Billion Dollar Business Philosophies With Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah

this is what i call it trillion dollar venn diagram success right i just made that up so you draw those examples of your skills and say okay well i'm now not like one in a million i'm one in a billion right one in five billion whatever that is and if you can convert that into some kind of monet business thing or whatever that's when magic sort of happens so that's kind thing number one is like what's your thing what are your skills and what drag what's how much value will that intersection create is two things one is how rare is that intersection whether it's two circles or three circles or whatever how rare is it and then the other one is so on the pod right now we've got da da is the founder of hubspot he's well your technical title cto right that is correct i see that that you have to do the ad reads for your own company today why are we talking on hubspot you do the ad attributes but you tell people why we're talking about hubspot because you guys do a much better job i am terrible at that i'm terrible at the promotion side of things but the sean do you you're renting a house right now yeah and da you do not rent though right not anymore i did for a long long time i'm a big believer in rentals doesn't it turns outfit but i i'm staying in brooklyn for the summer and i rent a furnished house and it or apartment and it is so much better than owning a place and having to worry about stuff all the time it is so much better i i think i i about the renting train i think now like i kind of been in there but like i actually love it more do you like it because sean you owned a place in san francisco for like four years and then now you rent again way better in fact every time something breaks i now just have joy to be like let me call somebody else this their problem their cost to fix they have to arrange it they have to do whatever and i don't have to think about it plus also in california property taxes are like insane or like san francisco because the the you know the house price is so high so you know even if you try to do the calculation it's so hard to beat just this annual property tax every single time on rent wait so dumb if you if you had the choice again i mean i i think maybe for perhaps you bought because like your wife wanted to or your kids wanted to but if it was up to you even with the family would you be a renter if it was up to me yes because just the the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one's psyche and soul that ownership you best upon you is just not worth it is that's that's my thing it's just like like i don't wanna worry about those things i wanna i wanna get as close to like living in the matrix as i possibly can right renting is a step closer to being in the matrix we don't have to worry about physical things and atoms and things like that like that's somebody else's problem like you show how how many people in your soc and economic like ballpark like you know founders of multi billion dollar companies or people like you do you think also rent because i think that'd be a a if it were a a fair amount that'd be fairly shocking to a lot of people but do you know a bunch of people that are similar to you that are still rent i know people that are similar to me in terms of that they would prefer renting because i've talked to them about this but almost everyone i know now once you get a family and once you have like other things that you're trying to factor in for instance you know one of the things my wife loves gardening and like loves having a yard and that's kinda hard to do in a rental and not that he can't do it but it's right what one thing that the guy told me who who's similarly was know i think he's probably got like a ten or ten or twenty billion dollar house he was like it he's like renting is amazing until you want until your wife wants a specific house and then once your wife wants a specific house or in a specific neighborhood that neighborhood like like higher end neighborhoods have no rentals so you just can't get into that neighborhood you which means you can't have whatever so then you're forced into a different path and so i thought know it's a it's a version of a good problems to have so we'll we'll count it that way alright what are we what are we talking about where should we start well you know do two think left over from the last episode sean i don't know if we wanna jump into some of those look one the last let's do one because i think you will have a take on this so so have you ever read i don't know do you know paul by the way i do what have we're not best buddies user or anything but i do know of him i've met him yeah so he's from boston right or cambridge cambridge yep yeah so you guys know one another he wrote a blog post back in two thousand and eight was october two thousand eight so this is like right after the the crash and it's it's just if you go to program dot com slash bad economy is the name of the blog post and he makes this case where he goes the economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in first stretches bad them mid seventies which is when microsoft and apple were founded and as those examples suggest like a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup up but he which you've heard before but i thought there's one interesting part which he goes i'm not saying it's a good time either the truth is more boring the economy doesn't matter much either way for for a founder starting a start and i actually thought that was a really good point because i hear the so much is like i'll talk to kind of young founders and they listen to twitter and they listen to podcasts and they listen you know they listen to kind of these like a lot of it's like you know vcs who are you know also pandemic at spurt and also you know you know macro economist as well and so they hear and then they they sort of start to adjust their plans and their mental models and like their room for everything that's like dude if you're a startup you're like an ants in this world does the ant care what's going on with the presidential election no like you basically just need to build a product you need to carry your little piece of dirt it's like build a product get a customer get ten customers like it doesn't matter if the if the economy is bad if you can't get ten customers it's not gonna work anyways and so thought it was a great little blog post talking about like kind of starting a a startup up during the downtime which is where i think we're about to or we just officially entered a recession again so yeah as curious der do you have any thoughts on that yeah so my position is i i'd lean more towards i don't know paul graham and in the spectrum which is i think it's either neutral that it doesn't matter it's one of things you're suggesting towards positive and the positive elements of being in a kind of down turning economy or recession is that things become available that would not have been available to a startup before like talent i it's like oh were there are people sitting at meta facebook sitting at google right now but maybe reevaluate their lives or they may have just been let go from a venture backed company that raised two hundred plus million dollars right so now you've got this talent that's coming on the market that might not have come on the market before things that were super expensive like buying google adwords or certain marketing channels because you have this glut of money and a glut of venture capital yeah i think of venture capital is a very efficient machine of turning like money from lps into google adwords rep right that's the they're just a conduit between the two and as in in a downward economy you're gonna get less of that kind of glut of money flowing in which drives the cost overall down for certain things that i think are important entrepreneurs so i'm i'm journey net positive that and down economy is actually a roughly good time to start a start up for like the last eighteen months or you know whenever like the last twenty four months whenever everything's been booming i've my wife works at a airbnb b and you know i've got a lot of friends at work at obviously i hubspot all these and sean was at twitch so we have like some some perspective on how on the salaries of big companies and i've seen some of these salaries and they are crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy as the as like a leader and the biggest shareholder of husband hubspot and you like see these see these numbers are you thinking to yourself like this like we can't afford to pay someone like an entry level person two hundred and fifty thousand dollars year i don't know how this is gonna work like what what's your perspective on that when when these salaries are going so high and now it's like a little bit normal more normal yeah but as a as a start up i mean you can't afford those salaries anyway right let's you're one of those kind of rare exceptions that has fifty plus million dollars going out of the gate which is very very rare and so you know as one of the things a founder has to kinda get good at it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing was to join you in your startup right and if you can't if you can't do that if you can't make that sale which is the most important sale you'll make is being able to kinda track people and then it's customers it's not gonna work so you have to do you want you know two things either recognize kinda superstar talent and give them something they can't get you know because it's beyond it's like you'll learn more here oh you're gonna do your own startup someday this is the place to get your start up mba because you'll be exposed to a bunch of things you'll meet your future cofounder of the company those kinds of things either you have to do that or you have to say i'm going to be really good at identifying diamonds in the rough people that have not made it to the two hundred plus three hundred thousand plus dollars hour yet but they will someday i caught them early in there kinda of evolution and so i can get them there's that's so it has to me one of the other form of arbitrage otherwise you you can't play the game that's just not don't look it's viable i i i'm doing when you're saying that it's like resonating so much because it's it's basically you all the three things we just talked about i'm doing it's like i started the milk road in january this year and so it's you know six it's been it's about to be six months or spend six months and it's like here let me start a crypto company right when crypto crashes you know like seventy percent and at the beginning ben even my c founder ben he was like you know the only thing i could see going wrong is if crypto goes in a bear market and i go well crypto gonna go into a bear market like that's like one of the few certain of crypto is that it goes up and down and when it does it is dramatic in all both ways it goes from the elevator is dramatic in both ways and i was like you know so it's just a question of like do you what do you think that kills it or do we just make it through like there's that's really all we have to think about here so that was the first part of starting in a bad economy the second one on talent was i recently hired this guy and he quit a pretty well known venture backed company that i think it just raised maybe fifty or a hundred million dollars and he joined and i had talked to him a little bit before he joined like he was thinking about doing his own startup he we traded a couple emails nothing serious just he he was wanting be to use his product then he took a job at this place alright whatever i forgot about it then he emails me and i i shared this on twitter he emails me subject line i have made an irreversible decision and i was like okay i gotta click this what's inside and he's like i just got my job and i think you should hire me and i was like okay direct to the point and he tells me why i'm blah blah and so i was like alright boom i'm sold very bold approach i already liked your hustle before this because when you were hustling to try to get me as your customer i was like this guy's is good so okay let's do this and i made him a job offer which was not like you know a silicon valley job offer but the guy lives in san francisco he was working for his silicon valley startup so he was like oh dude that's like a fifty percent pay cut and i was like i idea i didn't say this out loud but in my head what i what i felt i i told him i was like that's what i could afford to pay right out and like you look you come crush it the sky's is a limit but like that's what i could pay you right now side unseen and i said and in my head i was about to tell him the the line that i heard from warren buffett you guys probably heard the story but when warren buffett goes and tries to work for his you know kind of hero or whatever ben graham and he's like you know i'll work for you for free and ben graham goes your price is too high sir which is which is the the truth which is the idea that that you got to shadow ben graham at work side by side with him every day was you should be paying for that if you really wanna be like a successful investor that's how i felt and i didn't wanna say it because it's kinda arrogant but it's like dude if i take you under my way wing my team is like three people if you're become one of those three and you're working out of my he can't over to my house yesterday you're sitting by me work working out of you know side by side every day like really i'm providing more value to you than you are providing to me at that point and like there's still a you know i i i i appreciate the the value brink bring but let's like the the dollar amount is like the salary dollar amount is not what not the value you're getting and i think he knows that intuitively and that's why he said yes but like that ben graham story stands out family no no he's a young young guy just graduated from college but here's the thing i think people couple thoughts on that one is the salary slash compensation is just one vector of value that you get from a company that you join right another one that you get is you get the learning whatever it is that they get expose you to another one that you get is a network that you build while you're there right so there's all these other things but also in kinda in aggregate and maybe and i think it's common for people to over index on the compensation or the kinda of current compensation and under index on other things that and then there's just the just raw emotional value do you like being around the people that you're around do you enjoy the idea that you're working on like is it you know those things matter as it turns out have a fun hubspot story so when we start on this compensation thing you know brian i had to pick salaries for ourselves something more than zero and so we picked five thousand dollars a month right it's like okay well that's it's a it's a number and we obviously below market value we've been out in the market for a while and had worked in our lives so when we hired employee number of three we had to decide what we were gonna pay them five thousand dollars hired employee number four five thousand dollars and so we just built like okay here here for the salary you're here for the wrong reason right that that's not why you're gonna join this motley crew of of folks and that lasted for like a while was like we and then we and then it kinda has this inertia built in i like okay well all of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join the company are all paying each other i'm paying ourselves five thousand dollars a month now what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making five thousand dollars i of course that as a last forever and you have to what what was the pitch at that time so it's not like you know no offense to to hubspot that's not the sexiest idea you're not saying we're building the electric car here you know like you didn't have that going for you you know you might have had a like a you know your own magnet which is like you know like for me i get this cheat code because like this guy he listens to the podcast and and this happens this podcast is a great talent pipeline for us because people will listen to it over time they just they decide for themselves either i think this guy's a dummy and he annoys me or i get this guys smart and i really like you know i'd love to be hanging out with these guys i think i could learn a bunch from them and so it becomes an unfair advantage but you didn't have that back of the day so what was your how did you convince people to do this five thousand dollar you know like a block of salary building yeah so we cheated a little bit right because of the first eight people in the company seven of them came out of mit sloan the same school that brian and i went to and we met in class so it was kinda in network kind of it's like okay well it it's just a bunch of friends that sort wanna know each other in network or whatever let's go do this thing right and it's also and they were kinda far enough long in their careers that they were not missing meals or anything like that right they had just gone to you know business school or relatively good business school and and so that was a second and then the other thing and this is the great part there's equity but there's also the like this is not that risky dude like let's say this doesn't work out and we end up being chunks so the idea is really bad three six months from now you will basically be able to pick up where you left off right there's like there's no loss other than the opportunity cost of those three to six months this is not like a irreversible lifetime decision that i've made this call and that's all i'm gonna have to be able to do for the next five or ten years and that was enough it's yeah what did things change how many people do you think how many people do you think at hubspot have made like eight figures because of their equity and once you worked with those people for a long time and you're like oh shit like we the company went public and like you don't need to work anymore which and and does that change the dynamic it hasn't so to answer your questions so i i always have to there's this little it only takes like second a half for me to translate eight figures into what is that actually is that's ten million plus so yeah like me it may maybe that maybe five or ten million is like the number where you're like this don't need this job probably somewhere in the twenty to thirty range if i had to guess of people that have made that much you know over if fifty maybe even a hundred like millionaires errors in the seven figure range but even when that was happening right like well a couple of things one is it distort it a little bit because as a private company even though the valuation from the last round or whatever is x fifty the shares are not liquid so they're worth it but they're worth it on paper they can't go out and actually just sell their shares so that's kind of thing number one and so it doesn't even if they wanted to doesn't we can't really change behavior you can't go off and you know buy something with with with your shares that's thing number one but thing number two it's that we did have like this kinda speed of core right it wasn't really about the money was about winning it was about kinda of building something together and i i'd like to believe that it wasn't even really the idea that if we had taken that same early group of twenty twenty five people and parachute them into some other company in some other industry there's still software in sas that we would've have likely done reasonably well as well i think it came down to the people have the chemistry they were focused on the right thing i think we our early hiring policy was to hire kinda smart people that get shit done that was kind of the the thing we want people that have high what we call high wattage they were like me smart if you had to get have them take an iq test we didn't do that but me smart but there's lots of very very smart people in the world but they have this kind of pre election to action they could not help but like if they found a problem they're gonna go try and start solve they're gonna jump in you know fee first and they're just gonna do it or at first whatever the the phrase is and that was enough so we made a deliberate decision not to hire what we call press release hires press release hires when you hire someone and then you feel compelled to issue a press release say oh house hubspot just hired the vp sales from such and such company whatever that is a thirty year background in doing x if we felt like we ever hired someone that was worthy of a press release we did it wrong right that's not the kind of person we were looking for because they may have done amazing things that google microsoft facebook pick company of choice but the startup up is such a different context and you're we paying for these kind of specialized set of skills that may or may not be relevant ar arbitrage is really really hard so we're bigger on the identify diamonds in the rough people that are going to be big you know it's like you're buying the stock early versus going after the folks that already were press press release worthy so yeah i think i that's been my skill sean you've kinda seen my journey i think my skill has been finding the diamond in the diamonds in the rough we've had like well sean and i kinda discovered one another but then like there's steps smith who's now at a sixteen z we had t who's popular we had a bunch of people who went and founded different companies and what i've always looked for like i i purposely have looked for these diamond the roofs because i i was like i can't afford you know the pay wayne and z so i gotta hired this twenty four year old who i know will be a boss in like five or ten years by the end i sam it's not just that you can't afford them i remember once the hustle got to the point where you could afford them you were kinda disgusted by the concept of somebody making that much money i remember you were just like how much how much does this kid over here worth this like engineer at my office and i'd be like god and like whatever what he's one one fifty one seventy you're like what seventy oh my god like this is you know what if if this person left would the company fail now no not at all well it was like super crazy that was ten year or that was your was like yeah so things have changed a little bit but also like your people would show up to work here like noon and i like what the hell man this guy like just waltz in and like you're gonna and he's like are he right right when they're serving lunch but we've we've like discovered of cool people and i always look for a couple things the first thing is actually this is from paul he goes i looked to hire animals like people who like you're a little bit afraid of and they're like just like freaks where they work a lot i also work look for people who are like weird so i always want like weird people who have like fairly extreme opinions even if i totally disagree with their opinions i really like that someone's like well thought well well research it has a strong opinion on something but i love like weirdo and eccentric people and i have found that if you can at our startup at at the house we did a really good job of like accepting weirdo and letting them be odd and like we like embraced it and i always found that to be kind of like a a we used to say you know let your free flag let your free flag fly and we're like you you i don't i was like we'll have we had all types of different people we we we had just just every type of like person we work worked at our company and they'd like that we like embrace their ad they're kinda like them being different yeah and we have something so we have you know five kinda core values as part of our hubspot culture one of them is is remarkable or being remarkable and what we mean by that is there's something noteworthy they've done in their past there's something quirky something different something that's an outlier about them and it doesn't have to be specifically business or whatever you role that they're in but there's like they're just kinda like off the the kind of main beat and that we've done well with those kinds of people we give them a home kinda let them do their thing and it tends to work out yeah so so sam had weirdo and kind of like let let your free flag fly you have the the remarkable ability have you done something remarkable we had one at be that was the same as we we used to say we hired degenerate it's like intentionally a a word that's usually negative right like we hired tenders and what we said we'd always asked me and con we noticed this in each other we were like dude we've gone through these phases in our lives or we just got really obsessed with something that didn't have a clear payoff like it wasn't the popular thing to be obsessed with like it wasn't the like cookie cutter good thing to be obsessed like it wasn't like grades in school it would be like you know freaking got really into you know this video game and he was like yeah became like a top hundred ranked player of this game and like it was a total like you know in one hand i i knew it was like a waste of time but like i couldn't help it i just loved it and obsessed with it i became the best at it and i just wanted to win like so badly and at at some point even stopping about winning it was just like i wanted to like get to like the next level and and and keep going and i had i done the same thing with poker he had done it with poker also so we kind of identify these do you it's like hey do you go through these periods of like three years of deep obsession around some get competitive like thing and and then when you do do you like really like try to study the game and figure out how to like what are the loopholes in the game what the rules of the game you immerse yourself with other players in the game because like well cool our game now is just start and we would try to find people who had some evidence of d desi it's like yeah you come in at noon because you stay up till four in the morning like building that sound cloud player that works like tiktok for no reason because you're so in the way that sound cloud like it's too slow in the way that they develop things it's like other people would look at that as like oh you're not really reliable or very structured or you you know why does you work on that that wasn't even like the task at hand whereas we would see that and we'd be like oh all we need to do is just point this guy's d at the right direction and then we'll win and that was like go mindset sec that's yeah well i i think of that as a kind of borderline pathological obsession like that's like once you attach stuff whatever it happens to be right and what our job is to kind of bring it just shy of pathological where it's like herman sell but it's like you can't help yourself you're gonna like just dig in and and whether it's video games or whatever it happens to be people that have i don't call it a gene but i have that trait tend to work out well in startups because you're trying to tap your off to a a particular thing of particular problem desi thing i'm just as word since on the topic of talent i've got this little mini framework works at multiple levels of that abstraction they're like three kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people one is you have the creative and these are people that start they have ideas they have a hundred and eighty mile you know ideas is an hour kind of thing if you sit down a room with them then there are the so they're they're starters then you have the complete those are people that can make a list of like here are the things that need to get done in order for us to ship pod to do whatever and often those folks are at odds like the the idea folks are kinda really frustrated with the the complete that i was like i'm trying to check a box make our it's like yes but i'm doing this thing and it's not good enough yet but you have that tension and that's what brings him the third person which is the collaborator and the cal is really good at communicate is really good at bridging gaps across departments across individual people and kinda play it all together and usually you're looking for someone that has at least some like a nine or ten on one of those dimensions a seven or eight another one and usually very low on the third right like you can have one you super creative i'm on the creative side i'm i yeah for sure contribution well but how that doesn't make sense to me because you lead a twenty billion dollar a software company that then you've been doing it for twenty years like and as a cto she'll like how on earth you pull that off and it's public it's publicly traded which means you gotta go through all the bullshit that like is the opposite of creativity yep how do you how do like well like one thing that you shared last time you you talked about this little like kind of calculators or the little like kind of growth growth tools that you had built which was just like oh i was just tinkering and i made this little like page load speed test site and then or whatever i don't remember the exact example but you had built like three or four of those that drove like a substantial amount of traffic for hubspot early on and like even now with word play like you know you're just you're still creating stuff even now that were just talking we were just talking he's getting ready for the earnings call and like that to me is the opposite of creativity you know what i mean that's like you're you have so many you have such a narrow lane that you could stay within that's like it seems so hard yeah so i'll i'll say this i have done everything in my in my power to reduce the time i have to spend on things that i'm not good at right and which is the things that are kinda of non creative not a part of that so i don't have any direct reports which is unheard of for a company that is you know for a founder that has seven thousand people in the company and a lot of them on the kind of product and engineering team which presumably you know the cto would kinda help manage lee i i don't do that and so when the only meetings i go to are where there's some creativity involved i don't like to go to kinda status things and updates or whatever like i can read an email as well as the next person so but but there are things that are non del that one of we should we should probably talk about it as online list of things so one is earnings calls another one is getting on to public stages right so for instance we have an annual conference call inbound that you know the last time it was in person that had like twenty five thousand people in the live event right like it's it's big and i have to give the keynote every year and i've been doing it for ten plus years now which i hate and i'm bad at but that was one of those because i'm founder that was one of those non del things right i couldn't say oh well we're gonna have someone else to go do that because you know in my role is founder i have a certain kind of wait to me just by virtue of the title or of being a founder versus someone else so sean listen to this listen to this da story in da you could fill in the blanks as we go because you could decide how much you wanna reveal but there has been a couple different times maybe three different times i've introduced da mesh to a founder of a company who was raising money and literally within five minutes he replied and said i looked at the deck i'm in or blank them amount do he don't mind she could reveal if you wanna say some the some of the times how much it was but and he replied with i'm in just so you know though i've got one rule which is i always sided with the founder and i'm always on your team but the downside of that is like i'm gonna make close to no time you didn't say it this way but is like i'm gonna make close to no time for you or like you know like i think you said it like i'm totally gonna be silent a silent partner i'm not gonna bother you which means if you wanna bother me i probably you know i'm not gonna talk to you that much but that's like the stipulation for taking my money if you wanna take it great do it i've seen that happen three different times and do you wanna reveal how much it was or no i i don't recall but but i will say this i've made roughly i think a little over a hundred investments now across my angel investment i will call it a career but my activities and eighty to ninety percent i've never actually talked to the founders ever met with him okay over vast majority of my deals i make the decision within twenty four hours it's like like i don't have time to go dig in to do due diligence on some industry or whatever like that's not the point my point is not that there's only two reasons i do angel investing and it's and none of neither of them are to make a return one of them is around living vic through other entrepreneurs i just like i like that process and this is you know three dates even starting hubspot and the other one quite modestly is just bragging rights is to be able to say five to ten fifteen years from now it's like because no one cares like how much you investment what i was like oh yeah i was in o back in the i was just stack overflow back on the day i was like you know first money on this company this company this company and that feels nice it's it's not such a kind of magna was getting back to the community is purely is like it'd be cool to be able to have been part of you know these great founding teams that went off and build great companies i really respect that you said that part because i thought you were gonna say like you know just i what the deposits care about yeah yeah i just you know just a foster entrepreneurship or like you know you you know use the d word democrat something something and instead you said a true thing that i i think every angel investor feels is like it's awesome to have a notch on your belt and be like yeah i saw i i either i saw that or i backed that i bet on that and it and it worked out and it's awesome it's an awesome feeling it is a perk of the job and it's a real one so the fact that you said that to me shows me that you are a real one der i'm i i'm what i refer to myself as like a warm hearted red blooded capitalist right so i have passion it's not like and i don't like people on that social path but i i'm a capitalist it's like okay well for instance inside of this is gonna sound completely modest but we open this door on in the last episode somebody might as well walk through it now is so last episode we talked about kinda putting a value on your time whatever it happens to be and that anything that falls below the line in terms of you can outsource a delegated or whatever for less than that you don't do those things right don't mow your lawn whatever if and so i haven't i should recalibrate but you know my number personally the one i use just because the math is easier is like ten thousand dollars an hour but that's what i if i were on the open market i think i could i could make that if fast what dude i i would have thought higher i would have thought higher that affected so but what do you that number never use it's higher no but i think i i think it would be like fifty or a hundred thousand an hour maybe like i mean way higher one to make the case but i can make my point without having to make that particular case okay let me ask you a question yeah to make it real so you buy something you you book a plane ticket it's like whatever you it didn't work out or you you deserve a refund but you'd have to go chase it down do you just have somebody who you're like this is my chief of staff my ea that like i just say you do it or you're like hey it was two thousand dollars but it's below my early rate i'm not gonna do i just eat the loss and move on that'll do it because even del then require some follow up require some explanation and they're gonna apologize because they could only get passed back or it was only a trend like don't i don't care i just honestly don't care and so in factory investment thing so let's say you know my when i started my average investment rate was we'll call it a hundred thousand dollars give or take a little bit it's grown considerably since then but if i spent like five hours doing due diligence or having founder meetings or whatever i basically double their valuation or have my investment amount right because like and i believe i put cash in for which i'm gonna get shares but then i put another fifty thousand dollars or hundred thousand dollars worth of time in just in the due diligence which is easier to kinda run up that bill it makes no mathematical sense why people would do that right it's like okay do you really feel like you're going to and the reason they rationalize and this makes sense is that if you really believe that as a result of spending that time on the margin you're gonna make better investment decisions you're gonna pick better companies you're gonna do these things and maybe for the first hour or two in their early state startup there's just not that much diligence to do right like what are you gonna dig into like like i hear you don't you like the founders or you don't move on our son where's is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better or the the other part that's obvious but worth saying out loud just in case people are like well then why are you doing this podcast well you also just do things you like and you those are the things that you don't do you don't put a a dollar amount on because you enjoy them and therefore it is not a cost to you it is like a you know a benefit to you so so yeah if you love gardening then you garden no you don't put a ten thousand dollar an hour mark on it is that fair for you that's how i think about it at least that is fair and so what what i solve for is i like to solve for it's gonna sense it's a little bit of a squishy terms is just raw impact i'd like scale so if you folks were a much smaller blog let's to say it's like oh i'm gonna reach fifty people as a result this and i have ideas that i think our worth sharing and it was smaller i'm like and and and it's not like oh i don't get up pot of a bed in the morning unless there's at least you know ten thousand people if if this was morning for podcast then i i would i do it five amplify my time right one little time i have left on the planet what things that i know so i'm always looking for think to do things at scale like how find away let let speaking of things at scale let's talk about this thing because like on the surface this thing that you recently did like a year ago is incredibly silly and not worth your time but basically i think a year and a half ago world is it like a game that an online game is like a word game that that went viral you built a thing called the word play is it word play dot com it's word play dot com right dot com yeah by the way you buy domain names so you bought the hustle dot com for us you bought me copy that dot com thank you for that i forgot to say thank you in person but so you buy like a lot of amazing but you have word play dot com and did you tweet that it was getting seven million users a week or three what was the number well so the i just went check with the numbers okay so just to kinda of place the timeline in in frame so november and december of last year twenty twenty one is when word took off in january when it really kinda hit it's i think close to its peak and that's roughly when the new york times acquired word and couple things kind of bought in it was fine i think it was you know great outcome for josh ward but there were things that were kinda bothering me that were limitations in the game and wasn't an avid player of the game and now it's like okay well york times has bought there's no way that anything's gonna happen for like years than ever so i was kinda thing number one thing number two like it was it had been a while since i had launched like some simple free thing publicly i hadn't gone through the process and there were other things i wanted to learn so like oh i wanna learn more about ver rochelle in next js and types script and things like that so i like okay well this is excuse me then that intersect with the third thing which was like a dominant variable in the equation is my son was taking a python program in class he's eleven right he's going through this process and for him it's it's still very abstract he's learning programming using enjoys everything involving technology and screens but it was abstract so on a saturday night i said okay well let me build something when python happens to be my language build something so he can see because he plays world he knows the game and so i started on a saturday night with a deadline for sunday that i'm gonna launch something with him tomorrow we're gonna have google analytics on it so we're gonna launch it i'm gonna launch it by tweeting it and so he know he knows what social media is right he's you know so i'm like oh we've got this thing that didn't exist yesterday i wrote the code over the course of last night in python the language that you're learning and we're gonna launch it and now you can see users coming in right you can see and so now what i want him to have in his head is that when he as it through the course of his life as he encounters problems that are sol with software which is a lot like it's actually tactile for him he's like oh i don't know i don't have the skills right now to do what you know dad just did but i know it's possible i know it's possible because he did it in the span of twenty four hours so if i wanna go off and build a video game wanna go off and build some tool for my school i wanna go some social network for my whatever it is it feels like now it's it's more approachable for him it's got years ago before he'll get to that level but anyway so those three things sort of came together and so we launched it on that sunday this is i think in february or so give or take and since then it's had like forty five million games have been played nine and a half million people have come through it any given moment time right now i look at google analyst analytics it'd be two three thousand people playing like right now which how how did it get so much traffic where did the traffic come from well it helps that i have a social media falling right i've got a million followers on linkedin i've got three hundred thousand on twitter so there's that there's some that that's that's a lot but that's not i i wouldn't have that but yeah yeah so i don't know for that is it how many users you think out from that in the early all what was it big was it big right off the bat like the first week was it big i know first day probably a bunch of people checked it but like i'm sure you posted it and that was the big surge so what was like the first week roughly do you remember first week was probably maybe fifty to hundred thousand so it wasn't it wasn't a lot but it was something but then like once you kinda get into it this is the you know kind of power of iteration is that oh well one of the things that i found missing in the original world was that i it was a single player game like you played and you played once a day and that was it so two big changes that we made in word play one was it was unlimited play you didn't you didn't have to play just once a day and two it it allowed you to challenge your friends so you could say oh i just played this word i solved in four turns here's my score and send literally a simple link to anyone or a group on and this happens tens of thousands of times right like someone will take a link that they just play they're really proud of their score and then their family they can post it their a whatsapp group they can post it their you know wherever they want and say i invite you to like beat my score kind of thing and so that's the viral element and so then as more people play you can track that as you might have as a google analyst analytics event and say how many people how many anytime are people clicking that share button and issuing challenges to other people and so that once you can kinda get into something where there's a compounding effect on the user base so as a user base grows and so now the thing i'm fighting though right is that so that's happening that's going well but then the interest in world and related games is waiting because everything has its kinda peak in his and it's ebb and so but it's been an interesting exercise and so we on the had a learning path one of the things i hadn't done in a while i was like okay well what's traffic actually worth let's say i had to make a living on this thing or make the company quote unquote project profitable i put google adsense on it which is the easiest thing to do and discovered that like if i weren't bothered by the fact that there would be two ads on the main game board page if i were solving for rem monetization it was like ninety thousand dollars a month can google so it's traffic wow i thought you're less yeah i thought he's gonna say like five grade a month put ninety grand a month and you're you only have your only costs are hosting right yeah and and my time right yeah first of all sean go to word play dot com and then go to like the about page his about page is incredibly well written it's wonderful copywriting it's wonderful you've got a wonderful voice it says obviously the first sentence but it says why would you do this or is it better yet why would i do this that's a really good question my wife asked me the same question and then you like go on to explain what it just it you you're you're you're quite a good writer for also being like this amazing engineer typically those i wouldn't writing course that sean put on you know that right list like i'm right i go around here with my nice i like to say i todd dark mesh everything he knows even before he met me i'd somehow caught him all that good stuff before he built hubspot he what what do so this is making ninety grand a month maybe or about what do you is this there it could it's not right there's no ads don't turn ads off because that's no wait and people are asking is like our mesh why do you have ads on this thing i'm like to learn and like it's like i've learned what i need you to learn so i can was was tweeting in linkedin posting this on linkedin the only way you got users what do you think this could sell for right now and is this the is this the biggest side project you've ever created our our buddy tried to buy sue tried to bite off you did he really he he he tweeted out he's like i'd like to buy this off you i've you know i've built mobile games before know hey he was like semi serious at least i don't i don't know if you talk to him or not but check it what do you think you could what do you think like if you cared what do you think you could sell it for two three million dollars maybe right now that let's say the ad revenue would go down to like fifty thousand or something like because i haven't turned new adsense in a while that's six hundred thousand dollars a year apply a five x multiple so somewhere between two dollars and ten million dollars would be my guess if i like if fax calling for so and is this the it was was posting it on linkedin and twitter the only way that you got users or did you do some other weird hacks i had my blog have my it's like i'm a big believer in like you know what folks call like the flywheel there's all these little things that are attached to the flywheel right it's like oh while linkedin helps a little bit puts in little energy twitter it doesn't a little bit and i have my blog and the email goes out and there's like things that i sort of do yeah so it it helps but it's like the hardest part is that cold start problem like how do you get your first hundred thousand people a hundred to a thousand people and then it's the matter of like tracking the retention rate on those users do they come back the other thing that's been interesting about workplace as far as lesson learned is that you know when it started the average time a user spent according to google was roughly four minutes on the game okay in the early weeks and now that number is at fourteen minutes is the average time a user spends you know across how many a thousand users come in a given day so right what and is this the biggest side project you ever ever created depends on how you measure it so technically no not in terms of just like raw traffic i've built graders and things like that before that have done better but what what have you built that what side project have you built outside of hubspot that gets more traffic so two or people month really did side projects this is my first one that was like clearly because it was a game had had been anything other than a game i would have rationalize some way to bring it into the spot umbrella because i like to have like all my eggs in that basket but just given the the circumstances here didn't really make sense and even now like i'm thinking about doing a kind of a marketing and sales related addition of word play right like the entire list of words or do it based on mart tech companies it's like okay do you know the the players in the space kind of thing and then you can get sponsorships or whatever anyway but yeah yeah website greater was the this kind of a project where it was like a free i'm i'm i really like low friction things that people can come to the website and this is why i said i were chatting yesterday is where i'm looking at flutter this new development environment and language well darts the language but flutter is the the offering framework for building mobile apps across ios and android and things it's the it's the what the cool new kids are learning and he's like no why would ever wanna build a mobile app that's like something people have to download i have to get approval from you know apple to kinda post my like i've i wanna like to just do it like immediately he's got and he's right just like okay anyway so that's the play story it's been it's been a lot of fun i've and it's hard to know with these things like like we're the road leaves like we're playing itself may or may not kinda connect back to other things whatever but the things i've learned through it i think will it's like okay well here's what it takes to build this kind of it's like okay well then yeah i'm using it to play around in this community it's like okay can i take the word play user base one of are things they care about and build a community around word play you know using one of the existing kinda community platforms and and see if that's a thing right like okay if you could aggregate people with like interest that end of self has value and i want it to be send something that kind of self runs but we'll see if you were i'm i'm gonna ask der if sam had built this as a side project and he was at the same point you're at right now what would you like kind of advise him to do if it was sam's project and he were just kind of an outsider said oh that's really cool you did that and it sounds like you've kind of reached this point where you don't really have a direction of where it's gonna go next what would you kind of tell sam decide what you wanna do which is okay do you wanna like take this to the next level or you turn into a hundred million billion dollar business you know spit off or decide that it's just gonna be a personal project and just like my personal blog is that i've made that decision it's like i'm not going to try and monetize and hire employees i'm not gonna do any of those things right it's gonna be and and my son will continue to act as out of product because he's the one that test the thing every morning and we played tournaments every evening that's the big new feature that's coming out is a multi round tournaments by the way in terms of like i think half of what i know sean i i learned from you the other half i learned from from right like one of the things around chess dot com which you guys talked about which i've been a a member and player on for ten plus years i you of the site but then you think about word playing is like okay well this is chess dot com but for word game enthusiasts versus chest enthusiasts and then just all group so as a reminder people chest dot com is like a huge business like like multi billion dollar valuation we talked about this when we talked about chess also which was what other things are like chess and we had said su and we had said i think we had said like a sc or whatever yep word is word yeah i think they're almost as big if not i i think it would be i wouldn't be shocked if it was bigger than chess i wouldn't be shocked i would i would be more shocked if it was like a tenth the size as the chest ent audience i would guess it's like in the range and there's very few games that are in the range and so that alone makes it an interesting comp if in that sense so so the lessons you draw from chest dot com right which is a relatively straightforward is you have like a rating system right you have leader boards and scores you have challenges you have social connections where you make your friends on chest dot com so you can invite like it's all the things right these are very easily trans into other games like word play right right so anyway so we'll pick and choose as far give you one little feature i think would be cool because leader boards are always this problem in general where like leader boards cool for the top ten people and then for everybody else on earth it's like oh great i'm player number three thirty nine thousand fantastic right yep and so there's all these like if i kinda study this i was like who's solve this problem and there's really three models that work one is more like chess and and games do this they they create a rank system so it's not your number eighty thousand in the world because that doesn't mean anything but you go from bronze to silver to gold to platinum to master to grand master and like you you just compete to get your own level up within that to get to your next batch and that's a karate belt the karate belt method let's call it then there's the next one which is your social your rank matters when it's with people you know that are either your friends your school your city something like that so you can kinda hack a proximity based thing and then the third one which i think is somewhat interesting which is it doesn't even matter what my rank is but there's something cool like if i go to word play it right now i feel like i'm alone in this experience i don't know that there's three thousand other people solving this right now and also i don't know i bet you there's like some celebrity that plays word play every day like eventually like i don't know mila k plays this every day and i think there's something really cool to like sort of like a stars they're just like us vibe of like if i kinda knew that that that x known people have solved it for today that's just kinda interesting and it's kind of like you know makes them more approachable so i i almost wonder if there was like a little feature like that where if you're a blue check tech person you could kind of like off and be like i either solved it or failed today and you could just have that as a little bored anyways there's was my three random feature a good idea the one things and i it's not surfaced on the on the probably this is really good idea but one of things i do have is the comment there's there's commentary so as you're playing the software will kinda give you a little kind of sometimes snarky sometimes fun messages sometimes data like oh you're want a few people that's ever guessed this particular word that's not a very common word to use congrats good for you or this is the thousands time you've used this particular word yeah points for consistency so there's just kinda running commentary but i like that idea of like just kind front loading it's like here's a number of people that solve this game i i give you stats at the end of the game is like oh only fourteen percent of the people or players solve this particular word and it i took them on average seven point i mean four point seven guesses so yeah can i throw two more at you this is now my my future brainstorm room for you if you first there's nothing more there's nothing more than like an entrepreneur there's nothing more than like a person who has no stake saying hey have you thought have you thought about have you thought about this why did you know this yet there's nothing less entertaining out of podcast than me telling you features for word play by fuck it's this is our podcast good if you ever replied candy crush they do this thing which was they make they so steaks stakes matter a lot in stories or any kind of like adventure yep and so like you know the if you open up a pack of warhead and know you see a black one oh that's the really crazy one yep candy crush does this in their games where if you start a level it says this is night hard or this is a you know medium hard or whatever so i'd like to see that in the word play when i come into every day i'd like to know if this is a night hard puzzle or if this is just okay it gets me amped up for my play yep that's a little good idea and it's combining that with your cheering idea and then we can move on but so imagine we had a tier mechanism that you can go from bronze to silver to whatever to ninja level you know right now when you start the game you get a random word that and other people get random words as well and there's a daily word but everybody plays together but imagine that like as you move up the ring it gets harder like now you're a level that you have achieved let alone soft right it's like no one gets here you're here and then you know do things for streak like okay well you're the first person has solved like fifty games in a row with this tier or something like that that think that'd be fun so what one last one i think you'll like which is you are fan of crypto i think you would if you like the crypto ethos and i think if you could advance the cause of crypto that would be like a win for you personally so we gave out this milk money grant this like milk we gave out like a bunch of money to people just to build whatever they want at one guy this guy dave he built this thing that was like a world game but it was with crypto which was just you play word as is but if you solve it you could win like one mat like a tiny amount or like for then he was like playing with different ideas he's like oh there's actually a hundred matt jackpot for the day and like only winners are eligible for the jackpot you might you might get it or you might not and so you got a bunch of people connecting a wallet so i think what you could do is you could actually just add that into play which was by the way there's a hundred dollar a day prize paid out in mat or or whatever all you gotta do is create a little wallet here and like you might win and so i think a bunch of your avid players would create a crypto wallet where they might not otherwise so you'll onboard new people into the world of crypto you can create a dead simple meta either funnel them to meta ass or create a dead simple crypto wallet that will become like a the play to earn crypto wallet you know for the future anyways that's i will i will now stop talking yep by the way i just so i actually added the ability to connect your connect your diesel wall in your theory wallet to playing and my idea of the time was instead of turning ads off i'm gonna make that a pot and so as ad revenue accumulates until the next payout whatever it happens to and then it's like oh the top ten winners are gonna get this distribution and let's start over again so not to make money but we'll have money coming in through adsense sense and then we'll kinda right sustainable earn game that's awesome yeah it's amazing yeah yep let me sean let this is an interesting topic but i understand there's like laws and scc stuff around what you can and i'd say der just tell me it feel like you can't but basically i think it was in late may i'm looking at now in like may twenty fifth or something like that sean i don't know if you saw this but like there was headlines that said like da shah cto founder of hubspot buys hubspot shares and i think it was like was it ten million dollars it was it a was pretty substantial amount it was over over three forgot the exact amount is but it was millions of dollars and then suddenly like the stock like the next day like went up because it was like oh man da like the insider bought it he know he like here he has faith in the company that was a pretty that that's a pretty cool move when you're doing something like that what is your thinking like are you thinking like like is it part of you like i just wanna prove to the world that i'm brave is it part of you like oh no this is just undervalued like the they're they're foolish the it's i mean like what what's your what's your motivation there it's exactly what you said which is i just thought the company was undervalued given the in a long term potential and i've done this before i did it a couple years ago in bought a bunch of shares i think even more at that time like at a hundred and twenty five dollars a share right i'm like okay well and this is when hubspot stock had dipped over the ensuing i mean the pre year prior two to three months i'm like i understand the markets more like it's but this doesn't make any sense like it you know hubspot stock to me was worth more than at the time a hundred and twenty five dollars turns out i was right and so it's it's a similar thing it's like an and it does signal belief in the company right it's but it's what i it's what i believe and there are regulations around it and then you know people ask like well why did you you know buy at that time and as it turns out it was the exact window of time that had to wait a certain period since my last transaction to when i could buy in the day that i was eligible to buy i bought and it's like i coca the price is low enough i still have conviction that lot over the also buying with money that like where did this three million dollars come from let's say isn't that just stock you previously sold that you now are buying or like is it's all you have some other huge side yes yes yes or can you can you take a loan against your hubspot shares to buy more like there's like a hundred things you cannot do that's one of them yeah wow no i think i saw that the other day and you you've done you've made a few decisions like once in while you do something and i'm like oh this guy is nutty in a cool way and that's not exactly nutty but it's like a pretty bold move i i thought it was a pretty cool move and i and i saw that and i was wondering what what was going through your head when you did that because within the psychology like when i don't know how hubspot sucks like just rounding i think it's down like forty maybe fifty percent something like that from the time high like during the the the last kind of the the the peak of the peak last year or whatever and so you know we come on here sometimes and i'll be like alright guys you know you know sam would be like dude how are you and you lost a bunch of money today i'm like yeah yeah i lost like a million dollars today and like you know e eats is down and i'm i'm down a million dollars i'll share my psychology of like dealing with this this the t of a loss or whatever and i'll i'll be like you gotta you know here's how i think about it you play that game at like a thousand x higher stakes where like you know more like you're looking five hundred million yeah exactly i've losing five hundred thousand you're losing five hundred million or whatever something crazy like that what's what's your psychology like i don't know like i think you know what question i'm trying to ask even though i i don't have the how just feel to half a billion dollars is way you're asking me or how do you deal with that and i'm like yeah go go is that how much you lost do you think it's more than that but yeah who's kind of he's like this podcast were fun when we were talking about word play think fine like it i'm i'm not really in and i'm just saying this but it's true it does not fa me like one bit because the reality is it does not change my life one iota right other than like okay well it impacts you know hotspot hubspot employees and charlotte and i get that but in terms of me individually like nothing changes right like i wasn't off planning to buy smile small islands or take over governments or something like that or bi twitter right i was not i didn't have any of those kinds of plans and so absent those kinds of plans like i feel sorry for the nonprofit that i would have invested in but you know my wife continues to invest there's you know we have plans to do the last we wanna do and so it's like okay well i still will wake up every day and do the same things i did before and i'll look at the play things and respond to user emails or it looks like in do have hubspot stuff it's like okay they're like what's you don't even have you you don't even have the self talk in your head where you kinda need to like because for me when it happens i'm like you know i have a instant reaction as i go look at a chart or a price or whatever and then i give myself a little self talk i'm good like in the last seventeen seconds but i do have those seventeen seconds it sounds like you don't even have those seventeen seconds because you're like well i've already been over this before in my head at some point in my life and not it doesn't matter let alone the self talk the self talk is one thing let alone like that but and then there's also this other thing that you and i have sean which is like it if the markets are shit for a year two like we will change our day to day actions like you know we may not buy x y and z or like we might you know we're not to that point where it's like doesn't matter major cut backs at the p household right now major cut backs yeah it's like we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll maybe change behavior but you don't even change i laid it off my son yeah i i they change in the other direction right so the market is dipped my kind of average check size has actually gone up i've made bigger bets and things because i think valuations are starting to adjust know slowly i think they're better deals now good entrepreneurs starting companies so but overall like the psychology of it has just just does not like have any impact and like over the long term you know i didn't make this up but is is that the you you know the valuation of a company which is like the market price will os around the value right and value is like the revenues you have the products that you build what are you actually doing you know for your customers and so that you know far revenues had dropped off you know before something that's something like that had happened that'd be a different story but it's like okay well that hasn't changed we are the same business today if not better than we were three months ago six months ago and the valuation over time will kinda self correct one of the things i'd like about the market is that yeah i think that things will kind of wash out and we'll see yeah and a lot of hubspot customers are kind of like you know medium sized let's say businesses so do you like do you spend much energy being like okay where is the economy going what's gonna happen to my customers which will have some knock on effect of like what's gonna happen to our business do you care spend energy there because i find myself for the reason i asked because i find myself sometimes going down these rabbit holes like okay what do i think gonna happen then at pardon of me like well does any of that really matter or affect me or you know is this energy useful or is this just sort of nervous energy that i'm wasting thinking about this stuff do you is is hubspot customer base even many customers this husband have like a hundred and thirty thousand like yeah over that yeah yeah and the when i think when i sold it was a hundred thousand or just crossed a hundred thousand in the grand scheme of things the one that is i told them and like well a hundred thousand customers that's like kind of a lot but that's not that much i was like the the market's way bigger than a hundred thousand people who would wanna buy this and so is if the hides a hundred thousand or a hundred and fifty thousand whatever it is does that number even big enough to have the needle move significantly when the economy is shit on a on a percentage basis like it's i'll answer this way so i'll answer the first question then we'll kinda move the second one which is you know do i spend time thinking about this do i do anything about it in the answers yes and hubspot we will try to model out here's here's the impact we think we could have on our business but and there's two sides to it there's the kind of defensive side of it it's like we wanna make sure that we have enough cash in the bank to weather the storm and we don't know how long this one the last and we have models for how you know how long it's gonna last how deep it's gonna be those kinds of things as far as impact but then the other car which isn't to me and much more exciting which is okay given what we know what can we do to capitalize on this crisis right then this is what's happening right now what can we do to make this net positive for hubspot and we had something similar happened in two thousand eight at the last hubspot was much earlier so things we even when the pandemic started one of the things we did do is like oh there's lots of uncertainty businesses are struggling everyone's kinda batting down the hatch and so we said okay we're gonna give even more value we're going to for our partners we're gonna front them the cash for the you revenue we know is coming over time because cash is a is an issue we had a bunch of cash in the balance so we did things that kinda made us stronger helped our customers and so we're looking for those same kinds of opportunities i was like okay now that everyone's kinda looking at the p and l and looking at all their line items or whatever is can we benefit from this because hubspot you in some ways it's counter was like okay well instead of buying the big incumbent and spending hundreds a thousand dollars maybe now people that might not have considered hubspot a year ago would now consider it because there be more value cautious now than they were historically yeah so when you were starting the company so like there's a there you know if you just look at the math there's a world where hubspot in the next five or ten or who knows how long it can be worth like a hundred billion dollars which is you know one of the biggest top two hundred or something companies in the world when you were starting the company did you have a number in your head where like man i think this i think this can make a hundred million dollars year i think this might be a billion dollar company or was it as big as man i think this could be worth tens of billions we didn't have a specific number in our head but we had i i'll say comparable for lack of a better term which is okay there are successful software companies that have done similar or related things either they're in the same market or in the same target customer base that had achieved it it's like okay well and this is what we told to vcs at our pitch we're like okay we're not we think at the time we were just in marketing software so here he was i'll give you the first thirty seconds of the pitch is that in the history of software no one has ever really built a ten plus billion dollar household name global brand marketing software company had never been done omni was the greatest one at the time with a billion and a half dollar you know price tag at the time and we're like and the reason people you know companies have not been built in the marketing tech spaces because marketing is an arts and crafts kinda discipline it's about the shade of your logo and you're outsourcing a bunch of creative stuff or whatever but it's not the kind of problem software solves and our belief was that marketing was increasingly turning into the kind of thing software does solve lots of data coming in you're trying to make decisions around all the stuff look exactly like an industry the software can help with and so our thesis was that someday someone will build a hundred two hundred five hundred billion dollar software company that's doing the thing we're trying to do and we said it might as well be us were relatively nice people and we're and we're kinda committed to this and seeing it through so you know do we think the odds were relatively the high that we would pull it off no but do we think there was an opportunity to do the kind of thing that you're talking about yeah i'd like it others had done and we were not putting someone on mars right that was not i was like okay well people have done this before and this just a different time than maybe now the time is right for a new company to do something that you know has been done but but better this goes a little bit to your pixar kind of vision sean is it's like okay well you know people sometimes give us like okay well you you know what are you gonna do that's different and why is this you know what is the world need the answer is the world doesn't need more pixar and so you know saying to you like oh you don't really need to do that is like telling elon musk because the world wouldn't need another their car company and like they kind of downplay the fact that like it's got four wheels i guess you from point to point b but it's salt like there's just one interesting element about it makes it completely different right it's like it's the same thing like most ideas that have been super successful are not complete new from a whole cloth cut right they're like there and i don't like the cliche building shutting on those shoulders of giants but it's like like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree it's just based on your level of abstraction how many steps back you're willing to go so i was like okay yeah i can see someone building something massive here was like i don't i'll get off my ranch it's like so we had facebook did awesome well then twitter comes along and people said oh well that's just facebook well you have shorter messages or something like is like facebook with constraints with facebook instagram number long it's like well you can post photos on facebook why would anyone ever use instagram that's like facebook with all all the other cool things that i like as well right no messenger not none of that stuff and then tiktok comes along it's like well that's just kind of videos that you can do on facebook you can do on instagram you can do on twitter but is this it's like just different enough in a compelling enough way where and it's still a video social social based video app and you know let the world on fire right like so even something as old as video or as photos it's still not over it's just not over is part of the kinda the human condition right now anyway it's if you just sean if you go off and wanna do another pixar if you're ever looking for investor i will make a decision twenty four hours how your guy what was that tweet about sean i that was on the left field what do what are you saying okay so i all my tweets are at a left field so that's just twitter that's what twitter supposed to be right just a bunch of left field shit that i'll get in a feed i was watching i don't know what i was watching it i think my niece were over and they're watching toy story and i was like twitter is amazing pixar amazing and i was like why is like i was like i wanna do something amazing this literally how my brain works this is like putting oh that looks so awesome that's like an awesome end to output i would be so proud if i had made something like that bet i could right like it's this combination of like seeing something that is really appealing and then having the delusional belief that like of course i could do it if i just tried and so i just thought it to myself i was like you know that would be a fun company to build if you could just make great stories great movies and put them out to their into the world that would be so fun as a thing if that's like the thing you did and like i hundreds of millions of people not just like use your product there's one thing to use your product it's nothing to like love it grow up on it and have like you know like this extreme like nostalgic emotion around around like these movies right like if i see know for or everybody is a little bit different but for it's like don't know home alone and mighty ducks and then in a lion king there's like these a couple of movies that just like they meant a lot at the time and they still mean a lot even though i don't interact with them you so i have because otherwise i'm gonna forget one thing i need to say on on this particular episode because otherwise it'll keep me up at night so i have like a at a handful of like frameworks of some things i think about the way of and think about the world and this ties back to sean's next trillion dollar company thing which i think it can be by way sean just okay so imagine let's take a step back i'm on a whiteboard and the whiteboard we it's the universe of all possible people everyone on the planet and he draws a circle with one of your skills so in sean's case let's say we put copy as one of the skills that he's in the top one percent or top five percent whatever number you wanna associate with it and so that's the circle like okay x number of people are at sean's level or better and at copy awesome let's say we draw another circle that's we'll call it crypto knowledge is just how crypto works and that's a group of people awesome rarer skill because it's a newer there's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting we can accept that will be a smaller circle what happens though is if you intersect those two circles and turn into a venn diagram the number of people that no copy really well and also know crypto really well is a hundred times smaller than either of those circles combined right and this is we see the same effect like in standardized test if you took the sat or the g or the gm mat there are people that are really good at english portion of the test there are people that are really good the math portion of the test but the ones that score really really well are the ones that are good at both they don't have to best at both because that something that's actually rare is the combination of the english of the quan same thing here so now imagine so this is what i call it the trillion dollar venn diagram success right i've made data so you draw with examples of your skills and say okay well i'm now not like one in a million i'm one in a billion right or we're one in five billion whatever that is and if you can convert that into some kind of monet business thing or whatever that's when magic sort of happens so that's kind thing number one is like what's your thing what are your skills and what drag one how much value will that intersection create is two things one is how rare is that intersection whether it's two circles or three circles or whatever how rare is it and then the other one is how how much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have so for instance i must offer developer that's one of my that's my core skill i've been programming for like thirty years now that's my thing deep down outside my core if i combine that with i'm gonna go off in which i could never do become a olympic level swim let's say like also very rare the intersection of that is it's like okay well the opportunity that reveals because the two things are so unrelated was like i don't know how i would take my ability to build a web app and intersect with my like yeah there's something things i could but i know if that would be that huge but software development is applicable to lots of if i gonna be an academic researcher if i was gonna go into music if i was like other things there's a lot more overlap to degree that like those two inter they they reinforce each others the software helps me do this and that helps me do this and this is one of the reasons so my advice here was as you're picking skills to acquire acquire skills that are both rare but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at that that will kinda drive that kind of that ra and and that what drives drives the overall value which kinda brings me to it's like and so when i think those things that i wanted to learn it's like okay well this is why i got into to copy was like if i can and copy this is another form of this is communicating at scale is what copywriting it right like it's like in usually textual form it's like okay well i don't know that many software engineers that can copyright really well like i literally other than that that have that started companies right it's like i they don't exist but very rarely do you get like really really good engineers that went off in red six books on copywriting in du sean's class that that's not a common would you you are you are a good writing a writer before you got into this no no no i mean you're writing great and by the way sean let's what's you gotta pip it out m dot com slash power writing just go to m dot com and you see it yeah yeah just go to m dot com m a v e n dot com i'm on the homepage starts in two weeks alright so the the what you said is great i would add one more circle here your picks pixar thing by the way the reason you might pull it off is because you have a very weird and unique and related level of skills so yes there are people that are better maybe better creative better animators better entertain whatever but they don't know crypto maybe that's the thing that unlocks the next trillion dollar company is entertainment intersect with crypto it's the netflix for the blockchain whatever it is right something like that where two things combined that never had been put together in that way before right the the the other circle that i would add that i think people underestimate underestimated so i tweeted this out hour as so people i didn't explain what the tweet it well as i said the next company i build is gonna be like a new new age pixar like the like the next pixar and i think i i i think i would work on that project for thirty plus like thirty thirty plus years i i just keep going with that company i wouldn't be trying to sell it or flip it or get out of it there whatever so that was the tweet and then a bunch i basically i had two reactions one reaction was awesome like where can i sign up how do i work for this company that that sounds awesome my i love picks pixar or you could do it and those are like fans of m mfa type of thing or people who themselves had been thinking god that would be awesome to create another like pixar type of company you know because i love pixar then there's the other half of people that were like what makes you think you could do this you know like you know how hard it is to make a movie you know expensive it is you know how the how unique you know steve jobs and you know whatever las and cat like how how rare those talents were when they came together that's a once in a generation company and then other people were like one guy had this amazing burn he was like check aqua hire like a green check mark aqua hired power writing core a course podcast next pixar and i was like oh thanks that's that's pretty solid actually and so you know a bunch of people were sort of all in the same bucket of like this is so hard this won't work what you you can't do it by some version of that and so the third circle but one is like i'm really great at x i'm really great at y the third is just i have the courage to go do a thing and like tim ferris once told this story he goes i went to a a business school class a harvard business school class i gave this talk and then talk i go oh by the way guys i'm doing this challenge only for you guys you know whatever i wanna get in touch with either bill clinton jennifer lopez or you know some sports person you know michael jordan or whatever if anybody here can connect me over email with them like you know just reach out to them and if you get a ahold of them connect me over email i will buy you two around the world plane tickets you know for you could fly business class for a year around the world anywhere on my dime alright guys thank you very much and he told that to one class and and he's like you know i you have thirty days to complete this challenge and then i think i i forgot one was it was like he did it to two classes but he gave a slightly different message in each the first one he just just said that thirty days go by nobody did it sorry nobody's to completely the challenge was like oh what happened to you turns out nobody even tried the challenge the perceived difficulty was so high that nobody did it so in the next one he told that story and i think he added a twist which was whoever gets the closest to it wins mh and and all of a sudden like everybody tries and in fact i think somebody didn't get in touch and actually successfully completed the challenge and he was like he had this principle which was sort of like you know everybody wants to fish where everybody else is fishing because they think it's so easy to catch fish there he's like in actuality often it's easy to just go go catch a fish where the fish actually are and you you don't have to base it on how how many people how many other people you think have tried out there how you're what the perceived difficulty is and in fact sometimes the bigger you go the easier something can be because nobody else is even trying to do it and so i would say like you know this picture pixar thing who knows if i'm gonna go do this or something else i tweet things just almost a to my prototype it's like let me say this is out loud let me see how that feels if i sleep and to wake up tomorrow do i wanna tweet five more ideas about that or am i over it it was just a passing fleeting moment yeah but but the the corey ingredient i think most people lack is courage to actually go and do the thing and i think that's the the the people put way more emphasis on what skill am my top one percent and they kind of they they under credit themselves one one skill you could just have for free you just gotta go it's like at the santa of the the the deli at the group at the grocery store go pull the number is yeah i i have the courage to actually go do it like you know i'm i will go do pull the trigger on this thing and not wait for other people to kind of like reinforce that it's a good idea to me yeah and this is an could not agree more and so and i think people can sometimes skill versus talent and they believe they don't have the talent for entrepreneurship or for design for programming whatever it is in my mind so skill is something that's learn that's an easy definition and talent is the rate at which you could acquire a particular skill so if you have a talent for music that means you will acquire musical skills faster than someone that doesn't have a talent for music it doesn't mean that someone that doesn't have a talent for music can't learn it so they may have a ceiling as far as how far they can go fine i get that but this doesn't mean they can't do it and so one of the big lessons kinda in my my life my professional career is that most things are actually skills not talent most of like i like you can start with zero like i was i would have been voted least likely to ever start a company in my entire like generations of family right and that's not talent i ever had like when like until i went off did it like public speaking was not something it's like oh that that's a scale when you and then there's this thing from software engineering i it's we're sharing other i think some all the best ideas are we take stuff from other industries and pull them into this thing to apply it in a weird way but in software engineering there's this thing called functional d composition which is take a problem be articulate well so a function it has a set of inputs and and output and what it's supposed to do and really all software problems are being able to take the highest order function is let's say you wanna grade a possible investment based only on the website it's like i'm gonna give you a domain and you're gonna give me a score from zero to hundred as to how good this is okay well that function is easy to find like the domain goes in score from zero to one hundred comes out what other functions does that function need in order to pull that off like okay i want a function that looks at the domain and looks at the level of seo they have that's one layer down the process right in the seo function goes down like i'm gonna look at the on page seo and see how good they're doing at meta tags and one titles and gonna look at the off page seo and their link acquisition and that kind of stuff that's it's like so if you roll it all down and you go down far enough individual functions at the atomic level are so simple as to be trivial what matters is the fact that you were able to abstract to down that simple thing right and so most things can be broken down that way so so if you look oh i wanna become someone that can give a talk in front of twenty five thousand people on a stage that seems like an insurmountable task for someone like me that's never done that it's not my that might not my thing like oh well what does that involve number one you have to have kinda overcome i didn't have like stage fright i had severe stage anxiety right dear stage fright is like oh there's a ships gonna come down from space and just stuck you up because you you were so bad and staging anxiety is like man i wish a spaceship would come down and suddenly office stage right now i get off so there's bad like don't don't pass auto on stage and then there's the oh you learn about storytelling you learn about writing you learn about slide design you learn about a humor and i did all those things right read books took classes on all those components of public speaking in aggregate i'm okay now right like i i can do that and you again then it's and you do it over time anyway my point here is startups whatever skill startups are skill figure out what set up skills you need to acquire some you you'll be good at acquiring because you have the talent the other one you're just gonna have to grind it out more than others made but it's doable it's a doable thing one question that i have i do anyone can do it that's my point i love that so sean love sean kinda sean kinda added this thing to your to your venn diagram of like just people brave i to get started and would you add another thing like with when with the hustle we sold the year four or five and i'm i don't regret it i'm very happy with that but i actually like we look i looked at the numbers this year and i was like oh wow we would have made like maybe like it's it it was close to the point where like you could have potentially next year made more revenue that year than all the revenues combined and i'm like well that's kind of crazy like i again i'm happy with it but like real value like i guess for me i was like real value is created in year like five six seven eight of course you probably could say like when you're in year five six seven eight you're like well wow it's really created in ten eleven twelve but yeah yeah do you think that what portion of hubspot and your success has been well i'm just really i'm just willing to shut up and focus on this for twenty years as opposed to you actually being amazing or good at product and marketing and things like that yeah here's how i think about this i think the outcome is a combination of like dreaming really big and like iterating really small on having tight feedbacks feedback loops so the dream really big is you have to have something that can someday translate and it doesn't have to be as clearer vision as as you know sean has kinda laid out as far as though it's gonna be pixar for the new generation but you have to kinda have start with something roughly big in mind at least at some level but then it really comes down to the the iteration right it's i think the and others have demonstrated this through data is that the quality of the output is almost i wanna say always but frequently a function of the number of iterations not the quality of the you know the people's for instance the one of the common examples that throw out is and i've heard it with a pottery class or photography class but it's like oh one set of students divided this class in half let's say it's a photography class one set of students is like okay every day you have to submit a photo for the next thirty days while this class is running the other one is like at the end of the thirty days you're gonna submit your best photo and then your grade is gonna be based on the quality of that best photo the first class is like as long as you submit a photo every day you're gonna get an a at the end of the thirty days the other one is like as long as you're is a quality material that photo is going to win and what's been proven out across disciplines is that the class that did the multiple iterations had a better outcome than the one i was trying to solve for quality like the arguably the first one's is like oh all i really had to do was like submit a photo it didn't it has to be like world class quality is not the best i to do but just my virtue of doing it and they're were gonna make it better and make it better at the end of the thirty days they produced a better photo and they produced a better clay pot as a pottery class than the other one that was solving for quality and they were like too much in their heads trying to say gonna do the best i can do like no just do it repeatedly but the key to that it has to be meaningful iteration if you're just iterating and doing the same thing you're not learning anything there's no feedback loop then the iterations have no value but if you're if you have a tight feedback and i'm gonna do this thing and i immediately get response back that tells me whether i got better or got worse that is amazingly like powerful to be able to do that and compound it over time so so i think my i'm not that special candidly it's like i'm willing to grind it out more than people that are smarter and i'm a little bit smarter than people that are willing to work grind it out that's my van here that's awesome but have you you probably seen this or maybe you guys have done this but there's this group of like consultants i created this thing called the marshmallow challenge which they go to a company and they give you like a bunch of sticks one marshmallow some tape and like a string or something like that have you seen this der i think i have yeah but i'll kinda summarize with this yeah yeah there's you have it base basically they give they give you this these set of tools and they say okay your goal the game is you need to get a marshmallow the winning team is gonna have a marshmallow like as high above this table as you can so build your towers as high as you can if you can whoever gets the highest marshmallow whoever's tower has the highest marshmallow at the end wins we're right we're gonna stop the clock after thirty minutes we're gonna say hands up and you know your marshmallow whoever's marshmallow is standing the highest wins okay good good so they go and they do this test with like a bunch of different types of people they do it with consultants they do it with like kind of doctors and they do it with you know engineers they do it with whoever creative like add agency types and they're trying to see okay which group is gonna perform the best at a challenge like this and basically across the board what they found is that they suspected maybe engineers are gonna do the best the engineers do on average do a little bit better than than others but not by much they actually are all pretty horrible at it and i think like you know whatever eighty ninety percent of the groups at the end of the challenge their marshmallow is on the ground it is fallen over it never even you know got up at all like if you had just put it if you had just taken like you know two sticks and put a one marshmallow on top you would have won the challenge and the reason why is and and and they they did this test with kids and kids actually are phenomenal at this kids on average will beat the adults at this game and why is that well because what happened happened is that they would give the project to the adults and the adults spend the first five minutes like del roles like okay you're gonna be the person who does the planning you're gonna be the one who you work on the sticks and the the bottom structure we're gonna do this over here then they would just like kind of draw out like okay let's do a tip no let's do it a a a ladder let's do this a cube or shape or whatever and they would do all this at the very end they were trying to stick the marshmallow on and what they don't realize that the marshmallow is a lot heavier than it looks and it will outweigh the sticks that it'll all fall over and be but because they're doing that thing where they wait till the very end to like ship the final good product they don't even realize where the flow on their plan until like it's too essentially whereas what kids will do its kids will immediately grab the thing they'll stick the marshmallow on and it's like if the kids don't eat the marshmallow marshmallow will like get into the structure very quickly and they'll see oh it falls over okay it falls over that means we need to iterate and we need to do things differently than we would have otherwise assumed and that like one lesson i've done it pretty much every company i've ever started because the it's the only way i can get engineers and designers who by nature or often like sort of like perfection or quality and like they and their associate they in their mind associate the longer we work at this the better the quality will be before we ship it and i'm always like dude let's ship it today let's see how bad it sucks and then let's remove some suck from it and like tomorrow it'll suck a little less and then tomorrow it'll suck a little less again and the the best way i've been able to drive this point home is to give them the marshall emotional challenge and not just like watch the video watch the ted talk it's like no go fail at this so that you taste defeat and then you will actually learn this lesson dude that's like the greatest ceo thing that you've ever done that's a good one that's a really good one us to make people do this and then make them watch the ted talk that's like that's a really good leadership tactic i'm one hundred percent gonna steal that one day yeah it's it's it's an awesome one alright i don't we we went kinda long i don't know if were we're good to keep going or not but ben's tell me wrap up but but da this is awesome man i love having you around are you you at the last time you're on almost was like a year ago i think and i've been like i've been like begging you i'm like man just come on and so we messaged them today and he goes i'll just come on today i was like alright cool are you i actually have a quick question what you know people ask me about selling to hubspot and they're like has it been good from a creative perspective it's been awesome you guys have a like we haven't been told a thing on like what we can and it cannot do of course i don't think we do anything where anyone whatever tells us you can't do that but it may der you ever get complaints about anything we say or that's what i gonna ask that's what i gonna ask is there anything that like so far i guess there's nothing that's crossed the line because we've not heard a thing but like it we it's been crazy how productive of this relationship has been i did not think that because you know people say one thing and the reality is different but it's not been that way that's been pretty cool yeah thank you i'm glad glad it's working out and your team is it's you folks have been kinda great for hubspot and i know this keeps you up at night in terms of valuation i've thought about that a lot why not as much as you have but at the time i i i would not beat yourself up over i think it was a fair deal i i don't know that and even at that just so you know even at that price and i'm nothing to do with you but like it was a board level discussion we had to like okay it was do we really wanna is not that it wasn't worth that but was it worth factor to us at the time because it was a relatively new new thing that we were doing but i think there's a for both sides but yeah for sure i think there's a world i think there's a world where in one to three years the podcast alone is worth more than the deal yes i definitely see that yes yep but the same way to kinda of well we can kinda wrap on this is that when we were talking early in the beginning of the episode around kinda compensation as being just one of the kinda of dimensions of value in in a acquisition the kind of the valuation that you get the price tag is just one dimension of value then the rest of it is how happy are you how happy is a team did you meet people that will kinda out you will enjoy working with in your future years on your are there your future cofounder that kind of thing it's like we know that this is not forever we like we know that going in with even with people we hire but especially with m and a but yeah but hopefully in aggregate you know hubspot delivers a bunch of value that's my pitch for why it's okay to join hubspot if you're ever out there looking but no it awesome well thank you this is awesome so when you think yeah great episode and i'm glad you used our line against us i i i he emailed us something i was like oh you should come back on sometime which is like the sometime is like one of the most dangerous words in the time of seventh yeah because it's like you think it's soon and at in reality it's never and you pulled a great move which was what what we talk about which is like forget scheduling stuff like either i wanna do it and i if i if i can do it right now let's do it right now and if not like the let's not schedule it for the future because just because we didn't wanna do it right now and you were like how about today and we were like alright let's let's do it perfect yeah and i i intentionally made it like open like i knew when my last meeting was it's like anytime after this so it's not even like oh like i i could've have made it work this afternoon i was only available for this small windows it's like no any time between two pm and midnight if he a me had come back i would have been let's do it it's yeah that's awesome is awesome well it's a lot of fun doing this it's a lot of fun thank you for coming on okay alright thanks for having yeah guys