Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en here’s what i say here’s what i even have a seven-figure domain name picked out for you i will write the five million dollar check for you to go do it as far as a seed round uh or up to five million if you want to let other people in that’s amazing this just got spicy okay oh my god what’s the domain name that you [Music] all right we just got done like 30 seconds ago talking to the guy who we’re gonna introduce you to now uh that was amazing he’s amazing that guy’s darmesh is amazing he’s very cool um so we have darmash i don’t even know what is starmesh’s last name dharmasha i think shaw i just know him as darmash um he’s the co-founder of he’s like beyonce you know they just go with the one name at a certain point ron ronaldo beyonce darmesh that’s that’s it so darmesh um is the co-founder of hubspot he’s the largest shareholder i mean we we got pretty uh like into it right away we’re like just tell like it tell us what’s it like to be a billionaire so i just googled your net worth and it appears you’re worth a billion dollars yeah so yeah how does that feel and he’s like uh no i told him i was going to talk to him about that so we talked to him about just like well let’s rattle off some of the dope things he’s done so started hubspot hub spots like whatever 25 billion dollar company or something like that but he’s done some other cool things early investor in coinbase dropbox and loads of different stuff right and then also just has kind of like he’s like us he’s got that itch that entrepreneurial itch so he like we talk a little bit about he’s got like 20 domain names some domain names that are worth like you know millions of dollars and others that are you know just simple ideas everybody has an idea by the way hundreds of domain names right but he’s like got ideas loaded into them like oh here’s what you might do with this idea and then here’s a good domain name for it and so i think he’s you know he’s sort of like he’s one of our people in that sense like he’s an idea person he’s a frameworks person so he shared some frameworks he shared a bunch of ideas two two really big ideas one idea on air he goes sean if you want to start this i’ll fund you right now for five million dollars yeah he made me an offer i pretty much couldn’t refuse i just had to sort of you know uh yeah squeeze my thighs and sit still here so so you know but i thought it was exciting i thought the actual ideas were really great um so i think people are gonna like that we talked a little bit about the we talked a little bit about wealth we talked a little bit about kind of like early days you know hubspot and hustle acquisition and then we talk a bunch about ideas and then we uh some of those ideas are about like a new different type of linkedin or remote community we talked about um oh he talked about his framework for evaluating if an idea is good or not if he should pursue it that was actually incredibly educational it was awesome dude it was great so uh we’ll get to the episode can you guys do me a favor though click that subscribe button on itunes and that follow button on spotify that would mean a lot uh do we have to tell them anything else well there’s a thing going around where if you just post on your social networks and you’re just like hey you know psa to whoever needs this this podcast you know makes my commutes amazing this is the best business podcast hands down um you know good karma comes to you in your next life so that’s just something if you’re interested in having a good next life i would just do that yeah and i’ll reshare that for sure i mean because it impacts my ego and we hit i hit i share all i share all compliments so go ahead and do that make sure you share the itunes or spotify link with it thank you very much here’s the thing about me i like compliments all right yeah all right enjoy this episode i don’t remember what i was going to say but right before you came on i was asking darmesh what he listens to and he says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days amazing has that uh changed you have you probably become a worse person you seem like a pretty good person i feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days there’s gonna be a part of your brain that’s good but a part that gets like corrupted slightly you know it’s i think that’s true that’s an astute observation um it’s you know we’ve just have uh i won’t say like completely diverge in past so i’m just a yeah it’s been good though i’m a believer in and like just these kind of orthogonal things that’s like oh this is not stuff i’m like you know looking at retail businesses or like you guys have a wide array of stuff um but i think that kind of thing like builds a different muscle group and i think it’s been it’s gonna be useful for me um i’ll put it to you that way it’s i think we’re not uh right at birth by any stretch we have things that you know we reflectively have in common but um there are things that i’m just different and it’ll come out in the pods i’m a weirdo we’re on now so this is a pod but we uh yeah this might i have a feeling this might go a little long and i’m okay with that uh sean do what you want but we um i like in my world so i was just hanging out with heaton shaw yesterday and your name came up we were just talking to nathan barry the other day your name came up sean and i are in this text group where people talk about big clout your name comes up your name comes up everywhere like you’re you’ve got you’re like a little like you got like a spider web like you get your hands and all these little things and i i think part of it’s because you’ve been in the game for a while and you’re incredibly successful but do you so uh this is dar mesh darmesh is the uh you’re the co-founder of hubspot is your title cto yes do you are you active like are you working really hard at hubspot like how do you have time to have your hands on all this different stuff uh so the answer is yes uh hubspot is my obsession and preoccupation uh anything else that you see me doing uh there’s probably some diabolical threat that connects it back to hubspot there is right um so yeah it’s my baby it’s the thing that uh i spend pretty much all of my kind of non-family time non-personal time on um so it’s my and i just want to describe for people who are not watching so you should go to the youtube channel it’s youtube.com i think hustlecon and you’ll see the videos but uh so here’s what i see so darmesh is sitting there he’s got a keyboard like a piano keyboard to his right uh he’s got i think a steve jobs uh piece of art behind him or is that lennon or something like that i can’t tell exactly who it is john lennon maybe um and you’re in this room so just is this where you work on a day-to-day basis uh so this is well yes and no so that’s why you’re getting tricks sean you’re getting tricked listen this is my living room um but it’s a like i capture a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually would be but it’s a virtual background i’ve got the green screen and things set up so i can oh okay that’s pretty good because you usually when you have a green screen it’s like half your head also turns into like the background and uh this one’s actually pretty good all right i’m impressed i’ve done like a multiple green screen so i’m sort of surrounded with it so if i need to twist the camera one way or the other um so you’re kind of doing the oasis thing we talked about you basically you have a virtual background but the virtual background is not just you on a beach like a fake situation it’s your actual living room when it’s like clean and perfect the way you want it or whatever and you’re like that’s what i want my background to be regardless of the reality of the the current whatever your current situation is i like that trick really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real that’s not part of the background you’ll see so let me um let me do like a a very brief intro and like an overview of what we’re going to talk about so darmash sent us like a list of ideas we’re going to get into them but i need to give a background here so the listeners entirely understand so hubspot today is like a 25 or 30. i don’t know whatever the market cap is uh so 25 billion dollar publicly traded company you co-founded it 15 years ago i think prior to that you had another startup that you sold for a significant amount of money we can talk about that throughout this whole time you own uh i believe millions and millions of dollars worth of domains like you um you bought your wife like as a a gift humanism.com which we gotta talk about that’s pretty funny you’ve um you’re an eight or an angel investor in a lot of different startups including coinbase and things like that you’ve got your hands on all these different things like you according to wallmind or wallstreetmind.com you’re worth today 850 billion million dollars uh so like you you do a little bit of everything in the world of business it’s incredibly fascinating and so i wanted to today talk about you might be well you might be the wealthiest person we’ve ever had on this podcast i’m going to ask you questions about that um i don’t know it’s fine please we’re going to we’re going to ask you questions it doesn’t really matter that’s one thing i’ve learned we can talk about that too well that’s that’s okay if it doesn’t matter we’re going to talk about it we’re also going to talk about um your ideas uh we’re going to talk about building hubspot we’re talking about why you invest in what you invest and we’re going to talk about um uh do you ever invest in non-startup stuff we’re going to invest about we’re going to talk about a lot of stuff sean what do you think well i would have asked them okay so here’s my question my question is actually not about uh darmesh it’s actually about uh sam so uh so you see i’ve always wondered this so you acquired the hustle and i hope you could be as uh as transparent as you want here i think sam will will not care um so i would say dna wise the hustle is kind of a unique company sam’s a pretty unique uh dude that you kind of brought into your company different dna probably than the vast majority of employees there uh give me kind of like well and you do you’re part of the deal too sean so you’re in the book you don’t have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis so so doing that deal and bringing these guys in i guess like i don’t know are there any interesting observations any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post that had to do with you know sam and the hustle i’m just curious kind of like what’s your view on that side of the table because i’ve only been on the same side that sam’s on yeah and we haven’t hubspot has not done a lot of acquisitions uh in the past we’ve done a handful of them uh pretty much most of them have gone well the one thing that made this different i think as you as you observed is um the dna of the hustle is different than hubspot and um and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing so the thing i was worried about is um and and i until now i don’t think sam and i have actually ever had a one-on-one chat so this is my therapy session therapy for uh two people johnny the thing i was worried about is that um you know so sam is a kind of what i would think of as a kind of type a personality um just like he’s out there he’s hustling against the uh name of the company um which is fine but it’s just not uh most of the makeup of hubspot is not that we’re very we’re uh i don’t know what the right it’s gonna overly stereotype us but we’re not type a we’re like a kinder gentler humble just quieter kind of company um so that’s one thing oh here let me explain it this way sam would be described as brash i don’t think anybody would ever describe pub spot as brash well today kieran the guy i work with technically my boss he was like you should probably hire someone outside of hubspot for this role for your growth and i was like well why he goes i think you’re too direct for anyone who works at hubspot it’s like that that’s an example i think that was good advice but um but it’s worked out it’s worked out well so there have been um like the one kind of minor story i can recall there was a like a twitter back and forth that i think sam had with uh rand fishkin i don’t know if you recall this sam that there was something that was said about vcs or investment or something and ran’s been a good friend it’s like an and uh but it’s like oh okay well it’s fine i’m like okay you know it’s and not like either party was right wrong or indifferent but i know them you know at least now a little bit uh both but anyway so it’s but it’s been fine in my defense i i hope and even our podcast defense our goal is we will disagree with people but i hope that it never comes from a place of like disrespect or i’m trying to like hurt your feelings no but i will say i do put entertainment first sometimes so sometimes i will poke the bear for the entertainment value of it when you know the kinder nicer simpler thing to do would be to do to do nothing or just back away uh so i do like to have fun either on twitter or the podcast hubspot too much but one thing i will say this was as far as the deal itself it was one of the better things hubspot has done um in terms of like the strategy behind it i think um is strong in terms of like it gets hubspot into a thing which is where i think the future of kind of sas companies has is going to be heading which is more and more of them are going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people and recent horses and there’s other deals that have been done around the same timeline but i’m a believer in companies kind of controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying from buying audiences and renting them from someone else see this is where you should just say just drop a one line be like you know and we got it at a fantastic price just to drive sam crazy for the next seven years just leave him constantly questioning himself look i think there yeah could we have sold for more definitely maybe like that always is a maybe right um i think that when we sold hubspot i felt was undervalued uh i think when i think the day the deal closed it was or maybe like what was the stock in january was it like it was worth like 350 or was it even less 250 i don’t remember today today it’s 600 bucks so like our guess my guess was that i think hubspot is undervalued um and also i wanted to create a reputation of someone who was like a fair deal maker and like like i think people will know that uh like if i built something i sold it the all all parties got a good deal and so okay all right sounds good we can switch off the hubs the hustle acquisition so let’s do some ideas no wait i want to talk about one thing really quick can we let’s talk about money stuff okay because i told darmesh i was gonna ask him this so first of all is it weird that i know what your net worth is today because it’s like public information um it’s not weird for me honestly like i’m a um i’m generally like transparent i believe in kind of the openness um of the web it’s um and i’m a in a sense it’s a publicly traded company like that’s you know what i want my bank accounts and all my accounts kind of published on the web no but the fact that i’m an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares which you can take the number of shares which is on the public record and multiply it by the current price and get which is probably roughly 85 90 of my overall net worth because that’s where all my money is in hubspot shares um i don’t find that weird uh it’s yeah has your life changed as this as this has like accumulated and and things got didn’t different or has it basically so you had another company before this how much did you sell that for uh 10 or 15 in that range based on how you count it and has your life changed since that moment significantly because that’s a that’s a significant number in itself right yeah so here here’s the thing it’s um and i’d like to say no you know i wasn’t focused on money or i’m not focused on at the time when i was younger i was very very focused on money and i had very kind of modest upbringing and i was like okay well it wasn’t like the money and the accumulation of it it was the freedom you know ever since i was little i i always want to kind of configure the universe to my liking so to speak because i’ve got my quirks so like these are things the way i like to do things um and having to kind of work in a normal kind of classic job doesn’t give you a whole lot of control over your your part of the universe you don’t get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire you don’t have a lot of degrees of freedom um so yeah i’ve been thinking back and then i you know i kind of thought about money um and like the first i’ll say five million or so um has a dramatic impact had a dramatic impact on my life right because that buys you an inordinate amount of freedom right you don’t have to work again um you can invest in things you can do pretty as long as you’re not out you know buying small islands and overtaking countries i mean that’s a decent amount of money for for folks right um and then after that and their other kind of i don’t know exactly what the demarcations are where you know more money adds on a marginal basis a little bit more freedom you can do more things um but you know like the kinds of things i do like i enjoy food and restaurants there’s only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being even if you like the finer things it’s like okay unless you’re trying to make a statement and spend 100 times with the average of whatever x is it’s kind of hard to you know specifically well even if you have kind of high-end taste honestly the most common thing i’ve heard i don’t know if you would agree or disagree is like there’s these levels so it’s like first uh in depth in if when you’re in debt to no debt that’s like the first jump where oh freedom got this weight off my shoulders yeah then there’s kind of like you know um uh it’s what i’ll call there’s a zero to one million where it’s like oh my god mentally i’m a millionaire that’s kind of just like a mentally freeing concept an interesting concept that’s why we named the pod what we did but also you know that that’ll afford you a certain type of lifestyle and then the next jump i’ve heard is like at 10 or 10 or 10ish where it’s sort of like okay at tennis you sort of um you don’t have to work like at a million you still got to work at 10 you don’t have to work you can kind of like have a couple places to live you could do whatever you want you don’t really need to check the prices when you go do things and then there’s sort of like 100 or more which is sort of like you know the uh ego gets involved it’s like okay now i’m keeping score against you know in the in the business olympics against against these other folks and also you know i could do some like you know like i can i can i can buy an island i can buy a piece of an nba team i can i can go do these different things that are like kind of like bucket list and and the joy what i’ve heard is sort of like you know for most people is sort of like the joy actually like de-escalates from the from the beginning there like getting out of debt is sort of like the most relief most joy and then sort of like it starts to diminish sort of step by step as you go the 10 to 100 feels a lot less impactful and less sort of changes your joy in your mood than uh like going from zero to ten yeah i just have two friends i want to pull on as long as we’re talking about money um so one is one thing that’s kind of helped me reconcile it um in terms of um you know having to be in the net worth now is you know the plan my wife and i have talked about this the plan is to donate 90 plus percent of it right like we have one child we’re not going to spoil him so it’s not like we’re trying to build a multi-generational dynasty that is right not the goal um and so then like you know if i make a really good return on a startup or something like that it’s like okay well i’m discount 90 for my wife’s foundation that’s essentially what it comes down to right right it moves 90 of whatever it is uh i mean i don’t i think it’ll end up being higher because i just don’t think we’re capable of actually spending the spending the money um but yeah so that makes me feel better but just kind of taking it back to the early days one kind of lesson i learned early early on and this is useful um beginning part of my career is the kind of the relationship between time and and one thing is that we spend the better part of the first half of our lives converting time into money right and you’re looking for the hours you’re looking for yeah you want to get that you know rate up as you can and then the latter half of you’re desperately trying to buy time back with the money however best you can right so that’s um and it varies a little bit as to when that kind of turn happens but the thing that i kind of learned this was and i thought about it probably a few years after that um so i was making 3.65 cents uh in my first job when i came over as an immigrant and i worked all the way through school took me seven degrees to get my seven years to get my four-year degree i was working full-time the whole way through um and that wasn’t a lot of money and as it turns out um i had to do pretty much nothing was delegatable but then once i got to the point where i was making 10 20 50 an hour it’s like okay well now and like all of my time i can make as much billable as i want to as much as i’m humanly possible willing to work there was someone willing to pay me for that time i was an engineer that’s how things work back then it was and the the pivotal point for me is i i got this uh it was in my early 20s i got this bump to like 125 hours working as an engineer and that was an ungodly amount of money i was in birmingham alabama this is the uh the 90s uh that was like real money right and i was working lots i was making a fair amount so then i made the decision that if there’s anything i’m doing with my time that could be done by spending less than 125 an hour i’m being an idiot by actually doing it right if i enjoy it that’s a different story but if i’m not it’s just stupid and so i’ve carried that kind of idea it’s like okay so what value would i place in my time right what is occupying my time that i can kind of delegate or even if i’m paying a premium it’s like okay i could pay 75 an hour just up for someone to pay you know to mow my lawn yeah i hate it but it’s still profitable right like you’re like why would you do that like i would do that every day of the week um so the one thing that’s changed for me um so now like i went back and did the math because i knew i was going to be on this podcast and you might be folks like numbers if i let’s say i’ve worked on average 60 hours a week and i’ve done that for about 30 years give or take um it’s my kind of professional career my average hourly rate across the 30 years would be like 10 000 an hour right and now it’s back loaded effectively by hourly rate and so now it’s like okay well if there’s anything and i would actually pay a premium right now right above that right like so i would not spend my time even an hour on anything that wasn’t worth at least to that it’s like okay well like the future of me would buy for 50 100 000 if there’s some option value on that time anyway the the short message is uh most people don’t value their time enough and don’t think about it objectively enough and it like anything else is a resource but it’s finite um but put a number on it and then ask yourself like what are the things i’m doing with my time that are not worth that um right and so naval has this uh phrase in his like kind of how to get rich uh podcast or whatever how to get rich without getting lucky he says um he goes you know put up put up put a um i don’t know what he calls it like an outrageously uh outrageous hourly rate for yourself like an emba a super ambitious rate ambitious one one that’s way beyond wherever you’re at he’s like you know ever since i was young this is like one of the smart things i did i just said five thousand dollars an hour some like really aspirational hourly rate he’s like if my friends used to laugh and joke like dude you bought this blender you’re not even using it go return it and he’s like no i’m not gonna go return it i don’t i don’t enjoy it and it’s gonna get me back 30 for the hour round trip you know going and returning this thing at target so like i will throw it away i’ll give it away what i will not do is i will not give my time back into that because the hourly rate just doesn’t make sense i love that so i’ve done a similar thing and it’s kind of funny to like pick that hourly mark um because it sounds crazy like i my mom will get mad at me she’ll come to my house and she’ll see the way i’m living and she’s like oh my god like this this bill is late they’re gonna there’s a 75 fee if you don’t do it and i’m like i’m not calling them and they can charge me the 75 fee they could charge it to me 10 times like i’m not gonna use this hour like and i’ll tell her like look literally my hourly rate is x right it’s like thousands of dollars so so are you that’s my hourly rate so i’m not going to trade that hour to go do this thing i don’t enjoy um because her other argument is well you go watch tv and i’m like well that i enjoy so that that i’m actually spending the money um but sam i know you’re a little bit different like when i went to go visit sam in austin he had like cvs receipts that he had been saving in his like glove compartment of his super fancy car uh like he’s a dichotomy right he’s got he’s got well he likes to spend some things but he’s also enjoys being frugal it’s like that makes me yeah that makes me feel good about myself right like i guess the question i have for you is do you also have an hourly rate do you think about that or you don’t do that that framework sam is for you oh for me um yeah i have that framework yeah so like uh yeah i mean it makes me feel good not to waste stuff like i feel good about myself and i feel guilty if i waste it so i feel i feel happy when i do that and i feel it’s hard for me to go to bed at night if i if i waste something or i don’t return it um yeah i have that hour i mean i mean i have that rate like i just assume that i’m gonna make um i i assume that i’m gonna make three million dollars a year so whatever that hourly rate is but i i think i’m gonna make three million dollars a year and um anything that like will make less than that i don’t want to do it but that said like mowing the lawn i get joy from that so i have no problem i don’t like put a money thing on anything but like if someone’s like hey will you uh in fact sean someone asked us to fly to london to come speak at some event or something and i um i’ll afford it to you but they’re like yeah it’s october and i’m like i don’t want to go there i’m like how much money would they have to pay me to go and do this i’m like they have to pay me a lot like right because you’ll say yeah yeah excited i just don’t they just that just as a payment they’d have to pay me a hundred thousand dollars to do that and like that does not make any sense but i just hate i just hate it and uh so darmesh a couple more uh rich guy questions and we like these because honestly um you never get to ask these even if we were just hanging out personally i could never ask you this but for the for some reason with the podcast it’s like sort of okay for me to just like ask you random questions like this and i told him when he wanted to come on or i asked him to come on i go i’m going to ask you this stuff and we gave him an easy out i said if you don’t want to answer anything just say you don’t want to answer it right and i’m sort of projecting here where um you know i guess like i think i put myself in your shoes what if i had more money that i could ever spend what would i do and so my question to you is um what whether you did it or did or you just considered it what’s a sort of outlandish use of funds that you’ve either considered or done like so for example you know some people are like yeah you know like some people like jets that’s not i’m not buying a private jet i’m but what i really care about is i love this sock so i bought every i love jordan’s sneakers so i bought every pair of jordans i have this closet in my house just full of these things because i always wanted it when i was a kid right or if they overspend in some area and they they’re just happy to have done it or like um it could be like philanthropic like i think if i had a billion dollars i think like two days a year i would just wire somebody like a million dollars i would literally just wire a random person a million dollars and i would just see how that plays out and i think it would bring me like tons of joy and entertainment to do that and see how they react and what happens and what do they what do they do with it like maybe some kid who’s working on something interesting i would just be like look here check your account it’s there uh so give me something that is there anything that’s sort of non-standard that you either have done or considered doing yeah the thing that i do is i like those um kind of micro acts of kind of spontaneity that says oh like someone is wants to go to this event or something like that and can’t afford it or whatever it’s like i’ll be a sponsor like if you can find people that want to do this go do this um i’ll do that relatively regularly i’ve taken this the sound so i’ve taken my average tip amount up to between 50 and 100 percent um everywhere i go and this is partly because i want to make up for all the time when i was younger that probably did not dip well so i’m trying to average it out and that’s as long as i can do it without like drawing too much attention because i don’t want to be that weirdo guy it’s like okay knows like right send some time the wrong signals i want to do it um i do that by the way modesty um it’s okay it’s just i typically tip 50 it makes me feel good yeah um it’s it’s yeah and i’ve worked in the service industry before i know those kinds of things matter um so i’m a cheap bastard so i’ll stay silent here in terms of like you know large things so flying through me the running joke inside the house is uh my wife and i and so she’s not from the tech world at all but um so i’m really so i want to like own the world and she wants to save it right like so i will make the money yeah that’s something i’ve uh been relatively good at and she will be able to channel it to good causes and the film for epic effort so she’ll be able to do that um so i don’t have any like particular specific things um i will say like i am a so i’m the guy that’s like jacked with a matrix so if there was a world it’s like oh it’s like this is um you know like i live a virtual world so there’s no not a lot of physical things uh that i crave or desire other than a piano which i’ve wanted for a while and i have now a piano but it doesn’t excite me all that much right it’s like it’s and because atoms there’s a maintenance to atoms right like atoms versus bits like if you have whether it’s a yacht or whatever it is a plane like that takes calories i could take i don’t care how much you’ve delegated whatever that’s something in your life that’s kind of attached to you somehow and i just don’t like that i don’t like that idea it feels more weighty to me than uh kind of joyful but yes so speaking of time we um so hubspot 15 years old i don’t know how many people are here 2 500 3 000 whatever um it seems like you guys like grew pretty fast early on but has it always felt like a grind or i mean like when i when i see you i’m like well you don’t have to do this um like you could delegate this you don’t have to work here you’re set you’re good why are you still doing this and does it still feel like a grind and when has it stopped feeling like a grain one of the reasons why i wanted to sell to you um i was like if i don’t sell like in this cycle i’ll probably have to wait another five years am i do i want to put that work in or do i want to sell now like what like that’s a hard challenge did you face that and just walk me through that yeah so a couple things um it’s not widely known but um so brian is co-founders we had a kind of heart-to-heart co-founder chat which i encourage all founders to have and we have this list of questions we’re going to go through and i’ve published this on my uh on my own startups blog but one of the things was around um who’s going to be ceo and we decided he’s gonna be ceo because i suck at being ceo i you know i did that with my first startup for 10 years i’m just not that good at it so that was kind of decision one but decision two which is much um much more unconventional is that i have no direct reports so what my agreement with brian was i’m not going to have any management responsibilities in this company i’m going to be in it 100 but i’m not a good manager now i’m reasonably smart guy if i spent a bunch of time i could probably with some coaching get passively okay at management like i think i could get there i don’t want to spend 10 20 30 years of my life getting passively good at something i’m a big believer in take your strengths whatever they are and put like all your energy into kind of amplifying those strengths and getting really really good at that thing and don’t worry about your weaknesses all that much so i don’t want to worry about my weakness managing people and so we have over 4 000 people at hubspot i have zero direct reports i’ve never had direct reports in the 15 years and that is partly what makes it much i don’t think of it as a grind at all like it’s completely discretionary and optional for me uh obviously i have a lot of kind of vested interest in the company but in terms of the work that i do and i’ve sort of whittled down my life at a hubspot um this has been the this way for better part of a decade is is like i get it down to like three things i’m gonna work on and that i will change those every few years um so for a long time it was like brand uh culture and what i call boldness which is is the organization taking on enough risk because the temptation is always like once you start having customers and the revenues are growing things like that is just the what we call drag the spreadsheets like oh like here’s the numbers this is how it’s growing we’re just going to drag the spreadsheet and the numbers will flow basically um is to push the organization so we don’t do that um so what i do is i will maniacally focus on whatever those three things are and say no to pretty much everything else and and things will swap in and out so i’ve had you know product in there i’ve had platform in there um but on that thing whatever it is i’m working on so when i had culture on my list it’s like i spent 300 hours you know in the on the culture code deck at hubspot i’m going to uh do everything i can to learn everything i can to try and get culture to be a thing an upspot um and yeah so it’s i find it enjoyable i get to kind of pick the things so my three things are different um you know from year to year i like to dig into the details i don’t like kind of floating at 50 000 feet in lofty ivory towers i like to like if i’m going to work on brand i’m in there with the marketing team like reviewing copy and uh going through the and this is why i’m taking sean’s uh copywriting or like i i obsess over details um so anyway yep did you see sean that he’s in your power writing course yeah i saw that i was like how does this guy have time to do this this is amazing well have you how’s it been so far he talks to me all the time that’s why i’m like what do you do all day um i i found it very useful i’ll say that it’s uh and i think copywriting overall is one of the most underrated skills uh in entrepreneurship generally like if people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10 20 50 hours and you can learn a lot of what you need just by like reading the top three books on it and just practicing the craft right it’s a doable thing and the nice thing about it and one thing i love about it it’s like measurable you can objectively measure whether you got better at copywriting or not you can look at your conversion rates to whatever numbers you’re trying to to move as a result of your words uh and it’s a it’s a learnable skill um that’s yeah one more question and we can move on but when and the reason why you were able to do those no direct reports is i think that you were the first investor and so like was this was hubspot your idea or was it brian’s idea but i think you invested like half a million dollars of your own money to like get it started and aren’t aren’t you the largest shareholder of the company i am um and so so the idea of hubspot is that you have to decouple the two things um so hubspot was not supposed to happen and here’s what i mean by that when i sold my last company and i had been running it for 10 hours uh 10 years and working the proverbial entrepreneurial hours as one would expect right it was self-funded uh bootstrapped and i promised my wife um that i would not do another startup it’s like okay well you know the one i’m doing i’m in i can’t not be in uh the analogy um you know i use this it’s a little bit like being at um like a a gaming table in las vegas right and it’s like and you don’t know the rules of the game this is how startup entrepreneurship works up here if you’re self-funded it’s like you’re at the table and the only real feedback you get is like sometimes the chips go down sometimes if they go up you’re playing you’re trying to figure out the rules as you go you don’t know but there’s one like cardinal rule is that if you leave the table whatever chips you have on the table they’re gone every now and then the house will come up to you and say hey would you like to cash into your chips they’re worth x dollars and this is the position you were in so i was like okay would you like to sell your company here’s what someone’s willing to pay for and if you miss that opportunity you have no idea when the next opportunity to cash out your chips and again so you keep playing right it’s like and so the thing i told my wife is i have to keep playing i did like if i chose to get off the table it’s like yeah a lot of lessons this 100 of our net worth was invested in this um and so then eventually when i sold um that was a decision it’s like okay i’m i’m leaving the table cashing in my chips i don’t have to do this anymore so that’s why i went to grad school and my plan was go to grad school um i didn’t really get a chance to uh enjoy undergrad because i was working the whole time through and i’m gonna actually go to grad school be a real student apply myself and not go do anything how old are you i was 35 36 somewhere in that range um yep so like a 36 year old college kid living the dream i had a great time it was awesome one of the best things i did um is go back to grad school for a variety of reasons but anyway so i had not planned enough so my plan was go to grad school then maybe get like a phd and then go teach that was my kind of path uh my kind of chosen path uh and then i met brian in grad school and we both have this kind of shared passion for smb we both come from tech different backgrounds and so the first decision we made uh before we even decided what hubspot was going to be was that the two of us should do a company together and if like brian was not going to do a company there would be no hubspot right like i so i had registered the domain name i had kind of noodled on kind of variety of things but then we kind of came together and said let’s do this and by the way all through grad school um we were dueling on ideas right we’re like okay well we’ll do this and we had house five we went to the business plan competition wrote a business plan for early versions of upspot which is fun to look at um but the idea came after like we had kind of narrowed it down to two companies um two past one was in marketing which is what we ended up doing the other one was like oracle for small business like an erp similar to netsuite which you folks were talking about in the last episode uh all right so let’s do some ideas because i think you know one of the cool what i love about any technically minded person who has business success is typically when when people who are non-technical get into business they go in one of two paths they um they sort of become a financier they’re like great still love business but i don’t want to sweat anymore so i’ll invest and uh and lots of people invest but they make investing the main thing and um what i found is that a lot of people who are technical that end up being successful um they never stop loving kind of what’s new where technology is going how behaviors are changing that sort of thing and whether they start a new company or not um they sort of live as a user at the edge and so um so tell me like i guess what’s what maybe one or two kind of technologies or ideas right now spaces that are most exciting to you at the moment uh two one is around kind of broadly defined cryptocurrency um and we haven’t talked about big cloud yet but i’ll bring that out is a cryptocurrencies as applied to other kind of mainstream things so the i if i we’re not doing hubspot which i have no plans of doing anything else but um this is the idea of i’m gonna i’m gonna give you my pitch sean yeah what you should do since now you’re out of twitch um you should do a professional network um that’s powered by the blockchain that i’m going to say this is kindly uh people love uh because the people don’t love the incumbent right now can i can i say my opinion you know you know my opinion can you cool if i say it yeah yeah good linkedin sucks how about this a lot of people say linkedin sucks and you’re suggesting bill that building a different one um i even have a seven figure domain name picked out for you i will write the five as far as a seed round uh or up to five million if you want to let other people in that’s amazing this just got spicy okay oh my god what’s the domain name that you have i am i am dead serious i have uh and you yeah um so and here here’s why it needs to wait let’s play this out yeah keep going so the issue right now is that you know linkedin yes people don’t like it it was a product that was great for its time uh and times have changed now there’s a different kind of need and the thing i’m excited about is the intersection of a couple of things one is um you know we didn’t have things like big cloud or cryptocurrency before now we do right one of the issues with linkedin is like okay well you’ve got the kind of spam issue you’ve got all this like okay well how do i separate all the noise from the signal that’s just it’s just a pain in the ass over time right the acne tonic move for linkedin is like diminishing utility right it’s like it’s just going to become painful and then there’s there’s a cap on where you can go with it so imagine uh that you and so big cloud ended up doing twitter with the blockchain imagine if there was something else that did linkedin on the blockchain and you have your own kind of currency and then you could say hey you know what i’m afraid i’m an engineer that’s a free agent or whatever and for 500 i will look at your company and apply for it i’ll do a reasonably good job or for ten dollars i’ll open your email or for x i’ll do this it’s like okay there’s a right now there’s an inherent uh so the thing the cool thing about big cloud is everybody’s got a price right everybody’s got every coin has a certain value and so the beauty of uh of a professional one would be right now when you go on linkedin um it is not obvious the level of hierarchy right and so you always have people who are uh either recruiters or people who are at the bottom of the career ladder trying to keep connecting and reaching out to the people at the top of the career ladder and they have no real incentive to to to do it so they just sort of ignore linkedin all together why would i even go to this site i’m just going to get inundated with crap that i don’t really want and so the beauty of this is that because everybody has a coin value you sort of inherently have baked in this sort of like career worth career value that this person is bringing to the table into the network and so you um hey somebody has a way to buy attention so they buy your coin which increases your price so it’s a mutual beneficialness right now if i go pay linkedin i can send you spam inmail you do not receive any of the revenue from me paying linkedin for the right to spam you right in this case i could say hey if you want to spam me if you want me to read your thing and you want me to to respond to it here’s my prices so it becomes revenue generating for me the second thing is that when somebody reaches out i can quickly assess their value in the network based on how how much other people believe in this person how much other people weight this person and so now it’s not this kind of like every node kind of looks the same on the surface no they would not look the same on the surface which is really cool correct and just one more thing yeah so yes so that there’s a kind of crypto angle where everyone’s got a price the other angle is uh is we’ll call it page rank for the professional graph right so right now the professional that’s cool it’s all uh it’s all symmetric right so every person you follow gets an equal number of follow value whatever their account goes up by exactly one it’s not weighted in any single uh any anyway explain page rank a little bit so the kind of the beauty behind google the original idea that made it um the powerhouse is today is they said okay well how do we determine what the best set of results are to show for a keyword search right it came down to two things one is like the overall context of the page so if you’re searching for uh real estate boston or something like that it’ll look at all the pages that’s indexed it’s like okay well this these set of pages are about real estate in boston to varying degrees that’s kind of factor one in the function so which people also just say good content yeah exactly we’ll just call it quality like the context content yeah which is a whole round whole thing authority right and the authority is the where page rank comes in though they say okay here’s this individual web page that’s sitting on the internet we’re going to measure its authority by how many links are coming into that page because that’s a that’s this endorsement of effect and the value of those links passed to that individual page the page rank value of the authority that gets passed through is based on the page rank of those pages right so it’s a recursive function to say oh well if the new york times links to you that’s much more valuable than if dharmesh’s blog links to you because new york times has more pagerank last piece of the pagerank thing which is super important to know is that the amount of page rank you pass across the links from your page are proportional to your page rank so let’s say i have two units of page rank i’m making the number up and if i link to just one person it’s your blog sam all the page rank i have on that page accrues to you by transference if i link to 10 different people it gets distributed across those ten links yeah it’s a weighted graph versus just a symmetrical graph where we’re not so now if you imagine a professional network graph where everything was graphed was like okay well you know i endorse sam and i have a certain authority i have a certain currency if we’ve got a cryptocurrency underneath it as a result of which sam’s currency goes up by x amount so it’s not just me buying shares it’s just by that so i think the the notion of a follow should go away it’s like if you really really like that person buy a dollar buy five dollars or something like that right like that’s the one kind of so so what you’re saying is just to make sure i understand so what you were saying is instead of just following sam which you have an infinite supply and um you know sort of this is a pretty light signal you’re saying in this case you would be able to own some of sam’s coin that’d be a pretty strong endorsement and secondly the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that because you a valuable person owns sam’s coin sam’s coin goes up not just by the five dollars you paid but buy some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm the way the algorithm weights sam’s value now correct so for instance if you raise money if you’re a startup and you raise money from uh and recent or sequoia like a million dollars is nine million dollars yeah exactly has an impact the same thing like you know follow shouldn’t matter the fact you know that you follow me should matter more than someone that doesn’t hasn’t that just joined twitter or big cloud or whatever yesterday right like that’s the doesn’t make it this is a tremendous idea i’m having trouble containing myself at the moment this is this is one of the more exciting ideas because people don’t know exactly what i came here for is to put you on the spot uh he was like okay listen to this idea that’s insane you know because i got excited about big clout and i got excited about it because i think that we do want a social network that’s inverted so instead of one platform controlled by one company that owns all the data it’s inverted it’s inside out it’s basically no company uh all the data is free and you own you own your own business on top of it and so i think that you know i don’t want to say how do i say decentralized without saying decentralized that’s my way of saying it okay so i think that’s exciting and then a whole bunch of people were like i can’t believe you’re endorsing the scam project and blah blah blah blah is this is this going to make me rich or is this not going to make me rich i’m sort of like well it’s besides the point it might but uh it’s besides the point um it’s more like this is what the the next twitter linkedin facebooks are gonna look like um in either one or ten years i’m not sure and if big cloud or the next thing i’m not sure but i’m gonna play with this one and i’m gonna like give it a ride so that when the right one does arrive whether it’s this one or the next one i’ve i’ve no i know what i’m looking at i know what’s real and what’s not and that’s why i recommended people go play with it just to see um just just be on the forefront of it something like it needs to exist right whether it’ll be the one or not i don’t know and so i’ve been spending a fair amount of calories trying to kind of understand the mechanics of big cloud itself um money did you do on the uh top creators uh list so i’ve been kind of moving up the up the curve so to speak yeah dude the thing about how much have you put into big clout uh it’s gotta be a million dollars yeah i mean the thing that pissed me off about big clout was i got into this like i had i didn’t get into it because i had to i knew i was gonna get into this thing i’m about to say but i i was getting too i want to get into a pissing match real fast about building clout and because there was money on the line and yeah i just like oh i don’t actually want to get in this race um i don’t want to play that game and that so that i i kind of had a little like i one part of me is i actually fundamentally agree with most everything you’re saying on the other part i’m like oh if this exists i’m going to be getting in a lot of like pissing matches or whatever and i’m going to be playing more games and that kind of freaks me out a little bit yeah and this is one of the issues with big clout right now right you have a bunch of like founder rewards games and things like that and this is this is what happens this is why we can’t have nice partly right like anytime something new comes along there will be people that are trying to game the system whatever so even back in the early days of google’s like the internet wasn’t a scam and google wasn’t a scam but there were a bunch of people trying to scan google to kind of show up in the results and doing kind of spammy seo kind of stuff you see the same thing on big cloud right you have to sort of kind of separate that from the platform it’s like okay fundamentally the idea does not feel like a scam to me yes they needed to open it up and have it listed on exchange so you can actually take money out you know minor details but um it but they’re fixing those i talked to the uh to the founder like in like one of the few calls i’ve had in the last 12 months because i don’t do phone calls um but it feels legit to me and that’s not to say it’s going to succeed but it’s i’m relatively confident it’s not a scam that like this reason for being is not a scam so one of the things that happens with like a google or facebook is you know like you said there’s a big honey pot either of users or money on the line and so then you get good people excited about it you got technologies out of it but you also get these sort of scammers and not even scammers but i’ll call them schemers people who are not doing anything illegal but they’re thinking oh this is a game how do i play it so that i get the highest score and the score is either money or followers or whatever they’re trying to game yeah and uh whether this is like you know buzzfeed and upworthy saying oh newsfeed how do i game news feed to get all this monthly traffic or you know um zynga doing this with games on facebook or whatever with a company you sort of have the like for as much as people hate that facebook and google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from under you they are able to like swat down these schemers and scammers so that um you know they don’t ruin the experience for everybody and one thing that’s interesting with decentralized platforms is that there’s nobody in there’s no ceo there’s nobody in charge to to do that and so i think it’s gonna be very interesting how that plays out do you have a sense of if that’s going to be a problem or do you think that there’s a solution to that with the the governance i’m a believer in kind of self-governance over time like and it all depends on the time horizon will it fix itself in a year or two years maybe not i think there’s still going to be this kind of dark parts of big cloud that people don’t want to tread into but over time i think um once bitcoin kind of figures out what it wants to be when it grows up um like what’s the actual right now you know the way i think of it is like the kind of twitter use case is just a way to kind of prove out the protocol it just so happens they picked that one they could have picked any number of other ones um but as people kind of build real things using that underlying kind of technology because it’s um an open protocol i think things will settle down people will find a way that they can implement use cases that concretely solve a particular problem stay away from some of the kind of dark issues right now which is yeah um what’s the name that you bought for for sean you said you bought a seven-figure domain name for this idea i have one in i’m in the midst of negotiating the price on it i’m not gonna reveal it uh i don’t wanna be outbid how many how many letters is it seven hmm okay i’ll be very curious to hear this going to be you you had said two spaces so the one one is the crypto crypto social network yeah what was the other space you’re excited about the other one um is some broadly defined uh natural language processing uh in terms of okay so let me i’ll do a try to keep this a quick rant so every software company that ever was has always said our product is intuitive and easy to use like okay well and the reality is every one of them lies because here’s what happens in order for a human to use software it’s like here’s the thing i want to do and i have some amount of training and things whatever and i’m going to translate the thing my intent i’m going to translate into a series of drags and clicks and swipes and touches to make the software do the thing that i intended to do right now imagine uh if you know if i were eli i’d be like okay well you should be able to think the thought but let’s put that aside for now let’s just say you were like you’re in photoshop it’s like i want to remove the background you should just be able to say well i will remove the background if you’re in hubspot you should i want you to it’s you know how many new people signed up for our service hub product in the last 90 days you should just be able to type that question in because that’s your intent not like oh go to hubspot reporting tool build this dashboard pull in here the three columns you want or whatever and get to the thing you want you should just be able to say the thing you want express the thing you want a better way to state it and the software should figure it out like we have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand natural language in english and other languages and all we really need is a translation layer and so this is a broad based in my mind um a mega trend to be which is in my mind bigger than mobile so mobile was a oh we’re good the thing that mobile added for us which is like oh well the thing that you used to do on your desktop now you can do it from anywhere and enabled a bunch of different use cases this thing is like okay well the thing now you’ve been trying to learn you’re trying to use the software whatever that you never really got good at you never had the time now like a billion people can use that piece of software that wasn’t even possible before because they don’t have to learn the clicks and drags and things they can express something they want and the software can do it and then what i would do if i were an enterprising vc is like okay look so pick the categories where this thing will have the biggest impact uh like you know business intelligence reporting kind of stuff b2b software is a natural fit uh but i think can go elsewhere yeah and uh we’ve seen the beginnings of this on the consumer side with things like alexa but like the b2b world i think is open for just make the software actually intuitive they could do what i want have you seen anyone besides i was gonna say besides alexa have you seen any hints of what i call a magic trick it’s when you see somebody build a piece of software and then they’re like yeah so you just do xyz and boom it’s done and you’re like holy [ ] you got that you know you just wove your magic wand and got that and it’s like when you see a magic trick you it’s very hard to unsee and you kind of can’t look at the old software the same way anymore it’s like instagram filters or something like that it’s like oh wait your photo looks like oh [ ] okay well now all my photos in my camera look like [ ] in comparison like i can’t even look at these anymore um so have you seen any cool magic tricks with conversational uh or natural language classes closely i’ve gotten so i built something myself called growthbot uh a few years ago uh i remember that i remember growing up type and it was for it was built for marketers to be able to get marketing data out both of your kind of marketing systems something like a hubspot or a mailchimp but also just other data sources like oh what are the top three keywords that uber buys on ppc like that data’s out there right like we already know to kind of ask that and so uh or like when was this domain registered or like just a bunch of and i would go through every night and look at all the questions people asked of these things there was a blank canvas they had no idea what the thing was capable of and then i would go back and it’s like okay well here are the repeating patterns wouldn’t it be nice if i could go update the software to kind of do that thing so that’s it came close it was i think a little early i think we’re further along now people are more used to that notion right um of being able to express equipment that’s so funny that you do these i’m looking at the girl i i remember growth bot uh like people were sharing it and i just you just made this did you so you just whipped up this landing page and you made this i made the whole thing yeah like i spent a bunch of like time just learning about what’s possible coded the whole thing myself um god that’s so funny can you um gosh this is so funny uh you see that sean yeah yeah i’m on it it’s great right like it’s just cool that you do this stuff and you have uh within like everything you do is kind of related to hubspot right it’s all in the same world you also like you’re you’re it seems like you’re really into website graders is that right that business or what so i was talking to a heaton shod the other day he shot um um he did everything he’s starting up near yeah nera he’s got uh which crazy egg crazy egg uh quick sprout all types of [ ] i mean he’s like you you just [ ] has his hands and everything but he uh and his partner neil have neil patel.com uber suggests and then they also had neilpatel.com like rate your website or something like that why are you so into these website rating businesses and products what what the hell is going on with that well i’m into so the original thing was called website grader it’s actually a funny story so back when we first started hubspot uh it was just brian my co-founder and i and we would go look at people’s websites and to see if they would be a good fit for hubspot to software or not right and so we would go i would look at their age like i’d do a view source in chrome and then look at their source codes like okay do these they do they have the right meta tags or do they seem clueful right there’s a bunch of signals you can look and look alexa ranking stuff that you do you folks do all day long right now when you research companies like like a similar web type of thing yeah yeah and this is you know 15 years ago and so we so it’s like okay well when we were all doing it we were doing it manually there were no tools it’s like okay so i built that’s what i do it’s like oh i’m going to write this tool that does the automatically those looks and brings the apis we’ll bring down the source code for the html and see if they’re the tags are right and kind of give it a for us give it a score and then i had this and had not planned it this way was you know built as a tool for just the two of us um and it’s like oh i’m going to put this on the web because i think this is useful and so like okay well what name can i give it well at grades website i’m going to call it websitegrader.com the domain was available 15 years ago um and so i put that out there and it like it was on fire like that like all the early leads like tens of thousands of people right would and and then we like so they had a desire to kind of grade their website and so for your list for the listening audience one thing i will say is um the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense right this is the thing that so website greater was not the solution so it’s not like a freemium thing it’s like oh we’re giving you a lightweight version of hubspot it was a thing that made you realize you needed hubspot and that was super valuable and that can be done in any industry whether you’re in software or not it’s like okay i’m going to help you determine whether you have a problem or not because the natural thing when you do a website where it’s like oh i got a 23 out of 100. that sucks right i can help like here’s what we do um or even just like read these blog posts and you can watch these videos uh it’s so it’s it’s work so i’m obsessed with kind of grading an assessment um and you folks you guys had a an episode like 10 20 episodes ago um around like quizzes and things like that so one thing people are so if you do build a diagnostic tool the one thing and this is i’ve learned several lessons but one of the key ones is that relative scores work so website grader from its early days like okay so if i give you an 87 with that 87 actually means is that whatever calculations we’re doing behind the scenes this particular score you rated better than 87 oh 87 of the 800 000 or whatever the number was websites we’ve graded people love that it’s like oh that’s just that kind of relative score versus an absolute one makes a big difference a percentile score matters a lot to people it’s like oh right like i [ ] i’m in the bottom ten percent or the top ten percent of them are awesome anyway are you uh sean do you see his list of ideas let’s just start banging them out i to i like it so this is two things so first i think the thing you just described is like a growth hack without saying uh yeah i did it to grow thank you like solved your own itch but like that’s just we’ve talked about it for quizzes quizzes the same thing lead gen this is an amazing lead gen tool where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads uh people who self you know they self assess i have might have a problem they go get it checked up your digital doctor said yep you indeed do have a problem and then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called hubspot you know here’s a little i’ve got a little bottle for you yeah tell you how clueless i was back then so i put this thing up there um and at the time uh we we had a meeting set up with gail goodman who was the ceo of constant contact at that time and she later joined up spot board but we met with her we’re like oh we’re working on this company called hubspot it’s kind of related to constant contact space um we want to get her advice and i showed her website graders like oh here’s what we do and we can kind of look at websites whatever and and she loved it and then she’s you know you might consider putting like an email address box because we had no way of knowing who these people were they were not they were not linked for us we had like a hundred thousand people like use the tools unintentionally i never thought to collect an email address like oh wouldn’t it be nice to anyway let me obviously fix that uh but so i like that and then also for this uh conversational thing i think what you just said like we kind of it’s kind of sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing that i’m like whoa whoa whoa that’s actually a really big idea uh and i think you actually said two i think that the crypto linkedin one is a big idea and i think the second one is this idea that if you think about one of the biggest and what some people say is the best business they’ve ever seen is google right people come in there it’s just a search box it’s magic genie if you go ask a question and it tries to give you some answers and um the way i view this is if somebody could actually do this this is sort of like next level google where uh i ask it any question and it and it doesn’t just give me like a list of pages where the answer might be it’s like it actually gives me the answer and so um this might be you know in the business context might be like a business google but there’s many versions of this uh i don’t know if you’ve seen this have you ever seen uh d build we’ve checked out this website yeah we talked about d building my friend sharif uh there’s a perfect example of a magic trick thing he um was messing around with gpt3 so gp3 new technology comes out he gets access right away he drops his whole startup starts just hacking on this thing at night right and uh he throws up this he has this idea of like dude uh you know squarespace wix this website builder’s been around forever um great everybody wants to be able to code without having to code but like even now it’s still so complicated even after webflow after all this stuff and um so he’s like why can’t you just describe like you know i want a website that’s got like kind of like two columns and on the left i want pictures of like places you can stay and on the right i want the price of the other thing and you could literally just type that in and it’ll build you a website that looks like airbnb like it’ll build a website that does that he posted on twitter a gift he’s like you know i’m messing around with gpt3 and watch this like um you know build a website with a photo and then add a paypal button but then make it where the paypal button can only take five dollars uh max and like that’s it and then send send the payments to this and then it like spit out a website that was that did that like the html and the css that did that and he posted that gif and i think off basically one tweet with one gif he raised like two million dollars instantly from like really smart people when that tweet went viral because they were like oh you just showed me a magic trick and uh i don’t know what the company is here and i think he still doesn’t know what the company is but um go go down this path and uh see what you can find it was pretty amazing i remember when that tweet went live i mean i i i i it went viral right away yeah right i played with gpt3 uh played with it for a while across multiple things it’s it’s like the closest thing to like magic that in turn it’s weird because it’s it’s kind of a different vector right because it originally is like a text generation mechanism to be able to write you know pros based on because it’s got this corpus of of data behind the scenes um and it’s and i talked to sal malton the ceo brian i had a he’s gracious enough to give us some time to it’s like okay well like where is this headed what’s going on to see impacts on hubspot um in the world in general and it’s like that’s one of those things that i right now i don’t think quite there to be able to like implement like practical use cases to actually do the thing that uh people are trying to do and i’ve played with it on kind of multiple fronts but it’s one of those that it’s going to go from a peter like from a zero to a one very very quickly it’s like all of a sudden that wasn’t really possible and didn’t really quite work well enough and then it’s gonna be like holy crap then there’s like the uh kind of post gpt3 world what’s that phrase where it’s like you know slowly slowly then all of a sudden or something like that yeah it looks like it’s gonna be that uh sam you said you liked some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics let’s just we just talked about something huge that was a huge idea let’s talk about something small but still cool so it looks like did you buy remoteculture.com i did okay so that’s a no-brainer there’s a business that will make a million dollars a year remote culture online community for those building remote cultures easy right that’s a no-brainer what would you do there i would start a community uh for remoteculture.com this is okay i’m gonna do a blog i’m gonna do a paid community and it’s going to be targeted at people ops and hr people around the world that need to kind of figure out the new kind of new world order right we’re not going to try and sell them software we’re just going to connect them to each other and you and i’m a big big believer in these kind of communities and network-based businesses um because they’re efficient in terms of take that much you gotta get to critical mass that’s fine but um i think this one would work it’s it’s uh it’s a community that’s necessary at this moment in time that hasn’t existed because it hasn’t needed to now it does um and i’m sure there’s people out there doing it but money helps you can actually build something yeah there’s one on here that i really like uh speed round so uh so by the way this is these are what these are domains that like you don’t have uh by the way when i have like a an idea that’s enough in my head that’s like okay well this is kind of cool i don’t like write it down a notebook i go find a related domain um it’s like it costs 15 if it hasn’t been taken yet or right or maybe i’ll spend more if it’s you know um something really kind of strikes my fancy what’s what’s the most expensive ideas what’s the most expensive domain you own well um i haven’t had them valued i don’t really sell domains i own birmingham alabama.com i live there i think that’s probably the seven figure uh domain just bought humanism.com and humanism.org you also bought bought one for me bought one for you i bought the hustle.com for you as a gift that i’m gonna give to you on the podcast so you don’t care about domain names all that much no hold on a deal trophy right uh whenever you get acquired they have this little tro i don’t know sam did you know about this deal trophies no i want a deal trophy so when we got acquired they gave us like it took like a few months but it was like hey uh sorry i meant to give this to you like you know when the deal closed but i guess it’s like in the deal-making world i’m not i’m not like a mover and shaker of biz dev and like corp dev and things like that but i guess it is sort of a tradition of when the deals close it’s sort of like the the champagne what you do is you you get sort of like a little ornament that has some meaning to the deal like in our case our code name uh was like project whatever it was like let’s just call it uh um project sharp it wasn’t we were i think we were project h or something and so then they got like this like kind of like cool looking knife uh you know because it’s like project sharp whatever here’s the here’s the deal trophy so i think your deal trophy is this domain here well and and for the record darmesh if you like gift that to the hustle company we would love it and i actually do like domain names my whole point about domain names was it’s don’t let it stop you 99 of people are not like you are not like me like we do [ ] like you’re killing it and you just made this little rinky ding project called growth bot like that done we do [ ] 99 of people don’t do [ ] and they have stupid excuses like well i don’t have the domain name it’s taken or i do have the domain name therefore i should do that my point is don’t let it stop you but i still think it’s sick and it’s awesome and i love it it’s like saying like just because you don’t just because you don’t have a sick gym doesn’t mean you can’t go out there and walk and lose weight i think uh you know like justin was on the podcast last time and he was like um there should be a dating app that matches you on like kind of your credit card spending history or something like uh for me that’s what it’s like with this podcast where it’s like if i just if you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually you bought but you you don’t have like a live project on if that number is you know greater than 10 we’re gonna be we’re gonna be thick as thieves and like you know how many tabs do you have open right now if i just knew those two things i can kind of tell you if this podcast is a fit for you or if you’re somebody who owns zero domains then you probably aren’t gonna you know really connect with this podcast in a major way i don’t think one and i’d like i’m going to pull a biology here as uh i’m going to push that conversation on stack but one thing i want to make sure i get out there because it’s on the list of things just you’re talking about ideas um it’s like how do you assess ideas how do you think about ideas i know sean you love frameworks and you do too sam um here’s a simple one in terms of like assessing whether you’re doing it for yourself or you’re investing whatever it is and i’ll tell you the common mistake um so the three things i look at are like profit potential like if this thing went exactly as planned as the founders envisioned what could it be like let’s just assume all things like all the stars align everything works the way you expect it to and it goes what could it be what’s the overall potential for the project uh what kind of like passion do you have around it it’s like okay are you excited about it or not excited about it um and the third one is uh around the probability of that success that you that you want right and i i’m a quant based guy so i’ll take each of those factors with 0 10 square and multiply them together and i’ll get a score out of a thousand right and you can put the weighting differently it’s like oh i care more about passion than you know uh the profit potential or something else but the common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first and almost exclusively as the high order bit filter it’s like oh i had this idea but the likelihood is like 0.01 that that’s actually going to work and so i’m not even going to think about what the potential could have been or how passionate i may or may not be about it and then they just kind of discard the idea i think that is statistically unwise and an impractical move and here’s why is the way you should be looking at ideas is you kind of take the profit potential like here’s the possible outcome multiply this it’s the ev the expected value statistically of this thing it’s like oh i have a one percent chance at a billion dollars the expected value is one percent of a billion dollars that’s the value of that particular um and so you shouldn’t discard something just because the probability is low because it may have a disproportionately high potential that makes it more interesting than it would otherwise um so that’s the like be a little bit more structured about how you assess things that people throw things away too easily because in the second note hard one lessons good ideas are dangerous and they’re dangerous because what you want to find are the great ideas uh right that’s the thing you can kind of get behind you don’t have to find them before you start the company we can talk about that um so bad ideas are easy to find that’s just a bad idea good idea masquerade is great ideas and it’s hard to tell them apart and they’re the ones that end up kind of spinning a bunch of cycles for you and it’s like okay well it ended up being good but just it’s um yeah failure’s not a problem like mediocrity is a thing everybody should be fearful of it’s like just get it out there try and see what happens but uh and but the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource it wastes time right because it’s not gonna die quickly nor is it gonna take off so it is a slow long burn uh at a mediocre level and so you’re sort of locking in over a period of time a mediocre outcome and that’s what mediocrity is the biggest difference i think the hardest about bootstrap companies especially uh tech companies that have a low kind of capital need is they can actually live forever and not go anywhere right because it doesn’t take that much stuff it’s like okay you’ve got an aws instance somewhere that’s costing you it doesn’t really cost that much um and you don’t have investors pushing on you to say oh we need some sort of outcome and so you can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you could have done was sitting right behind it right like i have i’ve talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs by this point i have never ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur that had just one idea so i go you will have more dude it’s like okay and you know try the thing if you can sell the thing sell the thing if you’re not that excited about it or or you just want to cash out take some chips off the table there’s uh no harm and no shame um but yeah did you do but you guys didn’t raise a significant amount at hubspot did you uh 105 million money before in public yeah i’m supposed to say classic venture-backed playbook company it’s like there’s nothing and intentionally so that seems interesting to me because you don’t see you seem like a guy who likes freedom um knows that he’s knows what he is and knows that he’s a little bootstrapper that’s what he’s trying to do i’ll i’ll tell you the exact conversation we had so when brian i started this one things we were firmly agreed on is that we didn’t want i’m not a baseball or a sports person but like we didn’t want a single or a double hit right like we wanted to like swing for the fences and either this we we do this and we’re good at every point that we have a decision to make a fork in the road we are going to take the one that gives us a higher chance of being the spectacular outcome even if that means we’re possibly going to go down and crashing burning flames right and so was was was brian uh was he successful like you were or was he he hadn’t had like an exit because he was uh he hadn’t done a startup before this was his first one um but he also was like okay this is my last swing at bat right this is the i’m this is it this is the one that’s either gonna do it or not gonna do it um and so that that was the reason it’s like we weren’t worried about diluting we negotiate the fairest value we could we made sure the terms were meaningful had good investors but we were not worried what our percentage taken the company was and how that moved over time we’re like okay if this thing does what it needs to do uh the valuation and all that and the equity dilution will not matter like on the margin it just it it’s we want it to be a binary outcome either it’s going to be this huge massive thing which um will change our lives uh and have a massive impact or it goes down and crashing burning flames which is highly likely but um we weren’t looking to hold on to control we weren’t looking at this like we wanted to be we didn’t want to be king we want to be rich i guess when you’re doing like ideation and stuff though you you either i think you wrote you wrote it here you’re down with starting some a project with a bad idea because you’re quite confident that you’ll you can figure out you can make it great as you get into it right my general advice is and this is not just you know my personal kind of uh lived experience as the new folks would say having talked to entrepreneurs kind of looking at the history of them so many of them the thing that we know them for now is not the the idea they originally started with like there are a handful of cases where yeah when exactly the plan this is what it was and and often the case is that you will not find the great idea until after you start your company until after you start having contact with customers and actually trying to do the thing if you sit on the sidelines trying to assess ideas and look at market metrics and things like that and it’s like you’re just never going to get started that’s the kind of wannabe entrepreneurs that will kind of analyze it to death it’s like you wouldn’t even know what a good idea was it’s hard to tell these things until you actually try something it’s uh just yeah it and try it um where do we go from here sean we got uh i think we think we got a rap but here there’s this i think we have to have you on again if you’re down because here’s five topics i want to hear about uh why i don’t play golf and what i do instead uh i want that one why i hate inefficiency in markets uh why i don’t believe in karma but i believe in extended feedback loops uh sometimes faking it is making it uh introverted engineers guide for public speaking like i need i need all of these so we may have to do another one um i have one question i want to wrap with in this one uh which is you seem like a a pretty astute guy like you’re very very good observations and i think you you you know kind of who we are and what we care about and that we would value honestly so i’m curious you can ask me the intro question aren’t you you can ask me the intro question no no not the intro question that that sam sam’s trying to get all the interest he can ask you that one i want to know i’m i’m trying to make the content great so what would be the most uh fair criticism you could give us on the podcast what’s your critique of the podcast um for you as a listener and there’s you can offend you can exactly that’s kind of what i’m taking you up for say whatever it is whatever you truly feel all right um so partly i think you have to recognize that you guys are multi-channel so you’re kind of solving for the audio format i know you have the youtube videos and things like that but the one tactical thing that you should fix like next week or the week after is you should apply the sean 25 headlines thing for headlines for every podcast episode like what’s the one nugget that’s going to cause people to want to listen to that episode even if they’re not subscribed when they see it in their youtube feed and youtube recommends it’s like oh right why this successful entrepreneur never played golf and you shouldn’t either whatever it is right exactly i’m on uh i’m i’m taking notes keep going if you do that my my guess is that the click-through rate goes up because you can’t not um right now you just kind of identify the episode number and who the guest is or whatever there’s no real maybe the topic area but right now me and sam don’t even want people to click me and sam don’t even touch the headlines when dan does i don’t even know i see a notification it goes out and i think i judge the headline myself i’m like ah that’s not gonna give very many clicks or oh that’s a juicy one that’ll work i i say give dan a free pass to the um the sean copyright report of course yesterday that’s awesome okay what else you got anything else of course you have more who me yeah yeah what about more that was a weak criticism yeah that was an easy one okay um this is a hard one right um is around he’s gonna say like just change your voice like your face is great but i suppose it’s yours so it’s around the it’s around the brand and this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to kind of reconcile with so a couple of issues that i have as a amateur branding person is that anything that can be reduced an acronym will be which my first million is often reduced to that uh and then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym anyone that comes like immediately they’re not going to know what it is if they don’t know what it is and there’s some value to that but it doesn’t compensate for the kind of opportunity you have so that’s one thing is acronyms not good uh but the other one is that the kind of my first million there is a cadre caterer however that word is pronounced of people that will directly res that topic will resonate with like oh i want to learn about that but i think your reach is much wider now and there are people there are probably more people outside that fear that that particular like okay well it’s fine that it’s about that but really the reason i’m here is to hear folks like biology right like that and that episode which is i think one of the best epos episodes you’ve had had nothing to do with the first million anything it had to do with big ideas we i actually agree with you and we’ve had this conversation the problem that we had was like [ ] we’re pretty deep into it we can’t change yep yep i i for what it’s worth i think we should change just because i hate the name so i don’t really care about the brand equity i’m just sort of like i don’t want to have a thing i don’t yeah i don’t i don’t love it i really don’t it’s i don’t i don’t love the name i don’t like the name of the hustle either if you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future which i do then 90 of our future listeners haven’t even heard about us yet and so uh we’re we’re only offending a very small we’re only changing on a very small population of people for the good of the long run that would be my my and by the way if you think it’s hard now you realize the direction you’re headed it does not get easier right it’s going to get harder and harder like a year from now two years from now five years from now it’s like ah like should we have changed this like what would have been it’s like not that it’s gonna have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything but on the margin these things matter and they kind of uh accrue to accumulate and here’s what i would do to make life easier for yourselves um don’t decide to change the name decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives like okay am i willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better if something clicks for you great but make an honest concerted effort to come up with those alternatives and options and then you can still decide like yeah these are better but they’re just marginally better they’re not better enough to go through the headache of trying to change it right that would be my advice okay that’s great uh sam you want anything else before we go we’re going to follow up with some intros my man we got dan dan do we have an update are we reaching out to guests can we we got to use darmesh she knows everyone well i’m curious actually you do know everybody who’s awesome who’s like particularly awesome that you’re just either kind of underrated or you’re just so you know what i don’t know as many people as you think like i’m kind of on internet did i do things but i you know i don’t like i don’t leave my house right it’s like it’s like you have to in order to kind of be that person you have to sort of interact with carbon based life forms in real life right like i don’t do that that’s not a thing i do so it’s hard to kind of build those kinds of relationships but i would on your list i would have um so i’m not going to be good at intros but i like naval would be awesome to have on the podcast uh he’s like a like that kind of biology level uh thinker i think he’d be awesome the audience would love him so that would be great great we’ll take that intro thank you yeah he doesn’t know me i mean he knows me like loosely i’m gonna start calling you uh we’ll call you uncle darmesh you gotta pick it i’m willing to try it don’t don’t get me wrong those qualms about trying to make the intro just don’t uh demand your expectations it’s like well i thought like darmesh actually could like swing things and make [ ] happen anyone else someone i do know that i think would be good on the podcast drew from dropbox i know really well so that’s an intro i could make um what’s up yeah that would be a good one i heard he’s an amazing singer is that true he’s he’s uh he’s a good singer for a founder amazing founder is what i mean legit he’s legit um so darmesh darmash sean was pretty nervous coming up to this because he was like well i just like to over prepare and i don’t think good on my feet or sorry you’re like i i you know i prepare i and i don’t love like just making [ ] i think you did an excellent job dan has been texting me saying darmesh is so i told you darmash i go i told you this yesterday i’m going to predict the future you’re going to come on and then you’re going to start wanting to come on like once a month maybe i have a feeling that that we have just accomplished that and that’s going to be true you’re freaking awesome um what’s your twitter handle it’s just darmaso d-h-a-r-m-e-s-h you’re you’re really active so people want to get in touch with everywhere linkedin twitter facebook pick your thing anything you wanna you want to pimp out or promote no i’m not a promoter kind of guy that’s not my thing but well thanks man this is awesome we um i talked to you a lot i got to set up i want to set up like time to just holler at you because i i want to learn about you more i want to learn about hubs sam wants to be your first direct report in 15 years no no no no i don’t want to i don’t want that but uh this is great heaton was like you got to learn from dharmesh just learn what makes hubspot tick so uh thanks dude this is awesome we’re gonna have you back on did it did it turn out as good as you thought i love you guys this was this was fun this was i yeah and i say it’s it’s more importantly i hope it ends up being useful for the audience that’s the thing i’m solving for honestly i’m looking at this doc i feel like we left a lot on the table we have a lot more that we could do i’m sort of regretting uh you kind of have to i always feel this way with a guest by the way i’m like the first 20 minutes were slow but it’s also like i’ve never brought this person and like you know the audience doesn’t know all about this person so there is a certain context building that has to happen yeah you got a date i never figure out why every every single guest i’m like oh the first 25 minutes were slow but then it got really good and um yeah i don’t know if that’s just my own i’m just kicking myself for for no reason or if other people feel that way maybe we should actually do something different and like sort of pull the future forward like pull just start at the start at that uh 25 minute mark basically this is final folks that’s uh yeah all right that’s a wrap i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back