and I'm obsessed with it. I became the best at it and I just wanted to win so badly. And at some point I even stopped being about winning. I was just like, I wanted to like, get to like the next level and, and keep going. And I had I done the same thing with poker. He had done it with poker also. So we kind of
These do you it's like hey do you go through these periods of like three years of deep Obsession around, some get competitive, like thing and and then when you do, do you like really like try to study the game and figure out how to like, what are the loopholes in the game? What are the rules of the game? You immerse yourself with other players in the game because like will cool. Our game now is just startups and we would try to find people who had some evidence of degeneracy. It's like, yeah, you come in at noon because you stay up till 4:00 in the morning, like building that SoundCloud player that works.
Like Tick-Tock for no reason because you're so annoyed that SoundCloud like is too slow in the way that they develop things like other people would look at that as I know you're not really reliable or very structured or you, you know, why did you work on that? That wasn't even like the task at hand? Whereas we would see that and we'd be like, oh, all we need to do is just point. This guy's degeneracy at the right direction, and then we'll win. And that was like,
yeah. Well, I think of that as a kind of borderline pathological Obsession, like, that's like once you attach yourself, whatever it happens to be, right? And what our job
To kind of Bring It just shy of pathological words like kind of harming themselves, but it's like, can't help yourself. You're gonna like just dig in and then, whether it's video games, or whatever it happens to be people that have, I will call it a gene. But that have that trait, tend to work out well and startups, because you're trying to attach yourself to a particular thing of ticker problem. There's think I'm just as a word since on the topic of talent, I've got this little mini framework, works at multiple levels of abstraction. 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 180 Mile and, you know, he has an hour kind of thing. If you sit down a room with them, then there are the so they're their starters, then you have the completers. Those are people that can make a list of like your the things that need to get done in order for us to ship a product or do whatever. And often those folks are at odds like the idea. Folks are kind of really frustrated with the completers that I was like, I'm just going to check a box and make our ideas like, yes, but I'm doing this thing. It's not good enough yet, but you have that tension, and that's what brings in the third person, which is a collaborator and the collaborators
The communicating is really good at bridging gaps across, departments, across individual people, and kind of pulling it all together. And usually, you're looking for someone that has at least some like a nine or ten on one of those dimensions. A seven or eight another one and usually very low on the third, right? It's like, you can have one of you creative. I'm on the creative side. I'm like, yeah, for sure. How long have you you should well? But how, that doesn't make sense to me. Because you lead a twenty billion dollar software company that
You've been doing it for 20 years like and as a CTO, she like shit. How on Earth do you pull that off and it's public? Its publicly traded which means you got to go through all the bullshit that like is the opposite of creativity. Yeah. How do you, how do you, how
do you like one thing? Is your last time, you talked about those little, like, kind of calculators or the little, like, kind of growth growth tools that you had built, which was just like, oh, I was just tinkering and I made this little like page load speed test site. And then, or whatever I do, remember the exact example, but you had built like three or four of those at drove, like a
Amount of traffic for HubSpot early on and like, even now with wordplay like, you know, you're just, you're still creating stuff. Even now
that we were just talking we were just talking he's getting ready for the earnings call and like that to me is the opposite of creativity. You know what I mean? That's like your you have so many you have such a narrow Lane that you could stay within. That's like, it seems so hard. Yeah. So I'll say this, 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. It'll just the things that are kind non-creative not a part of that. So I don't have any direct reports which is unheard of for a company that for finer that has 7,000 people in the company. A lot of them on the kind of product and engineering team, which presumably the CTO would kind of help manage and lie. I don't do that and so the only meetings, I go to our where there's some creativity involved. I don't like to go to class status things and updates or whatever. It's like, I can read an email as well as the next person. So let's be clear, but there are things that are non-delegable, that one
We should, we should probably talk about it says on my list of things. So one is earnings calls. Another one is getting onto public stages, right? So first, we have an annual conference called inbound that, you know, the last time it was in person had like 25,000 people in the live event, right? Like it's it's big and I have to give the keynote every year and I've been doing it for ten plus years now which I hate and I'm bad at but that was one of those because I'm founder. That was what I was non-delegable things, right? I couldn't say oh well we're gonna have someone else to go do that because
As you know, in my role as down drive a certain kind of weight to me just by virtue of the title of being a Founder versus someone else. So Sean, listen to this, listen to this Dharma story and our mess, you could fill in the blanks as we go because you could decide how much you want to reveal, but there has been a couple different times. Maybe three different times, I've introduced our mesh to a founder of a company who is raising money and literally within five minutes, he replied and said I looked at the deck. I'm in
Or blank them out. Did he do? My she can reveal? If you want to say something that some of the times how much it was, but, and he replied with I'm in. Just so, you know, though, I've got one rule, which is I always side with the founder and I'm always on your team. But the downside of that is like, I'm going to make close to know type. You didn't say it this way, but it was like, I'm going to make close to, no time for you or like, you know, like, I think you said it. Like, I'm totally gonna be silent a silent partner. I'm not going to bother you, which means if you want to bother me, I probably, you know.
No, I'm not going to talk to you that much, but that's like the stipulations for taking my money. If you want to take it great, do it. I've seen that happen, three different times and do want to reveal how much it was, or, no. I don't recall, but I will say this, I've made roughly. I think a little over 100 Investments. Now, cross my angel investment, I will 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 the decision within 24 hours. It's like like I don't have time to go dig in to do due, diligence on some industry. Whatever is like, that's not the point. My point is not that there's only two reasons I do Angel Investing and it's none of these are the market to make a return. One of them is around, living vicariously through other entrepreneurs. I just like, I like that process.
And this is going to be predates, even starting HubSpot and the other one quite immodestly is just bragging rights is to be able to say 5 10, 15 years from now. It's like because no one cares that comment. You invest what I was like, oh yeah, I was an octave back in the day. I was a stack Overflow back in the day. I was like, first many on this company. This company, this company and that feels nice. It's, it's not such a kind of magnanimous getting back to the community is purely like it'd be cool to be able to have been part of these. Great founding teams that went off and build great
companies. I really respect that you
You said that part because I thought you were going to say like you know to support the hell is under about. Yeah I just you know just to Foster entrepreneurship while I go you know use the d word democratize, something something. And instead you said it a true thing that I think every angel investor feels is like it's awesome to have a notch on your belt and be like yeah. I see either I saw that or I back that I bet on that and it worked out, it's awesome. It's an awesome feeling. It is a perk of the job and it's a real one. So the
You said that to me, shows me that you are a real Wonder
mesh. I mean, I'm right refer to myself as like a warm-hearted red-blooded, capitalist rights, I have compassion. It's not like that. I don't like people. I'm not a sociopath but I am a capitalist. It's like okay well for instance I'm this is going to sound completely a modest but we open this door, the last episode so might as well walk through it now is so last episode we talked about kind of putting a value on your time, whatever it happens to be and that anything that falls below the line in terms of the you can Outsource it, delegated, whatever, for Less,
Than that you don't do those things, right? You don't mow your lawn, whatever. If and so I haven't I should recalibrate. But you know my number personally the one I use just because the math is easier is like ten thousand dollars an hour. Like that's what I if I were oddly open market I think I could I could make that if that's well dude I would have thought higher. I would have thought higher. Well, what do you think?
Want to make the case, but I couldn't make my point without having to make that particular
case. Let me ask you a question. Yeah, to make it real. So you buy something, you booked a plane ticket, it's like whatever you it didn't work out, or you, you deserve a refund, but you'd have to go chase it down. Do you just have somebody Who You're like? This is my chief of staff. My EA that like I just say you do it or you're like, hey, it was two thousand dollars, but it's below my hourly rate, I'm not gonna do it, I just eat the loss and move on and I'll do
it because even delegating then require some follow-up require some explanation.
I'm going to apologize because they could only get half back or it was only a credit psychotic, I don't care. I just honestly don't care and so and back to the investment thing. So let's say, you know my, when I started my average investment rate was, will call it a hundred thousand dollars, give or take a little bit. It's grown considerably since then, but if I spent like, five hours, doing due diligence, or having founder of meetings, whatever. I basically doubled their valuation, or have to my investment amount, right? Because I cannot believe I put cash in, for which, I'm going to get shares, but then I put my
Other fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars worth of Taemin just in the due diligence which is easier to kind of run up that bill. It makes no mathematical sense. Why people would do that, right? It's like, okay. Do you really feel like you're going to and the reason they rationalize and this makes sense, is that, if you really believe that, as a result of spending that time on the margin, you're going to make better investment decisions. You can pick better companies, you can do these things and maybe for the first hour to has an early stage startup, there's just not that much diligence to do, right? Like what are you going to dig into is like like the idea, you do you
The founders are you don't move on
or or the the other part that's obvious but worth saying out loud just in case people are like well then why are you doing this podcast? Well you also just do things you like and those are the things that you don't do. You don't put a dollar amount on because you enjoy them and therefore it is not a cost to you. It is like a benefit to you so so yeah, if you love gardening, then you Garden, you don't put a ten thousand dollar, an hour, mark on it. Is that fair for you? That's how I think about it. At least
that is fair. And it's like, what I solve for is, I'd like to solve for
it's because it's a little squishy term is just raw impact. I like scale. So if you folks were a much smaller blog, let's just say it's like, oh I'm going to reach 50 people. As a result of this, I have ideas that I think are worth sharing and it was smaller. I'm like and it's not like, oh, I don't get up out of bed in the morning. Unless there's at least, you know, 10,000 because
if that's morning first podcast and what was
right what I do it, all right, beside my time, right? To what little time I have left on the planet with things that I know. So I'm always looking for things to do things at scale.
Do I find a way? Let speaking of things that scale let's talk about this thing because like on the surface, this thing that you recently did like a year ago is incredibly silly and not worth your time. But basically I think a year and a half ago we're all is it like a game that an online game is like a word game that went viral? You built a thing called the word play? Is it weird play.com? It's more play.com, right? By the way, you buy domain names. So you bought the hustle.com for us,
You bought me a copy that.com? Thank you for that. I forgot to say thank you in person but so you buy like a lot of amazing domains. We have word play.com and did you tweet that? It was getting seven million users a week or three. What was the number was? So the I just went and checked the numbers. Okay, so just kind of place the timeline in frame. So, November, and December of last year. 2021 is when Wordle took off in January, is when it really kind of hit. Its, I
Close to its peak and that's roughly when the New York Times acquired Wordle and couple things kind of bought mean it was fine. I think it was a great outcome for Josh Wardle but there were things that were kind of bothering me that were limitations in the game and I was an avid player of the game and now it's like okay well the New York Times has bought it. There is no way that anything is going to happen for like years if ever. So I was kind of thing. Number one thing number two like it was headed been a while since I had launched like some simple free thing publicly.
Hadn't gone through the process and there were other things I wanted to learn. It's like, oh, I want to learn more about versatile and next JS and typescript and things like that. So like, okay, well this is a excuse them. They're not intersect with the third thing, which was like the dominant variable in the equation is my son, was taking a Python Programming class, he's 11, right? He's going through this process and for him, it's still very abstract. He's learning programs enjoys everything involving technology and screams. But it was abstract, so on a Saturday night, I said, okay, well,
Let me build something. Python happens to be my language build something. So he can see because he plays world, he knows the game and so I started on a Saturday night with a deadline for Sunday that I'm going to launch something with him tomorrow. We're going to have Google analytics on it. So we're going to launch it and the launch it by tweeting it and so he knows what social media is, right? He's, you know, so I'm like, oh, we've got this thing that didn't exist yesterday.
I wrote the code over the course of last night in Python the language that you're learning and we're going to launch it and now you can see users coming in, right? You can see the. And so now what I want him to have in his head is that when he has it through the course of his life as he encounters problems that are solvable with software, which is a lot like it's actually tackle for him psycho, I don't know. I don't have the skills right now to do what Dad just did. But I know it's possible. I know it's possibly because he did it in the span of 24 hours, right? So if I want to go off and build a video game, I got to go off and build some
For my school, I want to build some social network for my book. Whatever it is, it feels like now it's more approachable for him. He's got years to go before you'll get to that level. But anyway, so those three things sort of came together and so we launched it on that Sunday. This is I think in February or so give or take. And since then it's had like, 45 million games have been played nine and a half million people have come through it. Any given moment, I'm right there for a. Look at the Google analytics will be to 3,000 people playing like right now,
which
how did it get so much traffic? Where did the traffic come from? Well,
it helps that I have a social media following, right. I've got a million followers on LinkedIn. I've got 300,000 on Twitter, so there's that. There's some violence that, that's, that's a lot but that's not. I wouldn't have it that that yeah. Yeah it's not enough for that. Is it? How many users you think got from that in the
early game is all what was it? Big. Was it big right off the bat? Like the first week? Was it big? I know the first day, probably Bunch people check it out, but like I'm sure you posted it. And that was the big.
So what was like the first week roughly? Do you remember first
week was probably maybe fifty two hundred thousand. So it was, it wasn't a lot, but it was something. But then use the once you kind of get into it, this is the the car Power of iteration is that oh well, one of the things that I found missing in the original Wordle was I was a single player game like you played and you played once a day and that was it. So two big changes that we made in wordplay one was. It was unlimited play. He didn't even have to play just once a day and two it allowed you to challenge your friends.
Friends. So you can say oh I just played this word. I solved in 4 turns to, here's my score and send literally a simple link to anyone or a Groupon. And this happens tens of thousands of times, right? Like someone will take a link that they just play the really proud of their score and then their family, they can post it there. WhatsApp group, you can post it there wherever they want and say, I invite you to like, beat my score kind of thing. And so that's the viral element and so then as more people play, you cannot attract that as you might have as a Google analytics event and say, how many people I mean times are people clicking last year.
On issuing challenges to other people and so that once you can kind of get into something, where there's a compounding effect on the user base, so as a user base grows, and so now, the thing I'm fighting though, right? Is that? So that's happening that's going well, but then the interest in Wordle and related games is waiting because everything has its going to Peak and it's and it's ab and so, but it's been an interesting exercise. So we only kind of learning path, one of things I haven't done in a while, it's like okay, well what's traffic actually worth? Let's say I had to make a living on this.
This thing or make the company quote unquote or projects profitable. So I put Google AdSense on it which is the easiest thing to do and discovered that like if I were bothered by the fact that would be two ads on the main game board page. If I were solving for monetization it was like 90 thousand dollars a month, Google traffic 90 grand a month and your you only have your only costs are hosting, right?
Yeah and my time, right? And yeah, first of all, Shawn go to wordpress.com and then go to like the about page is about page is incredibly well written. It's wonderful copywriting. It's wonderful. You got a wonderful voice. It says I'll just read the first sentence, but it says, why would you do this or is it better yet? Why would I do this? That's a really good question. My wife asked me the same question and then you like, go on to explain what it just is. You, you're quite a good writer. For also being like this, amazing engineer, typically those eyes.
Do your writing courses, Sean put on you know that right looks like I'm not right. I do it around here with my family. I'm
nice. I like to say Todd, our mesh, everything he knows, even before he met me. I'd somehow I caught them all that good stuff before he built, HubSpot,
what, uh, what do you? So, this was making 90 grand a month maybe or about. What do you
assume it could? It's not right. There's no Adams
turn dad's off because that's what I'm telling you. Wait and people are asking is like our mesh, why do you have ads on this thing? And like to learn? Like it's like, I've learned what I needed.
To learn so I can was was tweeting and linked it posting this on LinkedIn. The only way you got users, what do you think this could sell for right now? And is the is this the biggest side project you've ever created?
Our buddy tried to die from suicide to buy it off, you did he really? He tweeted out? He's like I'd like to buy this off. Yeah. I you know I felt mobile games before, you know, he was like semi-serious at least. I don't know. I don't know if you talk to him or not but I do know.
What do you think you could say? What do you think? Like if you cared, what do you think you could sell it for a million dollars?
Baby right now that lets 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 six hundred thousand dollars a year.
Apply a 5x. Multiple somewhere between two and ten million dollars would be my guest if I like the fact that we're going for. So it's and is this, the bit was was posting it on LinkedIn and Twitter. The only way that you got users or did you do some other weird hacks? I had my blog. I had my, it's like, I'm a big believer in like, you know what, folks call it the flywheel, there's all these little things that are attached to the flywheel, right? It's like, oh, well, LinkedIn helps a little bit but it'll energy. Twitter does a little bit and I have my blog in the email goes out and there's like things that I sort of do.
Yeah. So it helps but it's like the hardest part. Is that cold start problems? Like how do you get your first hundred thousand people? A hundred to a thousand people and then it's a matter of like tracking the retention rate on those users. Do they come back? The other thing that's been interesting about wordplay as far as lesson learned is that you know, when it started the average time a user spent according to google was roughly four minutes on the game, okay? In the early weeks and now that number is at 14 minutes is the average time a user spends you know across however many
Others come in a given day. So right, what and is this the biggest side project you've ever created inside how you measure it now? So technically no, not in terms of your select Rod traffic I've built graders and things like that before that have done better but what have you built that? It what side project have you built outside of HubSpot that gets more traffic than 3 million people. A month we did side projects. This is my first one that was like clearly because it was a game have been anything other than a game. I would have rationalized
Is some way to bring it into that spot umbrella because I like to have like all my eggs in that basket of, but just given the circumstances here didn't really make sense? And even now like I'm thinking about doing a kind of a marketing and sales related edition of word playwrights like oh the entire list of words or do it based on Mark tech companies like, okay. Do you know that the players in the space kind of thing and then you can get sponsorships whatever. Anyway but yeah. Website greater was the this kind of a project where it was like a free. I'm
I really like low-friction things that people can come to the website and this is why I said I were chatting yesterday was where I'm looking at flutter, this new development, environment and language, well, darts the language. But flutters the the app framework for building mobile apps, across IOS and Android and things is the good stuff. What the cool new kids are learning and he's like, no. Why would I ever want to build a mobile app? That's like something people have to download. I have to get approval from, you know, Apple to got a post by like I I was like, dude. Just do it like immediately. He's got and he's right. It's like, okay anyway, so
That's the word play story. It's been. It's been a lot of fun. I've, it's hard to know with these things like like, where the road leads, like we're play itself, may or may not going to connect back to other things, whatever. But the things I've learned through it, I think will is like, okay, well, here's what it takes to do. This kind of thing is like, okay, well then I'm using it to play around with communities like okay, can I take the word play user base? One of the things they care about and build a community around wordplay using one of the existing kind of community platforms?
And see if that's a thing, right? It's like, okay, if you could aggregate people with, like interests that in of itself has valued, I wanted to be a semi or something that kind of self runs, but we'll see
if you were going to ask or imagine. If Sam had built this as a side project and he was at the same point you're at right now. What would you like kind of advise him to do? If it was Sam's project? If you were just kind of an outsider said, oh, that's really cool. You did that, and it sounds like you've kind of reached this point where you don't really have a direction of where it's going to go next. What would you kind of tell? Sam.
Decide what you want to do, which is, okay. Do you want to like take this to the next level and you turn into a hundred million billion dollar business, you know, spit off or decide that it's just going to be a personal project. And just like my personal blog is that I made that decision. 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 is out of product because he's the one that tests, the thing, every morning and we played tournaments every evening. That's the big new feature that's coming out is a multi round tournaments.
in terms of, like,
I think half of what I know Shawn. I learned from you, the other half I learned from from FM rights like so one of the things that surround chest.com which you guys talk about, which I've been a member and player on for ten plus years, I knew of the site. But then you think about wordplay is like, okay, well, this is chest.com but forward game enthusiasts versus chest enthusiasts, and that is all the others as a reminder, people chest that cam is like a huge business. Like, like, multi billion dollar valuation.
We talked about this when we talk about Chess also, which was what other
Are like chess and we had said sodoku. And me and said, I think we had said, like a Scrabble or whatever. Yep. Word is Wordle. Yeah, I think they're almost as big if not. I think it would be. I wouldn't be shocked if it was bigger than just I wouldn't be shocked. I would be more shocked if it was like a tenth the size as the chest Enthusiast audience. I would guess it's like in the range and there's very few games that are in the range and so that alone makes it an interesting comp in that sense.
So the lessons you draw from test.com right which
Is a relatively straightforward as you have like a rating system, right? You have leaderboards and scores, you have challenges, you have social connections where you make your friends on chest.com so you can invite like it's all the things right that there's these are very easily translatable into other games like we're playing, right? So anyway so we'll pick and
choose as far as give me one little feature. I think would be cool because leaderboards are always this problem in general, we're like leaderboards cool for the top 10 people and then for everybody else on Earth it's like a great time player. Number
39,000 fantastic, right? And so there's all these, like if you I kind of study this one, sounds like who solved this problem and there's really three models that work. One is more like chess and games do this, the creative rank system, so it's not your number 80,000 in the world because that doesn't mean anything. But you go from bronze to silver to gold to platinum to master to Grand Master and like you, you just compete to get your own level up within that to get to your next batch. And that's a karate belt. The karate belt method. Let's
call it. Then there's the next one which is your social rank matters when it's with people. You know, that are either your friends, your school, your city, something like that. So you can kind of hack a proximity-based thing and then the third one which I think is somewhat interesting which is it doesn't even matter what my rank is, but there's something cool. Like, if I go to work later right now, I feel like I'm alone in this experience. I don't know that there's 3,000 other people solving this right now and also, I don't know. I bet you there's like some celebrity that plays word play every day, right? Like I bet you like, I don't know, Mila.
Plays this every day. And I think there's something really cool to like sort of like a Stars. They're just like us, Vibe of like, if I kind of knew that that X known people have solved it for today, that's just kind of interesting. And it's kind of like, you know, makes them more approachable. So I almost wonder if there was like a little feature like that where if you're a blue check that person, you could kind of like oven and be like, I either solved it or failed today and you could just have that as a little bored. Anyways, those are my three random
feature, a weird idea, the world things and I don't it's not surfaced on the from this really good idea, but one thing's I
Have it in the comments, there's a there's commentary. So as you're playing the software will kind of give you a little kind of sometimes snarky, sometimes, fun messages sometimes data psycho, you're one of the few people that's ever guessed this particular word. That's not a very common word to use, congrats, good for you or this the thousandth time. You've uses particular word points for consistency. So there's just kind of running commentary but I like the idea of like just kind of front-loading. It's like here's a number of people of their solve this game. I give you stats. At the end of the game is like, oh, only 14% of people were players, solve this particular word.
It took them on average. Seven point. I mean 4.7 guesses. Yeah
that's our two more at you. This is now my future brainstorm for you. If you forget
there's nothing more, there's nothing more than like an entrepreneur, there's nothing more than like a person who has no stake saying hey have you thought of? I've thought about, have you thought about this? Why haven't you done this
yet? There's nothing less entertaining out of podcast than me telling you features forward played by fucking. Is this? Our podcasts a
good.
If you ever play Candy Crush, they do this thing. Which was they make, they
So steaks, steaks matter a lot in stories or any kind of like Adventure and so like, you know, if you open up a pack of warheads and if you see a black 100, that's the really crazy. One Candy Crush, does this in their games? Where if you start a level, it says this is nightmarishly hard or this is a, you know, medium-hard whatever. So I'd like to see that in the word play, when I come into every day, I'd like to know if this is a nightmarishly hard puzzle or if this is just okay, it gets me out up for my play. That's
the idea that's combining that with your cheering idea and then we can move on.
But so, imagine we had a tearing mechanism that you can go from bronze to Silver to whatever to Ninja level. You know? Right now when you start the game, you get a random word that other people get random words as well. And there's a daily word that everybody plays together but imagine that like as you move up the ring it gets harder as like now you're a level that few have achieved let alone solve right. It's like no one even gets here. You're here and then do things for streaks. Like okay. Well you're the first person has solved like 50 games in a row with this tear or something like that. That I think that'd be fun. So
what
Last one, I think you'll like, which is you are fan of crypto and I think you would if you like the crypto ethos. And I think if you could Advance the cause of crypto, that would be like a win for you personally. So we gave out this milk money grant. This like milk for the macro we gave out like a bunch of money to people just to build whatever they want at one guy. This guy, Dave, he built this thing. That was like a Wordle game, but it was with crypto which was just you play Wordle as is but if you solve it you could win like one Matic like a tiny amount or like then he was like playing with different ideas. He's like, oh there's actually a hundred Matic.
Jackpot for the day and Like Only Winners are eligible for the jackpot, you might you might get it or you might not. And so you got a bunch of people, connecting a wallet. So I think what you could do is you could actually just add that into wordplay, which is, by the way, there is a hundred dollar a day, prize paid out in matok or whatever. All you got to do is create a little wallet here and like you might win. And so I think a bunch of your Avid players would create a crypto wallet where they might not otherwise. So you're on board new people into the world of crypto. You can create a dead simple metal either funnel them to meta mass or create a dead simple.
A wallet that will become like a the play to earn crypto wallet, you know, for the future. Anyways that's I will now stop
talking good idea. Yeah, by the way, it just like, so I actually added the ability to connect your connector, diesel wall near, theorem wallet to work play. And my idea the time was instead of turning ads off, I'm going to make that the pot. And so as ad, Revenue accumulates until the next pay out, whatever it happens to be, and then it's like, oh the top ten winners are gonna get this distribution and let's start over again. So not to make money, but
We'll have money coming in through AdSense and then we'll kind of write a
sustainable. Make it later turned game, that's awesome. Yeah, it was amazing.
So let me Sean, this is an interesting topic but I understand. There's like, laws and SEC stuff around what you can and cannot say. Don't measure. Just tell me if like, you can't. But basically I think it was in late. May, I'm looking now and like May 25th or something like that. Sean, I don't know if you saw this, but like there was headlines that said, like dharma's sha CTO co-founder of husband.
Sighs HubSpot shares, and I think it was like, was it ten million dollars? It was, it was a pretty substantial amount as over three forgot the exact amount is but it was millions of dollars and then suddenly like the stock like the next day, like went up, because it was like, oh man are met like this Insider bought it. He like he has faith in the company, that was a pretty, but that's a pretty cool move when you're doing something like that. What is your thinking? Like are you thinking like, like is it part of your
View. Like, I just want to prove to the world that I'm brave. Is it part of you like, oh no, this is just undervalued, like they're foolish. It's I mean, like what what's your? What's your motivation there? It's exactly what you said, which is. I just thought the company was undervalued given that the long-term potential and I've done this before. I did a couple of years ago and about a bunch of shares. I think even more at that time, like, at 125 dollars a share, right? I'm like, okay, well and this is when top spot stock had dipped over the ensuing.
I mean, the premier prior two to three months. I'm like. Understand the markets were like, it's but this doesn't make any sense like it, you know. Bob spot stock to me was worth more than at the time I heard in $25 turns out I was right. And so it's a similar thing, it's like an and it does take no belief in the company right as but it's what I was what I believed and there are regulations around him and you know, people ask Allah, why did you buy at that time? As it turns out, it was the exact window of time. They had to wait, a certain period since my last transaction to when I could buy in the day that I was eligible.
Well to buy I bought them it's like okay the price is low enough, I still have conviction that all over. Los Angeles
also did buying with money that like where this three million dollars come from? Let's say isn't that just stock you previously sold that you now are buying or we go? Is that all you have some other huge side.
Yes, yes. Can you can you take a loan against your HubSpot shares to buy more like 100 things you cannot do? That's one of them. Yeah.
Wow,
no, I think I saw that the other day and you've
On you've made a few decisions like every once in a while you do something and I'm like, oh this guy is nutty in a cool way and that's not exactly nutty, but it's like a pretty bold move. I thought it was a pretty cool move and I saw that I was wondering what was going through your head when you did that.
Because what think psychology like when I don't know how socks? Like, I'm just rounding. I think it's down by 40, maybe 50 percent, something like that from the all-time high, like, during the last kind of the peak of the peak last year, whatever.
And so, you know, we come out here sometimes and I'll be like, alright guys, you know, you know, ice and we'll be like, dude, how are you? And I you lost a bunch of money today? I'm like, yeah, I lost like a million dollars today and like, you know, eith this down and I'm down a million dollars. I'll share my psychology is like dealing with this, this travesty of a loss or whatever and I'll be like, yeah, you know, here's how I think about it. You play that game at like 1000 x higher Stakes where like, you know, more like you're stealing my 500.
In the exactly I'm losing 500,000 you're losing 500 million or whatever your something crazy like that. What's your psychology? Like I don't know. Like I think you know what question I'm trying to ask even though I don't have the
word, I just feel to half a billion dollars is we're asking me or
had how do you deal with that and like yeah we go. Is that how much you lost?
You think it's more than that but yeah, who's counting?
He's like this podcast. We were talking about wordplay
But it's true. It does not faze me like one bit because the reality is it does not change my life one iota, right? Other than like, okay, well impacts you know, hotspot employees and charlatans, I get that. But in terms of me individually like nothing changes, right? I wasn't awful planning to buy smile small Islands or take over governments or something like that or by Twitter, right? I was not at didn't have any of those kinds of
Ends. And so absent. Those kinds of plans, like I feel sorry for the nonprofit's that I would have invested in is but, you know, my wife continues to invest, there's, you know, we have a place to do the philanthropy we want to do. And so it's like, okay, well, I still wake up every day, then do the same things I did before. And I'll look at the word playthings and respond to user emails or once I can do you might have spot stuff it's like okay like what's
displayed, you don't even have, you don't even have the self talk in your head where you kind of need to like because for me when it happens I'm like you know, I have
Instant reaction as I go, look at a chart or Price or whatever and then I give myself a little self talk and I'm good like in the last 17 seconds but I do have those 17 seconds. It sounds like you don't even have those 17 seconds because you're like, well, I've already been over this before in my head at some point in my life and let alone doesn't matter.
Let alone the self-talk, the self talk is one thing let alone like that. But and then there's also this other thing that you and I have shown which is like it if the markets are shit for a year to like we will change our day to day actions. Like you know, we may not buy it.
Quincy or like we might you know we're not that point where it's like doesn't matter
he's your cutbacks at the Puri household right now. Major cutbacks.
Yeah. It's like well, what bit well, maybe change Behavior but you can't even change. I
laid off my
son Exchange in the other direction. Right? Slavs the market, it's dipped. My kind of average check size has actually gone up. I've made bigger bets and things because I think valuations are starting to adjust slowly. So I think there are better deals now, good, entrepreneurs, starting,
Companies. So, but overall, like the psychology of it has just just does not like have any impact and like over the long term, you know, I didn't make this up but is that the, the valuation of a company, which is at the market price will oscillate around the value, right? In value is like the revenues. You have the products that you build, what are you actually doing for your customers? And so that, you know, if our revenues, I dropped off before something, something like that had happened that be a different story, but it's like, okay, well, that hasn't
We are the same business today, if not better than we were three months ago, six months ago, and the valuation over time, we'll kind of self. Correct. Some of the things I like about the market is that I think that things will kind of wash out and we'll see
ya and a lot of hopes W customers are kind of like, you know, medium size, let's say businesses. So do you like do you spend much energy being like, okay? Where is the economy going? What's going to happen to my customers, which will have some knock-on effect of like what's going to happen to our business do?
You care spend energy there because I find myself for the reason I ask because I find myself sometimes going down this Rabbit Hole of like, okay what do I think that happened than that? Part of me is like, well does any of that really matter or affect me or you know, is this energy useful or is this just sort of nervous energy that I'm wasting thinking about this stuff? Do
you? And is Huds. Cut is outside. Its customer base. Even how many customers is husband have like 130,000 like yeah and then we're over that. Yeah. Yeah and when I think when I saw that it was 100,000 or just crossed a hundred thousand in the grand scheme of things,
Kings the one there is ice. Hold on. Mike
100,000 customers. That's
like kind of a lot, but that's not that much as like the markets way bigger than 100,000 people who would want to buy this. And so, is the high as 100,000 or 150,000. Whatever it is, is that number even big enough to have the needle moves significantly when the economy is shit,
On a percentage basis. Like it's I'll answer this way. So I'll answer the first question then we'll going to move the second one which is you know. Do I spend time thinking about this? Do I do anything about it? The answer is yes. And how spot we will try to model out. Here's the impact. We think it could have on our business, but there's two sides to it. There's the kind of defensive side of it is like we want to make sure that we have enough cash in the bank, to weather the storm. We don't know how long, the storm. The last we have models for how, you know, how long it's going to last, how deep it's going to be those kinds of things as far as
But then the other part, which is into me, much more exciting, which is okay, given what we know, what can we do to capitalize on this crisis, right? That this is what's happening right now. What can we do to make this net positive for HubSpot and we have something similar happened in 2008 at the last spot was much earlier. So things we did even when the pandemic started. Well, the things we did is like oh, there's lots of uncertainty, businesses are struggling. Everyone's kind of battening down the hatches and so we said, okay we're going to give even more value. We're going to
For our partners, we're going to front them the cash for the revenue. We know is coming over time because cash is a, is an issue and we had a bunch of cash from about. So we did things that kind of made us stronger and help our customers. And and so we're looking for those same kinds of opportunities, those like, okay, now that everyone's kind of looking at the p&l and looking at all their line items. Or whatever is can we benefit from this? Because I'm spot. Some ways is counter-cyclical was like, okay, well instead of buying the big incumbent and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe now, people that might not have considered HubSpot a year ago would not
Consider it because there will be more value conscious now than they were historically. So when you are starting the company, so, like, there's a there, you know, if you just look at the math, there's a world where HubSpot in the next five or 10, or to knows how long can be worth, like 100 billion dollars, which is, you know, one of the biggest top 200 or something, companies in the world. When you are starting the company, did you have a number in your head? Where you like, man? I think this, I think this can make a hundred million dollars a year or I think this might be a billion-dollar company or was it as big?
Gaz, man, I think this could be worth tens of billions.
we did have a specific number in our head, but we had
I'll say, comparables, for lack of a better term which is ok, there are successful software companies that have done similar or related things either. They're in the same Market or in the same Target. Customer base that achieved. It's like, okay, well, and this is what we told to VC's in our pitch. We're like, okay, we're not
We think at the time, we were just a marketing software. So he was, I'll give you the first 30 seconds of the pitch is that 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 on mature was a greatest one, at the time with a billion half dollar price tag of the time and we're like, and the reason people in a companies have not been built in the marketing Tech spaces, because marketing is an arts and craftsy kind of discipline. It's about the shade of your logo and your Outsourcing a bunch of creative stuff, whatever. But it's not the kind of problem solved.
Solves.
And our belief was that marketing was increasingly turning into the kind of thing software does solve, lots of data coming in your try and make decisions around all. This stuff is look exactly like an industry. The software can help with. And so our thesis was that someday someone will build 100 200, 500 billion dollar software company. That's doing the thing we're trying to do and we said it might as well be us were wealthy nice people. And we're we're kind of committed to this and seeing it through. So yeah. Do we think the odds were relatively to hide? That we would pull it off? No. But do we think there was an opportunity?
Do the kind of thing that you're talking about. Yeah, I'd like that. Others have done it. We were not putting someone on Mars. Right. That was not. It's like, okay, well people have done this before and it's just a different time and maybe now the time is right, for a new company, to do something that, you know, has been done. But but better this goes a little bit to your picks are kind of vision. Shawn is like, okay, well, you know, people sometimes gives like, okay, well you know what do you do? That's different and why is this, what is does, the world need more at the answers world? Does need more fixed stars and so he saying to you like oh you don't really need to do that.
It's like telling Elon Musk does the world really need another car company and like the kind of downplay the fact that so yeah, it's got four wheels. I guess you from point A, to point B. But it's almost like there's just one interesting element about. It makes it completely different, right? It's like, it's the same things, like most ideas that have been super successful are not completely new from Whole cloth cut right there like that. And I don't like the cliche of building shortly on the shoulders of giants, but it's like I can just about everything that's ever been done. Is derivative to some degree. It's just based on your level of abstraction. How many steps back you're willing to go.
So it's like, okay, yeah, I can see someone building something massive here. It's like, I don't get off my Ranch. It's like so we had Facebook did awesomely well, then Twitter comes along and people said oh well that's just Facebook. Will you have shorter messages or something like that is like Facebook with constraints with less like, well you can post photos on Facebook. Why would anyone to ever use Instagram? That's like Facebook, without all the other cool things that I like as well, right? No messenger diaper, none of that stuff and then
Tick-Tock comes along it's like well that's just kind of videos that you can do on Facebook, you can do on Instagram, you can do on Twitter. But is this it's like just different enough in a compelling enough way where and it's still a video, social network, social Base Video app, and click the world on fire, right? Like so even something as old as video and or as photos is still not over, it's just not over. This is part of the kind of The Human Condition right now. Anyway, let's see if you just said if you go off and want to do another Pixar and if you're ever looking for an investor that will make it,
She's in 24 hours. Bye. You guys. What was that? Tweet about, Sean. I'd that was out of left field. What are you
saying?
Okay, so I all my tweets are out of left field so that's just Twitter. That's what we're supposed to be right. Just bunch of left field. Shit that I'll get to put in a feed. I was watching, I don't know what I was watching. I think my nieces were over there watching Toy Story and I was like, toasters amazing Pixar's amazing. And I was like, why is it like I was like, I want to do something amazing. This is literally how my brain works. It's like oh that looks so awesome. That's like an awesome and output. I would be so proud if I had made something like that. I bet I could write like it's his car.
Nation of like seeing something that is really appealing and then having the delusional belief that like, of course, I could do it if I just tried. And so, I just thought to myself, I was like, you know, that would be a fun company to build. If you could just make great stories, great movies, and put him out of there, into the world, like that would be so fun. As a thing, if that's like the thing you did. And like, I hundreds of millions of people not just, like, use your product, is one thing to use, your product, is nothing to like, love it. Grow up on it and have
Like, you know, like this extreme like Nostalgia commotion around around like these movies, right? Like if I see, you know, for everybody's a little bit different but for me it's like I don't know home alone and Mighty Ducks and then you know, Lion King there's like the a couple of movies that just like they meant a lot at the time and they still mean a lot even though I don't interact with them.
So I have otherwise I'm going to forget there's one thing I need to say on this particular episode because otherwise it'll keep me up at night. So I have like a handful of like Frameworks and things. I think about the
Way of think about the world and this ties, back to Sean's next trillion dollar company thing Pixar, which I think it can be by the way. Sean, just so, you know, okay, so imagine let's take a step back. I'm on a whiteboard and the Whiteboard. It's the universe of all possible people, everyone on the planet and he draws circle with one of your skills. So in Sean's case, let's say we put copywriting as one of the skills that he's in the top 1% or top five percent, whatever number you want associated with it. And so that's the circle that could get X. Number of people are at Sean's level or better and at copywriting, awesome. Let's say, we
Draw another Circle. That's we'll call it crypto. Knowledge is just how crypto works and that's a group of people awesome rarer skill because it's a newer. There's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting. We can accept that will be a smaller Circle. What happens though is, if you intersect, those two circles and turn into a Venn diagram, the number of people that know copywriting really well. And also know crypto really well is 100 times smaller than either of those circles combined, right? And this is we see the same effect in like in standardized tests. If you took the
T, or the GRE or GMAT. There are people that are really good at English portion of the test. Their people are really good at math portion of the test, but the ones that score really, really well are the ones that are good at both, they don't have to be the best of both because that's something that's actually rare is the combination of the English in the Quant. Same thing here. So now imagine
So this is why I call it the trillion-dollar Venn diagram success, right? I just made that up. So you drop all of your skills and say okay well I am now not like one in a million. I'm one in a billion right around 1 in 5 billion, whatever that is and if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sort of happens. So that's kind of thing. Number one is like, what's your thing, what are your skills and what drives one study, how much value will that intersection create is two things?
What is?
How rare is that intersection? Whether it's two circles are three circles, whatever, how rare is it? And then the other one is the how
How much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have? So for instance, what I'm a software developer, that's one of my, that's my core skill. I've been programming for like 30 years now. That's my thing, deep down inside my core. If I combine that with I'm going to go off in which I could never do become a limbic level swimmer, let's say like also very rare the intersection of that it's like okay well the opportunity that reveals because the two things are so unrelated. Like I don't know how I would take my ability to build a web app and intersecting with my like yeah there's some things I could do about that would
Huge, but software development is applicable to lots of if I was gonna be an academic researcher if I was going to go into music, if I was like other things, there's a lot more overlaps agree that it's like those two intraday, they reinforce each other. So the software helps me do this and that helps me do this 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 are already exceptional at that, that will kind of drive that kind of that Rarity. And that's what drives drives the overall value. Which
Kind of brings me to is like. And so when I think of things that I want to learn it's like okay well this is why I got into copy is like if I can and copywriting is another form of this is communicating at scale. Is what copywriting is right? Like it's usually textual form. It's like okay well I don't know that many software Engineers that can copyright really well. Like literally other than that have not started companies, right? It's like, I don't exist but very rarely do you get like, really, really good Engineers that went off and read six books. On copyright again, took songs class that that's not.
Wait, you you are you are a good writing a writer before you got into this? No no I mean your writing is great and by the way, Shawn, let's what's you got to pimp it out? Maven.com / power writing, or just go to navy.com and you see
it? Yeah, just got Maven.com. M AV and.com on the home page starts in two weeks. Alright, so the that what you said is great, I would add one more circle
street at Pixar thing. By the way, the reason you might pull it off is because you have a very weird and unique and
related level of skills. So, yes, there are people that are better, maybe you better creatives, better animators, better entertaining, whatever, but they don't know Krypton. Maybe that's the thing. That unlocks, the next trillion, dollar companies, entertainment intersect with crypto, it's the Netflix for the blockchain, whatever it is right, something like that. Where two things combined that never had been put together in that way before
the the other Circle that I would add that I think people underestimated. So I tweeted this out as a people, I didn't explain what the Tweet is the Tweet. Well as I said, the next company I build is going to be like a new new age Pixar.
Like the next Pixar and I think I'll, I think I would work on that project for 30-plus like 30, 30 plus years, I just keep going with that company. I wouldn't be trying to sell it or flip it or get out of it or whatever. So, that was the tweet and then a bunch of basically had two reactions. One reaction was awesome, like, where can I sign up? How do I work for this company? That's that sounds awesome. I love Pixar. You could do it. And those are like fans about MFM type of thing, or people who themselves had been thinking, God that would be awesome to create another like Pixar type of
Company, you know, because I love Pixar. Then there's the other half of people that were like, what makes you think you could do this, you know, like, you know how hard it is to make a movie, you know, how expensive it is, you know, how the how unique you know Steve Jobs and you know, whatever Lassiter and catmull. Like how rare those talents were when they came together. It's a Once in a generation company and then other people were like, one guy. Had this amazing burn. He was like, check Aqua higher like a green checkmark, Aqua hired.
Power, writing course podcast next Pixar and I was like, oh thanks, that's pretty solid. Actually and so you know a bunch of people were sort of all in the same bucket of like this is so hard just won't work, what you can't do it, that some version of that. And so the third circle one is, like, I'm really great at X. I'm really great at why. The third is just, I have the courage to go do a thing and, like, Tim Ferriss once told this story, he goes, I went to a business school class at Harvard Business School class. I gave
Talk. And then talking. Oh by the way guys, I'm doing this challenge only for you guys, you know whatever I want to get in touch with either Bill Clinton Jennifer Lopez or you know, some sports person, you know, Michael Jordan or whatever. If anybody here can connect me over email with them like, you know, just reach out to them and if you get a hold of them, connect me over email. I will buy you to round the world plane tickets for you. Could fly business class for a year around the world anywhere.
On my dime. All right, guys, thank you very much and he told that to one class and he's like, you know, you have 30 days to complete this Challenge and then I think I forgot what was it was like he did it to two classes but gave a slightly different message in each the first one. He's just just said that 30 days go by nobody did it start, nobody's completely challenges that go what happened to you turns out. Nobody even tried the challenge. The perceived difficulty was so high that. Nobody did it. So, in the next one, he
That story and I think he added a Twist which was whoever gets the closest to it wins and all of a sudden like everybody tries and in fact I think somebody did it get in touch and actually successfully completed the challenge and he was like he had this principle which was sort of like you know everybody wants to fish where everybody else is fishing because they think it's so easy to catch fish there he's like in actuality often it's easy to just go go catch a fish where the fish actually are and you don't have to base it on how how many people, how many other people you think I have tried something?
Your how you what the perceived difficulty is? And in fact, sometimes the bigger you go, the easier, something can be because nobody else is even trying to do it. And so I would say like, you know, this Pixar thing. Who knows? If I'm gonna go do this or something else, I tweet things just almost to my prototype. It's like, let me say this out loud. Let me see how that feels. If I sleep and to wake up tomorrow. Do I want to tweet five more ideas about that? Or am I over? It was just a passing fleeting moment, but the core ingredient think. Most people lack is courage to actually go and do the
Thing. And I think that's the, the people put way more emphasis on what skill a my top one percent. And they kind of, they under credit themselves, one quick, one skill, you could just have for free. You just got to go. It's like at the Santa the deli at the growth. At the girls start go. Pull the number is, yeah, I have the courage to actually go do it. Like, you know, I'm, I will go do, pull the trigger on this thing and not wait for other people to kind of like, reinforce that it's a good idea to me.
Yeah, and this is Anne, could not agree more and so, and I think people conflate
Sometimes skill versus talent and they believe, they don't have the talent for entrepreneurship, or for design, for programming, whatever it is in my mind. So, skill, is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Talent is the rate at which you could acquire a particular skill. So if you have a talent for music, that means you will acquire musical skills faster than someone who doesn't have a talent for music. It doesn't mean that someone that doesn't have a talent for music, can't learn it. So they may have a ceiling as far as how far they can go fine. I get that but this doesn't mean they can't do it. And so one of the big lessons kind of my my
My professional career is that most things are actually skills not Talent, mostly like it's like you can start with zero. Like I was, I would have been voted least likely ever start a company in my entire life generations of family, right? That's not talent I ever had. Like, I'm going until I went off and did it like public speaking? Was not something. It's like, oh, that's a skill when you and then there's this thing from software engineering. I think it's worth sharing that other. I think some of the best ideas are we take stuff from other Industries and pull them into this thing and apply it here in a weird way.
Way. But in software engineering, there's this thing called a functional decomposition, which is take a problem. People articulate. Well, so function that has a set of inputs and an output and what it's supposed to do and really all software problems are being able to go. The highest order function is, let's say you want to grade a possible investment based only on the website is like a, I'm gonna give you a domain and you going to give me a score from 0 to 100 as to how good this is. Okay, well that function is easy to find like domain goes in score from 0 to 1 or 2 comes out what
Other functions, does that function need in order to pull that off as like? Okay, I want a function that looks at the Domain and looks at the level of SEO. They have, that's what layer down the person is right in the SEO, function goes down levels. Like I'm going to look at the on-page SEO and see how good they're doing at meta tags H1 titles and I'm going to look at the off page SEO and their link acquisition, that kind of stuff. That's like. So if you roll it all down and you go down far enough individual functions at the atomic level are so simple. As to be trivial, what matters is the fact that you were able to abstract it down their sinful thing, right? And so most things
Can be broken down that way. So if you look at oh, I want to become someone that can give a talk on in, from 25,000 people on a stage that seems like an insurmountable task for someone like me, that's never done that. That's not my, that might not my thing. It's like, oh well, what does that involve? Number one, you have to have can overcome, I didn't have like stage fright. I had severe stage inside right stairs. Stage fright is like oh there's a ship's going to come down from space and just suck you up because you were so bad and staging Society is like me.
And I wish a spaceship will come down and set me off the stage right now. I want to get off so there's that I don't, you don't pass out on stage and then there's the oh, you learn about storytelling. You'd learn about writing, you learn about slide design. You learn about humor and I did all those things right, read books to classes, on all those components of public speaking and aggregate. I'm okay now, right? Like, I can do that and you thinking, then it's practice and you do it over time. So, anyway, my point here is startups, whatever. Skill of startups are skill. Figure out.
What set of skills you need to acquire some. You'll be good at acquiring because you have the talent the other one you're just gonna have to grind it out more than others made, but it's doable. It's a doable thing. One question that I had, if I can do it, anyone can do it. That's my point. I love that. So Sean, I love Sean, kind of, Sean kind of added this thing to your you're a Venn diagram of like just people brave enough to get started. And would you add another thing? Like when with the hustle we sold a near 4 or 5 and I don't regret it, I'm very happy with that but I actually
Like Louis, Le I looked at the numbers this year and I was like, oh wow, we would have made like maybe like it's it was close to the point where like you could have potentially next year, made more Revenue that year than all the revenues combined. And I'm like wow that's kind of crazy. Like I again I'm happy with it but like real value like I guess for me I was like real value is created in year like 5 6 7, 8, of course you probably could say like when you're near 5 6 7 8, you're like wow, wow it's really crazy than 10 11 12 but
Do you think that what portion of HubSpot in your success has been a while? I'm just real, I'm just willing to shut up and focus on this for 20 years as opposed to you actually being amazing or good at product and marketing and things like that. Yeah, here's how I think about it. I think the outcome is a combination of like, dreaming, really big and like iterating, really small having tight feedback loop feedback loops. So, the dream really big is you have to have something
Can somebody translate it doesn't have to be as clear of vision as finish on is kind of laid out. As far as though, it's going to be Pixar for the new generation, but you have to kind of have started. Something roughly big in mind, at least at some level, but then, it really comes down to the the iteration, right? It's I think the others have demonstrated this through data is at the quality of the output is almost almost a always, but frequently, a function of the number of iterations, not the quality of the peoples furniture. So one of the common examples as throw out is, I've heard it with a pottery class or photography class, but it's like, oh,
No one set of students divided class in half. Let's say it's a photography class. One set of students is like okay, every day you have to submit a photo for the next 30 days. While these classes running, the other one is like the end of the 30 days, you can submit your best photo. And then your grade is going to be based on the quality of that best photo. The first class is like as long as you submit a photo every day, you're going to get an A at the end of the 30 days. The other one is like as long as you're is a quality material that photo is going to win. And what's been proven out across disciplines? Is that the class that
Multiple iterations had a better output than the one. I was trying to solve for quality, but the argument the person was like all they really had to do. Was it like submit a photo, didn't have to be like world class. Quality is not the best I could do, but just by virtue of doing it. They're going to make it better. Make it better at the end of the 30 days, they produce a better photo and they produced a better Clay Pot. It was a pottery class than the other one that was solving for quality and they were like too much in their heads. Trying to say I'm gonna do the best I can do like no just do it repeatedly but the key to that it has to be meaningful iteration if you're just iterating and doing the same thing you got
Learning anything, there's no feedback loop, then the iterations have no value. But if you're, if you have a tight feedback loop that I'm going to do this thing and I immediately get response back, that tells me whether I got better or got worse.
That is amazingly like powerful to be able to do that in compounded over time. So so I think my I'm not that special candidly it's like I'm willing to grind it out more than people that are smarter and I'm a little bit smarter than people that are willing to work around it out. That's my Venn diagram.
That's awesome. Have you, you probably seen this or maybe you guys have done this? But there's this group of like, Consultants that created, this thing called the Marshmallow Challenge, which they go to a company and they give you like a bunch of sticks.
One. Marshmallow, some tape. And like, a string or something like that. Have you seen this dermis?
I think I have, yeah, but I'll kind of summarize for this, for
sure. Yeah, yeah. There's you have it. Basically, they give they give you this, these set of tools and they say, okay, your goal, the game is you need to get a marshmallow. The winning team is going to have a marshmallow, like I was high above this table as you can. So build your Tower is eyes. You can if you can, whoever gets the highest marshmallow whoever's tower, has the highest marshmallow at the end wins Wherever I Go.
Going to stop the clock after 30 minutes. We're going to say hands up and you know, your marshmallow whoever's marshmallow standing the highest winds. Okay. Good. So they go and they do this test with like a bunch of different types of people. They do it with Consultants, they do it with like kind of doctors and they do it with Engineers. They do it with whoever creatives, like Ad Agency types and the try to see, okay, which group is going to perform the best at a challenge like this and basically across the board. What they found is that they suspected, maybe Engineers are going to do the best and the engineers do on average do a little bit better than
But not by much, they actually are all pretty horrible at it. And I think like, you know, whatever 80 90 percent of the group's, at the end of The Challenge there, marshmallow is on the ground. It is fallen over and never even you know got up at all. Like if you had just put it if you're just taking like a no two sticks and put a one marshmallow on top, you would have won the challenge and the reason why is and they did this test with kids and kids actually are phenomenal. At this kids on average will be the adults at this game and why is that? Well, because what happened is that they would give the project
To the adults. And they don't spend the first five minutes, like delegating roles like, okay, you're going to be the person who does the planning. You're going to be the one who you work on the sticks in the, the bottom structure. We're going to do this over here, then they would just like kind of draw out. Like okay, let's do a teepee. No, let's do a ladder, let's do the cube or shape or whatever and they would do all this and the very end they would try to stick the marshmallow on what they don't realize that the marshmallow is a lot heavier than it looks. And it will outweigh the sticks that are all fall over and it because they're doing that thing where they wait till the very end.
And to like ship the final good product, they don't even realize where the flaw in their plan until like it's too late essentially, whereas kids will do is because, will immediately grabbed the thing they'll stick the marshmallow on. It's like if the kids don't eat the marshmallow, the marshmallow will like get into the structure very quickly and they'll see o it falls over okay Falls over. That means we need to iterate and we do to do things differently than we would have otherwise assumed and that like one lesson, I've done it pretty much every company I've ever started because it's the only way I can get engineers and designers who, by nature or
In like sort of, like perfectionist or quality and like they and their associate, they in their mind, associate the longer we work at this. The better. The quality will be. Before we ship it, and I'm always like, dude. Let's ship it today. Let's see how bad it sucks. And then let's remove some suck from it and like tomorrow, it'll suck a little less and then tomorrow, it'll suck a little less again. And the best way, I've been able to drive this point home is to give them the Marshmallow Challenge, and not just like, watch the video, watch the Ted Talk. It's like, no Go fail at this so that you taste defeat
And you will actually learn this
lesson.
Dude, that's like the greatest CEO thing that you've ever done. That's a good one. That's a really good one. It's make people do this and then make them watch the Ted Talk. That's like, that's a really good leadership tactic. I'm 100% gonna steal that one
day. Yeah, it's an awesome one. All right. I don't, we went kind of long. I don't know if we were good to keep going or
not. But
Ben's tell me wrap up but but don't mess. This is awesome man. I love having you around. Are you up? You are the last time you're almost a year ago, I think. And I've been like I've been like begging you. I'm like, man. Just come on. And so we messaged him today and he goes. I'll just come on today. I was like, all right, cool. Are you actually I have a quick question, what?
You know, people ask me about selling to HubSpot and they're like, has it been good from a creative perspective? It's been awesome. You guys have a like we haven't been told a thing. I'm like, what we can and cannot do of course. I don't think we do anything where anyone would ever tell us. You can't do that, but it may be right
there. Miss you ever get complaints about everything we say or do. That's gonna
ask that's not going to ask. Is there anything that like so far? I guess there's nothing. That's crossed a line because we've not heard a thing. But like it, we it
In crazy how productive this relationship has been. I did not think that because you know people say one thing and the reality is different but it's not been that way. That's been pretty cool. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad that's working out in your team's. How about you folks have been kind of great for HubSpot and I know this keeps you up at night in terms of valuation. I've thought about that a lot right now as much as you have, but
At the time, I would not beat yourself up over. I think it was a fair deal. I don't know that and even at that just so you know, even if that price and nothing to do with you but like he was a board level discussion. We had to just like, okay, it was, do we really want to is not that it wasn't worth that, but was it worth back to us at the time? Because it was a relatively new new thing that we were doing. But I think there's something for both sides but yeah, for sure, I think there's a world, I think there's a world where in one to three years, the podcast alone is worth more than the deal.
Yes, I definitely see that. Yes, yeah. But the same way to kind of learn. We can kind of wrap on this is that when we were talking early in the beginning of the episode around, kind of compensation is being just one of the kind of dimensions of value in a acquisition, the kind of the valuation that you get the price tag is with just one dimension of value. Then, the rest of it is, how happy are you? How happy is a team? Did you meet people that will have kind of? You will enjoy working with in your future years. Are your car, there, your future co-founders, that kind of thing. It's like we know that this is not forever. We we know that going in
Without even with people, we hire but especially with MAA but yeah. Hopefully an aggregate, you know, spot delivers, a bunch of value. That's my pitch for why? It's okay to join up spot if we were ever up there looking but no, it was awesome. Well, thank you. This is awesome. Someone you think.
Yeah. Great upset and I'm glad you used our line against us. I hate emailed us something. I was like, oh, you should come back on some time, which is like, the some time is like one of the most dangerous words in the English language. Yeah, it because it's like, you think it's soon and in reality,
D. It's never and the you'd pulled a great move which was what we talked about, which is like, forget scheduling stuff, like either I want to do it and if I can do it right now, let's do it right now. And if not like the, let's not schedule it for the future because just because we didn't want to do it right now and you were like how about today and we were like alright let's do it, let's do it. Perfect.
I intentionally made it like open. It's like, okay, I knew when my last meeting was it's like anytime after this. I was not even like, oh like I could have made it work this afternoon, I was only available for the small Windows like know.
Anytime between 2 p.m. and midnight. Thank you, come back. I was doing its Thang. Yeah, that sauce is awesome.
What's a lot of fun doing this? It's a lot of fun. Thank you for coming
on. All right, thanks for having me. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I
want to put my all into it like a day's
travel never looking back.
All right, let's take a quick second to talk about our sponsor HubSpot. That's what wants me to tell you about inbound 2022. And I'm happy to do it because inbound is one of the cooler kind of marketing and customer Centric conferences that are out there, right? If you want, if you're building Community, you're selling to customers in by 2022, is going to have content for you. It's happening online and in person. So September 6th through 9th. You can either go in person in Boston or you can browse for free online, if you just watch it a, you know, on the computer or on your phone.
And it's gonna have a bunch of things, right? They got presentations breakout sessions you know you're going to get to meet other leaders that are in Marketing sales operations. That's what you want to do. You want to be networking with the who's who of your industry so they have a bunch of different passes, you can get a starter pass, a Powerhouse pass, a VIP pass, whatever works for you and there's some new stages, you're always going to be on the podcast stage. There's a, what's next stage? And then there's of course, the main stage. So if you want to go network with, you know, leaders in your field and
you want to learn what's going on in The Cutting Edge, you should attend inbound 2020 to learn more and get your tickets at inbound.com that's inbound.com
