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 it’s this is kind of like a movie right so like guy builds huge tech company becomes billionaire has life-changing life-changing accident changes everything gives it all up explores the world it becomes like a mug you’ve never met sean right no say something you don’t like you can just fire sam and that pretty much takes care of the whole thing i love that i’ve always wanted and uh okay so you uh you listen to the first episode the very first episode or just like a random episode i ripped through like a couple little random things okay i heard you guys talking about the wright brothers and some random [ ] okay and from that random uh stumble uh describe what you heard what what kind of podcast is this um it’s a podcast for entrepreneurs uh to get inspiration and ideas uh yeah it sounds like by the way i’m not being condescending i thought it sounded sounded great but i heard it sounded great like something i would i would listen to but that’s what i was going to ask you you know is this something you would have earlier in your entrepreneurial career yes because now you know you’re now you’re mister i’ve made it you’re you know you don’t need that inspirational juice anymore or maybe you do i don’t know enough never enough inspirational juice look he doesn’t listen to podcasts like ours sean he just buys them yeah most people listen i purchase uh so one thing we i don’t know what you plan on talking about but one thing we could talk about that might be interesting is my snowmobile accident yeah so like we’re live now so we’re we’re recording now so yes we let’s we could do it so what we’ll do i’ll ask you about that i want to know about that and then also we’re going to talk to you about some different business ideas and i’ve got a few that i want to ask your opinion on but um so let me do it let me do the super short intro this is brian halligan he’s the c was that you were the ceo of hubspot now the chairman or exec chairman or something very fancy like that something fancy like that yes all right cool and you um you basically like like i think like two weeks so basically uh hubspot bought the hustle my company and like two weeks after you got into a really bad accident right yeah and you like broke like a dozen a dozen bones or i mean it was pretty serious i was like i hope ryan’s okay but also i was i was like if this deal if this would have happened like two weeks before the deal closed i wonder if that would have changed anything yeah cause i was a big proponent of the deal i was really happy we did it um i tell you the whole story i’m just gonna go uh i was snowmobiling up in vermont with my son luke and we were we were right yo we’re we’re right in the middle of nowhere right square in the middle of nowhere and we were cruising along and he was he was cruising along i asked him to slow down he just kind of got confused between the gas and the brake um he put his jammed his finger on the gas and he just panicked a little bit and we basically flew off a cliff and landed on a tree and wow i don’t remember neither of us actually he’s 17. neither of us remember the accident at all and we were both passed out before the we hit the tree and passed out after so we’re both lying there in the snow passed out i wake up first i wake him up and we are banged up like it’s like a cartoon or arms and legs or you know we’re a mess and i thought this is it it’s 4 30 in the afternoon it’s freezing cold we’re in the middle of nowhere no one knows where we are we’re gonna die tonight um and i reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone thinking there’s no way there’s signal and i i had three but i had enough signal i called nine i never called 911 my whole life called 9-1-1 she picked up i roughly described where we were right square in the middle of and um then they call in the troops and the troops in vermont are volunteer firefighters um they’re not you know professional emts and ambulances and stuff and it took him about an hour and one interesting thing that happened is they kind of came but one guy who found us came from below us and he marched up the hill and he’s yelling kind of yelling for us and we were yelling back and he finally got to us he starts asking us questions he says wait are you brian halligan i’m like yeah he said hey i’m joey i’m the guy who plows your driveway [Laughter] like that’s a volunteer firefighter and they are bad asses these volunteer firefighters so they strapped us to sleds pulled us straight up out of the you know ravine back onto the trails and then you know helicoptered us to the hospital when you’re laying there are you just in an incredible amount of pain what’s broken incredible amount of pain what what did what broke what was broken on your body i broke like 12 or 13 bones but but my i could show the pictures but my left knee like my left knee my tibia my my uh femur and tibia broke my right wrist broke my left elbow trash my right left shoulder trash and then my i already had a lot of loose screws up top and now the screws get even looser just like you had like a concussion or something yeah i had a concussion and um yours i broke my i hit the tree so hard broke my helmet oh my god and you’re what about your son he was banged up too he broke his femur which is a terrible bone bone to break and he broke his knee and he got a concussion so he was banged up then you had to like you had to cut him out of the will i mean after that for this he’s doing great i mean he’s 17 so he bounced back fast like he was at soccer practice today and stuff so really really bounce back you’re sitting in this chair it looks like you’re not a wheelchair just no listen no no no no i was in a wheelchair for three and a half months though a good long chunk i can walk i can drive i can do like a light hike like my brain is 100 i’m fine i think my brain’s actually better uh and what percentage of you you know sort of attributes this to the hustle deal the timing is coincidental i mean it was the adrenaline from the hustle deal got the whole whole thing you um and like so basically you know i don’t know so brian uh hubspot at this point is like a maybe i forget the market cap today maybe in the 30 billion range uh revenue north of a billion employees at like what 2500 or 3000 like so this we’re talking like a really big company at this point but you had been the the ceo from the beginning and after this accident you you know removed yourself you replaced yourself and now you’re the executive chairman did the accident when you’re having this like near-death moment where you’re like what am i doing with my life like what what did it was it like a crisis like this like when you’re done uh like recovering it’s a perfect question lying there in the snow thinking i was gonna die i thought to myself yourself how was your life are you proud of it are you enjoying your life as you’re thinking about it a second time if you live what do you want to change about your life um it was sort of a reset button for me and i think over time as i look back at the accident it may be the best thing that ever happened to me because i’ve made a lot of life changes since then that um like what what what sorts of changes yeah i broke up with my girlfriend of a couple years [Music] i you know my whole life was hubspot it wasn’t i really didn’t spend any time on any other causes like i read a check and so i went on a kind of a broad search for a cause that i could put my energy and some cash into and i found one that i fell in love with it’s called the woods hole oceanographic institute it’s like the harvard of the ocean yeah i’ve hung out there a bit right next to coffee obsession the coffee shop down there exactly exactly um and what got me about the institute and besides the fact that i live near it is and knew nothing about it despite living here for 10 years was a blatant optimism amongst the scientists on their ability to slow and reverse climate change leveraging the ocean in a sustainable way like it really caught me by surprise as i was walking the halls and getting to know them there’s a lot of optimism and there’s a lot of stuff on the lab there that they think can scale on a global level so i pick them and i’m on their board and i’m doing a lot with them these days that’s been very exciting so yeah i’ve done a lot of different stuff like now i used to work out sort of casually every day i’m like get my heart rate up into the 160s daily like i’m not screwing around anymore i want to live a long healthy life like i’m 54 and i’d like to live a long healthy life i don’t want to be an old man when i’m 70. i want to want to be a very vibrant seven-year-old what have you been reading since your accident is there like did you did it put you down this different path of learning and you’re like okay i want to explore this path or this spiritual thing or this giving thing i don’t know uh like a a different trajectory initially it was like lock yourself in a room and keep it dark and don’t read and don’t uh don’t see anything when you’ve got a uh concussion yeah yeah i read random stuff but i you know i’ll tell you one thing that surprised me is uh when you have a concussion like i had a neurosurgeon helping me i had a shrink helping me i had a shaman come and visit me i had all kinds of people consulting me on how to recover from a concussion and from the neurosurgeon to the shaman they all said to do one thing what do you think that thing is sleep meditate meditate meditate yeah they all were just like you got to meditate that’s the way you’re going to get through it and what what were you a meditator before i was not i never really met or i tried and i was just so bad at it that i gave up and so yeah i’m a pretty big meditator these days so like i’m just looking right here at the books i’m reading like one of the books is becoming supernatural i’m not sure about it yet i’m only through chapter one but it’s basically a meditation book i’m taking a class on vedic i’m not even sure i’m saying that right meditation next week because i want to get better at it just seems like it unlocks a lot um so this is this is kind of like a movie right so like guy builds like i have no i don’t know if this is true or not but guy builds huge tech company world it becomes like uh it saves saves the option starts this is like this is like uh this is a movie right this is this is how it’s going to be the other thing i would say is i’m still involved with hubspot so i’m still like today i’ve had four hubspot calls so i’m not i’m i’m very much engaged with hubspot i’m just not engaged in stuff i don’t like to do like i don’t like doing one-on-ones with people and doing performance reviews and talking about their salary and stuff like that i really i’m not great at it and but i’m able to work on the product stuff and the vision stuff um the stuff that really motivates me so it’s it’s really worked out but i’m still very busy with the hubspot stuff and i always wondered this like uh when i was at twitch emmett is the ceo he was the original founder right so he’s like 10 years in and um and he basically went from like you know starting the thing with two two three you know buddies basically to okay two thousand employees and you know whatever millions of millions of users and for a long time his thing was like you know yeah i’m not the professional ceo manager type i’ll get coaching there so that i’m not like awful at it yeah but uh you know i’m great with product and growth and i’m gonna like there was like this perpetual candidate search for a chief product officer that somehow was never getting filled and it’s like everyone knew it’s because emmett loves to do it and it’s great about it i had a little of this yeah i think it’s pretty common to do for this to happen or the ceo’s like well that’s the thing i like don’t don’t take away the one thing i like when there’s like the rest of it is just firefighting and politics like you know i’m not not super into that bit and then you know eventually found it when i was there found somebody who was a you know really good product leader and an engineering leader and basically over you know over that year i saw that person take more of that role and then i was like oh emma what are you gonna do now and he was like i’m gonna work on like you know the vision and the long trip strategy i was like yeah but like you know when you wake up what do you what do you do you just sit there and i’m gonna think about the vision right now it’s like that’s such a weird what do you do day to day and i never really understood what that meant and so like would you say i think i would i work on you know the vision and strategy now you wake up what the heck do you do okay so today there was a bunch of emails back and forth between darmesh and i about what subspot looked like five years from now um so literally i woke up thinking about exactly that right it turns out so you’re doing like it’s like long form writing so you’re just like writing out you guys it’s like a basically an email brainstorming session yeah it wasn’t even that long it was emails back and forth um and just different product ideas and different areas we could go into um and then i read a lot and so you guys probably saw that amazon came out with like a billion new products yesterday that looked kind of interesting actually it’s just amazing how much new stuff they had and how well it tied together i think that started the thread like holy crap is there a lot of innovation coming out of that company and yeah there’s a lot of r d in there but it’s amazing the amount of innovation coming out of there and uh i think that sort of started it by the way did you see this infinidash thing that came from from amazon did you guys see this no what is it so so aws so amazon launches all these different products and uh somebody said somebody basically on twitter goes and they go oh my god you know aws infinidash looks like a game changer um and i think you know werner vogels who’s like one of their kind of like cto scientists yeah gto types he tweets out like you know at the end at the hashtag infinidash event tonight blah blah celebrating and then um and it’s a fake product there is no product called infinidash it was like just like a meme but people started kind of memeing it into existence so someone immediately responds they go i’m buying open dash dot io so i don’t get locked into aws as an as an open source alternative to infinidash and then signal the big messaging app that has like 50 million users was like um you know we’re hiring an engineer with an emphasis on infiniti dash lifecycle manager and um there’s like youtube videos with infinite demos and like people like i’m an infinite consultant and it just like took on a life and if you knew it was fake you knew but everybody kind of played the party that’s awesome the whole bunch of people thought it was real that’s awesome that’s awesome ryan you um i saw this like i saw this graph i think it was from darmesh at a talk at saster and the graph was pretty amazing it was like it was like maybe hubspot’s first five years of revenue and i’m almost positive i was trying to like read the graph and it wasn’t all marked out clearly but i’m almost positive it said something like in year three you already had like six million in arr is that accurate i doubt it it’s too low or too high and too high too high i would say the thing about sas businesses that’s fascinating is it takes you approximately forever to get to 5 million in ar uh but once you get to 5 50 is like bam you know it’s tomorrow well that’s what i thought but like it took us so long no no i think i think you’re misreading that graph it took us a long time to get to 5 million an hour it took us a long time to get to a million how long did it take i forget but it’s we had a lot of churn our product you know we’ve turned into a product-centric company a design-centric company and a customer-centric company but it took us a long time to get there and so we had lots of customers coming in but we had lots of churn in those early days eating away at our growth um so it took us a while it took us it felt like forever to get to a million i remember and then forever to get to 10 and then all of a sudden bam 100 then bam two you know it started happening fast and even now like we got to a billion and you know it’s starting to happen really fast now well and like your first there was like the joke was like i actually disagree with you i think you i think darmash maybe squished that crap a little bit yeah i i i could have read it wrong but for some reason i was like wait they hit they hit something they hit like 15 like something we didn’t break any records on that [ ] well and he made a joke he was like the first five people on the team were like brian who was like an mba sales person and then like another marketing guy another like sales person and then another operations person and then me who was a technical person and i actually had to build the thing and they’re like this combination is a horrible combination for the early an early team yet somehow it kind of worked i actually i think his point on that was the early team was a bunch of people we knew from sloan that we got mbas with like people we thought were super sharp they started them as contractors then we hired them and that in a lot of ways that was good in a lot of ways that was bad um in the early days the hub spot there was a lot of pluses doing minuses to it the first person the first very few people know this but the the the first version of hubspot was built by darmesh and these two guys in egypt that he found through um found online put a test out there pharah maui and i forgot the other guy’s name and they built like the prototype of those three built the prototype outside here’s how hubspot worked in the early days all day long i would be using the product demoing the products pitching the product and using it to run our marketing and then at the end of the day i’d write up you know here’s the 10 most important bugs i found and then at night darmesh is a night owl and those guys are obviously working at night because they’re in egypt they’d fix all 10 and create like 50 more so it’s just a constant whack-a-mole that first year and then we hired a guy a kid from yale who was a he was a poli-sci major but he was a computer scientist on the side who’s really good named patrick fitzsimmons and he joined the team and then we started getting going um and then we hired a guy from mit who ran engineering and then we ran and then we hired a guy that ran darmesh’s last company he was an engineer and then we really started cooking but that first version was written in egypt of all places wow and you know when we think uh like i think back about upshot what’s that what’s the name of the company option upshot what is that when you can outsource your dev projects what’s the other one oh desk or elance or upwork upwork it used to be called yeah i heard stories about a friend who was early at uber and they used to like this was like a secret that they didn’t tell a lot of people but one of the co-founders of uber is mexican oscar he’s from mexico i forget his last name oscar salazar or something like that and they used to make jokes that like some of the early code was in spanish and they couldn’t fix it and i was like why i was like why what’s going on he’s like well apparently you know just like you don’t think about it but uber was just like any other small business that didn’t have any money and one of the co-founders was mexican and he lived in mexico and they had their peers or friends like it was like contractors that they could only afford and coat make the early uber code and there was this joke that like a lot of the early stuff was in spanish and they couldn’t fix it and so it’s kind of funny to hear that yeah that’s right it’s funny you say that you don’t you don’t ever think of uber as like a struggling little startup with no money but everyone starts that way except for today there’s so much money sloshing around people don’t start that way they start with like five million bucks in their bank account well the uber guys had money they just thought of it as a side project they were they didn’t think about it like this is going to dominate the world they thought of it like this would be cool we’ll roll around in black cars in san francisco and not have to worry about taxis i don’t think they had that much money i know travis had had an exit but i don’t think that they were like right through stumble upon right he had done well like he didn’t i don’t think they were rich enough that they could like put three or four million dollars into a business before it really was they knew it was gonna be worth it like i i don’t think it may be that i mean those guys are hyper connected right like they sure they can raise a seed round if they needed to um so we were talking last episode about this company called nerd wallet and the nerd wall the story the the part that’s relevant it’s basically it’s a big finance kind of like blog basically and um and they make a ton of money because they rank at the top of the search engine for uh best credit card best credit card for business whatever and they get a bunch of they make like 100 million dollars off that referral essentially at the end of the day but they got there by making great content and like it was like tortoise and the hair everybody else was like you know just trying to farm as much content as you could these guys are trying to do quality content and for two years they’re sitting in their apartment just banging away at blog posts and like the traffic really wasn’t it wasn’t impressive and i was telling sam i was like if i had started this company i would have pivoted 10 times by then if i was advising them i’d be like guys look at the data this is not working but they had a lot of faith and they sort of kept going and there’s these like perseverance stories and they hear these other stories that are like well we we tried this thing we saw the signals and so we made a shift in strategy and these like inflection points are the hardest thing because as an entrepreneur you never know which one is this one of those moments where i should be persevering in spite of the data or should i be taking the signals and making a dramatic shift in what i’m doing pivoting in some way and i think everybody has like i look back at any startup i started and i see multiple moments where maybe i made the wrong decision maybe i made the right decision it’s very hard to say because you never know what would have come out the other side when you look back at early hubspot was there are there any moments like that where you know either it was not when it was not working and you decided either to persevere or shift in your strategy shift in your the way you guys were doing something yeah there have been two big pivots in hubspot’s history that people don’t talk about the first pivot was about six months in we were building kind of a general purpose platform for for legal firms we call it legal spot this is probably something we were still in business school but we were spending time on it we had a prototype of it and we would go to law offices and we demo it and try to get people excited about it and they weren’t super psyched about it but there was a little piece of it that was around grading your website and around seo that the law firms got excited about and got excited about the lead gen piece and we stuck with this legal spot idea for a really long time and we’re just getting very mediocre feedback and finally george and i were like why don’t we just work on that one thing they keep asking us about and so we killed legalspot and we built website greater and we built the lead generation system and then we killed the idea of verticalizing it and went horizontal and sold it to all our friends and startups so that was the first huge pivot we had was giving up basically on the original idea and the reason the original idea was there was when we were in business school they put you in little pods for uh for stuff and there was a woman in our pod who was terrific who had started a company in the legal space and convinced us there was something really there um and she might have been right if we stuck with it but uh we ended up pivoting away from that and she ended up not joining hubspot the second huge pivot we had is we were a marketing app software company i mean we built we started with we started as a web 2.0 company back a hundred thousand years ago with seo and blogging and social media and we were good at helping people get in front page of digging reddit and stumble upon [ ] like that wait that that was the service was that you were good at getting people on top of dig and reddit we were good at helping people get turn strangers into visitors on their site with no advertising money so start your blog get good at search engine optimization start a twitter face get going on dig get going on reddit and start building credibility there and so create these channels into your business basically that’s that’s how hubspot effectively started but we were seo geeks at heart and then we moved into marketing automation which was an obvious move because everyone was buying hubspot but then they’d buy marketo or they’d buy pardot or they buy one of these other platforms you’re like they’d spend a lot of money on it we’re like you know we get into that business and so we moved into that business but the big pivot was when we said we’re not a marketing apps company anymore we’re a crm platform company and then we’ve really turned ourselves on our head and we made that decision about seven years ago and that turned out to be a very very good pivot for us and we’re still in the middle of it like we have so much more work to do on our apps and so much more work to do on our platform like it really works well our customers love it you’re talking about oh i know i was gonna ask when you guys were early on when did the company launch oh five oh six oh six yeah what what why don’t you know we launched it that’s when we officially started it actually we never really launched the company we just kind of started it when you were doing that what i mean you know your behemoth now but what percentage of it do you attribute to you just picked the right idea in a huge market and had fantastic timing and it kind of you got pulled to success compared to you’re just uh you know you’re you made the right decisions and you’re smart and talented and skilled i mean what percentage of that came down to it was just we got lucky that we saw this early on and it kind of worked out that we just stuck with it versus we’re really healthy dose of both are are a very healthy dose of both the thing we saw in the and the thing that anchors me is i just watch the way people shop in the way they buy and the way they evaluate products i’m sort of look like a little bit of an anthropologist of watching people buy stuff i noticed two things that were going on first of all all the marketing stuff that i had done my whole career whether it was emailing you know doing email marketing or was advertising or cold calling or anything didn’t work because people like caller id they had spam protection that ad blockers like it’s broken and at the same time people no longer were going to like idc and you know gartner and all this stuff they were reading blogs and they were reading articles on social media and uh they were going to google and so those two things just kind of clicked inside our head and like there’s a transformation that needs to happen from this very old school outbound interruption-based marketing to this new school inbound marketing you have to match the way you market to the way people actually want to shop and buy and what the nice thing about it is your success in that new type of marketing was much much more about the width of your brain than the width of your wallet you didn’t need a lot of money and so we initially sort of targeted small businesses we moved up to some uh to larger businesses these days but uh that’s sort of how it got going and we it turns out we were right about that and we were early on that thesis and i remember there was a decision point in the early days of hubspot like we were starting to get traction it was starting to go and we were unsure you know is this going to be a big company is this going to be like the two of us are going to fund this we’ll do some angel thing or is this going to be a go big or go home and i remember looking at it at some point in time it was like we’re right about inbound and other people are noticing we’re right we gotta like raise a lot of money and go fast because some people are gonna start copying us and people did copy us like crazy and so at some point we sort of flipped the switch from you know we got a little business that’s going pretty well we may have 50 people we might end up doing a lot of services to know we’re building a big software company and it was the realization that we were early and right about this idea of inbound and and one of the reasons people love the pod is because we we started off with kind of like what we’re doing a little bit now which is interviews with people who are successful say hey how’d you do it what’d you do what was it like and somewhere along the way i just said hey sam let’s record an extra episode on a friday what i really wanted to do is help him promote trends and i was like let’s just talk about trends let’s talk about what are some opportunities your your research crew has found and let’s just shoot the [ ] about it it’ll sell some trans subscriptions and it’ll be i think interesting like it’s like how we talk offline let’s just record it and um what that started was a lot of the podcast now is basically brainstorming and just shooting the [ ] about well today here’s what i see as some opportunities maybe i’m not going to do them because i’m already doing two businesses my hands are full but if somebody’s out there looking you know i think this is really interesting this is where i would be sniffing right now and so i don’t know if that’s hard for you because you’re so concerned by a large problem let me ask a little bit differently so earlier you you had this thing called legal spot now you guys are just your hubspot which is you know the the crm for like you know any business ever but i see a lot of companies pop up that say they are the hubspot for x so you said you started as legal spot now there probably is like are hubspot just for the legal industry we are hubspot only for dentists we are hubspot only for doctors whatever what do you think about those and if you if you’re not a fan or you don’t think that they like are necessarily gonna have legs which industry do you think could have legs where you could have a hubspot for x that you guys just simply can’t meet because their their knees are so specific as soon as you brought this up i was like there’s an infinite number of opportunities for people to build stuff on top of hubspot that’s vertical specific and so someone should build a legal spot on top of hubspot someone should build a hospital spot on top of hubspot like whatever they want and it’s all sort of there the apis are there like there is incredible low hanging fruit for entrepreneurs to build and then just sell it to our install base all the new customers there’s lots of channels you can sell through hubspot that is it’s it’s it’s probably the upside on it you’re probably not going to build a 100 billion dollar company but you’re the beta on it’s low you can build a good company make good money by doing that are there any success stories of people doing this so far there’s a bunch of them there’s these kids in um in the uk not kids they’re in their 20s but they built something called org chart hub on top of hubspot which was hey i’m working on selling to procter gamble and they pulled in procter gamble’s org chart and then as a team you can go and change that org chart around as a change and it became wildly popular inside of hubspot for sales reps using the product and now they’ve built a series of different apps inside of hubspot that’s worked out that’s that was the first of them now there’s a whole bunch of them popping up have you seen um have you seen the org a company called the org okay so it’s i think it might be the org.com actually uh is it similar idea something like that yeah and so all they do is it’s a database of org charts and they recently raised i think they’ve raised two rounds but a recent raise was a 20 million dollar round from founders fund or something like that like a tier one vc this org chart thing actually like it just happened to it yeah and one of the very first brainstorms when daniel gross joined we had brainstormed this because i had said it’s so hard to know who the heck is who inside companies linkedin has become impossible to know exactly and we said this is a wedge to build a new style of linkedin linkedin basically took all said we’ll take the resume and then we’ll create you know basically like the social network on top of this database of resumes well why don’t you create a database of org charts get people to crowdsource because i think people like to say here’s my hierarchy here’s where i am in the hierarchy so people are willing to fill it in for their company and you can crowdsource that and then use that as like the basis of a new style of linkedin i think that’s what these guys are doing almost to a tee i think i think linkedin is there’s certain companies that i think are ripe for disruption i think there that work chart hub thing is is cool the company who i bet is kicking themselves is the it’s the you know the information do you guys subscribe to the information yeah they have an org chart thing they haven’t worked for things it’s awesome by the way i bet they’re kicking themselves they didn’t spin that out into a company and raise a venture for it and crowdsource that because it’s very good um i i refer to it often actually yeah that’s the media company dna though um all right so what about non-hubspot related what if you were 21 today and you’re thinking about business ideas or you just graduated business school like when you started hubspot what do you what would have your your fascination your curiosity where would you be building what opportunities have you seen that you’re like okay if i had a clean slate of time here’s where i would go what i would go for okay i like to think about like the big trends and then sort of zero in on okay what’s an idea on the big trend so i just think just the most enormous trend that’s going on and i saw in hubspot’s board meeting last week so i’ve been out for six months i went to the first board meeting we had an hour and a half discussion about the environment and we have this whole chart on how we eventually want to get to a zero carbon footprint every board meeting in the world is having that same conversation and that’s a hard thing for companies to pull off and that’s just the beginning at this point you know europe sort of taxes carbon the us doesn’t tax carbon eventually the u.s is going to figure that tax department i just think clean tech ocean tech there’s there’s gonna be trillions of dollars made in that industry explain that from a big company’s perspective because i’ve never you know our business was much smaller than hubspot and so like when i thought about climate change i’m like yeah that’s important to me as a person but like my business i’m just trying to make payroll like i can’t even think about that at the moment like you know how my company fits into that you guys are much bigger what what do you um like from your perspective what does that mean you’re you’re willing to spend money in order to do oh we are we’re spending huge money so yeah tell me like well how much are you spending and what are you spending that money on and what’s the motivating factor there is like a dollar and cents thing is it to look good is it to feel good what what what where’s the what’s the motivating factor there from uh from a buyer’s perspective i think fundamentally it’s a moral issue for hubspot it’s board and it’s leadership team and we all are behind it even if you didn’t moralistically believe in that type of stuff your employees are going to force you to do it your investors are going to force you to do it your customers are going to eventually force you to do it so you don’t have a choice if you’re a company hubspot size or even a little bit bigger than where you are sam eventually your employees are going to be like you know what are we doing about this you know they were actually asking you about it in your group meetings um and so what hubspot’s done is you know we’ve tried to lower our carbon footprint as much as possible get our energy now through wind fund uh sustainable projects like forestry projects river projects renewal projects out there to offset some of the energy we consume changing policies to consume less carbon dioxide so at this point you know we’re at zero from the beginning of hubspot but we want to consume far far less we don’t want to be buying offsets how are you tracking how much how do you track that is there like a dashboard i mean i i’m it’s very hard to track and the companies who are trying to track it are the same are like your auditors like the price waterhouse and people like that and there’s no great way to track it so it’s a big business opportunity for companies that can figure out how to track that stuff well have you heard of um what was the thing we were talking about sean was so it stands for leadership and energy and environmental design have you ever have you ever seen a building um yeah a lead scored yeah or something like that but we were looking it up on the show we were talking about that we’re like it’s kind of interesting and so it’s a non-profit so you can actually see their sales and their revenue is like 36 or 38 million dollars and it’s something i think it’s highly recurring and uh is that it was kind of a shocking business and it was weird it’s like what on earth made all these people believe that lead is like the thing yeah you know it’s like jd power for cars it’s like i don’t actually or gartner it’s like i don’t know i think they just kind of said that they’re the experts and everyone kind of bought into it and yeah and i’m like i think i got similar yes i i think even beyond that like carbon sequestration is going to have to become a thing if we’re going to solve it and people are investing in ways to pull carbon out of the air that are really expensive right now i’m optimistic on our ability to pull carbon out of the air with the ocean in a more effective way but at some point you’re gonna need to be able to say to hubspot to microsoft to whoever hey you purchase a certain amount of credits around carbon sequestration is it legit and have a true measurement system that’s quantitative not just like a most of the stuff out there is is survey-based did you do this did you just do this and you sort of self-certify it right uh there needs to be a more more like nielsen than jd power you know right and there’s there’s a huge opportunity so let’s say you’re right okay so that’s the that’s the mega trend and you say okay i could i could see the world is moving in this direction and it’s it’s going to need some catalyst some companies that help accelerate it in that direction pull the future forward where’s your inclination when or how do you approach something like that because i think for most entrepreneurs they say okay climate change well okay that’s daunting like uh i gotta save the planet all right that’s a sort of a big idea here i don’t really know where to start and then there’s all sorts of frameworks you can use like picks and shovels businesses like how do you sell tools to the people who are going to be trying to fix this problem or investing in in a portfolio of companies that are all doing this there’s deep science where like you know would you go find a partner like darmesh who’s got an idea around some technical solution to pulling second carbon out of the air how would you actually go about approaching it once you decide okay this is where the puck is going uh how would you how would you actually tackle that as an entrepreneur okay so i just rolled the clock back to i’m an mba at sloane and i’m looking for a partner in a business opportunity and back then it made sense darmash and i made perfect sense um we were both super passionate about small businesses and web 2.0 and disruption and we took all the same classes and we liked each other at this point i wouldn’t be looking for a darmesh i’d be looking for somebody from the other side of the university most likely that could help me figure this like how do i get more plastic out of the ocean or how do i once i get that plastic out of the ocean turn it into products in a much more efficient way how do i get really smart about carbon sequestration how do we get kelp to soak up all the carbon in the world and then drop that kelp into the bottom of the ocean and sequester it for thousands of years i’d be looking for scientists and engineers who are working on that type of stuff and i think it’s it’s it’s endlessly fascinating i think it’s it’s it’s and i think the answers are there i i actually am confident that the capitalist system the startup environment can solve some of these problems like you read the news and you just think oh it’s now we’re never never gonna fix it like it’s the end of the world and when you’re ever gonna get that 1.5 degrees celsius it’s going to blow but actually i think startups and entrepreneurs and that same gusto that went into the biotech east ecosystem the same gusto that went into the software ecosystem i think that’s going to happen in clean tech in ocean tech and i think it’ll work did you see sean did you see the i think you’re friends with this guy the old ceo of reddit who has a new business and it’s like he’s like johnny appleseed it’s like only planting trees or something like that right terraform i think is the name of it what is that do you know what that is yeah so this guy ishon wong and um he was i think early kind of facebook um and then he ended up becoming this he was hired as ceo of reddit uh he was like basically kind of like a user of reddit that just ended up becoming the ceo because he had the right tech background and now what he’s doing is he’s got this startup i’m trying to find the name real quick um i’ll find it terraform or terraformation and yeah what he’s doing is basically he’s uh he he he was started thinking about climate like at last i don’t know or i don’t know when he started thinking about it but he started really like making that his next project over the lasting of five years and i think what he decided was like oh i think one way we can attack this is to find large plots of land and we need to plant like millions of trees in this area and we need to basically re-terrify the terra formation sort of like re you know resurfacing of the way you use land and um and that’s what we’re gonna do and i think it’s called terraformation inc is the name of his company and he found this plot of land i think near hawaii or something like that and um and he’s basically published his idea of like here’s a full solution to climate change that can be done in under 30 years and you know he’s got kind of like a bold view of what that what that looks like i don’t know all the details he hasn’t really said all the details just yet but he’s been revealing more and more over time it’s it’s one to watch it’s one to to kind of keep an eye on it the climatetech vc community is going to explode in the next couple years i think chamoth said something like like this is the number one thing that i i want to invest in but the problem is and he actually just made an investment they launched it announced it today i think it’s called drone seeds and i was reading about it i was i think it’s like these custom drones that basically uh is it they do it before a fire happens in a forest they go and they map out where they think fires will happen and i don’t know exactly how it works but somehow they can guess where they think a fire is going to happen and they’ll help fix it before it happens i believe that that’s what it is it’s called drone seeds just invested into it but the but he basically said he’s like this is the main thing that i’m focused on for you know the next few decades and when he said that i was like okay that’s that’s cool uh in theory i’m totally behind this but i was thinking i’m like but i have no idea how to solve it like i it’s such a grand huge thing that like so you’re now investing and or working with um you know scientists at uh uh uh i forget what what was it called um who which solo should you grab against yes and i’m like well that’s just like incredibly intimidating um and then i think like i think like because i mean like it’s so much that’s so much more challenging than just sitting in your room with darmesh and just coding something and then calling someone asking to buy it um both are hard but one seems like way more you can get to market a lot quicker building software that’s for sure yeah and i was thinking of other ideas in this space because i’m like well like i’m behind this i like money like what’s this huge trend like let’s if i can if you can build a huge company and help the world that sounds like a win-win um but i was i was i was struggling to get my hands on something that is actually interesting uh that can actually be attainable there’s a bunch of people working on um measurement systems like our measurements are horrible on global warming beyond just the aggregate temperature of the globe like measurement systems of the tides and you tell that measurement that measurement to the insurance companies so they know when the you know big storm is coming um and getting really precise about that kind of stuff systems to measure the salinity of the oceans the temperature of the ocean the temperature of the atmosphere and using all that information to input to the carbon exchanges that happen in europe and hopefully globally some day like there’s going to be a whole stock mark you think with there’s a there’s a stock market there’s a commodities market there’s nasdaq there’s the new york stock exchange that’s going to happen for carbon and think of all the businesses that happened around that marketplace there’s this company right now that i see being advertised everywhere it’s called i think it’s called aspiration and basically have you brian noticed that there’s like all these new credit card companies coming out basically what they do i’m kind of dumbing it down but i believe this is exactly how it works they just partner with mastercard mastercard typically takes one percent of the purchase price from the merchant and makes money that way mastercard then says hey if anyone starts a new credit card system and you’re able to convince these people to sign up we’ll split that with you and that’s kind of that’s kind of dumbed down and there’s this new company called aspiration i think it’s called and we predicted this on trends shockingly like this is something that like we nailed way before this company came out and it’s called aspiration and what they do is and i have no idea how they do this but whenever you make a purchase it tells you on your phone how uh how much carbon it used or you know what what the impact on the environment was and when i heard about this i’m like i don’t buy this i can’t believe someone like i care about this stuff but like that’s just amazing that someone’s willing to switch credit cards just for this reason because switching credit cards are pain in the ass and these guys i think they’ve raised over 100 million dollars and they’ve attracted so many new customers just on this idea and it was shockingly interesting i i i never in a million years would have thought that that would take off like it did yep i think this is a huge huge trillion dollar industry it’s going to be the like software industry is a huge industry biotech’s a huge industry this is going to be a giant industry and there’s lots of ways to get at it um but it’s it’s a different it’s a different model it’s not just you know hacking together something on the weekend testing it and then iterating on it it’s a little different so if climate is a trend a big trend a big wave that you believe in what are some things that you see other entrepreneurs doing that you are less excited about or you you’re not a believer in is there some trends because there’s sometimes head fakes or things that are too early uh that they’re you know the time is not now um i’m curious what do you see or the time has passed you’re not a believer in you’re not interested in that sort of thing you know ye old enterprise software companies with ye old uh giant outside sales forces um it just feels like the time has passed to build that kind of thing and i’ve predicted that before and been wrong um but it feels like there’s a new breed of company that sells in a new way and they start with small businesses whether it’s shopify or it’s stripe or it’s hubspot there’s a new way to build a company and it’s not targeting fortune 500 companies like when i see these companies starting like yeah we’re targeting the fortune 500 like take the technology piece away just all the compliance work you have to do to be able to sell to those companies and all the boxes you need to check to get in there and then the sales model it’s just like oh good luck it’s a it’s a that’s a tough road to help and i want to read a couple of tweets that you had put out and i want to hear you kind of elaborate on a little bit so one is um you know you need to manage your if something on long lines if you need to manage your creative people with loose reigns and that’s from lauren michaels the the sort of i think he’s a producer or the creator of saturn out live for a long time so what was uh what struck what circuit chord with you about that okay you brought some you actually brought up something earlier that was really interesting about uh the twitch ceo so in the early days of hubspot i’m not a product guy by the way by training or by dna for that i i think someone described you i believe it was kip i’m a sales guy he said you’re the best you’re the best salesperson he’s ever met yes i’m a salesperson and i grew up in sale i grew up in enterprise sales which is ironic because i just said i think that industry died but um i tried to convince myself that i was a product guy in early days the hubspot so i read everything i could about it design books i’ve read everything about steve jobs and you name it and i just tried to get really smart on it and i was the truth is i just was not good at it and we hired one product manager didn’t work we finally found a product manager that uh i liked and we sort of built around and i was like oh i see i don’t actually have that dna i’m not good at this and it took me a while to it took me seeing someone who’s actually really good at it to understand that i’m actually shitty at it and i was like oh i get it and then then i had to figure out well how do i manage this type of person and the way i managed this person and the team was by really giving them a lot of free reign like giving them very wide boundaries and just saying hey you guys figure out and gals what’s inside this box this is what the box looks like and what was that box like we need to attract this type of customer we need to grow by this we need to like we need to we can’t have these people churning out i’ll show you show you the box it’s a box i’ve drawn on white boards in the product organization a million times here’s the crm platform okay mark bryan’s literally drawing a box right now by the way he’s got like a professor-style channel oh you guys all right so i’m right so on the board i’ll describe what i’m drawing i drink this is good we have a youtube channel box on the bottom that’s like the hubspot crm keep drawing by the way we have a youtube channel this is going to be on there okay it’s a crm platform on the bottom and then on top are apps like we got a marketing app we have a sales app we have a service app we have a content management system we have an ops app now and basically i would draw that on every board and what’s it what’s interesting about the dimensions of it is the vast majority of the space in the drawing is in the big box at the bottom which is a message to the developers the product people like hey the power inside of hubspot isn’t a whole bunch of applications that we’re going to buy and glue together and cobble together we’re gonna build a killer platform and that platform’s gonna have workflows as part of it it’s gonna have social media as part of it and messaging it’s gonna have a set of shared services and then the apps themselves are actually quite a bit smaller but they’re all just woven together pieces of the underlying platform and they got it and uh and actually they they extended it in big ways and then i said i want a marketing business it’s going to be a billion dollar business growing x percent and this year i want a sales box and in that sales box i want that to be whatever 300 million dollar business growing y percent and i just draw out the numbers and draw the boxes and they would decide what to put in there based on what they thought and what customers were saying and where they thought the world was going so i managed them very very very loosely i managed other parts of hubspot very very tightly but the product worked very very loosely but i heard i’ve heard that you you are like that most of the time and then when something isn’t going well you get down and dirty in your heart and you’re like we have to we have to nail this i do i will i’m either at a very high level or go very very deep one of the first things that you said to me was like um keeps you know you didn’t you didn’t mean it this way but you’re like keep being you keep being crazy yes and if anyone says anything to you about what you can and cannot say you’d let me know yeah stay weird yeah that’s what it was it was staying weird you’re like awesome to stay weird down so i just naturally thought it would stay weird because what makes you you is you’re you’re [ ] dude you’re weird well dude so chuck bryan has a book so if you google brian halligan guitar he bought jerry garcia’s guitar and you could like see the price on there um which i was like that’s weird that like i know that you bought a two million dollar jerry garcia guitar that’s crazy and also he has this book called like what the grateful dead can teach you about social media about marketing about marketing um so a lot a lot what can i learn from the grateful dead give me that four points we’re gonna have to do a whole other podcast about it it’s just too much i uh do you know so there’s this company called i bet you definitely know what it is nuggs.net you know yes okay so nugs is this okay so the reason i know about it was the hustle started this small apartment that i rented for really cheap but it was craigslist’s old office so craigslist was doing like 900 million dollars a year and craig newark basically owned the whole thing and he was based out of this little shitty apartment that i ended up renting right when he moved out and we shared it with nugs.net is this company that it started out basically i think only for grateful dead but basically i remember as a kid sean i don’t know you probably even have an older brother so you probably didn’t do this but like you would meet people on the internet and you would get their address and you would mail them a tape and they would mail you a tape back and you would have a live recording of a particular concert and nuggs.net was the the platform or the message board kind of where you could like meet other people who went to a pearl jam or a grateful dead concert and you trade tapes i don’t even know what they do now now it’s cool now it’s a live broadcast for concerts it’s awesome so you want to see a giant you want to see a dave matthews concert tonight you know they’re probably broadcasting it uh it’s awesome now they’ve really come a long way that’s an awesome app now and they like so they started as this like it was like the exchange i guess now they have like a thing and we were talking about the grateful dead and we can learn them these people have the most like it’s you know there’s like a few things like moms are like really culty about like products for their babies um dog lovers are kind of like this um health nuts it can be like this and like grateful dead fans yeah like the people who are into like fish grateful dead this type of stuff it’s it’s their engagement is off the charts so i’ll give you a non-secretary giving in a weird way the grateful dead inspired hubspot and here’s what here’s how so sam let’s say you’re going to a rolling stones concert you show up with like your big camera and your giant like recording equipment what happens when you get to the door they say bounce you know you can’t and what are they what is the grateful dead say i think they have a section where you can sit special taper section for you like come on in sit right here put your microphone up like get your gear all set up come early you got like vip access and you go and tape and and then you listen to the concert and one of the things about the grateful dead that’s interesting like when you see the rolling stones you see them in boston they play a certain set list and they play it very precisely and they’re very good then they go to new york and what do they play it’s it’s totally different exactly yeah most bands do the same thing but grateful dead it changes every night every time and sometimes by the way sometimes it’s terrible but usually it’s quite good and so you tape in boston and then you go to new york and they do you know giant stadium for two nights then you go to philly and you follow them around and by the end of the show you’ve got like you know 15 shows on you know of your tapes and you pick the two or three real good ones and you make copies for your friends and you send them around to your friends and then you’re at some fraternity party or whatever and somebody’s playing the state and the person next to you is like hey what’s this crazy gypsy music they’re playing you’d be like oh this is a grateful dead why don’t you come with us we’re going on to on the spring on the summer tour this summer come along with us the grateful dead were the first and best inbound marketers they gave away all their content and they used the best content to spread the word around the internet they were they were very inspirational behind inbound and content marketing and all that stuff they were the first ones they were the really first ones to really embrace uh viral marketing in in a super super modern way and back then there was an email marketing and there wasn’t like uh social media but they were big on message boards and the message boards were on fuego i think the the live music space is interesting to me and there’s a few opportunities that i’ve seen so there’s this company that is streams live concerts on apple tv uh i forget what it’s called um but they by the way that’s exactly what nuggs does yeah and this company they just built like a uh they don’t stream live ones but it’s like it’s like a it’s like netflix for concerts and they were doing like that’s a cool idea it was pretty cool they were doing about 20 million dollars a year in subscription revenue and i think they bootstrapped it they’re based out of england look i’ll look up the name in a second and then the second thing that i always thought was interesting and it totally bombed with song kick sean did you know song kick yeah no okay so song kick what it did was they basically you would say where you’re living and it would tell you all the all the concerts happening that day or for any other day email yeah so they have this huge email it’s basically like an email marketing business and they raise a little bit of money and it complete i think it went i think they it failed and was sold for nothing but the thing about the live music space is like a lot of people have tried to build stuff in there because it’s fun right it’s like you’re passionate about it but very few companies have been able to pull it off and make money um another one was uh like um something fm what was that called uh i forget what it was called it was started in san francisco fm turntable fm and it that bomb too it didn’t work out nothing there’s rights problems there’s rights problems that’s one problem for music and the other thing is the trick in business is i think to do what you’re passionate about that not every other human is also passionate about right because you want to follow your passion but you don’t want to follow everyone’s passion because that’s just competition right like brian nerds out about inbound marketing he’s passionate about something that 99 of other people don’t even know or care about so that’s the beauty of hubspot and how you can build a giant company like website because you’re going to go further than everybody else live music okay yeah great here you go you and every other really good point 20 year old wants to do it i’m not a huge beer teal fan but he said he said something interesting in his book he said in order to be successful you need to be right about something that everyone else thinks you’re wrong about and they think you’re wrong about it for a long period of time yeah i i think that’s rightish yeah somebody says something like that they go investing is pi is being a great investor is investing things that everybody agrees with you about later yes it’s called quello by the way q-e-l-l-o and they claim that they have two or three million subscribers uh very interesting business we got a wrap uh we got another pod right after this actually brian this is great thanks for coming on uh thanks for having me this is fun you’re a fun hang i like this i didn’t know yeah before this so this is cool i want to have you on again the things next i want to talk about is like the evolution how you go from like just being scrappy to now you’re like very corporate ceo that’s a that’s a it sounds like an insult that’s not an insult i mean like you’re able to like manage thousands of people and like very few people have been able to pull that off so i wanna i wanna tell we can talk about the ceo journey and how it changes over time it’s interesting but we definitely have some more grateful dead down i’m down well thank you man this is awesome this is it’s kind of your podcast now so anytime you will come on let’s do it okay travel never looking back