Billion Dollar Business Philosophies With Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah

So this is what I call like the trillion dollar Venn diagram of success, right? I just made that up. But so you draw those circles of your skills and say, okay, well, I am now not like 1 in a million, I'm 1 in a billion, right? Or 1 in 5 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 1 is like, what's your thing? What are your skills? And what drives— what value— how much value will that intersection create? It's 2 things. One is how rare is that intersection, whether it's 2 circles or 3 circles or whatever, how rare is it? And then the other one is—

So on the pod right now, we've got Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the founder of HubSpot. He's, uh, your technical title is CTO, right?

That is correct.

I see you more— I think this means that, uh, that you have to do the ad reads for your own company today.

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

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, uh, Sean, do you— you're renting a house right now?

Yeah.

And Dharmesh, you do not rent though, right?

Not anymore. I did for a long, long time.

I'm a big believer in rentals as it turns out, but I, uh, I'm staying in Brooklyn for the summer and I rent a furnished house and it— or an 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 think 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 it? Because Sean, you owned a place in San Francisco for like 4 years and then now you rent again.

Way better. In fact, every time something breaks, I now just have joy to be like, let me call somebody else. 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 tried to do the calculation, it's so hard to beat just this annual property tax every single time on rent.

Wait, so Dinesh, 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 a family, would you be a renter?

If it was up to me, yes. Because just the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one's psyche and soul that ownership bestows upon you is just not worth it. That's my thing. It's just like, I don't want to worry about those things. I want to get as close to living in the Matrix as I possibly can, right? Renting is a step closer to being in the Matrix where you don't have to worry about physical things and atoms and things like that. It's like, ah, that's somebody else's problem. Why you show up?

How, how many people in your socio-economic, like, ballpark, like, uh, you know, founders of multi-billion dollar companies or people like you, do you think also rent? Because I think that'd be a sh— 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?

I know people that are similar to me in terms of that they would prefer renting because I've talked to them about this. But almost everyone I know now, once you get a family and once you have other things that you're trying to factor in. For instance, you know, one of the things my wife loves gardening and loves having a yard and that's kind of hard to do in a rental. Not that you can't do it, but it's right.

One thing that a guy told me who's similarly, you know, I think he's probably got like a $10 or $20 million house. He was like, it, he's like, renting is amazing until you want the, until your wife wants a specific house. And then once your wife wants a specific house or in a specific neighborhood, that neighborhood, like higher end neighborhoods have no rentals. So, You just can't get into that neighborhood, 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 good problems to have. So we'll count it that way. All right. What are we talking about? Where should we start?

Well, you have a few things left over from the last episode, Sean. I don't know if we want to jump into some of those. Let's do one.

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?

I do. 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?

Cambridge.

Yep. Yeah. So you guys know one another.

He wrote a blog post back in 2008. It was October 2008. So this is like right after the crash and it's, it's just, if you go to paulgramm.com/badeconomy, um, is the name of the blog post. And he makes this case where he goes, The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid-'70s, 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, which you've heard before, but I thought there's one interesting part where 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. And I actually thought that was a really good point because I hear this so much. It's like, I, I'll talk to kind of young founders and they, listen to Twitter and they listen to podcasts and they listen, you know, they listen to kind of these, like a lot of it's like, you know, VCs who are, you know, also pandemic experts and also, you know, you know, macroeconomists as well. And so they hear and then they sort of start to adjust their plans and their mental models and like their room for everything. And it's like, dude, if you're a startup, you're like an ant in this world. Does the ant care what's going on with the presidential election? No. Like, You basically just need to build a product. You need to carry your little piece of dirt. It's like build a product, get a customer, get 10 customers. Like it doesn't matter if the economy is bad. If you can't get 10 customers, it's not going to work anyways. And so I thought it was a great little blog post talking about like kind of starting 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, Dharmesh, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. So my position is I lean more towards kind of the Paul Graham end of the spectrum, which is I think it's either neutral, that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a kind of downturn in economy or recession 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 $200+ million. Right. So now you've got this talent that's coming on the market that might not have come on the market before, uh, things that were super expensive like buying Google AdWords or certain marketing channels because you have this glut of money and glut of venture capital. Um, you know, I think of venture capital as a very efficient machine of turning like money from LPs into Google AdWords revenue, right? That's, uh, they're just a conduit between the two. Um, and as in a downward economy, you're going to 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 I'm generally net positive that a down economy is actually a relatively good time to start a startup.

For like the last 18 months or, you know, whenever, like the last 24 months when everything's been booming, I've, uh, my wife works at Airbnb and, uh, you know, I've got a lot of friends that work at HubSpot, 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, 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 $250,000 a year. I don't know how this is going to 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 startup, I mean, you can't afford those salaries anyway, right? Unless you were one of those kind of rare exceptions that has $50+ million going out of the gate, which is very, very rare. And so, you know, one of the things a founder has to kind of 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 kind of attract people and then its customers, it's not going to work. So you have to do one of two things, either recognize kind of superstar talent and give them something they can't get because it's beyond competition. It's like, oh, you'll learn more here. Oh, you're gonna do your own startup someday. This is the place to get your startup MBA because you'll be exposed to a bunch of things. You'll meet your future co-founder 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 $200,000+ $300,000+ salary yet, but they will someday. I caught them early in their kind of evolution and so I can get them there. So it has to be one or the other form of arbitrage. Otherwise you can't play the game. That's just not, uh, I don't think it's viable.

I, I'm doing, uh, when you're saying that, it's like resonating so much because it's basically all the 3 things we just talked about I'm doing. It's like I started the Milk Road in January this year. And so, you know, it's been, it's about to be 6 months or it's been 6 months. And, um, it's like, here, let me start a crypto company right when crypto crashes, you know, like 70, 80%. And at the beginning, Ben, even my co-founder Ben, he was like, you know, um, The only thing I can see going wrong is if crypto goes in a bear market. I go, well, crypto is going to 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 in both ways. It goes— the elevator is dramatic in both ways. And I was like, you know, so it's just a question of like, do you— what do you think, that kills it or do we just make it through? Like, there's— that's really all we have to think about here. So that was the first part of starting in a bad economy. The second one on talent was I recently hired this guy and he quit a pretty well-known, uh, venture-backed company that I think had just raised maybe $50 or $100 million. 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 had— we had traded a couple emails, nothing serious, just he had— he was wanting me to use his product. Then he took a job at this place. All right, 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. 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, direct and to the point. And he tells me why, blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, all right, 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. Um, 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, Oh dude, that's like a 50% pay cut. And I was like, um, and I didn't, I didn't say this out loud, but in my head what I, what I felt, I, I told him, I was like, that's what I can afford to pay right now. And like, look, you come crush it, the sky's the limit, but like, that's what I could pay you right now, uh, 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. And he's like, you know, I'll work for you for free. And Ben Graham goes, your price is too high, sir. Which is, which is the truth, which is the idea 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 want to be like a successful investor. That's how I felt. And I didn't want to say it because it's kind of arrogant, but it's like, dude, if I take you under my wing, my team is like 3 people. If you become one of those 3 and you're working out of my— he came over to my house yesterday. You're sitting by me working at, 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 appreciate the value you bring, but let's like, the dollar amount is, um, like, uh, the salary dollar amount is not what, not the value you're getting. Uh, and I think he knows that intuitively and that's why he said yes, but like, uh, that Ben Graham story always stands out. No, no, he's a young guy, just graduated from college.

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. Um, you know, you might've had like a, you know, your own magnetism, which is like, you know, like for me, I get this cheat code cuz 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 I think this guy's a dummy and he annoys me, or I think this guy's smart and I really like, you know, I'd love to be, 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 $5,000, you know, Lego block of, uh, salary building?

Yep. So we cheated a little bit, right? Because, um, of the first 8 people in the company, 7 of them, uh, came out of MIT Sloan, the same school that Brian and I went to and we met in class. So it was kind of 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, let's go do this thing. Right. And it's also, and they were kind of far enough along in their careers that they were not missing meals or anything like that. Right. They had just gone to business school, a relatively good business school. And, and so that was it. It's like, and then the other thing, and this is the, uh, 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 chumps. So the idea is really bad 3, 6 months from now. You will basically be able to pick up where you left off, right? There's like, there's no loss other than the opportunity cost of those 3 to 6 months. This is not like an irreversible lifetime decision that I've made this call and that's all I'm going to have to be able to do for the next 5 or 10 years. Um, and that was enough. It's, yeah. Um, what did things change?

Uh, how many people do you think, um, how many people do you think at HubSpot have made like 8 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 does that change the dynamic?

Um, it hasn't. So to answer your question, so I always have to, there's this little, it only takes like a second and a half for me to translate 8 figures into what is that actually? So that's $10 million plus. Um, yeah.

Like maybe, maybe 5 or $10 million is like the number where you're like, fuck this, I don't need this job.

So I think I, uh, that's been my skill. Sean, you've kind of seen my journey. I think my skill has been finding the diamond in the rough, diamonds in the rough. So we've had like, well, Sean and I kind of discovered one another. Uh, but then like there's Steph Smith, who's now at a16z. We had Trung, who's popular. We've had a bunch of people who went on and founded different companies. And what I've always looked for, like I purposely have looked for these diamond in the roughs because I was like, I can't afford, you know, to pay X, Y, and Z. So I got to hire this 24-year-old who I know will be a boss in like 5 or 10 years.

By the way, Sam, it's not just that you can't afford them. I remember once the hustle got to the point where you could afford them, you were just kind of 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? This like engineer at my office. And I'd be like, I don't know, like whatever, one, one $150, $170. You're like, what, $170? Oh my God. Like, this is, you know, if this person left, would the company fail? No, no, not at all. Well, it was crazy.

That was 10 years or that was a year ago. Yeah. So things have changed a little bit. But also like 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 going to— and he's like, he arrived right when they're serving lunch. Uh, but, uh, we've, we've like discovered some cool people and I always look for a couple of things. The first thing is actually, this is from Paul Graham. He goes, I like to hire animals, like people who like you're a little bit afraid of. And they're like, uh, 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, uh, 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, at our startup, 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, uh, a, uh, we used to say, you know, let your freak flag, uh, let your freak flag fly. And, uh, we're like, you know, I don't, I was like, we'll have, we had all types of different people. We, we had, uh, just, just every type of like person we, worked at our company and they liked that we like embraced their odd, their kind of like them being different.

Yeah, we have something similar. So we have, you know, 5 kind of core values as part of our HubSpot culture. One of them is, is remarkability or being remarkable. And what we mean by that is there's something noteworthy they've done in their past or there's something quirky, something different, something that's an outlier about them. And it doesn't have to be specifically business or whatever even role that they're in, but there's like, they're just kind of like off the kind of main beat. And that we've done well with those kinds of people and we give them a home, kind of let them, uh, do their thing and it tends to work out.

Yeah. So Sam had weirdos and kind of like let, let your freak flag fly. You have the, um, the, uh, remarkability. Have you done something remarkable? We had one at Bebo that was the same as we, we used to say we hired degenerates. It's like intentionally a, a, a word that's usually negative, right? Like we hired degenerates. And what we said, we would always ask me and Furkan, 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 with something that didn't have a clear payoff. Like, it wasn't the popular thing to be obsessed with. Um, like, it wasn't the, like, cookie-cutter good thing to be obsessed with. Like, it wasn't, like, grades in school. It would be like, you know, Furkan got really into, you know, um, this video game. And he was like, yeah, became like a top 100 ranked player of this game. And like, it was a total, like, you know, in one hand 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 keep going. And I had, 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 3 years of deep obsession around some competitive like thing? And, and then when you do, do you like really like try to study the game and figure out how to like What are the loopholes in the game? What are the rules of the game? You immerse 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 4 in the morning, like building that, uh, SoundCloud player that works like TikTok for no reason, because you're so annoyed that SoundCloud like is too slow in the way that they develop things. It's like other people would look at that as like, oh, you're not really reliable or very structured. Or you, You know, why did you work on that? That wasn't even like the task at hand. Whereas we would see that and we'd be like, oh, all we need to do is just point this guy's degeneracy at the right direction and then we'll win. And that was like our mindset.

Yeah. I think of that as a kind of borderline pathological obsession. Like that's like once you attach yourself, whatever it happens to be, right? And what our job is to kind of bring it just shy of pathological where it's like kind of harming themselves, but it's like you can't help yourself. You're going to like just dig in and whether it's video games or whatever it happens to be, people that have— I won't call it a gene, but that have that trait tend to work out well in startups because you're trying to attach yourself to a particular thing, a particular problem. The other thing I'm just aware of, since we're on the topic of talent, I've got this little mini framework, works at multiple levels of abstraction. There are like 3 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 180-mile, you know, ideas an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. Then there are the— so they're the starters. Then you have the completers. Those are the people that can make a list of like, here are the things that need to get done in order for us to ship a product or do whatever. And often those folks are at odds. Like the idea folks are kind of really frustrated with the completers that are just like, ah, I'm just trying to check a box and make our ideas 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. And usually you're looking for someone that has at least some, like a 9 or 10 on one of those dimensions, a 7 or an 8 on another one, and usually very low on the third, right? It's like you can have—

What are you?

Super creative. I'm on the creative side. I'm like, yeah, for sure. Well, how have you—

Well, but how— that doesn't make sense to me because you lead a $20 billion software company that you've been doing it for 20 years. Like, and as a CTO, she's like, how on earth do you pull that off? And it's public, it's publicly traded, which means you've got to go through all the bullshit that like is the opposite of creativity.

Yeah.

How do you, how do you, how do you—

Well, like one thing you shared last time, you talked about those little like kind of calculators or the little like kind of growth, growth tools that you had built, which was just like, oh, I was just tinkering and I made this little like page load speed test site. And then, or whatever, I don't remember the exact examples, but you had built like 3 or 4 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, we were just talking, he's getting ready for the earnings call. And like that to me is the opposite of creativity. You know what I mean? That's like, you're, you have so many, you have such a narrow lane that you could stay within. That's like, it seems so hard.

Yeah. So I'll say this, um, I have done everything in my, uh, in my power 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 non-creative, not a part of that. So I don't have any direct reports, which is unheard of for a company that is, you know, for a founder that has 7,000 people in the company and a lot of them on the kind of product and engineering team, which presumably, you know, CTO would kind of help manage and lead. I don't do that. And so the only meetings I go to are where there's some creativity involved. I don't like to go to kind of status things and updates or whatever. It's like I can read an email as well as the next person. So, but, but there are things that are non-delegatable that one of we should, we should probably talk about. It's on my list of things. So one is earnings calls. Another one is getting on the public stages, right? So for instance, we have an annual conference called Inbound that, you know, the last time it was in person, it had like 25,000 people in the live event, right? Like it's, it's big and I have to give the keynote every year and I've been doing it for 10+ 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-delegatable things, right? I couldn't say, oh, well, we're going to have someone else go do that because, you know, in my role as founder, I have a certain kind of weight to me just by virtue of the title, um, of being a founder versus, um, someone else.

So— Sean, listen to this. Listen to this Dharmesh story. And Dharmesh, you could fill in the blanks as we go, because you could decide how much you want to reveal. But there has been a couple different times, maybe 3 different times, I've introduced Dharmesh to a founder of a company who was raising money. And literally within 5 minutes he replied and said, I looked at the deck, I'm in for blank amount. He, he, Damash, you could reveal if you wanna say some of the, some of the times how much it was. But, uh, and he replied with, I'm in. Just so you know though, I've got one rule, which is I always side with the founder. Um, 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 is like, I'm gonna make close to no time for you. Or like, you know, like I think you said it, like, I'm totally going to be silent, a silent partner. I'm not going to bother you, which means if you want to bother me, I probably, you know, I'm not going to talk to you that much, but that's like the stipulations for taking my money. If you want to take it, great. Do it. I've seen that happen 3 different times. And do you want to reveal how much it was or no?

I really respect that you said that part because I thought you were going to say like, um, you know, to support the causes I care about. Yeah. I just, you know, just to foster entrepreneurship or like, you know, you know, use the D word, democratize something, something. And instead you said a true thing that I think every angel investor feels is like, it's awesome to have a notch on your belt and be like, yeah, I, I either I saw that or I backed that, I bet on that and it worked out and it's awesome. It's an awesome feeling. It is a perk of the job and it's a real one. So the fact that you said that to me shows me that you are a real one, Dharmesh.

I'm, I'm what I refer to myself as like a warm-hearted, red-blooded capitalist, right? So I have compassion. It's not like that I don't like people. I'm not a sociopath, but I, I'm a capitalist. It's like, okay, well, for instance, I'm, this is gonna sound completely immodest, but we opened this door in 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 it, delegate it, whatever, for less than that, you don't do those things, right? You don't mow your lawn, whatever. If, um, and so I haven't, uh, I should recalibrate, but you know, my number personally, the one I use just because the math is easier, is like $10,000 an hour. I think that's what I, if I were on the open market, I think I could, I could make that.

If that's what I would have thought higher, I would have thought higher. Well, what do you think?

That's the best number to use.

It's higher. No, but I think, I think it would be like $50,000 or $100,000 an hour, maybe. Like, I mean, way higher.

One could make the case, but I can make my point without having to make that particular case.

Okay. Let me ask you a question to make it real. So you buy something, you book a plane ticket, it's like, whatever, it didn't work out or 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 $2,000, but it's below my hourly rate. I'm not going to 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 going to apologize because they could only get half back or it was only a credit. It's like, I don't, I don't care. I just honestly don't care. 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 $100,000, give or take a little bit. It's grown considerably since then. But if I spent like 5 hours doing due diligence or having founder meetings or whatever, I basically doubled their valuation or halved my investment amount, right? Because like, not only did I put cash in for which I'm going to get shares, but then I put another $50,000 or $100,000 worth of time in just in the due diligence, which is easy to kind of run up that bill. It makes no mathematical sense why people would do that, right? It's like, okay, um, 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 going to pick better companies, you're going to do these things. And maybe for the first hour or two in an early-stage startup, there's just not that much diligence to do, right? Like, what are you going to dig into? It's like, you like the idea or you don't. You like the founders or you don't. Move on. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM.

Our software is the best.

HubSpot, grow better.

Or the 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. Those are the things that you don't do, you don't put a dollar amount on because you enjoy them and therefore it is not a cost to you. It is like a benefit to you. So So yeah, if you love gardening, then you garden. You don't put a $10,000 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 like to solve for, it's gonna, it's a little bit of a squishy term, is 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 50 people as a result of this. And I have ideas that I think are worth sharing. Um, and it was smaller. I'm like, and, and it's not like, oh, I don't get up outta bed in the morning unless there's at least, you know, 10,000 people. It's like, if, if this was Morning Brew's podcast, then we should have Amplify my time, right? To what little time I have left on the planet, what things that I know. Um, so I'm always looking for, uh, to do things at scale. Like, how can I find a way?

Let, let— speaking of things at scale, let's talk about this thing because like on the surface, this thing that you recently did like a year ago is incredibly silly and not worth your time. But basically, I think a year and a half ago, Wordle— is it like a game that an online game. It's like a word game that went viral. You built a thing called Wordplay. Is it wordplay.com? It's wordplay.com, right? Uh, by the way, you buy domain names. So you bought thehustle.com for us. You bought me, uh, copythat.com. Thank you for that. Um, I forgot to say thank you in person, but, uh, uh, so you buy like a lot of amazing domains, but you have wordplay.com. And did you tweet that it was getting 7 million users a week or 3? What was the number?

Which— how did it get so much traffic? Where did the traffic come from?

Well, it helps to have a social media following, right? I've got a million followers on LinkedIn. I've got 300,000 on Twitter. So there's that. Uh, there are some viral elements.

That's, that's a lot, but that's not—

I wouldn't have thought that.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's not enough for that, is it? How many users do you think got from that?

Um, in the early days, all of them. Was it big?

Was it big right off the bat? Like the first week, was it big? 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?

Yeah.

Wow.

I thought you were gonna say way less.

Yeah. I thought he was gonna say like 5 grand a month, but 90 grand a month. And you're, you only have, your only costs are hosting, right?

Yeah. And my time.

Right. And first of all, Sean, go to wordplay.com and then go to like the about page. His about page is incredibly well written. It's wonderful copywriting. It's wonderful. Uh, you've got a wonderful voice. It says, uh, I'll just read the first sentence, but it says, why would you do this? Or better yet, why would I do this? That's a really good question. My wife asked me the same question. And then you like go on to explain why it just, you, you're, you're, you're quite a good writer for also being like this amazing engineer. Typically those things don't go—

I went to a car writing course that Sean put on, you know that, right? Let's like, I'm not, I'm not getting around here with my car.

The alumni. I like to say I taught Dharmesh everything he knows even before he met me. I somehow taught him all that good stuff before he built HubSpot.

What, uh, what do you, so this was making $90 grand a month maybe, or about, what do you, is this—

It could, it's not, right? There's no ads here.

I turned ads off because that's sort of the point., and people were asking me, it was like, Dharmesh, why do you have ads on this thing? I'm like, to learn. Like, it's like, I've learned what I needed to learn so I can—

Was, was tweeting and LinkedIn, posting this on LinkedIn the only way you 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 buddy tried to buy it from— Suli tried to buy it off you.

Did he really?

He tweeted out, he's like, I'd like to buy this off you. I've, you know, I've built mobile games before, you know, he was like semi-serious at least. I don't know. I don't know if you talked to him or not, but I did not.

What do you think you could sell? What do you think, like, if you cared, what do you think you could sell it for? $2 or $3 million maybe?

So it's— and, um, is this the bit— 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, uh, had my, it's like I'm a big believer in like, you know, what folks call like the flywheel. There's all these little things that are attached to the flywheel, right? It's like, oh, well LinkedIn helps a little bit, puts a little energy, Twitter does a little bit, and then I have my blog and the email goes out and there's like things that I sort of do. Um, yeah, so it, it helps, but it's like the hardest part is that cold start problem. It's like, how do you get your first 100,000 people, 100 to 1,000 people? And then it's a matter of like tracking the retention rate on those users. Do they come back? The other thing that's been interesting about Wordplay as far as a lesson learned is that, you know, when it started, the average time a user spent according to Google was roughly 4 minutes on the game. Okay. In the early weeks. And now that number is at 14 minutes is the average time a user spends, you know, across however many thousands of users come in a given day. So.

Right. What— and is this the biggest side project you've ever created?

Depends on how you measure it. So technically, no, not in terms of just like raw traffic. I've built graders and things like that before that have done better.

But what have you built that did— what side project have you built outside of HubSpot that gets more traffic?

I haven't really done side projects. This is my first one 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 circumstances here, it didn't really make sense. And even now, like I'm thinking about doing a kind of a marketing and sales related edition 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 players in the space kind of thing? And then you can get sponsorships or whatever anyway. But yeah, Website Grader was the, this kind of a project where it was like a free, I'm I really like low-friction things that people can come to the website. And this is why my son and I were chatting yesterday, because we're looking at Flutter, this new development environment and language. Well, Dart's the language, but Flutter is the app framework for building mobile apps across iOS and Android and things. It's what the cool new kids are learning. And he's like, no, why would I ever want to build a mobile app? That's like something people have to download. I have to get approval from, you know, Apple to kind of post my— like, I want to like just do it like immediately. He's got that, and he's right. It's like, okay, anyway. So that's the Wordplay story. It's been, it's been a lot of fun. I've— it's hard to know with these things, like, like where the road leads. Like Wordplay itself may or may not kind of 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. It's like, okay, well then I'm using it to 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?, and, and see if that's a thing, right? It's like, okay, if you could aggregate people with like interests, um, that in and of itself has value. And I want it to be something, something that kind of self-runs, but we'll see.

If you were, uh, I'm gonna ask Dharmesh, if Sam had built this as a side project and he was at the same point you're at right now, what would you like kind of advise him to do? If it was Sam's project and you were just kind of an outsider said, oh, that's really cool you did that. And it sounds like you've kind of reached this point where you don't really have a direction of where it's gonna go next. What would you kind of tell Sam?

As a reminder to people, Chess.com is like a huge business, like, like multi-billion dollar valuation.

We talked about this when we talked about chess also, which was what other things are like chess? And we had said Sudoku and we had said, I think we had said like a Scrabble or whatever.

Uh, yep.

Word is, word games are all, yeah.

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 10th the size as the chess enthusiast audience. Um, 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, um, in that sense.

So, so the lessons you draw from Chess.com, right, which is 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 Chess.com so you can invite— like, it's all the things, right? That these are, uh, very easily translatable into other games like Wordplay, right? Um, so anyway, so we'll pick and choose.

Can I give you one little feature I think would be cool? Because, uh, leaderboards are always this problem in general where, uh, Like a leaderboard's cool for the top 10 people. And then for everybody else on earth, it's like, oh great, I'm player number 3— 39,000. Fantastic. Right. Uh, and so there's all these, like, if you— I kind of studied this once, I was like, who solved this problem? And there's really 3 models that work. One is more like chess, uh, and, and games do this. They create a rank system. So it's not your number 80,000 in the world, cause that doesn't mean anything, but you go from bronze to silver to gold to platinum to master to grandmaster. And like you, you just compete to get your own level up within that to get to your next badge. And that's a karate belt, the karate belt method, let's call it. Then there's the next one, which is your social rank matters when it's with people you know that are either your friends, your school, your city, something like that. So you could kind of 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 Wordplay right now, I feel like I'm alone in this experience. I don't know that there's 3,000 other people solving this right now. And also, I don't know, I bet you there's like some celebrity that plays Wordplay 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 kind of knew that, that X known people have solved it for today, that's just kind of interesting. And it's kind of like, you know, makes them more approachable. So I almost wonder if there was like a little feature like that where if you're a blue check type person, you could kind of like auth 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 3 random feature ideas for you. That's a good idea.

The one thing's, and I don't, it's not surfaced on the, on the front, this is a really good idea. But one of the things I do have is in the comment, there's a, there's commentary. So as you're playing, 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 guessed this particular word. That's not a very common word to use. Congrats, good for you. Or this is the 1,000th time you've used this particular word. You know, points for consistency. So, So there's this kind of running commentary, but I like that idea of like just kind of front loading is like, here's a number of people that have solved this game. I give you stats at the end of the game. It's like, oh, only 14% of the people or players solved this particular word. And it took them on average 7 point, I mean, uh, 4.7 guesses. So yeah.

Can I throw 2 more at you? Uh, this is now my, my feature brainstorm for you. Uh, if you ever played Candy Crush—

there's nothing more, there's nothing more than like an entrepreneur. There's nothing more than like a person who has no stakes 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 on a podcast than me telling you features for wordplay, but fuck it. It's just our podcast. We can do whatever we want. Have you ever played Candy Crush? They do this thing, which was they make the, uh, so stakes, stakes matter a lot in stories or any kind of like adventure. Um, and so like, you know, if you open up a pack of Warheads and you see a black one, oh, that's the really crazy one. Uh, Candy 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 or whatever. So I'd like to see that in the wordplay when I come into every day. I'd like to know if this is a nightmarishly hard puzzle or if this is just okay. It gets me amped up for my play.

That's a really good idea. Combining that with your tiering idea, and then we can, uh, move on. But so imagine we had a tiering mechanism that you go from bronze to silver to whatever to ninja level. Um, you know, right now when you start the game, you get a random word that— and other people get random words as well. And there's a daily word, um, that everybody plays together. But imagine that like as you move up the rank, it gets harder. It's like now you're a level that few have achieved, let alone solved, right? It's like no one even gets here. You're here. Um, and then, you know, do things for streaks. Like, okay, well you're the first person to have solved like 50 games in a row at this tier or something like that. I think that'd be fun.

So one last one I think you'll like, which is, um, you are a fan of crypto and I think you would, if you like the crypto ethos. And I think if you could advance the cause of crypto, that would be like a win for you personally. Um, so we gave out this milk money grant, this like milk for the milk road. 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 1 MATIC, like a tiny amount. Or like, then he was like playing with different ideas. He's like, oh, there's actually 100 MATIC jackpot for the day. And like, only winners are eligible for the jackpot. You might, you might get it or you might not. And so you got a bunch of people connecting a wallet. So I think what you could do is you could actually just add that into Wordplay, which is, by the way, there's a $100 a day prize paid out in MATIC or, or whatever. Um, all you gotta do is create a little wallet here and like you might win. And so I think a bunch of your avid players would create a crypto wallet where they might not otherwise. So you'll onboard new people into the world of crypto. You 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 crypto wallet, you know, for the future. Anyways, that's, I will, I will now stop talking about Wordplay.

Also a good idea. Yeah. By the way, I just think, so I actually added the ability to connect your, connect your Diesel wallet and your Ethereum wallet to Wordplay. 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 until the next payout, whatever it happens to be, and then it's like, oh, the top 10 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 play-to-earn game. That's awesome.

Yeah. That would be amazing.

Yeah.

So let me, Sean, this is an interesting topic, but I understand there's like laws and SEC stuff around what you can and cannot say. Dharmesh, just tell me if like you can't, but basically I think it was in late May. I'm looking at now in like May 25th or something like that. Sean, I don't know if you saw this, but like there was headlines that said like, Dharmesh Shah, CTO, co-founder of HubSpot, buys HubSpot shares. And I think it was like, was it $10 million? It was, it was a pretty substantial amount.

It was over $3 million. 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, Dharmesh, like this insider bought it. He, he like, he has faith in the company. That was a pretty, that's a pretty cool move. When you're doing something like that, what is your thinking? Like, are you thinking like, um, like, is it part of you like, I just want to prove to the world that I'm brave? Is it part of you like, oh no, this is just undervalued, like, they're, they're foolish? Uh, it's— I mean, like, what, what's your, what's your motivation there?

Um, it's exactly what you said, which is, uh, I just thought the company was undervalued given the long-term potential. And I've done this before. I did it a couple years ago and bought a bunch of shares, I think even more at that time, like at $125 a share, right? I'm like, okay, well, and this is when HubSpot stock had dipped over the ensuing, I mean, the prior 2 or 3 months. I'm like, I understand the markets were 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, $125. Turns out I was right. And so it's a similar thing. It's like, and it does signal belief in the company, right? But it's what I believe. And there are, regulations around it. You know, people ask, look, well, why did you buy at that time? As it turns out, it was the exact window of time that I had to wait a certain period since my last transaction to when I could buy. And the day that I was eligible to buy, I bought. And it's like, oh, the price is low enough. I still have conviction that over the long term—

Aren't you also buying with money that, like, where did this $3 million 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 bank account.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Or can you, can you take a loan against your HubSpot shares to buy more?

There are like 100 things you cannot do. That's one of them. It's, uh, yeah.

Wow. No, I think, uh, I saw that the other day and, uh, you, you've done, you've made a few decisions. 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 wondering what, what was going through your head when you did that?

What's the psychology like when, uh, I don't know, HubSpot stocks, like I'm just rounding, I think it's down like 40, maybe 50%, something like that from the all-time high, like during the, the last kind of the peak of the peak last year or whatever. Um, and so, you know, we come on here sometimes and I'll be like, uh, all right guys, you know, you know, Sam will be like, dude, how are you? And, uh, you lost a bunch of money today. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I lost like a million dollars today. And like, like, you know, ETH is down and I'm down $1 million. I'll share my psychology of like dealing with this, this travesty of a loss or whatever. And I'll be like, yeah, you know, here's how I think about it. You play that game at like 1,000x higher stakes where like, you know, more like you're just losing $500 million. Yeah, exactly. I'm losing $500,000. You're losing $500 million or whatever. You know, something crazy like that. What's, what's your psychology like? I don't know.— I think you know what question I'm trying to ask, even though I don't have the words.

How does it feel to lose half a billion dollars is what you're asking me? Yeah.

And how do you deal with that? And like, yeah, go, go for it.

Is that how much you lost?

You think? It's more than that, but yeah, who's counting?

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

No, no, actually fine. I'm not really, and I'm not just saying this, but It's true. It does not faze me like one bit because the reality is it does not change my life one iota, right? Other than like, okay, well, it impacts, you know, HubSpot employees and shareholders. I get that. But in terms of me individually, like nothing changes, right? Like I wasn't off planning to buy small islands or take over governments or something like that or buy 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 that I would've invested in, but you know, my wife continues to invest. There's, you know, we have plans to do the philanthropy we want to do. And so it's 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 or what's like and do my HubSpot stuff. It's like, okay, like what's really—

you don't even have, you don't even have the self-talk in your head where you kind of need to like, —because for me, when it happens, I'm like, uh, you know, I have an 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 lasts 17 seconds, but I do have those 17 seconds. It sounds like you don't even have those 17 seconds because you're like, well, I've already been over this before in my head at some point in my life, and I just decided it doesn't matter. Let alone the self-talk.

The self-talk is one thing, let alone like that. But, and then there's also this other thing that you and I have, Sean, which is like, it if the markets are shit for a year or two, like, we will change our day-to-day actions. Like, you know, we may not buy X, Y, and Z, or like, we might, you know, we're not to that point where it's like it doesn't matter.

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

Yeah, it's like, well, we'll maybe change behavior, but you don't even change.

I laid off my son.

Yeah. And a lot of HubSpot's customers are kind of like, you know, medium-sized, let's say businesses. Um, so do you like, do you spend much energy being like, okay, where is the economy going? What's going to happen to my customers, which will have some knock-on effect of like what's going to happen to our business. Do you care, spend energy there? Cause I find myself, the reason I ask, cause I find myself sometimes going down these rabbit holes of like, okay, what do I think is going to happen? Then 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— And is HubSpot's customer base even— how many customers does HubSpot have? Like 130,000? Like, yeah. And then somewhere over that. Yeah. Yeah. And when I think when I sold, it was 100,000 or just crossed 100,000. In the grand scheme of things, one of the reasons I sold them, like, well, 100,000 customers, that's like kind of a lot, but that's not that much. Uh, I was like, the market's way bigger than 100,000 people who would want to buy this. And so is, is the Is $100,000 or $150,000, whatever it is, is that number even big enough to have the needle move significantly when the economy is shit?

So when you were starting the company, so like there's a, there, you know, if you just look at the math, there's a world where HubSpot in the next 5 or 10 or who knows how long can be worth like $100 billion, which is, you know, one of the biggest top 200 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 $100 million a year. I think this might be a billion-dollar company. Or was it as big as, man, I think this could be worth tens of billions?

We didn't have a specific number in our head, but we had, um, 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— we think at the time we were just in marketing software. So here was— I'll give you the first 30 seconds of the pitch is that in the history of software, no one has ever really built a $10+ billion household name, global brand marketing software company had never been done. Omniture was the greatest one at the time with a $1.5 billion price tag at the time. And we're like, and the reason people, you know, companies have not been built in the marketing tech space is because marketing is an arts and crafty 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. And our belief was that marketing was increasingly turning into The kind of thing software does solve, lots of data coming in, you're trying to make decisions around all this stuff. It looks exactly like an industry that software can help with. And so our thesis was that someday someone will build $100, $200, $500 billion 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, uh, and we're kind of 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. Uh, but did we think there was an opportunity to do the kind of thing that, uh, you're talking about? Yeah, others have 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 has been done but better. This goes a little bit to your Pixar kind of vision, Sean. It's like, okay, well, you know, people sometimes give us like, okay, well, you know, what are you going to do that's different? And why is this? You know, what does the world need more of? The answer is the world does need more Pixars. And so, you know, saying to you like, oh, you don't really need to do that is 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 4 wheels and it gets you from point A to point B, but 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 are not complete new from whole cloth cut, right? They're like, and I don't like the cliché of building on the shoulders of giants, but it's like, like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree. It's just based on your level of abstraction, how many steps back you're willing to go. So it's like, okay, yeah, I can see someone building something massive here. It's like, I'll get off my rant. It's like, so we had Facebook, did awesomely well. Then Twitter comes along and people said, oh, well, that's just Facebook where you have shorter messages or something like that. It's like Facebook with constraints. With less. And then Instagram comes along. It's like, well, you can post photos on Facebook. Why would anyone ever use Instagram? That's like Facebook without all the other cool things that I like as well. Right? No Messenger, none of that stuff. And then TikTok comes along. It's like, well, that's just kind of videos that you can do on Facebook, you can do on Instagram, you can do on Twitter, but 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, lit the world on fire, right? It's like, so even something as old as video or as photos is still not over. It's just not over. It's just part of the kind of the human condition right now. Anyway. It's, uh, I'm with you, Sean. If you go off and want to do another Pixar, and if you're ever looking for an investor that will make a decision 24 hours, I'm your guy.

What was that tweet about, Sean? That was out of left field. What are you saying? Uh, okay.

So all my tweets are out of left field. So that's just Twitter. That's what Twitter is supposed to be, right? Just a bunch of left field shit that all gets put in a feed. Um, 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, Toy Story is amazing. Pixar is amazing. And I was like, why is it like— I was like, I want to do something amazing. This is literally how my brain works. It's like, oh, that looks so awesome. That's like an awesome end output. I would be so proud if I had made something like that. I bet I could, right? Like, it's this combination of like, um, seeing something that is really appealing and then having the delusional belief that like, of course I could do it if I just tried. And so I just thought it to myself. I was like, you know, that would be a fun company to build. If you could just make great stories, great movies, um, and put them out there into the world. Like, 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 another thing to like love it, grow up on it, and have like, you know, like this extreme like nostalgic emotion around, around like these movies, right? Like if I see, you know, for everybody it'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, uh, they meant a lot at the time and they still mean a lot even though I don't interact with them. Um, so I have—

Wait, you, you weren't, you weren't a good writing, a writer before you got into this? No. No. No. Oh, I mean, your writing's great. And by the way, Sean, let's, what's, you gotta pimp it out. Maven.com/powerwriting or just go to Maven.com and you see it.

Yeah. Yeah. Just go maven.com, M-A-V-E-N.com. I'm on the homepage. Starts in 2 weeks. All right. So the, the, uh, what you said is great. I would add one more circle to that.

Let's do 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 of skill. So yes, there are people that are better, maybe better creatives, better animators, better entertain, whatever, but they don't know crypto. And maybe that's the thing that unlocks the next trillion dollar company is entertainment intersected with crypto. It's the Netflix for the blockchain, whatever it is, right? Something like that where two things combined that never had been put together in that way before.

One question that I have—

if I can do it, anyone can do it. That's my point. I love that.

So Sean, Sean kind of added this thing to your Venn diagram of like just people brave enough to get started. And would you add another thing? Like when, with The Hustle, we sold in year 4 or 5 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 was close to the point where like you could have potentially next year made more revenue that year than all the revenues, uh, combined. Um, and I'm like, whoa, that's kind of crazy. Like I, again, I'm happy with it, but But like real value, like I guess for me I was like real value was created in year like 5, 6, 7, 8. Of course you probably could say like when you're in year 5, 6, 7, 8, you're like, oh wow, it's really created in 10, 11, 12. But, um, yeah. Do you think that, um, what portion of HubSpot and your success has been, well, I'm just really, I'm just willing to shut up and focus on this for 20 years as opposed to, uh, you actually being amazing or good at product and marketing and things like that.

That's awesome. But, uh, 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 Challenge, which they go to a company and they give you like a bunch of, um, sticks, uh, one marshmallow, some tape and like a string or something like that. Have you seen this, Dharmesh? I think I have. Yeah.

But I'll kind of summarize for those who haven't.

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 100% going to steal that one day.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's an awesome one. Um, all right. I know we, we went kind of long. I don't know if we were good to keep going or not, but—

Ben's telling me, uh, wrap up, but, uh, But, uh, Dharmesh, this is awesome, man. I love having you around. Are you, uh, you, um, the last time you were on was like a year ago, I think.

And I've been like, yeah, probably give or take.

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, all right, cool. Are you, uh, I actually, I have a quick question. What, you know, people ask me about selling to HubSpot and they're like, has it been good? From a creative perspective, it's been awesome. You guys haven't, 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, uh, maybe, Darmesh, do you ever get complaints about anything we say or do?

That's what I was going to ask. That's what I was going to ask. Is there anything that like, so far, I guess there's nothing that's crossed the line because we've not heard a thing, but like it, we, it's been crazy how productive, uh, this relationship has been. I did not think that. Because, you know, people say one thing and the reality is different, but it's not been that way. That's been pretty cool.

Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad, uh, glad that it's working out in your teams. Have I— it's— you folks have been kind of great for HubSpot. Um, and I know this keeps you up at night in terms of valuation. I've thought about that a lot. Um, probably not as much as you have, but at the time I, I would not— beat yourself up over it. I think it was a fair deal. I don't know that. And even at that, just so you know, uh, even at that price,, and nothing to do with you, but like it was a board-level discussion. We had to just like, okay, do we really want to— 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, um, I think there's some— to play for both sides.

But yeah, for sure. I think there's a world— I think there's a world where in 1 to 3 years the podcast alone is worth more than the deal.

Yes, I definitely see that. Yes. Um, yeah. But in the same way to kind of— when we can kind of wrap on this is that when we were talking early, in the beginning of the episode around kind of compensation as being just one of the kind of dimensions of value in an acquisition, the kind of the valuation that you get, the price tag is just one dimension of value. Then the rest of it is how happy are you? How happy is the team? Did you meet people that will kind of, you will enjoy working with in your future years? Are there your future co-founders? That kind of thing. It's like we know that this is not forever. We know that going in with even with people we hire, but especially with M&A. But Yeah, but hopefully the, in aggregate, um, you know, HubSpot delivers a bunch of value. That's my, uh, pitch for why it's okay to join HubSpot if you're ever, uh, out there looking.

But no, it was awesome. Well, thank you. This is awesome. Sean, what do you think?

Yeah, great episode. And I'm glad you used our line against us. I, I, I, he'd emailed us something. I was like, oh, you should come back on sometime, which is like the sometime is like one of the most dangerous words in the English language. Yeah. Because it's like you think it's soon and in reality it's never. Um, and you pulled a great move, which was what we talk about, which is like, forget scheduling stuff. Like either I want to do it and I, if I, if I can do it right now, let's do it right now. And if not, like, then let's not schedule it for the future. Cause just because we didn't want to do it right now. And you were like, how about today? And we were like, all right, let's do it. Let's do it.

Perfect. And I intentionally made it, um, 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 I could have made it work this afternoon, but I was only available for the small window. It's like, no, anytime between 2:00 PM and midnight, if you had said, if you had come back, I would've been, let's do it. It's, uh, yeah. That's awesome.

This is awesome. Well, it's a lot of fun.

Thanks for doing this. It's a lot of fun. Thank you for coming on. All right.

Thanks for having me. See you.