Encarta | How To Come Up With Billion Dollar Business Ideas

00:00

This is what I call a petroleum dollar Venn diagram success. Right? I just made that up. But so you draw those principles of your skills

00:06

and say, okay. Well, I'm now not like one in a million. I'm one in a billion. Right? We're one in five billion. Whatever that is. And if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sort of happens. So that's kind of thing number one is, like, what's your thing? What are your skills?

00:22

And what drives one cycle and how much value will that intersection create as two things?

00:28

One is

00:30

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

00:43

So on the pod right now, we've got Darmash. Darmash is the, founder of Hub spot. He's, well, your technical title, CTO. Right? That is correct.

00:52

I see more. This means that, that you have to do the ad reads for your own company today.

00:57

Why are we talking about HubSpot? You do the ad reads.

01:00

You tell people why to buy You'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.

01:12

And Darmas, you do not rent though. Right?

01:14

Not anymore. I did for a long, long time. I'm a big believer in rentals as it turns out, but I, I'm staying in Brooklyn for the summer, and I rent, a furnished house and it or a 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'm on the renting train I think now. Like, I've kind of been there, but, like, I actually love it more. Do you like because Sean, you owned a place in San Francisco for, like, four years. And then now you rent again.

01:43

Way better. In fact, every time something breaks, I now just have joy to be like, Let me call somebody else. It's their problem. It's 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 in 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.

02:11

Wait. So, Demesh, if you if you had the choice again, I mean, I I think maybe perhaps you bought because, like, your wife wanted to or your kids wanted to, but if it was up to you, even with the family, would you

02:22

be a renter?

02:25

If it was up to me, yes.

02:27

Because

02:30

Just the the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one's psyche and soul that ownership,

02:36

you know, bestows upon you is just not worth is that's that's my thing. It's just, 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 as a step closer to being in the matrix, we don't have to worry about physical things and atoms and things like that. It's like, that's somebody else's problem. I just show up. How how many people in your socio and a economic like ballpark, like, you know, founders of multi billion dollar companies

02:59

or people like you, do you think also rent because I think that'd be a a if it were 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 still rent?

03:10

I know people that are similar to me in terms of them. 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,

03:21

you know, one of the things my wife loves gardening and loves loves having a yard, and that's kinda hard to do in a rental.

03:27

Not that you can't do it, but it's

03:29

Right. One thing that a a guy told me who who's Similarly, you 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, the, 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, you 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?

04:06

You have a few things left over from the last episode, Sean. I don't know if we wanna jump into some of those.

04:11

Let's do one.

04:12

Let's do one because I think you will have a take on this. So so have you ever read I don't know. Do you know Paul Graham, by the way?

04:19

I do.

04:21

We're not best buddies or anything, but I do know of him. I've met him. Yeah. So he's from Boston. Right? Or Cambridge?

04:27

Cambridge. Yep. Yeah. So you guys know one another?

04:30

He wrote a blog post back in two thousand and eight. It was October two thousand eight. So this is, like, right after the the crash. And it's it's just if you go to paulgram dot com slash bad economy,

04:40

is the name of the blog post.

04:42

And he makes this case where he goes, the economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in first stretch as bad as them in seventies.

04:50

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. But he in which you've heard before, but I thought there's one interesting 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 startup.

05:08

And I actually thought that was a really good point because I hear this so much. It's like, I I'll talk to kinda young founders, and they

05:14

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 experts and also, you know, you know, macroeconomists

05:26

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 aunt in this world. Does the aunt care what's going on with the presidential election? No. Like,

05:40

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 I thought it was a great little blog post talking about, like, kind of starting a a startup during the downtime, which is where I think we're about to or we just officially entered a recession again. So, I was curious, Durham. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. So my position is I I'd lean more towards kinda, Paul Graham end of the spectrum, which is I think it's either neutral. God, it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting.

06:14

Towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a, a kind of downturning economy or recession

06:20

is that, things become available that would not have been available to a startup before. Like, talent. It's like, oh, well, there are people sitting at Meta Facebook or sitting at Google right now that may be reevaluating 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 in a glut of venture capital. You know, I think of venture capital as a very efficient machine of turning, like, money from LPs into Google AdWords's rep. Right? That's, they're just a conduit between the two.

06:56

And as in a in a downward economy, 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 to entrepreneurs. So I'm journal net positive that a down economy is actually a relatively good time to start a startup. For, like, the last eighteen months or, you know, whenever, like, the last twenty four months, whenever things been booming,

07:14

I've, my wife works at Airbnb

07:17

and,

07:18

you know, I've got a lot of friends that work at hub obviously, Hubspot and 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.

07:30

Crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy. As the as like a leader and, the biggest shareholder of 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 fifty thousand dollars a 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 startup, I mean, you can't afford those salaries anyway, right, unless 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 the founder has to kinda get good at, it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing, which is 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 attract people and then it's customers,

08:16

it's not gonna work. So you have to do one of, you know, two things, either recognize kind of superstar talent and give them something they can't get, because it's beyond confidence. It's like, oh, you'll learn more here. You're gonna do your own startup someday. This is the place to get your startup MDA 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 salary yet, but they will someday. I caught them early in their kind of evolution, and so I can get them there's that's has to be one or the other form of arbitrage. Otherwise,

08:51

you can't play the game. That's just not, I don't think it's viable. I I I'm doing,

08:57

when you're saying that it's like resonating so much because it's it's basically all the three things we just talked about I'm doing. It's like I started the milk road in January this year. And so it's, you know, sick it's been it's about to be six months or it's been six months. And,

09:10

it's like, here, let me start a crypto company right when crypto crashes, you know, seventy eighty percent. And at the beginning, Ben, even, my co founder, Ben, he was like, you know,

09:19

the only thing I could see going wrong is if crypto goes into bear market, I go, well, Krypto is gonna go into a bear market. Like, that's, like, one of the few certainties of crypto is that it goes up and down. And when it does, it is dramatic and 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,

09:37

do you what? Do you think that kills it, or do we just make it through? Like, there's a that's really all we have to think about here. So that was the first part of, like, starting in a bad economy. The second one on talent was I recently hired this guy,

09:49

and he quit a

09:51

pretty well known,

09:53

venture backed company that I think had 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 had traded a couple emails.

10:04

Nothing serious. Just he he was one to be to use his product. Then he took a job at this place. Alright. Whatever. I forgot about him. Then he emails me, and I I shared this on Twitter. He emails me subject line. I have made an irreversible decision.

10:16

And I was like, okay. I gotta click this. What's inside? And he's like, I just quit my job, and I think you should hire me. And I was like, okay, directed to the point. And then he tells me why, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, alright. Boom. I'm sold. Very bold approach. I already liked your hustle before this. Cause when you were hustling to try to get me as your customer, I was like, this guy's good.

10:35

So, okay, let's do this. And I made him a job offer which was not, like, you know, a Silicon Valley job offer, but the guy lives in San Francisco. He was working for a Silicon Valley startup. So he was, like,

10:45

dude, that's, like, a fifty percent pay cut. And I was, like,

10:49

And I didn't I didn't say this out loud, but in my head, what I what I felt I I I told him. I was like, that's what I could afford to pay rent out. And, like, you come crush it, the sky's the limit, but, like, that's what I could pay you right now,

11:01

sight unseen. And I said, and in my head, I was about to tell him the the line that I had 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,

11:13

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 truth, which is the idea that that you got to shadow Ben Graham and 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 I didn't wanna say it because it's kinda arrogant. But it's like, dude, if I take you under my wing, my team is, like, three people. If you become one of those three and you're working out of my he came 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 you bring, but let's

11:51

like, the the dollar amount is,

11:54

like,

11:55

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,

12:02

that Ben Graham story

12:05

No. No. He's a young young guy. Just graduated from college. But here's the thing. I think people,

12:10

couple of 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? There's all these other things that also in kinda in aggregate and maybe And I think it's common for people to over index on the compensation or the kind of current compensation, and under index on other things that, and then there's just the raw emotional value. Do you like being around 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? And I find the HubSpot story. So when we start on this compensation thing,

12:46

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 it's a it's a number.

12:54

And,

12:55

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 three,

13:02

We had to decide what we were gonna pay them, five thousand dollars, hired employee number four, five thousand dollars. And so we just both said, okay, Eric, 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

13:16

for, like, a while. It's like we and then we then it kinda has this inertia built in. Right? Like, okay. Well, all of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join the company are all paying each other. I'm paying ourselves five thousand dollars a month. Now what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making five thousand dollars. Of course, that doesn't last forever, and you have to,

13:33

what what was the pitch at that time? So it's not like you know, no offense to to HubSpot, but it'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.

13:44

You know, you might have had, like, a, you know, your own magnetism, which is, like, you know, you 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 and over time, they just they decide for themselves, either think this guy's a dummy and he annoys me, or I think this guy's smart. I really like, you know, I'd love to hang 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 in the day. So what was your how did you convince people to do this five thousand dollar, you know, lego block of a salary building?

14:15

So we cheat it a little bit, right, because,

14:18

of the first eight people in the company,

14:20

seven of them,

14:22

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 thing. It's like, okay. Well, it's just a bunch of friends that sort of know each other in network or whatever. Let's go do this thing. Right? And it's also and they were kinda far enough along 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, did business school. And and so that was it. It's like and then the other thing, and this is the -- I agree. -- 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 with the idea is really bad. Three, six months from now, you will basically be able to pick up where you left 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 I'm gonna have to be able to do for the next five or ten years. And that was enough. It's the app. Well, did things change?

15:10

How many people do you think

15:12

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?

15:31

It hasn't. So to answer your questions, I always have to there's this little it only takes, like, a second and a half for me to translate eight figures into what is that actually? So that's ten million plus. Yeah. Like, maybe

15:43

maybe five or ten million is, like, the number where you're, like, I don't need this job.

15:49

Probably somewhere in the twenty to thirty range if I had to guess of people that have made that much, you know, over fifty maybe even a hundred, like, millionaires in the seven figure range. But even when that was happening, right, like, well, a couple of things. One is it distorts it a little bit because as a private company, even though the valuation from the last round or whatever is x,

16:08

the shares are not liquid. Right? So they're worth it, but they're worth it on paper. They can't go out and actually sell their shares. So that's kind of thing number one And so it doesn't even if they wanted to, doesn't we can't really change behavior. You can't go off and,

16:19

you know, buy something with with, with your shares.

16:23

That's thing number one. The thing number two is that, we did have,

16:26

like, this kinda esprit de corps. Right? It wasn't really about the money. It was about winning. It was about kind of building something together. And I,

16:34

I like to believe

16:35

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 into some other industry. There's still software in SAS that we would have likely done

16:47

reasonably well as well. I think it came down to the people who have good chemistry. They were focused on the right thing. I think we,

16:53

our early hiring policy was, to hire

16:57

kinda smart people that get shit done. That was kind of the the thing. Right? We want people that have high, what we call high wattage. They were like measurably smart. If you had to get haven't taken IQ test. We didn't do that, but, measurably smart.

17:08

But there's lots of very, very smart people in the world, but they have this kind of predilection to action.

17:12

They could not help, but, like, if they found a problem, they're gonna go try and start solve it. They're gonna jump in,

17:18

you know, feet first and they're just gonna do it or head first whatever the the phrase is. And that was enough. So, again, we made a deliberate decision not to hire what we call press release hires.

17:27

Press release hires when you hire someone, and then you feel compelled to issue a press release, say, Oh, HubSpot just hired the VP of sales from such and such company, whatever that is a thirty year background in doing x.

17:38

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

17:45

They may have done amazing things at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, pick your company of choice, but the startup is such a different context, and you're you're paying for these kind of specialized set of skills that may or may not be relevant

17:55

arbitrage is really, really hard. So we're,

17:58

bigger on the

17:59

identified diamonds in the rough, people that are going to be big, you'd know it. It's like, you're buying the stock early.

18:04

Versus going after the folks that already were press, press release worthy. So yeah. I think I,

18:10

that's been my skill. Sean, you've kinda seen my journey. I think my skill has been finding the diamonds in the diamonds in the rough, so we've had like well, Sean and I kinda discovered one another.

18:21

But then, like, there's Steph Smith who's now at a sixteen z. We had Trunk who's popular. We had a bunch of people who went on and founded different companies.

18:29

And what I've always looked for,

18:31

like, I I purposely have looked for these diamond, the roughs because I I was like, I can't afford, you know, to pay x y and z, so I gotta hire twenty four year old who I know will be a boss in, like, five or ten years. But when I went to Sam, it's not just that you can't afford them. I remember once the hustle got to the point where afford them. You were just kinda disgusted by the concept of somebody making that much money. I remember you were just, like, how much do you how much does this kid over here work to, like, engineer up at my office? And I'd be like, god, and I'm like, whatever. What he's one one fifty, one seventy. You're like, what? Seventy?

18:59

Oh my god. Like, this is, you know, What a if if this person left, would the company fail? No. No. Not at all. Well, it was, like, this is crazy.

19:08

That was ten year or that was the year of That was ten years ago. Yeah. So things have changed a little bit. But also, like,

19:14

your people would show up to work at, like, noon. And I'd be like, what the hell, man? This guy, like, just waltzed in and, like, you're gonna he's like, are he arrived right within their serving lunch?

19:25

But, we've we've, like, discovered some cool people. And always look for a couple things. The first thing is, actually, this is from Paul Graham. He goes, I look to hire animals. Like, people who, like, you're a little bit afraid of and they're, like, just like freaks 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 researched and has a strong opinion on something, but I love, like, weirdos and eccentric people. And I have found that if you can add our startup at at the hustle, we did a really good job of, like, accepting weirdos and letting them be odd. And, like, we, like, embraced it and I always found that to be kind of like a,

20:05

a, we used to say, you know, let your freak flag, let your freak flag fly.

20:10

And, we're like, you know, I don't I was like, we'll have we had all types of different people. We we we had,

20:15

just just every type of, like, person, we worked at our company and and they'd like that we, like, embrace their odd. They're kind of like them being different.

20:23

Yeah. But we have something simple. So we have, you know, five kind of core values as part of our HubSpot culture. One of them is is, remarkably or being remarkable. Now what we mean by that is there's something noteworthy they've done in their past where 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 enroll 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,

20:50

do their thing, and it tends to work out. So Sam had

20:54

weirdos and kind of like let let your free fly fly. You have the,

20:58

the, remarkability. Have you done remarkable. We had one at Bebo that was the same as we we used to say we hired degenerates.

21:05

It's like intentionally,

21:07

a word that's usually negative Right? Like, we hired agendas. And what we said, we would always ask me and for a con, we noticed this in each other. We were like, dude, we've gone through these phases in our lives where we just got really obsessed

21:18

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, cutter good thing to be obsessed with. Like, it wasn't, like, grades in school.

21:27

It would be, like, you know, for kinda got really into, you know,

21:31

this video game. And he was, like yeah. It 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 some point, I even stopped being about winning. It was just like I wanted to, like, get to, like, the next level and and and keep going. And I had the I had done the same thing with poker. He had done it with poker also. So we kind of identified these. Do you it's like, hey. Do you go through these periods of, like, three years of deep session

22:01

around some get competitive, like, thing.

22:04

And, and then when you do, do you, like, really, like, try to study the game and figure out how to, are the loopholes in the game? What are the rules of the game? You immersed yourself with other players in the game? Because, like, well, cool. Our game now is just startups, and we would try to find people who had some evidence of degeneracy. It's like yeah. You come in at noon because you stay up till four in the morning, like, building that,

22:24

soundcloud

22:25

player that works like TikTok for no reason because you're so annoyed that SoundCloud,

22:30

like, is too slow in the way that they develop things. It's like other people would look that as, like, oh, you're not really reliable or very structured or you, you know, why did you work on that? That wasn't even, like, the task at hand. As we would see that and we'd be like, oh, all we need to do is just point this guy's degeneracy

22:45

at the right direction, and then we'll win. And that was, like,

22:48

Yeah. Well, I I I think of that as a, kind of borderline pathological obsession.

22:52

Like, that's, like, once you attach your stuff, whatever it happens to be, right, and what our job is to kind of bring it just shy pathological words, like, kinda harming themselves, but it's like, you can't help yourself. You're gonna, like, just dig in and whether it's video games or whatever it happens to be, people that have, I don't call it a gene, but that have that trait,

23:09

tended to work out well in startups because you're trying to attach yourself to a a particular thing, a particular problem.

23:15

I think I'm just as aware since I'm on the topic of talent. I've got this little, mini framework

23:19

works at multiple levels of that ab abstraction. They're like,

23:22

three kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people. One is that you have the creatives. And these are people that start things. They have ideas. They have a hundred and eighty mile, you know, he has an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. Then there are the so here are the starters. Then you have the completers. Those people that can make a list of, like, here are the things I need to get done in order for us to ship a product or do whatever.

23:42

And often those folks are at odds. Like, the the idea folks are kinda really frustrated the the completers that are just like, oh, I'm just trying to check a box and make art. Yeah. 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 in the third person, which is the collaborator. And the collaborator is really good at communicating, is really good at bridging gaps across departments, across individual people, and kind of pulling it all together.

24:02

And usually, you're looking for someone that has at least some

24:05

like a nine or a ten on one of those dimensions,

24:09

a seven or eight, another one, and usually very low on the third. Right? It's like you can have the What are you? Creative.

24:14

I'm on the creative side. I'm, like, yeah.

24:17

For sure. Well, how long have you

24:19

Well, but how that doesn't make sense to me because you lead a twenty billion dollar

24:25

software company that that you've been doing it for twenty years. Like, and as a CTO,

24:29

so, like, how on earth do 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.

24:38

Yeah. How do you do you Well, like, one thing he shared last time. He he talked about those little, like, kind of calculators

24:44

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 Wordplay, like, you know, you're just you're still creating stuff even now that's like We were just talking are just talking. He's getting ready for the earnings call. And, like, that to me is the opposite of creativity.

25:11

You know what I mean? That's, like, you're you have so many you have such a narrow lane that you stay within. That's like seems so hard.

25:17

Yeah. So I'll I'll say this. I have done everything in my

25:22

in my power

25:23

to reduce the time I have to spend on things that I'm not good at, right, which is the things that are kind of noncreative, not a part of that. 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. A lot of them on the kind of product and engineering team, which presumably,

25:39

know, CTI would kinda help manage and Lee. I I don't do that.

25:43

And so the only meetings I go to are where there's some creativity involved. I don't to go to kind of statuses and updates or whatever. It's like I can read an email as well as the next person.

25:53

So, but, yeah, but there are things that are non delegatable that, one of should we should probably talk about it. It's an 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.

26:06

That, you know, the last time it was in person, it had, like, twenty five thousand people in the live event. Right? Like, it's,

26:12

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 delevatable things. Right? I couldn't say, oh, well, we're gonna have someone else go do that because

26:27

you know, in my role as founder, I have a certain kind of weight to me just by virtue of the title,

26:32

of being a founder versus, someone else. So Sean, listen to this Listen this Darmash story. In Darmash, you could fill in the blanks as we go because that you could decide how much you wanna reveal. But there has been a couple different times maybe three different times. I've introduced Dimesh to a founder of a company who was raising money.

26:50

And

26:51

literally within five minutes, he replied and said, I looked at the deck. I'm in or blank amount. He he don't know if she could reveal if you wanna say some of the some of the times how much it was. But,

27:03

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

27:09

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 it's, 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,

27:26

you know, I'm not gonna talk to you that much. But that's, like, the stipulations 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?

27:37

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,

27:45

I will call it a career, but my activities. And

27:48

eighty to ninety percent,

27:51

I've never actually talked to the founders or ever met with them.

27:54

Over

27:56

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 into due due diligence on some end whatever. It's like, that's not the point. My point is not that. There's only two reasons I do Angel investing.

28:10

And it's and none of these are the are to make a return.

28:13

One of them is around living vicariously through other entrepreneurs. I just like I like that process.

28:18

And this is, you know, the free dates even starting HubSpot, And the other one, quite immodestly is just bragging rights. It's to be able to say five, ten, fifteen years from now. It's like, because no one cares, like, how much you invest. What I was like, oh, yeah. I was in back in the day. I wasn't back overflow back in the day. I was, like, you know, first many on this company, this company, this company, and that feels nice. It's, it's not such a

28:37

kind of magnanimous getting back to the community as purely as like, it'd be cool to be able to

28:42

have been part of, you know, these great founding teams that went off and built great companies. I really respect that you said that part because I thought you were gonna say, like,

28:52

you know, just I went to hoses. I care about. Yeah. I just you know, just to foster our viewership or, like, you know, you know, use the d word democratize something something. And instead, you said 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 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 me shows me that you are a real one, Dimesh.

29:21

I'm, I'm what I refer to myself as, like, a warmhearted

29:25

red blooded capitalist.

29:26

Right? So I have compassion. It's not like I don't like people. I'm not a sociopath.

29:30

But I I'm a capitalist. It's like, okay. Well, for instance, I mean, this is gonna sound completely immodest, but we opened this door on the last episode. So might as well walk through it now is so last episode, we talked about kind of putting a value on your time, whatever it happens to be. And that anything that falls below the line in terms of you can outsource a delegated, whatever, for less than that, you don't do those things. Right? You don't mow your lawn, whatever, if, and so

29:53

haven't, I should recalibrate, but, you know, my number personally, the one I use just because the math is easier. It's like ten thousand dollars an hour. I think that's what I if I were on the open market, I think I could I could that's what Dude, I I would have thought higher. I would have thought higher.

30:10

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.

30:17

One could make the case I couldn't make my point without having to make that particular case. Well, okay. Let me ask you a question -- Yeah. -- to make it real. So,

30:24

you

30:25

buy something. You you book a plane ticket. It like, whatever.

30:29

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 it. I just eat the loss and move on. I don't do it. Because even delegating, then requires some follow-up, requires some explanation, and they're gonna apologize because they could only get passed back or it was only a credit. It's like, I don't I don't care. I just honestly don't care.

30:54

And so and back to the 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

31:10

double their valuation or have my investment amount. Right? Because, like, not only did I put cash in for which I'm gonna get shares, but then I put another fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars worth of time in just in the due diligence, which is easy 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 going to 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 the early stage startup, there's just not that much diligence to do. Right? Like, what are you gonna dig into? It's like, like the idea you don't. You like the founders or you don't. Move on.

31:52

Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot?

31:55

See most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. Think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. Hub spot, 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.

32:14

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 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 it's like what what I solve for is I'd like to solve for

32:34

it's because it's a little bit of a squishy term. It's just raw impact. I like scale. So if you folks were a much smaller blog. Let's just say. It's like, oh, I'm gonna reach fifty people as a result of this. And I have ideas that I think are worth sharing,

32:46

and it was smaller. I'm like,

32:48

And and and it's not like, oh, I don't get up out of bed in the morning, unless there's at least, you know, ten thousand people. If if this is morning Bruce podcast, then and I would not do it. I amplify my time, right, to what little time I have left on the planet, what things that I know.

33:00

So I'm always looking for,

33:02

thing to do things at scale, like how can I find it away?

33:06

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

33:14

silly and not worth your time. But basically, I think a year and a half ago, Wirtle, is it like a game that an online game is like

33:23

a word game that that went viral. You built

33:26

a thing called the wordplay. Is it wordplay dot com? It's wordplay dot com. Right?

33:31

By the way, you'll buy domain names. So you bought the hustle dot com for us. You bought me,

33:35

copy that dot com. Thank you for that. I forgot to say thank you in person. But,

33:40

So you buy, like, a lot of amazing domains, but you have word play dot com. And

33:45

did you tweet that it was getting seven million users a week or three what was the number?

33:50

So the I just went and checked with the numbers. Okay. So just to kind of place the timeline in in frame. So November and December of last year, twenty twenty one, is when Wirtle took off. In January is when it really, kinda hit its, I think, close to its peak,

34:05

and that's roughly when the New York Times acquired Wirtle.

34:09

And couple things kind of bobbing it. It was fine. I think it was, you know, great outcome for Josh Wirtle, but there were things that were kind of bothering me that were limitations in the game, and I wasn't a avid player of the game.

34:20

And now it's like, okay. Well, the New York Times has bought it. There's no way that anything's gonna happen for, like, years if ever. That was kind of thing number one.

34:28

Thing number two, like, it was, it had been a while since I had launched, like, some simple free thing publicly.

34:34

Hadn't gone through the process. And there were other things I wanted to learn.

34:37

I was like, oh, I wanna learn more about Versell and Next JS and TypeScript and things like that. So I was like, okay. Well, this is excuse them. Then that intersected with the third thing, which was like the dominant variable in the equation,

34:48

is my, son was taking a Python program in class. He's eleven. Right? He's going through this process.

34:53

And for him,

34:56

it's, you know, still very abstract. He's learning programming. He enjoys everything involving technology and screens, but It was abstract. So on a Saturday night, I said, okay. Well,

35:05

let me build something when Python happens to be my language.

35:08

Build something so he can see because he plays Wirtle. He knows the game.

35:12

And so

35:14

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 so he know he knows what social media is. Right? He's,

35:26

you you know, so I'm like, oh, we've got this thing that didn't exist yesterday.

35:30

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 the and so now what I want him to have in his head is that when he as a through the course of his life, as he encounters problems that are solvable with software, which is a lot,

35:46

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 Right? So if I wanna go off and build a video game, I wanna go off and build some tool for my school. I wanna build some social network for my whatever it is.

36:04

It feels like now it's it's more approachable for him. It's got years to go 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.

36:16

And since then, it's had, like, forty five million games have been played. Nine and a half million people have come through it.

36:23

Any given moment in time right now if I were to look at the Google analytics, it'd be two, three thousand people playing, like, right now.

36:29

Which how did it get so much traffic? Where did the traffic come from? Well, it helps to have a social media fall in. Right? I've got a million followers on LinkedIn. I've got three hundred thousand on Twitter. So there's that.

36:39

There's some vital elements. That that's that's a lot, but that's not I I wouldn't have thought that Yeah. Yeah. It's not enough for that. Is it? How many users you think got from Matt?

36:51

In the early days, all of What was it big was it big right off the bat? Like, the first week, was it I know the first day, probably a bunch of people checked it out, 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? The first week was probably

37:04

maybe fifty to a hundred thousand. So it wasn't it wasn't a lot, but it was something.

37:08

But that means that once you kinda get into it, this is the

37:11

you know, kind of power of iteration is that, oh, well, one of the things that I found missing in the original wordle was that it was a single player game. Like, you played, and you played it once a day, and that was it. So two big changes that we made in Wordplay. 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 it in four turns. The here's my score and send literally a simple link to anyone or a group on and this happens

37:39

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 to their WhatsApp group. They can post it there, you know, wherever they want. And say, I invite you to, like, beat my score kind of thing.

37:52

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 analytics event, and say how many people how many times are people clicking that share button and issuing challenges to other people? And so that

38:03

once you can kinda get into something where there's a compounding effect on the user base. So as the 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 Wirtle, in related games is waiting because everything has its kind of peak in its, in its Ebb,

38:20

And so but,

38:22

it's been an interesting exercise. And so on the kinda learning path, one of the things I hadn't done in a while is 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, or project profitable.

38:33

So I put Google AdSense on it, which is the easiest thing to do, and discovered that, like,

38:39

If I were bothered by the fact that there would be two ads on the main game board page, if I were solving for monetization, it was like ninety thousand dollars a month.

38:47

You can do glass boats -- Wow. -- facing the traffic. Yeah. Wow. I thought you were gonna say,

38:52

like, five grand a month. Put ninety grand a month and your you only have your only costs are hosting. Right?

38:58

Yeah. And and my time.

39:01

Right. And

39:02

first of all, sean, go to wordplay dot com, and then go to like the about page. His about page is incredibly well written. It's wonderful copywriting. It's wonderful.

39:10

You've got a wonderful voice. It says, I understand the first sentence, but it says, why would you do this?

39:15

Or the better yet, why would I do this? That's a really good question.

39:19

My wife asked me the same question. And then you, like, go on to explain why it just you've you're you're you're quite a good writer for also being like this amazing engineer. Typically, I wouldn't have a power writing course that Sean put on. You know that. Right? Let's like I'm -- Right. -- I do it around here with my

39:35

I like to say I've taught Dharmesh everything he knows, even before he met me. I somehow caught him all that good stuff before he built HubSpot.

39:42

What, do you so this is making ninety grand a month maybe or about what do you Is this your it could. It's not. Right? There's no ads. I turned I turned ads off because that's So I'm telling you. Point. And people were asking me is like, Doremesh, why do you have ads on this thing? I'm like,

39:56

to learn. And, like, it's like, I've learned what I needed to learn so I can

40:00

was was tweeting in LinkedIn posting this on LinkedIn the only way you've got users. What do you think this could sell for right now? And is the is this the biggest side project you've ever created? Our our buddy tried to buy fro Sui tried to buy it off you.

40:13

Did he really? He he tweeted out. He's like, I'd like to buy this off you. I've, you know, built mobile games before. You know, he was, like, semi serious at least. I don't know. I don't know if you talk to him or not, but I cannot.

40:23

What do you think he could sell? What do you think, like, if you cared, what do you think he could sell for? Two or three million dollars, maybe. Right now that,

40:30

let's say the ad revenue would go down to, like, fifty thousand or something like that because I haven't turned Google AdSense in a while. That's hundred thousand dollars a year.

40:38

Apply a five x multiple.

40:41

So somewhere between two and ten million dollars would be my guess if, like, if that's what I was solving

40:45

for. Serves.

40:46

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, had my it's like, I'm a big believer in, like, you know, what folks call like the fly wheel. There's all these little things that are attached to the fly wheel. Right? It's like, oh, LinkedIn helps a little bit, puts a little energy. Twitter does a little bit, and they have my blog and they email those out, and there's like things that I sort of do.

41:10

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.

41:19

And then it's the matter of, like, tracking the retention rate on those users so they come back. The other thing that's been interesting about Workplay as far as lesson learned

41:26

is that, you know, when it started, the average time a user spent, according to Google was roughly four minutes, on the game. Okay.

41:33

In the early weeks, And now that number is at fourteen minutes. Is the average time a user spends, you know, across however many a thousand users come in a given day. So Right. What, and is this the biggest side project you've ever created?

41:46

And it's on how you measure it. So technically, no, not in terms of your select raw traffic. I've built graders and things like that before that, have done better. But what what have you built that? Did what side project have you built outside of HubSpot that gets more traffic that Two or three main people have. We did side projects. This is my first one,

42:05

that was, like, clearly because it was a game. Had it been anything other than a game, I would have rationalized some way to bring it into the HubSpot umbrella because I like to have, like, all my eggs in that basket, but just given the the circumstances here, it didn't really make sense. And even now, like, what I'm thinking about,

42:20

doing a,

42:21

kind of a marketing and sales related edition

42:25

of Wordplay. Right? It's like, oh, the entire list of words, or do it based on MarTech companies? Like, okay. Do you know the the players in the space kind of thing? And then you can get sponsorships or whatever. Anyway, but,

42:35

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

42:42

things that people can come to the website. This is why I were chatting yesterday is where I'm we're looking at flutter. This new development environment and language,

42:50

well, darts the language, but flutter is the app framework for building mobile apps across iOS and Android and things. It's the it's the what the cool new kids are learning.

42:57

And he's like, no. Why would I ever wanna build a mobile like something people have to download. I have to get approval from, you know, Apple to kind of post my, like, I've I wanna, like, just do it, like, immediately. He's got, and he's right. It's like, okay. Anyway, so

43:10

That's the word play story. It's been, it's been a lot of fun. I've,

43:13

it's hard to know with these things, like,

43:16

like, where the road leaves. Like, Wirplay 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 thing. Okay. Well, then I'm, yeah, I'm using it to,

43:29

play around with community. It's like, okay. Can I take the wordplay user base? What are the things they care about and build a community around wordplay? Using one of the existing kind of community platforms,

43:40

and and see if that's a thing. Right? It's like, okay. If you could aggregate people with like interests

43:45

that end of itself has value. And I want it to be something that kinda self runs, but we'll see. If you were, I'm I'm gonna ask

43:51

Dharmesh, if Sam had built this as a side project and he was at the same point you're at right now,

43:57

what would you, like, kind of advise him to do? If it was Sam's project and you were just 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?

44:10

Decide what you wanna do, which is, okay, do you wanna, like, take this to the next level? I mean, you've turned into a hundred million billion dollar business, you know, spin it off. Or decide that it's just gonna be a personal project

44:21

and just like my personal blog is that I made that decision. It's like I'm not going to try and monetize and hire employees. I'm not gonna do any of those things. Right? It's gonna be and and my son will continue to act as head of product, because he's the one that test the thing every morning, then we play tournaments every evening. That's the big new feature that's coming out is a multi round tournaments.

44:40

By the way, in in terms of, like,

44:43

I think half of what I know, Sean, I I learned from you, the other half I learned from from MFM, right? It's like, so one of the things is around chess dot com, which you guys talked about, which I've been a member and player on for ten plus years. I knew of the site, but then you think about wordplay as like, okay. Well, this is chess dot com, but for word game enthusiasts versus chess enthusiasts. And then, but we're all the companies in group. As a reminder of people, chest dot com is, like, a huge business. Like, like, multi billion dollar evaluation. We talked about this when we talked about chess also, which was what other things are like chess. And we had said, Sedoku, and we had said, I think we had said, like, a scrabble or whatever.

45:18

Yep. Word is Wordal. Uh-uh. Yeah.

45:21

I think they're almost as big. If not, 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 enthusiast audience.

45:32

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,

45:39

in that sense. So so the lessons you draw from chess com, right, which is a relatively straightforward, is you have, like, a rating system. Right? You have leaderboards and scores. You have challenges. You have social connections where you make your friends on chest dot com. So you can invite Like, it's all the things, right, that these these are,

45:55

very easily translatable into other games like Word Play. Right? So anyway, so we'll

46:01

Pick and choose as far. I'll give you one little feature, I think, would be cool because, leaderboards are always this problem in general where,

46:07

like,

46:08

leaderboards 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? And so there's all these, like, if you I kinda studied this one. So I was like, who solved this problem? And there's really three models that work.

46:22

One is more like chess and and games do this. They they create a rank system. So it's 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,

46:35

and, like, you you just compete to get your own level up within that. Ticket 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 friends, your school, your city, something like that. So you could 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 Work Play 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. Right? Like, I bet you, like, I don't know, Mila Kunis, 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 the that x known people have solved it for today,

47:23

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,

47:30

You could kind of, like, opt in and be like, I either solved it or failed today. And you could just have that as a little board. Anyways, those are my three random feature. Well, that's a good idea. The one thing and I don't it's not surfaced on the on the process. It's a really good idea, but, one of the things I do have is in the comment, there's there's commentary. So as you're playing,

47:46

the software will kind of give you little kind of sometimes snarky, sometimes fun messages, sometimes data. It's like, oh, you're one of the, few people that's ever have guessed this particular word. That's not a very common word to use. Congrats good for you. Or this is the thousandth time you've used this particular word. You know, points for consistency.

48:01

So there's just kinda running commentary, but I like the idea of, like, just kind of front loading. It's like, here's a number of people other solve this game. I I give you stats at the end of the game. It's like, oh, only fourteen percent of the people or players solve this particular word. Took them on average seven point I mean, four point seven guesses. So, yeah.

48:16

Should I throw two more at you?

48:18

This is now my my future brainstorm for you. If you've ever lived in Ukraine There's nothing more there's nothing more than, like, an entrepreneur.

48:25

There's nothing more than, like, a person who has no stake saying, Hey, have you thought of have you thought about have you thought about this? Why haven't you done this yet? There's nothing less entertaining at a podcast than me telling you features for wordplay fucking. It's just our podcast.

48:39

If you ever played candy crush, they do this thing, which was they make the so stakes stakes matter a lot in stories or any kind of like adventure.

48:48

And so, like, you know, the if you open up a pack of warheads, and if you see a black one, oh, that's the really crazy one.

48:54

Kandy crush does this in their games where if you start a level, it says, this is nightmarishly hard, or this is a, you know, medium hard, whatever. So I'd like to see that in the word play when I come into every day. I'd to know if this is a nightmarishly hard puzzle, or if this is just okay, it gets me amped up for my play. Yep. That's a good idea. And then it's combining that with your tiering idea, and then we can, move on. But So imagine

49:14

we had a tiering mechanism that you go from bronze to silver to whatever to ninja level.

49:18

You know, right now, when you start the game, you get a random word that other people get random words as well, and there's a daily word, that everybody plays together. But imagine that, like, as you move up the ring, it gets harder. It's like now, you're a level that if you have achieved, let alone soft. Right? It's like no one even gets here, you're here.

49:35

And then, you know, do things for streaks. Like, okay. Well, you're the first person to have solved like fifty games in a row at this tier or something like that. I think that'd be fun. So One one last one I think you'll like, which is,

49:45

you are a fan of crypto, and I think you would if you like the creative crypto ethos, and I think if you could advance the cause of crypto, that would be like a win for you personally.

49:53

49:54

We gave out this milk money grant, this, like, milk for the milkrow. We gave out, like, a bunch of money to people just to build whatever they want. And one guy, this guy, Dave, he built this thing that was like a wordle game, but it was with crypto, which was just you play wordle as is. But if you solve it, you could win, like, one matic, like, a tiny amount or, like, he was, like, playing with different ideas. He's like, oh, there's actually a hundred matic jackpot for the day. And, like, only winners are eligible for the jackpot. You might you might get it or you might not. 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 Workplay, which is, by the way, there is a

50:25

hundred dollar a day prize paid out in Matic or or whatever.

50:30

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 to the world of crypto. You could create a dead simple meta either funnel them to Metamask or create a dead simple crypto wallet that will become, like, a the play to earn,

50:47

crypto wallet, you know, for the future. Anyways, that's I will I will now stop talking about Also, it's a good idea. Yep. By the way, it's just, like, so I actually added the ability to connect your,

50:56

connect your diesel wallet and your Ethereum wallet.

50:58

To Workplay.

51:00

And my idea at the time was instead of turning ads off, I'm gonna make that the pot. And so as ad revenue accumulates,

51:06

until the next payout, whatever it happens to be. And then it's like, oh, the top ten winners are gonna get this distribution and let's start over again. So not to make money, but, we'll have money coming in. Through AdSense and then we'll kind of Right. A sustainable player earned game. That's awesome. Yeah. That would be amazing.

51:20

Yeah. So let me, Sean.

51:22

This is

51:23

an interesting topic, but I understand there's, like, laws and SEC stuff around what you can and cannot say, Darmesha, just tell me if, like, you can't. But basically, I think it was in late May. I'm looking at it now in, like, May twenty fifth or something like that.

51:36

Sean, I don't know if you saw this, but, like, there's headlines that said, like, Darmesh Shah,

51:41

CTO cofounder of HubSpot buys

51:44

HubSpot shares. And I think it was like was it ten million dollars? It was it was a pretty substantial amount.

51:50

Is o over three. I 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, Dar Matt, like, this insider bought it. He, you 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,

52:11

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, they they're they're foolish.

52:20

The it's I mean, like, what what's your what's your motivation there?

52:25

It's exactly what you said, which is, I just thought the company was undervalued

52:29

given the the long term potential. And I've done this before. I did it a couple of years ago,

52:34

and about 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,

52:43

I mean, the prior prior two to three months, I'm like, I understand the market's 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.

52:55

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. I mean, you know, people ask, look, well, why did you, you know, buy at that time? As it turns out, it was the exact window of time that had to wait a certain period since my last transaction,

53:11

when I could buy in the day that I was eligible to buy, I bought. And it's like, okay, the price is low enough. I still have conviction that,

53:17

over the long range, you're also buying with money that Like, where does three million dollars come from, let's say? Isn't that just stock you previously sold that you now are buying? Or it's not like you have some other huge side

53:30

Or can you can you take a loan against your HubSpot shares to buy more of like that? There's like a hundred things you cannot do. That's one of them. It's, yeah.

53:39

Wow. No. I think, I saw that the other day. And, you you've done you've made a few decisions,

53:45

like, every once in a while, you do something. And I'm like, oh, this guy is Nutty in a cool way. And that's not exactly nutty, but it's like a pretty bold move. I I thought it was a pretty cool move. And I and I saw that and I was what what was going through your head when you did that? Because What's the psychology like when, I don't know. Helpbox talks, like,

54:03

I'm just rounding. I think it's down, like, forty, maybe fifty percent, something like that. From the all time high, like, during the the the last kind of the the the peak of the peak last year or whatever.

54:14

And so, you know, we come on here sometimes, and I'll be like,

54:18

alright, guys, you know, you know, Sam will be like, dude, how are you? And uh-uh, you lost a bunch of money today. I'm like, yeah. Yeah. I lost, like, a million dollars today. And, like, you know, e Ethis is down, and I'm I'm down a million dollars. I'll share my psychology as, like, dealing with this this travesty of a loss or whatever. And I'll I'll be like, yeah, 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, he lost five hundred million. Yeah. Exactly. I'm losing five hundred thousand. You're losing five hundred million or whatever. It is something crazy like that.

54:48

What's what's your psychology like? I don't know. Like,

54:52

I think you know what question I'm trying to ask even though I I don't have the word. How does it feel to put half a billion dollars as we asking me. Yeah. And how do you deal with that? And, like, yeah, go go Is that how much you lost you think? It's more than that, but, yeah, who's counting?

55:07

He's like, this podcast is more fun when we were talking about wordplay.

55:12

Actually, fine. I can I'm I'm not really in in I'm not just saying this, but but It's true.

55:18

It does not phase me like one bit because the reality is, it does not change my life

55:26

one Iota. Right? Other than, like, okay. Well, it impacts, you know, HubSpot employees and children. I get that, but in terms of me individually,

55:33

Like nothing changes. Right? Like, I wasn't off planning to buy small small islands or takeover governments or something like that,

55:39

or by 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 nonprofits

55:47

that I would have invested in, but, you know, my wife continues to invest. There's, you know, we have place to do the philanthropy we wanna do. And so I was like, okay. Well, I still wake up every day then do the same things I did before, and I'll look at the wordplay things and respond to user emails, and it looks like Do you may have spot stuff? It's like, okay. Like, what's really good? You don't even have

56:07

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 and I'm good. Like, it 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 it doesn't matter.

56:29

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 too, 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 cutbacks at the Puri household right now. Major cutbacks.

56:50

Yeah. It's like, we'll we'll we'll we'll be Well, maybe change behavior, but you don't even change. I laid off my son. Yeah.

56:58

Like, I think it changed in the other direction. Right? So as the market has dipped,

57:02

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,

57:09

slowly. So I think there are better deals now, good entrepreneurs starting companies. So but overall, like, the psychology of it has just just does not, like, have any impact. And, like, over the long term, you know, I didn't make this up, but I,

57:23

is is that the

57:25

you know, the valuation of a company, which is like the market price,

57:28

will oscillate around the value.

57:30

Right? And value is like the revenues you have, the products that you what are you actually doing, you know, for your customers? And so that,

57:37

you know, if our revenues had dropped off, you know, before something something like that had happened, that'd be a different story, but Well, that hasn't changed. We are the same business today, if not better than we were three months ago, six months ago.

57:47

And the valuation over time will kinda self correct one of the things I like about the market,

57:53

is that

57:54

yeah. I think things will kinda wash out and we'll see. Yeah. And a lot of HubSpot's customers are kind of like, you know, medium sized, let's say businesses.

58:03

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 on effect of, like, what's gonna happen to our business.

58:12

Do you care spend energy there? Because I find myself for the reason I ask, because I find myself sometimes going down these rabbit holes, I'm like, okay. What do I think is gonna happen then at part of me is like, well, does any of that really matter or affect me? Or, you know, is this energy useful or is this just sort of nervous energy that I'm wasting thinking about this stuff? Do you use that? And is HubSpot's

58:30

customer base even how many customers does his husband have? Like, a hundred and thirty thousand

58:34

Like Yeah. And the Over that. Yeah. Yeah. And the when I'm I think when I sold, it was a hundred thousand or just crossed a hundred thousand. In the grand scheme of things, the one of the reasons I sold, I'm like, well, hundred thousand customers. That's like kind of a lot, but that's not that much.

58:49

I was like the the market's way bigger than a hundred thousand people who would wanna buy this. And so is is the is a hundred thousand or hundred fifty thousand whatever it is, is that number even big enough? To have the needle move significantly

59:00

when the economy is shit?

59:03

On a on a percentage basis, like it's,

59:06

I'll answer it this way. So I'll answer the first question then we'll gonna move the second one, which is, you know, do I spend time thinking about this? Do I do anything about it? And the answer is yes,

59:14

at HubSpot, we will try to model out. Here's here's the impact we think it could have on our business.

59:19

But the and there's two sides to it. There's the kind of defensive side of it. It's like we wanna make sure

59:24

that we have enough cash in the bank to weather this storm. We don't know how long this storm's gonna 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 part, which isn't to me, much more exciting, which is, okay, given what we know, what can we do to capitalize,

59:40

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 have something similar happen in two thousand eight at the last, HubSpot was much earlier. So things, we did even when the pandemic started, one of the things we did is, like, oh, there's lots of uncertainty businesses are struggling. Everyone's kinda batting down the hatches. And so we said, okay. We're gonna give even more value. We're going to,

01:00:02

for our partners, we're gonna front them the cash for the, you know, revenue we know is coming over time because cash is an issue, and we had a bunch of cash from the bank. So we did things that kinda made us stronger and helped our customers. And, and so we're looking for those same kinds of opportunities. I was like, okay. Now that everyone's

01:00:17

kinda looking at the P and L and looking at all their line items or whatever is can we benefit from this because

01:00:22

HubSpot, you know, in some ways is counter cyclical. It's like, okay. Well, instead buying the big incumbent and spending hundreds of thousand dollars,

01:00:29

maybe now people that might not have considered HubSpot a year ago would now consider it because they're a bit more value conscious now than they were historically.

01:00:36

Yeah. So

01:00:38

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 can be worth like a hundred billion dollars, which is, you know, one of the biggest

01:00:50

top two hundred or something companies in the world when you were starting the company, did you have a number in your head where you're like, man, I think this I think this can make a hundred million dollars a year or I think this might be a billion dollar company. Or was it as big as, man, I think this could be worth tens of billions.

01:01:06

We did have a specific number in our head, but we had,

01:01:11

I'll say comparables 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

01:01:28

We think at the time we were just in marketing software. So here he resolved giving you the first thirty seconds of the pitch. Is that in the history of software,

01:01:34

no one has ever really built a ten plus billion dollar household name global brand marketing software company had never been done. Omniture was the greatest one at the time, with a billion 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 spaces because marketing is an arts and craftsy kind of 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.

01:02:00

And our belief was that marketing was increasingly turning into

01:02:04

the kind of thing software does solve lots of data coming in. You're trying to make decisions around all this stuff. It's look exactly like an industry. The software could 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. We're 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 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 left it. Others had done it. We were not putting someone on Mars. Right? That was not, it's like, okay. Well, people have done this before, and this is just a different time. And maybe now the time is right, for a new company to do something that,

01:02:43

you know, has been done, but, but better. This goes, a little bit to your Pixar,

01:02:47

kind of vision. Sean is like, okay. Well, know, people sometimes give you, like, okay. Well, you, you know, what are you gonna do that's different? And why is this, you know, what is does the world need more? The answer is the world does need more if it's ours And so, you know, saying to you, like, oh, you don't really need to do that. It's like telling Elon Musk, does the world really need another car company? And, like, they kind of downplay the fact that it's like, yeah, it's got four wheels. I guess you from point to point b. It's all 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

01:03:15

are not complete, new

01:03:17

from whole cloth cut. Right? They're like they're and I don't like the cliche of buildings showing on the shoulders of giants, but it's like like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree. Just based on your level of abstraction, how many steps back you're willing to go.

01:03:30

So it's like, okay. Yeah. I can see someone building something massive here. It's like it's,

01:03:35

I'll get off my rant. It's like,

01:03:37

So we had Facebook

01:03:39

did awesomely well. Then Twitter comes along and people said, oh, well, that's just Facebook. Well, you have shorter messages or something like that. It's like Facebook with constraints. With less. Yeah. And then, Facebook ran come along. It's like, well, you can post photos on Facebook. Why would anyone ever use Instagram? That's like Facebook with all the other cool things that I like as well. Right? No messenger dot none of that stuff. And then

01:03:58

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 it's this. It's like just different enough in a compelling enough way where and it's still a video social net social based video app and, you know, let the world on fire. Right? It's like, so even something as old as video or as photos,

01:04:17

it's still not over. It's just not over. It's just part of the, kinda, the human condition right now. Anyway, It's,

01:04:24

if you go off and wanna do another Pixar and if you're ever looking for an investor that will make a decision twenty four hours, by your guy. What was that tweet about, Sean? I that was on the left field. What are what are you saying?

01:04:36

Okay. So

01:04:37

I all my tweets are at a left field. So that's just Twitter. That's what Twitter's supposed to be. Right? Just a bunch of left field shit that I'll get to put in a feed.

01:04:44

I was watching I don't know what I was watching. I think my nieces were over and they were watching Toy Story. And I was like, Toyster is amazing. Pixar's amazing.

01:04:52

And I was like, why is it, like, I was like, I wanna do something amazing. This is literally how my brain works. It's like, 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,

01:05:07

seeing something that is really appealing and then having the delusional belief that, like, of course, I could do it if I just tried.

01:05:13

And

01:05:15

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,

01:05:22

and put them out into their end of the world. That 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,

01:05:37

nostalgic emotion around around, like, these movies. Right? Like, if if I see, you know, for everybody's a little bit different, but for me, it's, like, I don't know, home alone and mighty ducks, and then you know, Lion King. There's, like, a couple of movies that just, like,

01:05:49

they meant a lot at the time, and they still mean a lot, even though I don't interact with them.

01:05:54

So I have because otherwise, I'm gonna forget there's 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, like, a handful of, like, frameworks and things I think about the, way to think about the world and this ties back to, Sean's next trillion dollar company thing. Pixar, which I think it can be, by the way, Sean, just so you know. Okay. So imagine, let's take a step back. I'm on a whiteboard,

01:06:15

and the whiteboard, we see, it's the universe of all possible people. Everyone on the planet, and he draws circle with one of your skills. So in Sean's case, let's say we put copywriting

01:06:24

as one of the skills that he's in the top one percent or top five percent whatever number you wanna associate with And so that's the circle. It's like, okay. X number of people are at Sean's level, or better and at copywriting.

01:06:34

Awesome. Let's say we draw another circle that's,

01:06:37

We'll call it crypto. Knowledge is just how crypto works.

01:06:41

And that's a group of people. Awesome.

01:06:44

Rarer skill because it's newer. There's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting, we can accept that. It'll be a smaller circle.

01:06:50

What happens though, is if you intersect those two circles and turn into a Venn diagram, the number of people that know copywriting really well and also know crypto really well is a hundred times smaller than either those circles combined. Right? And this is we see the same effect in, like, in standardized tests. If you took the SAT or the GRE or the Gmat, there are people that are really good at English

01:07:09

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

01:07:16

good at both. They don't have to be the best at both because that's the thing that's actually rare is the combination of the English and the quant. Same thing here. So now imagine

01:07:24

so this is what I call it, the trillion dollar venn diagram of success. Right? I just made that up. But so you draw those circles of your skills,

01:07:31

and say, okay. Well, I'm now not, like, one in a million. I'm one in a billion. Right? We're one in five billion. Whatever that is, And if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sorta happens. So that's kinda thing number one is, like, What's your thing? What are your skills?

01:07:47

And what drives one valuable and how much value will that intersection create as two things?

01:07:53

One is

01:07:55

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,

01:08:04

How much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have? So for instance, I'm a software 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 inside my core.

01:08:15

If I combine that with, I'm gonna go often, which I could never do, become a Olympic level swimmer, let's say.

01:08:21

Like, also very rare. The intersection of that is like, okay. Well, the opportunity that that reveals because the two things are so unrelated. It's like, I don't know how I would take my ability to build a web app and intersect it with my, like, yeah, there's some things I could do, but I don't know if that would be that huge. But, software development is applicable to lots of if I was gonna be an academic researcher, if I was gonna go into music, if I was other things,

01:08:42

there's a lot more overlaps. The degree that, like, those two inter they they reinforce each other. 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,

01:08:53

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 rarity, and and that's what drives, drives the overall value, which kind of brings me to is like and so when I think of things that I want to learn, it's like, okay. Well, This is why I got into copy. It's like, if I can and copywriting is another form of this is communicating at scale is what copywriting is. Right? Like, it's, in usually textual form, It's like, okay. Well, I don't know that many software engineers that can copyright really well. Like, like, literally, like, other than that that started companies. Right? It's like, I they they don't exist, but, very rarely do get, like, really, really good, engineers that went off and read six books on copywriting in Duke Sean's class. That that's not a common Wait. You you you are you are a good writing, a writer, you got into this?

01:09:38

No.

01:09:39

No. No. I mean, your writing is great. And by the way, Sean, let's let's you gotta pip it out. Maven dot com slash power writing. Just go to maven dot com and you see it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just go maven dot com, m a v e n dot com. I'm on the home page. Starts in two weeks. Alright. So that that

01:09:54

What you said is great. I would add one more circle to that. See your Pixar thing, by the way. The reason you might pull it off is because you have a very weird and unique and related level skills. So, yes, there are people that are better,

01:10:06

maybe better creators, better animators, better entertainment, whatever, they don't know crypto. Maybe that's the thing that unlocks the next trillion dollar company is entertainment intersecting with crypto. It's the Netflix for the blockchain. Whoever it is. Right? Something like that. Where two things combined that never had been put together in that way before.

01:10:21

Right? The the the other circle that I would add that I think people underestimate it. So I tweeted this out. Right? So people, I didn't even explain what the tweet is. The tweet well, as I said, the next company I build is gonna be, like, a new new age Pixar

01:10:34

like, the, like, the next Pixar. And,

01:10:36

I think I I think I would work on that project for thirty plus, like, thirty thirty plus years. I'd I'd just keep going with that company. I wouldn't be trying to salad or flip it or get out of it or whatever.

01:10:46

So that was the tweet. And then a bunch yeah. Basically, it had two reactions. One reaction was Awesome. I'm like,

01:10:52

where can I sign up? How do I work for this company? That's that sounds awesome. My lump picks are. You could do it. And those are, like, fans of MFM type of thing, or people who themselves had been thinking, god, that would be awesome to create another, like, Pixar type of company, you know, because I love Pixar.

01:11:06

Then there's the other half of people that were like,

01:11:09

what makes you think you could do this? You know, like, you know how hard it is to make a movie? You know how expensive it is. You know how the how unique, you know, Steve Jobs and, you know, whatever,

01:11:20

lasseter and Catmole, like, how how rare those talents were when they came together? It's a once in a generation company.

01:11:25

And then other people were like, one guy had this amazing burn. He was like,

01:11:30

check,

01:11:31

aqua hire, like, a green check mark, aqua hired,

01:11:34

Powerwriting co a course

01:11:36

podcast next Pixar. And I was like, oh, thanks. That's that's pretty solid, actually.

01:11:42

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. That's 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 Farris once told this story, he goes, I went to a a business school class, a Harvard business school class. I gave this talk. At the end of the talk, I go, oh, by the way, guys, I'm doing this challenge.

01:12:09

Only for you guys, you know,

01:12:11

whatever.

01:12:12

I wanna get in touch with either Bill Clinton

01:12:15

Jennifer Lopez or, you know, some sports person, you know, Michael Jordan or whatever.

01:12:20

If anybody here can connect me over email with them, Like, you know, just reach out to them. And if you get a hold of them, connect me over email, I will buy you two round the world plane tickets, you know, for you could fly business class for a year.

01:12:33

Around the world anywhere on my dime. Alright, guys. Thank you very much. And he told that to one class. And,

01:12:38

he's like, you know, you have thirty days to complete this challenge.

01:12:43

And then, I think it I forgot what it was. It's 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 completely the challenge. He's 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,

01:13:04

he told that story, and I think he added a twist which was whoever gets the closest to it.

01:13:09

Wins.

01:13:10

And and all of a sudden, like, everybody tries. And in fact, I think somebody did get in touch and actually successfully completed the challenge.

01:13:17

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,

01:13:26

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 something or how what the perceived difficulty is. And in fact, sometimes the bigger you go, the easier something can be because nobody else is even trying to do it. And so I would say, like, you know, this Pixar thing, who knows if I'm gonna go do this or something else? I tweet things just almost to to my prototype. It's like, let me say this out loud. Let me see how that feels. If I sleep and to wake up tomorrow, do I wanna tweet five more ideas about that? Or am I over it? It was just a passing fleeting moment.

01:13:59

But but the the ingredient, I think most people lack is courage to actually go and do the thing. And I think that's the the the people people put way more emphasis on what skill am I top one percent in? 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 sand at the the deli at the 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. Yep. And this is I could not agree more. And so I think people conflate sometimes skill versus talent, and they believe they don't have the talent for entrepreneurship or for design for programming whatever it is. In my mind,

01:14:41

so skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition.

01:14:45

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

01:15:02

one of the big lessons coming in my in my life in my professional career is that most things

01:15:06

are actually skills not talent.

01:15:09

Mostly, like, it's like you can start with zero. Like, I was

01:15:12

I would have been voted least likely to ever start a company in my entire, like, generations of family. Right? Like, that's not

01:15:18

talent I ever had, like, when I, until I went off and did it. It's like, public speaking was not something. It's like, oh, that that's a skill. When you And then, there's this thing from software engineering, I think it's it's worth sharing. I think some of the best ideas are when you take stuff from other industries and pull them into this thing and apply it here in a weird way. But in software engineering, there's this, thing called functional decomposition, which is take a problem.

01:15:39

Be able articulate well. So a function that has set of inputs and a an output in what it's supposed to do.

01:15:44

And really all software problems are being able to take the highest order function is, let's say you wanna,

01:15:51

grade a possible

01:15:52

investment based only on the website. It's like, oh, 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 define. Like, domain goes in, score from zero to one hundred comes out. What other functions does that function need in order to pull that off? It's 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 person that's writing the SEO function goes down level. It's like, I'm gonna look at the on page SEO and see how good they're doing at meta tags and h one titles, and I'm gonna look at the off page SEO, then they're acquisition, that kind of stuff. That's it's like a 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.

01:16:29

What matters is the fact that you were able to abstract it down that simple thing. Right? And so most things, can be broken down that way. So so if you look at, oh, I wanna become someone that can give a talk in front of twenty five thousand people on a stage,

01:16:42

that seems like an insurmountable task for someone like me that's never done that. And that's not my that my not my thing. It's like, oh, well, what does that involve? Number one, you have to have, kind of overcome the I didn't have, like, stage fright. I had severe stage anxiety. Right? Steyr stage fright is like, oh, there's a ship that's gonna come down from space and just suck you up because you you were so bad. And stage anxiety is like, Man, I wish a spaceship would come down and sign the office stage right now. I wanna get off.

01:17:08

So there's that. Like, don't, you know, don't pass auto stage. And then there's the o. You learn about storytelling. You learn about writing. You learn about slide design. You learn about humor. And I did all those things. Right? Red books, took classes on all those components of public speaking in aggregate,

01:17:23

I'm okay now. Right? Like, I I can do that. And you and again, then it's practice and you do it over time. So anyway,

01:17:29

My point here is, startups,

01:17:31

whatever skill and startups are skill. Figure out what set of skills you need to acquire. Some you'll be good at acquiring because you have a talent. The other one, you're just gonna have grinded out more than others made, but it's doable. It's a doable thing. One question that I have. If I can do it, anyone can do it. That's my point. I love that, Frank. So Sean,

01:17:48

Sean kinda added this thing to your,

01:17:51

to your event diagram of, like, just people brave enough to get started. And

01:17:56

would you add another thing, like, when with the hustle, we sold a near 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

01:18:15

combined.

01:18:16

And I'm like, whoa, that's kind of crazy. Like, I again, I'm happy with it, but,

01:18:21

like, real value, like, I guess for me, I was like, real value was 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, oh, wow. It's really created in ten, eleven, twelve. But,

01:18:34

do you think that, what portion of HubSpot and your success

01:18:38

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?

01:18:51

Here's how I think about it. I think the outcome is a combination of,

01:18:55

like, dreaming really big

01:18:57

and, like, iterating really small. And having tight feedbacks feedback loops. So the dream really big is you have to have something that can someday translate in. It doesn't have to be as clear of vision as as, you know, Sean is kinda laid out as far as, oh, it's gonna be pixar for the new generation.

01:19:11

But you have to kind of have start with something relatively big in mind, at least at some level, but then it really comes down to the the iteration. Right? If I think the and others have demonstrated this through data is that the quality output is almost, I won't say always, but frequently a function of the number of iterations, not the quality of the the people's, for instance, one of the common examples that's thrown out is, and I've heard it with a pottery class or a photography class, but it's like, oh, one set of students divided class in half. Let's say it's a photography class.

01:19:38

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,

01:19:59

that photo is going to win. And what's been proven out across disciplines

01:20:03

is that the class that did the multiple iterations a better output than the one that was trying to solve for quality. Like, the argument, the first one was like, oh, all they really had to do was, like, submit a photo. It didn't have to be like world class quality. It's not the best I could do. But just by virtue of doing, and they're 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 if it was a pottery glass. Than the other one that was solving for quality. And they were, like, too much in their heads trying to say, oh, I'm gonna do the best I can do. Like, no. Just do it repeatedly.

01:20:29

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, it looks like I'm gonna do this thing and I immediately get response back that tells me whether I got better or got worse,

01:20:45

That is amazingly,

01:20:46

like, powerful to be able to do that and compound it over time. So so I think my

01:20:51

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 word grind it out. That's my vendor.

01:21:02

That's awesome. But, have you you've probably seen this or maybe you guys have done this, but there's this group of, like, consultants that created this thing called the Marshmallow

01:21:09

Challenge which they go to a company and they give you, like, a bunch of, sticks,

01:21:15

one marshmallow,

01:21:16

some tape, and, like, a string or something like that. Have you seen this, Darmash?

01:21:20

I think I have. Yeah. But I'll I'll kinda summarize for this. Yeah.

01:21:24

Yeah. There's you have it. Basically, they give they give you this these set of,

01:21:28

tools.

01:21:29

And they say, okay, your goal the game is you need to get a marshmallow.

01:21:33

The winning team is gonna have a marshmallow, like, as high above this table as you can. So build your tower as high as you can. If you can whoever gets the highest marshmallow whoever's tower has the highest marshmallow at the end wins. However, 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,

01:22:01

whoever creatives, like ad agency types. And they're trying to see, okay, which group is gonna form the best at a challenge like this.

01:22:07

And, basically, across the board, what they found is that, they suspected maybe engineers are gonna do the best, and 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.

01:22:33

And the reason why is 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 is that they would give the project to the adults, and the adults would spend the first five minutes, like, delegating 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 bottom structure, we're gonna do this over here. Then they would just, like, kind of draw out, like, okay, let's do a tipi. No. Let's do

01:22:59

a ladder. Let's do this cube

01:23:02

or shape or whatever. And they would do all this. And at the very end, they would try to stick the marshmallow on. And what they don't realize is the marshmallow is a lot heavier than it looks. And it will outweigh the sticks and it'll all fall over.

01:23:11

And be but because they're doing that thing where they wait on the very end to, like, ship the final good product,

01:23:17

they don't even realize where the flaw in their plan until, like, it's too late essentially. Whereas what kids will do is kids will immediately grab the thing. They'll stick the marshmallow on, and it's like if the kids don't eat the marshmallow, the marshmallow will, like, get into the structure very quickly and they'll see, 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 at pretty much every company I've ever started because it's the only way I can get engineers and designers who by nature or often, like, sort of, like, perfectionist or quality. And, like, they in 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 martial arts challenge. 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.

01:24:17

Dude, that's like the greatest CEO thing that you've ever done. That's a good one. That's a really good one is 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.

01:24:31

Alright. I know we've we went kinda long. I don't know if we were we're good to keep going or not,

01:24:35

Ben's telling me, wrap up. Perfect. But,

01:24:39

but, Darmesh, this is awesome, man. I love having you around. Are you,

01:24:44

You, the last time you're on was, like, a year ago, I think.

01:24:48

And I've been, like Yeah. Probably getting sick. I've been, like, begging you. I'm, like, man, just come on. And so we messaged him today, and he goes, I'll just come on today. And I was like, alright. Cool. Are you,

01:24:56

actually, I have a quick question. What?

01:25:00

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 it, like, we haven't been told a thing on, like, what we can and cannot do. Of course, I don't think we do anything where anyone would ever tell us you can't do that. But,

01:25:16

is it May do you ever get complaints about anything we say or do here? That's what I was gonna ask. That's what I was gonna ask. Is there anything

01:25:23

that, like,

01:25:24

So far, I guess there's nothing that's crossed the line because we've not heard a thing, but, like, it we've it's been crazy how productive,

01:25:31

this relationship has been. I did not think that because you know,

01:25:35

people say one thing and the reality is different, but it's not been that way. That's been pretty cool.

01:25:41

Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad,

01:25:43

glad that's working out in your teams. Have I it's you folks have been kinda great for HubSpot.

01:25:48

And I know this keeps you up at night in terms of evaluation. I've thought about that a lot.

01:25:52

Right as much as you have. But

01:25:55

at the time, I I would not

01:25:58

beat yourself up over it. I think it was a fair I I don't know that. And even at that, just so you know, even at that price,

01:26:04

and nothing to do with you, but, like, it was a board level discussion. We had to just, like, okay. What's do we really wanna, is Not that it wasn't worth that, but was it worth that to us at the time because it was a relatively new, new thing that we were doing. But,

01:26:17

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.

01:26:26

Yes. I definitely see that. Yes.

01:26:28

Yeah. But the same way to kind of, well, I mean, we can kinda wrap on this is that when we were talking early, the beginning of the episode around kind of compensation as being just one of the kind of dimensions of value

01:26:37

in a acquisition, the kind of the valuation that you get the

01:26:41

price tag is just one dimension of value. Then the rest of it is how happy are you? How happy is the team? Did you meet people that will kinda,

01:26:48

you will enjoy working with in your future years? Are you are there your future co founders, 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,

01:27:00

Yeah. Hopefully, the 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

01:27:08

No. It was awesome. Well, thank you. This is awesome. Found what do 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 Sometimes is, like, one of the most dangerous words in the in the language.

01:27:22

Yeah. It because it's, like, you think it's soon and in reality, it's never.

01:27:27

And you pulled a great move, which was what we talked 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, 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 do it. Perfect.

01:27:44

And I I intentionally made it, like, open. It's like, okay. I knew when my last meeting was. It's like, anytime after this, so it's not even, like, oh, like, I I made it work this afternoon, but I was only available for the small windows. Like, no. Any time between two PM and midnight. If you get, if you come back, I would have been let's do it. It's, yeah. That's awesome. It's awesome. Well, it's a lot of fun. Thank you for coming on. Alright. Thanks for having.

00:00 01:28:25