Near Death Accidents, Hitting $1B ARR, and Selling Like the Grateful Dead with Brian Halligan, Founder & Executive Chairman of HubSpot

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