My First Million - #197 with Dharmesh Shah - Frameworks for Becoming a Billionaire (From a Billionaire's Perspective)

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) are joined by HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah (@Dharmesh). Dharmesh shares his thought process behind buying the Hustle, how he thinks about time & money, and how HubSpot came to be. They close the episode talking about ideas around a better version of LinkedIn and the future of software. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (0:57) Intro * (9:10) The inside scoop on why HubSpot bought The Hustle * (14:00) What it's like to be a billionaire * (18:54) A framework on the relationship between time & money * (24:50) Rich guy questions * (28:24) Dharmesh on the beginnings of HubSpot * (37:10) Idea: A blockchain version of LinkedIn * (45:35) Dharmesh on BitClout * (50:22) Idea: NLP, the future of software * (53:20) Growth Bot & website graders * (59:25) Dharmesh on GPT-3 * (1:02:55) Idea: A community for remote work * (1:04:41) Deal trophies * (1:06:56) A framework to evaluate startup ideas * (1:13:55) Constructive podcast criticism * (1:18:36) Outro

Here's what I say. I even have a seven-figure domain name picked out for you. I will write the $5 million check for you to go do it as far as a seed round, or up to $5 million if you want to let other people in. That's amazing. This just got spicy. Okay. Oh, my God.

What's the domain name that you have? I am dead serious. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. We just got done like 30 seconds ago talking to the guy who we're going to introduce you to now.

That was amazing. He's amazing. Darmash is amazing. He's very cool. So we have Darmash. I don't even know. What is Darmesh's last name? Darmesh.

I think Shaw. I just know him as Darmash. He's the co-founder of-he's like Beyonce. They just go with the one name at a certain point. Ronaldo, Beyonce, Darmesh. That's it. So Darmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. He's the largest shareholder.

I mean, we got pretty. like into it right away. We're like, just tell, like, tell us what's it like to be a billionaire? So I just Googled your net worth and it appears you're worth a billion dollars. Yeah. So how does that feel?

And he's like, uh, no, I told him I was going to talk to him about that. So we talked to him about just like wealth, which was, let's rattle off some of the dope things he's done. So started HubSpot,

HubSpot's like a whatever, $25 billion company or something like that. But he's done some other cool things, early investor in. Coinbase, Dropbox, and loads of different stuff. Right.

And then also just has kind of like, he's like us. He's got that itch, that entrepreneurial itch. So he like, we talk a little bit about he's got like 20 domain names, some domain names that are worth like, you know, millions of dollars and others that are, you know, just simple ideas. Everybody has an idea. By the way, hundreds of domain names. Right. But he's like got ideas loaded into them like, ah, here's what you might do with this idea. And then here's a good domain name for it. And so I think he's, you know, he's sort of like, he's one of our people in that sense. Like he's an idea person. He's a framework's person. So he shared some frameworks. He shared a bunch of ideas, two really big ideas in my opinion.

One idea on air. You go, Sean, if you want to start this, I'll fund you right now for $5 million. Yeah, maybe an offer. I pretty much couldn't refuse. I just had to sort of, you know, squeeze my thighs and sit still here. So, you know, but I thought it was exciting. I thought the actual ideas were really great. So I think people are going to like that.

We talk a little bit about the, we talk a little bit about the, we talked a little bit about early days, you know, HubSpot and the hustle acquisition. And then we talk a bunch about ideas. And then some of those ideas are about a new different type of LinkedIn or remote community. We talked about, oh, he talked about his framework for evaluating if an idea is good or not, if he should pursue it. That was actually incredibly educational. It was awesome, dude. It was great.

So we'll get to the episode. Can you guys do me a favor, though? Click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify. That would mean a lot. Do we have to tell them anything else? Well, there's a thing going around where if you just post on your social network, works and you're just like, hey, you know, PSA to whoever needs this, this podcast, you know, makes my commute's amazing. This is the best business podcast. Hands down, you know, good karma

comes to you in your next life. So that's just something. If you're interested in having a good next life, I would just do that. Yeah, and I'll reshare that for sure. I mean, because it impacts my ego and I hit, I share all I share all compliments. So go ahead and do that. Make sure you share the iTunes or Spotify link with it. Thank you very much. Here's the thing about me. I like compliments. All right. Yeah. All right. Enjoy this episode. I don't remember what I was going to say. But right before you came on, I was asking Darmesh what he listens to. And he says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days.

Amazing. Has that changed to you? You've probably become a worse person. You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days, there's going to be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets like corrupted slightly. You know, I think that's true. That's an astute observation.

It's, you know, we just have, I won't say like completely divergent paths. just a, yeah, it's been good, though. I'm a believer in, like, just these kind of orthogonal things. That's like, oh, this is not stuff I'm like, you know, looking at retail businesses or like, and you guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think that kind of thing, like builds a different muscle group, and I think it's been, it's been useful for me. I'll put it to you that way.

It's not, I think we're not separated birth by any stretch. We have things of that, you know, collectively we have in common, but there are things that I'm just different. And it'll come out in the pods. I'm a weird game. Well, we're on now, so this is the pod. But we, yeah, this might, I have a feeling this might go a little long, and I'm okay with that. Sean, do what you want.

But we, I, like, in my world, so I was just hanging out with Heat and Shaw yesterday, and your name came up. We were just talking to Nathan Barry the other day. Your name came up. Sean and I are in this text group where people talk about BitClout. Your name comes up. Your name comes up everywhere.

Like, you've got, you're like a little, like, you got like a spider web. Like you get your hands and all these little things. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. But do you, so this is Darmesh. Darmesh is the, you know, the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO?

Yes. Do you, are you active? Like, are you working really hard at HubSpot? Like, how do you have time to have your hands and all this different stuff? So the answer is yes. HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Anything else that you see me doing? There's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot.

There is, right? So, yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that I spend pretty much all of my kind of non-family time, non-personal time on. So it's my... And I just want to describe for people who are not watching. So you should go to the YouTube channel. It's YouTube.com slash, I think, hustle con. And you'll see the videos.

But so here's what I see. So Dar Mesh is sitting there. He's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard to his right. He's got a, I think, a Steve Jobs piece of art behind him, or is that Lennon or something like that? I can't tell exactly who it is, John Lennon, maybe. And you're in this room. So is this where you work on a day-to-day basis? So this is, well, yes and no.

You're getting tricked, Sean. You're getting tricked. Listen. This is my living room. But it's a, like a capture a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually would be. But it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up. I can. Oh, okay. That's pretty good because usually when you have a green screen, it's like half your head also turns into like the background. And this one's actually pretty good. I'm impressed. I've done like a multiple green screen. So I'm sort of surrounded with it. So if I need to twist the camera one way or the other, still kind of. So you're kind of doing the oasis thing we talked about. You basically, you have a virtual background. But the virtual background is not just you on a beach like a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's like clean and perfect the way you want it or whatever. And you're like, that's what I want my background to be regardless of the reality of the.

the current, whatever your current situation is. I like that. Really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real. That's not part of the background. So you'll see you got the big sound. So it's kind of cool. So let me do like a very brief intro and like an overview of what we're going to talk about. So Darmash sent us like a list of ideas.

We're going to get into them. But I need to give a background here so the listeners entirely understand. So HubSpot today is like a 25 or 30. I don't know whatever the market cap is. So $25 billion publicly. trade a company. You co-founded it 15 years ago, I think. Prior to that, you had another startup that you

sold for a significant amount of money. We can talk about that. Throughout this whole time, you own, I believe, millions and millions of dollars with the domains. You bought your wife as a gift, Humanism.com, which we got to talk about. That's pretty funny. You're an angel investor

in a lot of different startups, including Coinbase and things like that. You've got your hands on all these different things. Like you, according to wallmine or WallstreetMind.com, you're worth today $850 million. So like you do a little bit of everything in the world of business. It's incredibly fascinating. And so I wanted to talk today, talk about you might be, well, you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm going to ask you questions about that.

I don't know. I don't know. We're going to ask you questions about it. It doesn't really matter. That's the one thing I've learned. We can talk about that too. Well, that's okay if it doesn't matter. We're going to talk about it.

We're also going to talk about your ideas. We're going to talk about building HubSpot. We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. And we're going to talk about do you ever invest in non-start-up stuff? We're going to talk about a lot of stuff. Sean, what do you think? Well, I would have asked them. Okay, so here's my question.

My question is actually not about Darmesh. It's actually about Sam. So I've always wondered this. So you acquired the hustle, and I hope you could be as transparent as you want here. I think Sam will not care. So I would say DNA-wise, the hustle is kind of a unique company. Sam's a pretty unique dude that you kind of brought into your company, different DNA probably than the vast majority of employees there.

Give me kind of like... Well, and you do. You're part of the deal too, Sean. So you're in the book. You don't have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis. So we're doing that deal and bringing these guys in, I guess, like, I don't know, Are there any interesting observations, or any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post

that had to do with Sam and the hustle? I'm just curious, kind of like, what's your view on that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on. Yeah, and we haven't, HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them. Pretty much most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think, as you observed,

is the DNA of the hustle is different than HubSpot. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. So the thing I was worried about is, and until now, I don't think Sam and I've ever had a one-on-one chat. This is my therapy session for you. It's like through therapy for two people, Johnny. Josh and I talk a lot on Slack. We're like buddies on Slack. But the thing I was worried about is that, you know, so Sam is a kind of what I would think of as a kind of type A personality.

just like he's out there, he's hustling, that's the name of the company, which is fine, but it's just not, most of the makeup of HubSpot is not that. We're very, I don't know what the right, it's going to overly stereotype us, but we're not type A. We're like a kinder, gentler,

humble, just quieter kind of company. So that's the one thing I go. Here, let me explain it this way. So Sam would be described as brash. I don't think anybody would ever describe HubSpot as brash. Well, today, Kieran, the guy I work with, technically my boss, he was like, you should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role for your growth. And I was like, well, why? He goes, I think

you're too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot. That's an example. I think that was good advice. But it's worked out, it's worked out well. So there have been, like the one kind of minor story I can recall, there was a Twitter back and forth that I think Sam had with Ran Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this, Sam, that there was something that was said about VCs or investment or something. And Rand's been a good friend. It's like, but I'm like, oh, okay, well,

it's fine. I'm like, okay. You know, it's like, and not like either party was wrong or indifferent, but I know them, you know, at least now a little bit, both, but anyway,

so it's, but it's been fine. Well, in my defense, I hope, and even our podcast defense, our goal is we will disagree with people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of, like,

disrespect or. No, it didn't. I'm trying to, like, hurt your feelings. But I will say I do put entertainment first sometimes. So sometimes I will poke the bear for the entertainment value of it when, you know, the kind or nicer, simpler thing to do would be to do nothing or just back away. So I do like to have fun either on Twitter or on the podcast. HubSpot is too much, but the one thing I will say, this was as far as the deal itself,

it was one of the better things HubSpot has done. In terms of, like, the strategy behind it, I think, is strong in terms of, like, could get HubSpot into a thing, which is where I think the future of kind of SaaS companies is going to be heading, which is more and more they're going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people. And recent Horace's, and there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline, but I'm a believer in companies kind of controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying from buying audiences and renting them from someone else.

So this is where you should just say, just drop a one line, be like, you know, and we got it at a fantastic price just to drive Sam crazy for the next seven years, Just leave them constantly questioning himself. Look, I think there, yeah, could we have sold for more? Definitely maybe. Like that always is a maybe, right? I think that when we sold HubSpot, I felt was undervalued. I think the day the deal closed, it was, or maybe like, what was the stock in January?

Was it like it worth like $350 or was it even less? $250? I don't remember. Today it's 600 bucks. So like our guess, my guess was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. And also, I wanted to create a reputation of someone who was like a fair dealmaker. And like, I think people will know that like if I built something, I sold it, that all all parties got a good deal.

And so. Okay. All right. Sounds good. We can switch off the hustle acquisition. So let's do some ideas. No, wait. I want to talk about one thing really quick.

Let's talk about money stuff. Okay. Because I told Darmesh I was going to ask him this. So first of all, is it weird that I, know what your net worth is today because it's like public information? It's not weird for me, honestly. Like, I'm a, I'm generally like transparent. I believe in kind of the openness of the web.

It's, and I'm a, in a sense, it's a public-to-traded company. Like, that's, you know, when I want my, like, bank accounts and all my accounts kind of published on the web? No. But the fact that I'm an executive in a public-a-craded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares, which you can take the number of shares, which is on a public record, and multiply it by the current price and get, which is probably roughly 85, 90% of my overall net worth

because that's where all my money is, is in Hopspot shares. I don't find that weird. It's, yeah. Has your life changed as this has accumulated and things got different? Or has it basically, so you had another company before this. How much did you sell that for? 10 or 15 in that range based on how you count it. And has your life changed since that moment significantly?

Because that's a significant number in itself, right? Yeah. So here's the thing. It's, and I'd like to say, no, you know, I wasn't focused on money or I'm not focused on. At the time when I was younger, I was very, very focused on money. And I had very kind of modest upbringing. And I was like, okay, well, it wasn't like the money and the accumulation of it. It was the freedom.

You know, ever since I was little, I always want to kind of configure the universe to my liking, so to speak, because I have got my quirk. So like, these are things, the way I like to do things. And having to kind of work in a normal kind of classic job doesn't give you a whole lot of control over your part of the universe. You don't get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire. You don't have a lot of degrees of freedom. So I'd been thinking back in then, I had kind of thought about money. And the first, I'll say, $5 million or so, has a dramatic impact, had a dramatic impact on my life, right? Because that buys you an in an enormous amount of freedom, right?

You don't have to work again. You can invest in things you can do as long as you're not out, you know, buying small islands and overtaking countries. I mean, that's a decent amount of money for folks, right? And then after that, and there are other kind of, I don't know exactly what the demarcations are, where more money adds on the marginal basis, a little bit more freedom, you can do more things. But, you know, like the kinds of things I do, like I enjoy food and restaurants, there's only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being, even if you'd like the finer things. It's like, okay, unless you're trying to make a statement and spend 100 times with the average of a way,

whatever X is, it's kind of hard to spend money pretty well, even if you have kind of high in taste, honestly. The most common thing I've heard, I don't know if you would agree or disagree, is like there's these levels. So it's like first in-depth, when you're in debt to no debt, that's like the first jump where, oh, freedom, got this weight off my shoulders. Then there's kind of like, you know, what I'll call, there's a zero to one million where it's like, oh my God, you know, mentally, I'm a millionaire.

That's kind of just like a mentally freeing concept and interesting concept. That's why we named the pod, what we did. But also, you know, that'll affords you a certain type of lifestyle. And then the next jump I've heard is like at 10 or 10 or 10-ish, where it's sort of like, okay, at 10-ish, you sort of, you don't have to work. Like at a million, you still got to work. At 10, you don't have to work. You can kind of like have a couple places to live.

You can do whatever you want. You don't really need to check the prices when you go do things. And then there's sort of like a hundred or more, which is sort of like, you know, the ego gets involved. It's like, okay, now I'm keeping score against, you know, know, in the business Olympics against these other folks. And also, you know, I could do some like, you know, like, I can, I can, I can, I can buy an island. I can buy a piece of an NBA team. I can, I can go do these different things that are like, kind of like bucket list. And the joy, what I've

heard is sort of like, you know, for most people is sort of like the joy actually, like de-escalates from the beginning there. Like getting out of dead is sort of like the most relief, most joy. And then sort of like it starts to diminish sort of step by step as you go. Like the 10 to 100 feels a lot less impactful and less sort of changes your joy and your mood than like going from zero to ten. Yep. Just two friends I want to pull on as long as we're talking about money. So one is one thing that's kind of helped me reconcile it in terms of having to be in the net worth now is, you know, the plan, my wife and I've talked about this, the plan is to donate 90 plus percent of it, right? Like we have one child, we're not going to spoil them, so it's not like we're trying to build a multi-generational dynasty.

That is not the goal. And so then, like, you know, if I make a really good return on a startup or something like that, it's like, okay, well, I'm discount 90%. For my wife's foundation. That's essentially what it comes down to, right? So it moves 90% of whatever it is. I mean, I don't, I think it'll end up being higher because I just don't think we're capable of actually spending the money. But yeah, so that makes me feel better. But just kind of taking it back to the early days, one kind of lesson I learned early, early on, and this is useful, beginning part of my career, is the kind of relationship between time and money. And one thing is that we spend the better part of kind of the first half of our lives converting time into money, right?

And you're looking for the hours. You're looking for, yeah, you want to get that rate up as you can. And then the latter half of you're desperately trying to buy time back with the money however best you can. Right. So that's, and it varies a little bit as to kind of when that turn happens. But the thing that I kind of learned, this was, and I thought about it probably a few years after that. So I was making $3.65 in my first job when I came over as an immigrant. And I worked all the way through school. It took me seven degrees to get my four, seven years to get my four year degree. I was working full time the whole way through. And that wasn't a lot of money. And as it turns out, I had to do pretty much, nothing was delegatable. But then once I got to the point where I was. I was making $10, $20, $50 an hour. It's like, okay, well, now, and like all of my time, I can make as much billable as I want to, as much as I'm humanly possible, willing to work. There was someone willing to pay me for that time.

I was an engineer. That's how things work back then. It was, and the pivotal point for me is I got this, in my early 20s, I got this bump to like $125 an hour working as an engineer. And that was an ungodly amount of money. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the 90s. That was like real money, right?

and I was working a lot. So, then I made the decision that if there's anything I'm doing with my time, that could be done by spending less than $125 an hour, I'm being an idiot by actually doing it. If I enjoy it, that's a different story. But if I'm not, it's just stupid. And so I've carried that kind of idea. It's like, okay, so what value would I place in my time? Right.

What is occupying my time that I can kind of delegate or even if I'm paying a premium? It's like, okay, I could pay $75 an hour for someone to pay, you know, to mow my loan. A, I hate it, but it's still profitable, right? Like, why would you do that? It's like, I would do that every day of the week. So the one thing that's changed for me, so now, like, I went back and did the math because I knew I was going to be on this podcast and you folks like numbers. So if I, let's say I work on average 60 hours a week and I've done that for about 30 years,

give or take. It's my kind of professional career. My average hourly rate across the 30 years would be like $10,000 an hour. Right. And now it's backloaded. That's effectively my hourly rate. And so now it's like, okay, well, if there's anything, and I would actually pay a premium right now, above that, right?

So I would not spend my time even an hour on anything that wasn't worth at least that. It's like, okay, well, like the future of me would buy it for $50, $100,000 if there's some option value on that time. Anyway, the short message is most people don't value their time enough and don't think about it objectively enough. And it, like anything else is a resource, but it's finite. but put a number on it and then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not worth that?

Right. And so, Naval has this phrase in his like kind of how to get rich podcast or whatever, how to get rich without getting lucky. He says, he goes, you know, put it up, put a, I don't know what he calls it,

like an outrageously, or outrageous hourly rate for yourself. Like a super ambitious rate. An ambitious one. That's way beyond wherever you're at. He's like, you know, ever since I was young, this was like one of the smart things I did. I just said,

$5,000 an hour. Some like really aspirational hourly rate. He's like, if my friends used to laugh and joke like, dude, you bought this blender, you're not even using it, go return it. And he's like, no, I'm not going to go return it. I don't enjoy it. And it's going to get me back $30 for the hour round trip, you know, going and returning this thing at Target.

So like, I will throw it away. I will give it away. What I will not do is I will not give my time back into that because the hourly rate just doesn't make sense. I love that. I love that. And so I've done a similar thing. And it's kind of funny to like,

pick that hourly mark because it sounds crazy. Like my mom will get mad at me. She'll come to my house and then she'll see the way I'm living. And she's like, oh my God, like this bill is late. They're going to, there's a $75 fee if you don't do it. And I'm like, I'm not calling them and they can charge me the $75 fee. They could charge it to me 10 times. Like I'm not going to use this hour.

Like, and I'll tell her like, look, literally my hourly rate is X. It's like thousands of dollars. So are you, that's my hourly rate. So I'm not going to trade that hour to go do this thing I don't enjoy because her other argument is, well, you go watch TV, and I'm like, well, that I enjoy. So that, that I'm actually spending the money. But Sam, I know you're a little bit different. Like, when I went to go visit Sam in Austin, he had like CVS receipts that he had been saving in his, like glove compartment of his super fancy car. Like, he's like dichotomy, right? He's got, he's got

he likes to spend some things, but he's also enjoys being frugal. It's like a fun hobby. Yeah, that makes me feel good about myself. Like, yeah, I guess the question I had for you is, do you also have an hourly rate? Do you think about that or you don't do that framework? Sam, this for you. Oh, for me? Yeah, I have that framework. Yeah. So like, yeah, I mean, it makes me feel good not to waste stuff. Like, I feel good about myself and I feel guilty if I waste it. So I feel, I feel happy when I do that. And I feel it's hard for me to go to bed at night if I, if I waste something or I don't return it. Yeah, I have that hour. I mean, I have that rate. Like, I just assume that I'm going to make, I assume that I'm going to make $3 million a year. So whatever that hourly rate is,

but I think I'm going to make $3 million a year. And anything that will make less than that, I don't want to do it. But that said, like, mowing the lawn, I get joy from that. So I have no problem. I don't, like, put a money thing on anything. But like, if someone's like, hey, well you, in fact, Sean, someone asks us to fly to London to come speak at some event or something. And I'll afford it to you.

But they're like, yeah, it's October. And I'm like, I don't want to go there. I'm like, how much money would they have to pay me to go and do this? I'm like, they have to pay me a lot. Like, right. Because you also hate flying. Yeah. Yeah.

I just don't, that just, that just is a paper. They'd have to pay me $100,000 to do that. And like, that does not make any sense, but I just hate, I just hate it. And so, Darmash, a couple more rich guy questions. And we like these because, honestly, you never get to ask these. Even if we were just hanging out personally, I could never ask you this. But for some reason with the podcast, it's like sort of okay for me to just like ask you random questions like this.

And I told them, when he wanted to come on or I asked him to come on. I go, I'm going to ask you this stuff. And we gave him an easy out. I said, if you don't want to answer anything, just say you don't want to answer. it. And I'm sort of projecting here where, you know, I guess like I think I put myself in your shoes. What if I had more money than I could ever spend? What would I do? And so my question to you is whether you did it or did, or you just considered it, what's a sort of outlandish use of funds that you've either considered or done. Like so for example, you know, some people are like, yeah,

you know, like some people like jets. That's not, I'm not buying a private jet. I'm, but what I really care about is I love this sock. So I bought every, I love Jordan's sneakers. So I bought every, pair of Jordans. I have this closet in my house just full of these things. I always wanted it when I was a kid, right? Or they overspend in some area and they're just happy to have done it. Or like, it could be like philanthropic. Like I think if I had a billion dollars, I think like two days a year, I would just wire somebody like a million dollars. I would literally just wire a random person a million dollars and I would just see how that plays out. And I think it would bring me like tons of joy and entertainment to do that and see how they react at what happens and what do they do with it.

Like maybe some kid who's working on something interesting. I would just be like, look, here, check your account. It's there. So give me something that, is there anything that's sort of non-standard that you either have done or considered doing? Yeah, the thing that I do is I like those kind of kind of micro acts of spontaneity that says,

oh, like someone wants to go to this event or something like that and can't afford it or whatever. It's like, I'll be a sponsor. Like, if you can find people that want to do this, they'll do this, I'll do that relatively regularly. I've taken the sound so I've taken my average

tip amount up to between 50 and 100% everywhere I go and this is partly because I want to make up for all the time when I was younger that I did not tip well so I'm trying to

average it out and that's as long as I can do it without like drawing too much attention because I don't want to be that weirdo guy it's like okay no it sends sometimes the wrong signals I want to do it I do that by the way

modesty I typically tip 50%. It makes me feel good. Yeah. And I've worked in the service industry before I know that. Those kinds of things matter. I'm a cheap bastard, so I'll stay silent here. In terms of like, you know, large things.

So philanthropy, the running joke inside the house is my wife and I, and so she's not from the tech world at all. But I'm really, so I want to like own the world and she wants to save it. Right. So I will make the money. Yeah, that's something I've been relatively good at. And she will be able to channel it to good causes and the film for effort, so she'll be able to do that. So I don't have any, like, particular specific things.

I will say, like, I am a, so I'm the guy that's like jacked with the matrix. So if there was a world, it's like, oh, it's like, this is, you know, like, I live a virtual world. So there's not a lot of physical things that I crave or desire other than a piano, which I've wanted for a while and I have now a piano. But it doesn't excite me all that much, right? It's like it's, and because atoms, there's a maintenance to atoms, right? Like, atoms versus bits. Like if you have it, whether it's, yacht or whatever it is a plane. Like that takes calories. I don't care how much you've delegated whatever. That's something in your life that's kind of attached to you somehow. And I just don't like that. I don't like that idea. It feels more weighty to me than kind of joyful. So speaking of

time, we, so HubSpod, 15 years old, I don't know how many people are here, 2500, 3,000, whatever. It seems like you guys grew pretty fast early on, but has it always felt like a grind or I mean, like, when I see you, I'm like, well, you don't have to do this. Like, you could delegate this. You don't have to work here. You're set. You're good. Why are you still doing this?

And does it still feel like a grind? And when has it stopped feeling like a grind? One of the reasons why I wanted to sell to you, I was like, if I don't sell, like, in this cycle, I'll probably have to wait another five years. Do I want to put that work in or do I want to sell now? Like, that's a hard challenge. Did you face that and just walk me through that? So a couple of things.

It's not widely known, but. So Brian and I as co-founders, we had kind of heart-to-heart co-founder chat, which I encourage all founders to have. And we have this list of questions we're going to go through. And I've published this on my own startup's blog. But one of the things was around who's going to be CEO, and we decided he's going to be CEO because I suck at beating CEO. I did that with my first startup for 10 years. I'm just not that good at it. So that was kind of decision one.

but decision two, which is much more unconventional, is that I have no direct report. So my agreement with Brian was I'm not going to have any management responsibilities in this company. I'm going to be in it 100%, but I'm not a good manager. Now, I'm reasonably smart guy if I spent a bunch of time. I could probably with some coaching get passably okay at management. Like I think I could get there. I don't want to spend 10, 20, 30 years of my life getting passably good at something.

I'm a big believer in take your strengths, whatever they, are and put like all your energy into kind of amplifying those strengths and getting really, really good at that thing and don't worry about your weaknesses all that much. I don't want to worry about my weakness managing people. And so we have over 4,000 people at HubSpot. I have zero direct reports. I've never had direct reports in the 15 years. And that is partly what makes it much.

I don't think of it as a grind at all. Like it's completely discretionary and optional for me. Obviously I have a lot of kind of vested interest in the company. but in terms of the work that I do, and I've sort of whittled down my life at a HubSpot, this has been this way for better part of a decade, is I get it down to like three things I'm going to work on, and that I will change those every few years. So for a long time, it was like brand, culture, and what I call boldness,

which is, is the organization taking on enough risk? Because the temptation is always, like, once you start having customers and revenues are growing, things like that is just the kind of what we call drag the spreadsheet. It's like, oh, like, here are the numbers. This is how it's growing. We're just going to drag the spreadsheet, and the numbers will flow, basically, is to push the organization so we don't do that. So what I do is I will monically focus on whatever those three things are

and say no to pretty much everything else. And things will swap in and out. So I've had product in there. I've had platform in there. But on that thing, whatever it is I'm working on. So when I had culture on my list, it's like I spent 300 hours, you know, on the culture code deck at HubSpot. I'm going to do everything I can't,

learn everything they can to try and get culture to be a thing at Upspot. And yeah, so it's, I find it enjoyable. I get to kind of pick the things. So my three things are different, you know, from year to year. I like to dig into the details. I don't like kind of floating at 50,000 feet and lofty ivory towers. I like to like if I'm going to work on brand, I'm in there with the marketing team, like reviewing copy and going through the, and this is why I'm taking Sean's

copywriting word. I obsess over details. So anyway, yeah. Did you see, Sean, that he's in your powerwriting course? Yeah, I saw that. I was like, how does this guy have time to do this? This is amazing. I don't know.

How has it been so far? He talks to me all the time. That's why I'm like, what do you do all day? I found it very useful. I'll say that. And I think copywriting overall is one of the most underrated skills in entrepreneurship generally. Like if people do not realize the amount of, leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, 50 hours. And you can learn a lot of what you need

just by reading the top three books on it and just practicing the craft, right? It's a doable thing. And the nice thing about it and one thing I love about it, it's like measurable. You can objectively measure whether you got better at copywriting or not. You can look at your conversion rates, but whatever numbers you're trying to move as a result of your words. And it's a learnable skill. One more question and we can move on. And the reason why you were able to do those no direct reports is I think that you were the first investor. So, like, was this, was HubSpot your idea or was it Brian's idea? But I think you invested like half a million dollars of your own money to like get it started. And aren't, aren't you the largest shareholder of the company? I am. And so,

so the idea of HubSpot is that you have to decouple the two things. So HubSpot was not supposed to happen. And here's what I mean by that. When I sold my last company, you know, I'd been running it for 10 hours, 10 years and working the proverbial entrepreneurial hours as, as, as one would expect, right? It was self-funded, bootstrapped. And I promised my wife that I would not do another startup. It's like, okay, well, you know, the one I'm doing, I'm in. I can't not be in. The analogy, you know, I use this. It's a little bit like being at, like, a gaming table in Las Vegas, right? And it's like, and you don't know the rules of the game. This is how startup entrepreneurship works if you're self-funded. It's like you're at the table. And the only real feedback you get is

like sometimes the chips go down, sometimes they go up, you're playing, you're trying to figure out the rules as you go, you don't know. But there's one like card rule is that if you leave the table, whatever chips you have on the table, they're gone. Every now and then the house will come up to you and say, hey, would you like to cash in your chips? They're worth X dollars. And this is the position you were in. So it's like, okay, would you like to sell your company? Here's what someone's willing to pay for it. And if you miss that opportunity, you have no idea when the next opportunity to cash out your chips. And so you keep playing, right? It's like, and so the thing I told my wife was like, I have to keep playing. I did like if I chose to get off the table, it's like a lot of best sense this.

A hundred percent of our net worth is invested in this. And so then eventually when I sold, that was a decision. It's like, okay, I'm leaving the table, cashing in my chips. I don't have to do this anymore. So that's why I went to grad school. And my plan was go to grad school. I didn't really get a chance to enjoy undergrad because I was working the whole time through and I'm going to actually go to grad school, be a real student, apply myself and not to do anything. How old are you? I was 35, 36, someone in that range. Yep.

So like a 36-year-old college kid, living the dream. Yeah, I had a great time. It was awesome. One of the best things I did is go back to grad school for a variety of reasons. But anyway, so I had not planned. So my plan was go to grad school, then maybe get like a PhD and then go teach. That was my kind of path, the kind of chosen path. And then I met Brian in grad school.

And we both have this kind of share. passion for SMB. We both come from tech, different backgrounds. And so the first decision we made, before we even decided what HubSpot was going to be, was that the two of us should do a company together. And if, like, Brian was not going to do a company, there would be no HubSpot, right? So I had registered the domain name. I had kind of noodleed on kind of variety of things, but then we kind of came together and said, let's do this. And by the way, all through grad school, we were noodling on ideas, right? We're like, okay, well, we'll do this. And we had HubSpot. We went to the business plan competition, wrote a business plan for early versions of Uspot. It was fun to look at.

But the idea came after. We had kind of narrowed it down to two companies. Two past one was in marketing, which is what we ended up doing. The other one was like an Oracle for small business, like an ERP, similar to next week, which you folks were talking about in the last episode. All right, so let's do some ideas because I think, you know, one of the cool things, what I love about any technically minded person who has business success is typically when people who are non-technical get into business, they go in one of of two paths. They, you know, sort of become a financier. They're like, great, still love business, but I don't want to sweat anymore, so I'll invest. And lots of people invest, but they make

investing the main thing. And what I found is that a lot of people who are technical that end up being successful, they never stop loving kind of what's new, where technology is going, how behaviors are changing, that sort of thing. And whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live as a user at the edge. And so tell me like, I guess, what's, what, maybe one or two kind of technologies or ideas right now, spaces that are most exciting to you at the moment? Two.

One is around kind of broadly defined cryptocurrency. And we haven't talked about Big Cloud yet, but I'll bring that out, is a cryptocurrencies as applied to other kind of mainstream things. So if I were not doing HubSpot, which I have no plans of doing anything else, but this is the idea I'm going to give you my pitch, Sean. What you should do since now you're out of Twitch

you should do a professional network that's powered by the blockchain that I'm going to say this that people love because if people don't love the incumbent right now, can I say my opinion? You know my opinion. You cool if I say it?

Yeah, go ahead. LinkedIn sucks. How about this? A lot of people say LinkedIn. sucks. And you're suggesting, Bill, that you're building a different one on the blockchain. Let's get it out. So here's what I say. I even have a seven-figure domain name picked out for you.

I will write the $5 million check for you to go do it as far as a seed round. Or up to $5 million if you want to let other people in. That's amazing. This just got spicy. Okay. Oh, my God. What's the domain name that you have? I am dead serious.

I have any. So, and here's why it needs to exist. Wait, let's play this out. Yeah, keep going. So the issue right now is that, you know, LinkedIn, yes, people don't like it. It was a product that was great for its time. And times have changed now. There's a different kind of need.

And the thing I'm excited about is the intersection of a couple of things. One is, you know, we didn't have things like Big Cloud or cryptocurrency before. Now we do. Right. One of the issues with LinkedIn is like, okay, well, you've got the kind of spam issue. You've got all this like, okay, well, how do I separate all the noise from the signal? It's just a pain in the ass. Over time, the act of the apping product moved.

for LinkedIn is like diminishing utility, right? It's like it's just going to become painful. And then there's a cap on where you can go with it. So imagine that you, so BitCloud ended up doing Twitter with the blockchain. Imagine if there was something else that did LinkedIn on the blockchain and you have your own kind of currency. And then you could say, hey, you know what? I'm an engineer that's a free agent or whatever.

And for $500, I will look at your company and apply for it. I'll do a reasonably good job. Or for $10, I'll open your email. or for our X, I'll do this. It's like, look, there's a, right now the market is. There's an inherent, so the thing, the cool thing about BitCloud is everybody's got a price, right? Everybody's got, everybody's coin has a certain value. And so the beauty of a professional one would be right now when you go on LinkedIn,

it is not obvious the level of hierarchy, right? And so you always have people who are either recruiters or people who are at the bottom of the career ladder trying to keep connecting and reaching out to the people at the top of the career ladder. and they have no real incentive to do it. And so they just sort of ignore LinkedIn altogether. Why do you can go to this site? I'm just going to get inundated with crap that I don't really want. And so the beauty of this is that because everybody has a coin value,

you sort of inherently have baked in the sort of like career worth, career value, that this person is bringing to the table into the network. And so you know, A, somebody has a way to buy attention. So they buy your coin, which increases your price. So it's a mutual beneficialness right now. If I go pay LinkedIn, I can send you spam. mail. You do not receive any of the revenue from me paying LinkedIn for the right to spam you. In this case, I could say, hey, if you want to spam me, if you want me to read your thing and you

want me to respond to it, here's my prices. So it becomes revenue generating for me. The second thing is that when somebody reaches out, I can quickly assess their value in the network based on how much other people believe in this person, how much other people wait to this person. And so now it's not this kind of like every node kind of looks the same on the surface. No, they would not look the same on the surface, which is really cool. Correct. And just one more thing. Yeah.

So, yes. So there's a kind of crypto angle where everyone's got a price. The other angle is, we'll call it page rank for the professional graph. Right? So right? So, including where it's all, it's all symmetric, right? So every person you follow gets an equal number of follow value, whatever, their account goes up by exactly one. It's not weighted in any single way.

You got explain page rank a little bit. So the kind of the beauty. behind Google, the original idea that made it the powerhouse it is today is they said, okay, well, how do we determine what the best set of results are to show for a keyword search, right? And it came down to two things. One is like the overall context of the page. So if you're searching for real estate Boston or something like that, it'll look at all the pages that's indexed. It's like, okay, well, these set of pages are about real estate and Boston to varying degrees. That's kind of factor one in the function. Which people also just say good content.

Yeah, exactly. We'll just call it quality, like the context. Quality content, yeah, which is the whole thing. Authority, right? And the authority is where page rank comes in. They say, okay, here's this individual webpage that's sitting on the internet. We're going to measure its authority by how many links are coming into that page, because that's a endorsement of effect. And the value of those links pass to that individual page, the page rate value of it, the authority that gets passed through, is based on the page rate of those pages. So it's a recursive function to say, oh, well, if the New York. Times links to you, that's much more valuable than if Darmesh's blog links to you, because Newark

Times has more page rank. Last piece of the page ring thing, which is super important to know, is that the amount of page rank you pass across the links from your page are proportional to your page rank. So let's say I have two units of page rank. I'm making the number up. And if I link to just one person, it's your blog, Sam, all the page rank I have on that page accrues to you by transference. If I link to 10 different people, it gets distributed across those 10 links.

Yeah. It's a weighted graph versus just a symmetrical graph where we're not. So now if you imagine a professional network graph where everything was graph, it's like, okay, well, you know, I endorse Sam and I have a certain authority. I have a certain currency if we've got a cryptocurrency underneath it, and as a result of which Sam's currency goes up by X amount. So it's not just me buying shares. It's just by that.

So I think the notion of a follow should go away. It's like if you really, really like that person, buy a dollar, buy $5 or something like that, right? Like that's the one kind of. So what you're saying is, just to make sure I understand. So what you were saying is instead of just following Sam, which you have an infinite supply and, you know, sort of is a pretty light signal. You're saying in this case, you would be able to own some of Sam's coin.

That would be a pretty strong endorsement. And secondly, the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that because you, a valuable person, owns Sam's coin. Sam's coin goes up not just by the $5 you paid, but by some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm, the way the algorithm waits Sam's value now. Correct. So, for instance, if you raise money, if you're a startup and you raise money from an Andreessen or Sequoia, like a million dollars is not a million dollars.

Yeah, exactly. It actually has an impact. The same thing. Like, you know, follow should matter. The fact that you follow me should matter more than someone that doesn't, hasn't, that just joined Twitter or BitCloud or whatever yesterday, right? Like, that's the, doesn't make any sense. This is a tremendous idea.

I'm having trouble containing myself with the moment. This is one of the more exciting ideas because people are right. Exactly what I came here for is to put you on the spot. And it was like, okay, listen to this idea. That's insane. You know, because I got excited about BitClout, and I got excited about it because I think that we do want a social network that's inverted. So instead of one platform controlled by one company that owns all the data, it's inverted. It's inside out.

It's basically no company. All the data is free, and you own your own business on top of it. And so I think that, you know, I don't want to say, how do I say decentralize without saying decentralized? That's my way of saying it. Okay. So I think that's exciting. And then a whole bunch of people are like, I can't believe you're endorsing this scam and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Blah, is this going to make me rich? Or is this not going to make me rich? I was sort of like, well, it's besides the point, it might. But it's besides the point. It's more like this is what the next Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebooks are going to look like in either one or 10 years. I'm not sure. And BitClout or the next thing, I'm not sure. But I'm going to play with this one.

And I'm going to like give it a ride so that when the right one does arrive, whether it's this one or the next one, I know what I'm looking at. I know what's real and what's not. And that's why I recommended people go play with it just to see, just to be on the forefront of it. Something like it needs to exist, right? Whether it'll be the one or not, I don't know. And so I've been spending a fair amount of calories trying to kind of understand the mechanics of BitCloud itself. How much money did you?

On the top creators list. I've been kind of moving up the curve, so to speak. I love it. Dude, the thing about how much have you put into BitClout? It's got to be a million dollars. Over a million dollars, yeah. Man, the thing that pissed me off about Big Cloud was I got into this. Like, I didn't get into it because I had to, I knew I was going to get into this thing.

I'm not about to say, but I was getting to, I wanted to get into a pissing match real fast about building Clout. And because there was money on the line. And yeah, I just like, oh, I don't want to actually want to get this race. I don't want to play that game. And that, so that I kind of had a little, like, one part of me is I actually fundamentally agree with most everything you're saying. On the other part, I'm like, oh, if this exists, I'm going to be getting in a lot of pissing matches or whatever, and I'm going to be playing more games. And that kind of freaks me out a little bit. Yeah, and this is one of the issues with BitClout right now, right? You have a bunch of, like, founder rewards, games and things like that.

And this is what happens. This is why we can't have nice things, partly, right? It's like anytime something new comes along, there will be people that are trying to game the system, whatever. So even back in the early days of Google, it's like the internet wasn't a scam and Google wasn't a scam, but there were a bunch of people trying to scan Google to kind of show up in the results and doing kind of spammy SEO kind of stuff, you see the same thing on BitCloud, right? And you have to sort of separate that from the platform. It's like, okay, fundamentally the idea does not feel like a scam to me.

Yes, they needed to open it up and have it listed on exchange so you can actually take money out, you know, minor details, but they're fixing those. And I talked to the founder, like one of the few calls I've had in the last 12 months because I don't do phone calls. But it feels legit to me. That's not to say it's going to succeed. But I'm relatively confident it's not a scam.

That is reason for being is not a scam. So one of the things that happens with like a Google or a Facebook is, you know, like you said, there's a big honeypot either of users or money on the line. And so then you get good people excited about it. You get technology excited about it, but you also get these sort of scammers and not even scammers, but I'll call them schemers. People who are not doing anything illegal, but they're thinking, oh, this is a game. How do I play it?

I get the highest score. And the score is either money or followers or whatever they're trying to game. And whether this is like, you know, BuzzFee, an upwardly saying, oh, newsfeed, how do I game news feed to get all this monthly traffic or, you know, Zinga, doing this with games on Facebook or whatever. With a company, you sort of have the, like, you know, for as much as people hate that Facebook and Google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from under you, they are able to like swat down these schemers and scammers so that, you know, they don't ruin the experience

for everybody. And one thing that's interesting with decentralized platforms is that there's nobody, there's no CEO. There's nobody in charge to do that. And so I think it's going to be very interesting how that plays out. Do you have a sense of if that's going to be a problem or do you think that there's a solution to that with the governance? I'm a believer in kind of self-governance over time. Like, it all depends on the time horizon. Will it fix itself in a year or two years? Maybe not. I think there's still going to be these kind of dark parts of BitClout that people don't want to tread into. But over time, I think once BitClout kind of figures out what it wants to be when it

grows up. And what's the actual, right now, the way I think of it is like the kind of Twitter use case is just a way to kind of prove out the protocol. It just so happens they picked that one. They could have picked any number of other ones. But as people kind of build real things using that underlying kind of technology, because it's an open protocol, I think things will settle down. People will find a way that they can implement use cases that concretely solve a particular

problem and stay away from some of the kind of dark issues right now, which is, yeah. What's the name that you bought? for for Sean you said you bought a seven figure domain for this idea I have one in I'm in midst of negotiating the price on it I'm not going to reveal it

I don't want to be outbid how many how many letters is it seven hmm okay I'll be very interesting what this is going to be you had said two spaces and one is the crypto crypto social network

what was the other space you're excited about the other one is so broadly defined natural language processing in terms of, okay, so let me, I'll do a, try to keep this a quick rant. So every software company that ever was has always said, our product is intuitive and easy to use. Like, okay, well, and reality is every one of them lies. Because here's what happens in order for a human to use software. It's like, here's the thing I want to do.

And I have some amount of training and things, whatever, and I'm going to translate the thing, my intent. I'm going to translate into a series of drags and clicks and swipes and touches to make the software do the thing that I intended to do, right? Now, imagine, if I were Elon, I'd be like, okay, well, you should just be able to think the thought, but let's put that aside for now. Let's just say, you're in Photoshop. It's like, I want to remove the background. You should just be able to say, well, remove the background. If you're in HubSpot, you should, I want, you should, like, you know, how many new people signed up for our service hub product in the last 90 days? You should just be able to type that question in because that's your intent, not like, oh, go to HubSpot's reporting tool,

build this dashboard, pull and hear the three columns you want, whatever, and get to the thing you want, you should just be able to say the thing you want, express the thing you want, the better way to state it, and the software should figure it out. Like, we have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand natural language, English, and other languages. And all we really need is a translation layer. And so this is a broad, based, in my mind, a mega trend to be, which is, in my mind, bigger than mobile. So mobile was a, oh, we're going to, the thing that mobile added for us, which is like, oh, well, the thing that you used to do on your desktop, now you can do it from anywhere, enabled a bunch of different use cases.

This thing is like, okay, well, the thing that you've been trying to learn, you're trying to use this software, whatever, that you never really got good at, you never had the time. Now, like, a billion people can use that piece of software that wasn't even possible before because they don't have to learn the clicks and drag things. They can express the thing they want and the software can do it. And then what I would do if I were an enterprising VC is like, okay, so pick the categories where this thing will have the biggest impact, like, you know, business intelligence reporting kind of stuff, B2B software is a net.

fit, but I can go elsewhere. And we've seen the beginnings of us on the consumer side with things like Alexa, but like the B2B world, I think, is open for just make the software actually intuitive. They can do what I want. Have you seen anyone besides, I was going to say, besides Alexa, have you seen any hints of what I call a magic trick? It's when you see somebody build a piece of software and then they're like, yeah, so you just do X, Y, Z and boom, it's done.

And you're like, holy shit. You got that, you know, you just wove your magic wand and got that. And it's like when you see a magic trick, it's very hard to unsee. And you kind of can't look at the old software the same way anymore. It's like Instagram filters or something like that. It's like, oh, what, your photo looks like that? Oh, shit. Okay.

Well, now all my photos in my camera will look like shit in comparison. Like, I can't even look at these anymore. So have you seen any cool magic tricks with conversational or natural language processes? Closer that I've gotten. So I built something myself called GrowthBot a few years ago. I remember that. I remember growth. And it was built for marketers to be able to get marketing data out, both of your kind of marketing system, something like a HubSpot or a MailChimp, but also just other data sources.

Like, what are the top three keywords at Uber buys on PPC? Like, that data's out there, right? Like, we would know to kind of ask that. And so, or like, when was this domain registered? Or like just a bunch of, and I would go through every night and look at all the questions people asked of this thing because it was a blank canvas. They had no idea what the thing was capable of. And then I would go back and it's like, okay, well, he would go back. it's like, okay, well, here are the repeating patterns.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could go update this software to kind of do that thing? So it came close. It was, I think, a little early. I think we're further along now. People are more used to that notion of being able to express a quote. Dude, that's so funny that you do these. I'm looking at the growth. I remember growth bot, like people were sharing it.

And I just, you just made this. Did you, so you just whipped up this landing page and you made this? I made the whole thing. Yeah, like I spent a bunch of like time just learning about what's possible, coded the whole thing myself. God, that's so funny. Can you, gosh, this is so funny.

You see that, Sean? Yeah, yeah, I'm on it. It's great, right? Like, it's just cool that you do this stuff. And you have, with an, like, everything you do is kind of related to HubSpot, right? It's all in the same world. You also, like, you're, you were,

it seems like you're really into website graders. Is that right? That business is a web. So I was talking to a heat and shaw the other day. Heat and Shaw, He started... He did everything. He started a new startup, Nira.

Yeah. Nira, he's got... Crazy egg. Crazy egg. Quick Sprout. All types of shit. I mean, he's like you. He just fucking has this hands

and everything. But he and his partner, Neil, have Neil Patel.com slash Uber suggests. And then they also had Neil Patel.com slash, like, rate your website or something like that.

Why are you so into these website rating businesses? and products? What the hell is going on with that? I'm into, so the original thing was called website Grater. It's actually a funny story. So back when we first started a HubSpot, it was just Brian and my co-founder and I, and we would go look at people's websites and to see if they would be a good fit for HubSpot to software or not, right? And so we would go and I would look at their age, like I'd do

a view source and Chrome and then look at their source codes. Like, okay, do they have the right menatags? Do they seem cluelful, right? There's a bunch of signals. You can look and look at Alexa ranking, stuff that you do, you folks do all day, long right now when you research companies. Like a similar web type of thing. Yeah, yeah. And this is 15 years ago. And so we, it's like, okay, well, when we were all doing it, we were doing it manually,

there were no tools. So it's like, okay, so I built something. That's what I do. It's like, oh, I'm going to write this tool that does the automatically goes, looks and things, the APIs, we'll bring down the source code for the HTML and see if the tags are right and kind of give it for us, give it a score. And then I had this, had not planned it this way. It was built as a tool for just the two of us. And it's like, oh, I'm going to put this on the web because I think this is useful. And so like, okay, well, what name can I give it?

Well, it grades website. I'm going to call it website grader.com. The domain is available 15 years ago. And so I put that out there. And it was on fire. Like, all the early leads, like tens of thousands of people, right? And then we, like, so they had a desire to kind of grade their website. And so for the listening audience, one thing I will say is the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry,

is immense, right? This is the thing that, so website grader was not the solution. So it's not like a freemium thing. It's like, oh, we're giving me a lightweight version of HubSpot. It was a thing that made you realize you needed HubSpot.

And that was super valuable. And that can be done in any industry, whether you're in software or not. It's like, okay, I'm going to help you determine whether you have a problem or not because the natural thing when you do a website grade, it's like, oh, I got a 23 out of 100.

That sucks. Right. HubsBock can help. Like, here's what we do. Or even just like, read these blog posts. I mean, you'll watch these videos. So it's, it's work. I'm obsessed with kind of grading an assessment.

And you folks, you guys had an episode, like 10, 20 episodes ago, around like quizzes and things like that. So one thing people are, so if you do build a diagnostic tool, the one thing, and this is, I've wanted several lessons, but one of the key ones is that relative scores work. So website grader from its early days, like, okay, so if I give you an 87, what that 87 actually means is that whatever calculations we're doing behind the scenes, this particular score, you graded

better than 87% of the 800,000 or whatever the number was, websites we've graded. People love that. It's like, oh, that's just that kind of relative score versus an absolute one makes a big difference. A percentile score matters a lot to people. It's like, oh, like, I suck. I'm in the bottom 10% or the top 10% of them are awesome.

Are you, Sean, do you see his list of ideas? Let's just start banging them. I want to, I like it. This is two things. First, I think the first, I think, the thing you just described is like a growth hack without saying, yeah, I did it to a growth hack. You like solved your own itch. But like that's just, we've talked about it for quizzes, quizzes, the same thing, lead gen.

This is an amazing lead gen tool where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads. People who self-assess, I might have a problem. They go get it checked up. Your digital doctor said, yep, you indeed do have a problem. And then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called HubSpot. You know, here's a little bottle for you. Yeah. I would tell you how coolest I was back then.

this thing up there. And at the time, we had a meeting set up with Gail Goodman, who was the CEO of Constant Contact at that time. And she later joined the HubSpot board. But we met with her, like, oh, we're working on this company called HubSpot. It's kind of related to the constant contact space. We want to get her advice. And I showed her website graders. Like, oh, here's what we do, and we can kind of look at websites, whatever. And she loved it. And then she said, you know, you might consider putting like an email address box on because we had no way of knowing who these people were. They were not, they were not lia for us. We had like 100,000 people, like use the tool.

unintentional growth hack. I've never thought to collect an email address. Like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to, anyway, we obviously fix that. So I like that. And then also for this conversational thing, I think what you just said, like, it's kind of like sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing that I'm like, well, whoa, whoa, that's actually a really big idea. And I think you actually said two. I think the crypto LinkedIn one is a big idea. And I think the second one is this idea that if you think about one of the biggest and what some people say is the best business they've ever seen is Google, right?

people come in there. It's just a search box. It's a magic genie. If you go ask a question and it tries to give you some answers. And the way I view this is if somebody could actually do this, this is sort of like next level Google where I ask it any question and it doesn't just give me like a list of pages where the answer might be. It's like it actually gives me the answer. And so this might be, you know, in the business context, it might be like a business Google, but there's many versions of this. I don't know if you've seen this. Have you ever seen DeBuild? Have you ever checked out this website? Yeah, we talked about debil My friend Sharif, there's a perfect example of a magic trick thing. He was messing around with GPT3. So GPT3, new technology comes out.

He gets access right away, drops his whole startup, starts hacking on this thing at night, right? And he throws up this, he has this idea of like, dude, you know, Squarespace, Wix, these website builders have been around forever. Great, everybody wants to be able to code without having to code, but like even now it's still so complicated, even after Webflow, after all this stuff.

and so he's like, why can't you just describe, like, you know, I want a website that's got like kind of like two columns. And on the left, I want pictures of like places you can stay. And on the right, I want the price of the thing. And you could literally just type that in and it'll build you a website that looks like Airbnb. It'll build you a website that does that. And he posted on Twitter a gift. He's like, you know, I'm messing around with GPT3 and watch this.

Like, you know, build a website with a photo and then add a PayPal button, but then make it where the PayPal button. but then make it where the PayPal button can only take $5 max. And that's it. And then send the payments to this. And then it like spit out a website that did that, like the HTML and the CSS that did that. And he posted that GIF. And I think off basically one tweet with one GIF, he raised like $2 million instantly from like really smart people when that tweet went viral because they were like, oh, you just showed me a magic trick.

And I don't know what the company is here. And I think he still doesn't know what the company is. But go down this path and see what you can find. It was pretty amazing. I remember when that tweet went live. I mean, it went viral right away. Yeah. I played with the GPT3.

I played with it for a while across multiple things. It's like the closest thing to like magic that in turn. It's weird because it's kind of a different vector, right? Because it originally is like a text generation mechanism to be able to write, you know, prose based on because it's got this corpus of data behind the scenes. And it's and I talked to. Salm Alton, the CEO, Brian and I had, he was gracious enough to give us some time. It's like, okay, well, like, where is this headed what's going on to see the impacts on HubSpot in the world in general?

And it's like, that's one of those things that I, right now, I don't think quite there to be able to, like, implement, like, practical use cases to actually do the thing that people are trying to do. And I've played with it on kind of multiple fronts. But it's one of those that it's going to go from, like, from a zero to a one very, very quickly. It's like, all of a sudden, that wasn't really possible and didn't really quite work well enough. And then it's going to be like, holy crap. Then there's like the kind of post-GPT3 world. What's that phrase where it's like, you know, slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden or something like that?

Yeah, it looks like it's going to be that. Sam, you said you liked some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics. Let's just go back a little bit. We just talked about something huge. That was a huge idea. Let's talk about something small but still cool. So it looked like, did you buy RemoteCulture.com? I did.

Okay. So that's a no brainer. There's a business that will make a million dollars a year. Remote Culture. online community for those building remote cultures. Easy, right? That's a no-brainer. What would you do there?

I would start a community for remoteculture.com. This is, okay, I'm going to do a blog. I'm going to do a paid community. And it's going to be targeted at people ops and HR people around the world that need to kind of figure out the new kind of new world order, right? We're not going to try and sell them software. We're just going to connect them to each other. And I'm a big believer in these kind of communities and network-based businesses because

they're efficient in terms of them to take that much. you gotta get to critical mass, that's fine. But I think this one would work. It's a community that's necessary at this moment in time that hasn't existed because it hasn't needed to. Right. And I'm sure there's people out there doing it, but brandy helps, you can actually build something.

There's one on here that I really like speed round. So by the way, these are what? These are domains that you don't have an idea for it. By the way, when I have like an idea that's enough in my head that's like, okay, well, this is kind of, I don't like write it down a notebook. I go find a related domain. It's like it cost $15 if it hasn't been taken yet or maybe I'll spend more if it's,

you know, something really kind of strengths my fancy. What's the most expensive ideas? What's the most expensive domain you own? Well, I haven't had them valued. I don't really sell domains. I own Birmingham,

Alabama.com. I live there. I think that's probably good seven-figured domain. I just bought Humanism.com and Humanism.org. You also bought one for me. Bought one for you. I bought the hustle.com for you as a gift that I was going to give to you on the podcast. So, so like, you don't care about domain names all that much.

No, hold on. A deal trophy, right? Whenever you get acquired, they have this little, I don't know, Sam. Did you know about this deal trophies? No, I want a deal trophy. So when we got acquired, they gave us like, it took like a few months, but it was like, hey, sorry, I meant to get this to you like, you know, when the deal closed, but I guess it's like in the deal making world.

I'm not, I'm not like a mover and shaker of biz-des. and like corp dev and things like that. But I guess it is sort of a tradition of when the deal is closed. It's sort of like the champagne. What you do is you get sort of like a little ornament that has some meaning to the deal. Like in our case, our code name was like project whatever. And it was like, let's just call it Project Sharp. I think we're Project H or something.

And so then they got like this like kind of like cool looking knife, you know, because it's like Project Sharp, whatever. Here's the deal trophy. So I think your deal trophy is this. this domain here. Well, and for the record, Darmash, if you like gift that to the hustle company, we would love it. And I actually do like domain names. My whole point about domain names was it's,

don't let it stop you. 99% of people are not like you or not like me. Like, we do shit. Like you're killing it and you just made this little rinketing project called GrowthBot. Like, we do shit. 99% of people don't do shit. And they have stupid excuses. Like, well, I don't have the domain name.

It's taken. or I do have the domain name, therefore I should do that. My point is, don't let it stop you, but I still think it's sick and it's awesome. And I love it. It's like saying, like, just because you don't have a sick gym doesn't mean you can't go out there and walk and lose weight. I think, you know, like Justin was on the podcast last time and he was like, there should be a dating app that matches you on like kind of your credit card spending history or something like that. For me, that's what it's like with this podcast where it's like, if I just, if you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually bought, but you don't have like a live project on. If that number is, you know, greater than 10, we're going to.

going to be, we're going to be thickest thieves and like, you know, how many tabs do you have open right now? If I just knew those two things, I can kind of tell you if this podcast is a fit for you or not. If you're somebody who owns zero domains, then you probably aren't going to, you know, really connect with this podcast in a major way, I don't think. What I'm going to put a apology here. I'm going to push that conversation on the stack, but one thing I want to make sure I can get out there, because on the list of things, just you're talking about ideas. It's like, how do you assess ideas, how do you think about ideas? I know, Sean, you love frameworks, and you do too, Sam.

Here's a simple one in terms of assessing whether you're doing it for yourself or you're investing whatever it is. And I'll tell you the common mistake. So the three things I look at are like profit potential. Like if this thing went exactly as planned as the founders envisioned, what could it be? Like let's just assume all things like all the stars align, everything works the way you expect it to and it goes, what could it be? What's the overall potential for the project? What kind of like passion do you have around it? It's like, okay, are you excited about it or not excited about it?

And the third one is around probability of that success that you want, right? And I'm a quant-based guy, so I'll take each of those factors. Zero to 10 square and multiply them together and I'll get a score out of 1,000, right? And you can put the weighting differently. It's like, oh, I care more about passion than the profit potential or something else. But the common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first and almost exclusively as the high-order bit filter. It's like, oh, I had this idea, but the likelihood is like 0.01% that that's actually going to work.

And so I'm not even going to think about what the potential could have been or how passion I may or may not be about it. And then they just kind of scarred the idea. I think that is statistically unwise and an impractical move. And here's why is that the way you should be looking at ideas is you kind of take the profit potential. Like here's the possible outcome, multiply. It's the EV, the expected value statistically of this thing. It's like, oh, I have a 1% chance at a billion dollars. The expected value is 1% of a billion dollars.

That's the value of that particular thing. And so you shouldn't discard something just because the probability is low because it may have a disproportionately high potential that makes it more interesting than it would otherwise. So that's the, like be a little bit more structured about how you assess things. People throw things away too easily because. And the second note, I'll put it as a hard one lessons. Good ideas are dangerous.

And they're dangerous because what you want to find are the great ideas. That's the thing you can kind of get behind. And you don't have to find them before you start the company. We can talk about that. So bad ideas are easy to spot out because that's just a bad idea. Good ideas. Mascarade is great ideas and it's hard to tell them apart. And they're the ones that end up kind of spinning a bunch of cycles for you.

And it's like, okay, well, it ended up being good. But just it's not a problem. Like mediocrity is the thing everybody should be fearful of. It's like just get it out and try and see what happens. But anyway. And mediocrity is the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource. It was time. Right?

because it's not going to die quickly, nor is it going to take off. So it is a slow, long burn at a mediocre level. And so you're sort of locking in over a period of time, a mediocre outcome. And that's why mediocrity is the biggest risk. I think the hardest about bootstrapped companies, especially tech companies that have a low kind of capital need, is they can actually live forever and not go anywhere, right? Because it doesn't take that much to it.

It's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you. It doesn't really cost that much. and you don't have investors pushing on you to say, oh, we need some sort of outcome. And so you can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you could have done was sitting right behind it, right? Like I have talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs by this point. I have never, ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur that had just one idea. It's like, oh, you will have more, dude.

It's like, okay. And try the thing. If you can sell the thing, sell the thing. If you're not that excited about it or you just want to cash out, take some chips off the table. There's no harm. shame. But yeah. Did you, but you guys didn't raise a significant amount at HubSpot, did you? 105 million.

Oh. Money before when public, yeah. Oh. Hopspot's a classic venture-backed playbook company. It's like there's not, and intentionally so. But that seems interesting to me because you don't see, you seem like a guy who likes freedom and knows that he's, knows what he is and knows that he's a little bootstrapper. Is what he's trying to say.

Why don't you bootstrap? I'll tell you the exact conversation we had. So when Brian and I started this, one of the things we were firmly agreed on is that we didn't want, I'm not a baseball or a sports person, but like we didn't want a single or a double hit, right? Like we wanted to like swing for the fences and either this, we do this and we're good, at every point that we have a decision to make a fork in the road, we are going to take the one that gives us a higher chance of being the spectacular outcome. Even if that means we're possibly going to go down and crashing burning flames, right? But was Brian, was he successful like you were?

Or was he, like, he didn't like need, he hadn't had like an exit because he was, he hadn't done a startup before. This was his first one. But he also was like, okay, this is my last swing at bat, right? This is not, this is it. This is the one that's either going to do it or not going to do it. And so that was the reason. It's like we weren't worried about dilute.

You know, we'd negotiate the fairest value we could. We made sure the terms were meaningful, had good investors. But we were not worried about what our percentage stake in the company was and how that moved over time. We're like, okay, if this thing does what it needs to do, the valuation and all that and the equity dilution will not matter. Like on the margin, it just, it's, we want it to be a binary outcome. Either it's going to be this huge massive thing, which will change our lives and have a massive impact or it goes down and crashing burning flames, which is highly likely, but we weren't looking to hold on to

control. We weren't looking at this like we wanted to be, we didn't want to be king. We want to be rich, I guess. But when you're doing like ideation and stuff though, you, you, you, you, either, I think you wrote, you wrote it here, you're down with starting a project with a bad idea because you're quite confident that you can figure out, you can make it great as you get into it, right? And my general advice is, and this is not just, you know, my personal kind of lived experience, as new folks would say, having talked to entrepreneurs and kind of looking at the history of them, so many of them, the thing that we know them for now is not the idea they originally started

with. Like, there are a handful of cases where, yeah, when exactly the plan this, is what it was. And often the case is that you will not find the great idea until after you start your company, until after you start having contact with customers and actually try to do the thing, if you sit on the sidelines trying to assess ideas and look at market metrics and things like that, and it's like, you're just never going to get started. That's the kind of want to be entrepreneurs that will kind of analyze it to death. It's like you wouldn't even know what a good idea was. It's hard to tell these things until you actually try something. It's, yeah.

That's crazy. Just do it and try it. Where do we go from here, Sean? I think we got to wrap. I think we have to have you on again if you're down because here's five topics I want to hear about. Why I don't play golf and what I do instead. I want that one. Why I hate inefficiency in markets. Why I don't believe in karma, but I believe in extended feedback loops.

Sometimes faking it is making it. Introverted engineer's guide for public speaking. I need all of these. So we may have to do another one. I have one question I want to wrap with in this one, which is, you see a lot. like a pretty astute guy, like very, very good observations. And I think you, you know kind of who we are and what we care about and that we would value honestly. So I'm curious. You can ask me the intro question, aren't you? You can ask me the intro question.

No, no, not the intro question. Sam, Sam's trying to get all the intro. So he can ask you that one. I want to know. I'm trying to make the content great. So what would be the most fair criticism you could give us on the podcast? What's your critique of the podcast for you as a listener? And there's like, you can offend. You can offend. You can offend. Exactly. That's kind of what I'm tinging you up for. Say whatever it is, whatever you truly feel. All right. So partly I think you have to recognize that you guys are multi-channel. So you're kind of solving for the audio format. I know you have the YouTube videos and things like that. But the one tactical thing that you should fix like next week or the week after is you should apply the Sean 25 headlines thing for headlines for every podcast episode. Like what's the one nugget that's going to cause people to want to listen to that episode even if they're not subscribed? When they see them their YouTube feed and YouTube recommends it's like, oh, like, why? this successful entrepreneur never played golf and you shouldn't either.

Whatever it is, right? Exactly. I'm on a, I'm taking notes. Keep going. If you do that, my guess is that the click through rate goes up because I can't not. Right now, you just can identify the episode number and who the guest is or whatever,

but there's no real, maybe the topic area. But right now me and Sam don't even even touch the headlines. Dan does it, I don't even know. I see a notification. It goes out and I think to my judge the headline myself. I'm like, ah, that's not going to get very many clicks. or, oh, that's a juicy one, that'll work.

I say give Dan a free pass to the Sean Copyrighting. Yeah, I did. I put a bit of course yesterday. That's awesome. What else? What else you got? Anything else? Of course, you have more.

Who me? Yeah, what about more? That was a weak criticism. Oh, that was an easy one. Okay. This is a hard one, right? Is around... He's going to say, like, just change your voice.

Like, your face? is it great. I suppose it's yours. So it's around the brand. And this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to kind of reconcile with. So a couple of issues that I have as an amateur branding person is that anything that can be reduced in acronym will be, which my first million is often reduced to that. And then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym, anyone that

comes like in immediate, they're not going to know what it is if they don't know what it is. And there's some value to that, but it doesn't compensate for the kind of opportunity you have. So that's one thing is that acronyms not good. But the other one is that the kind of my first million, there is a cadre, Cater, however that word is pronounced, of people that will directly, that topic will resonate with like, oh, I want to learn about that. But I think your reach is much wider now. And there are people, there are probably more people outside that sphere that that particular, like, okay, well, it's fine that it's about that. But really the reason I'm here is to hear folks, I'm body, right?

Like that, and that episode, which is, I think, one of the best episodes you've had, had nothing to do with the first million anything. It had to do with big ideas. We, I actually agree with you. And we've had this conversation.

The problem that we had was like, fuck, we're pretty deep into it. We can't change. Yep. Yep. For what it's worth, I think we should change

just because I hate the name. So I don't really care about the brand equity. I'm just sort of like, I don't want to have a thing that I dislike. I don't, I don't love it. I really don't. I don't love the name.

I don't love the name of the hustle either. If you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future, which I do, then 90% of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet. And so we're only offending a very small, we're only changing on a very small population of people for the good of the long run. That would be my take. And by the way, if you think it's hard now, you realize the direction of your head, it does not get easier, right?

It's going to get harder and harder than a year from now. two years from me out five years from now it's like ah like should we have changed this like what would have been it's like not that it's going to have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything but on the margin these things matter and they kind of accrued accumulates i and here's what i would do to make life easier for for yourselves um don't decide to change the name decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives like okay am i willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better If something picks for you, great, but make an honest, concerted effort to come up with those

alternatives and options. And then you can still decide, like, yeah, these are better, but they're just marginally better. They're not better enough to go through the headache of trying to change it. Right. That would be my advice. Okay, that's great. Sam, do you want anything else before we go? We're going to follow up with some intros, my man.

Dan, Dan, do we have an update? Are we reaching out to guess? We got to use Darmesh. She knows everyone. Well, I'm curious, actually, you do know everybody. Who's awesome? Who's, like, particularly awesome that you're just like either, kind of underrated or you're just like, you know.

So thing number one, I don't know as many people as you think. Like I'm kind of on the internet. Did I do things? But I, you know, I don't, like, I don't leave my house. Right. It's like, in order to kind of be that person, you have to sort of like interact with carbon-based life forms in real life, right? Like, I don't do that.

That's not a thing I do. So it's hard to kind of build those kinds of relationships. But I would, on your list, I would have. So I'm not going to be good at intros, but like, Naval would be awesome to have on the podcast to use like a like a, like that kind of biology level thinker. I think it would be awesome. The audience would love him.

So that would be great. Great. We'll take that intro. Thank you. He doesn't know me. I mean, he knows me like loosely. I'm not sorry,

Connie, we'll call you Uncle Darmes. You got to hook it up, man. Come on. I'm willing to try. Don't, don't get me wrong.

I know Kwan's about trying to make the intro. Just don't, to manage your expectations. It's like, well, I thought like, Darmesh actually could, like, swing things and make shit happen.

I, I, I don't know that to the truth. Anyone else? Anyone else? Someone I do know that I think would be good on the podcast. Drew from Dropbox I know really well. So that's an intro I could make.

What's up? Dropbox. Yeah. That would be a good one. I heard he's an amazing singer. Is that true? He's a... He's a good singer.

For a founder. Amazing for a founder is what I mean. He's legit. So, Darmash, Sean, was pretty nervous coming up to this because he was like, well, I'd just like to over-prepare. And I don't think good on my feet. sorry, you're like, you know, I prepare. And I don't love like just making shit up.

I think you did an excellent job. Dan has been texting me saying, Darmash is so awesome. I told you, Darmash. I told you this yesterday. I'm going to predict the future. You're going to come on and then you're going to start wanting to come on like once a month maybe. I have a feeling that that we have just accomplished that and that's going to be true.

You're freaking awesome. What's your Twitter handle? It's just D-H-A-R-M-E-S-H. You're really active. So people want to get in touch with you. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, pick your thing. Anything you want to... Orgdarmesh.net.

But yeah. Anything you want to, you want to pimp out or promote? No, I'm not a promoter kind of guy. That's not my thing. Well, thanks, man. This is awesome. I talked to you a lot. I got to set up...

I want to set up, like, times to just holler at you because I want to learn about you more. I want to learn about hubs. Sam wants to be your first direct report in 15 years. No, no, no, no. I don't want to... I don't want that. But this is great.

Heaton was like, You got to learn from Darmash. Just learn what makes Hubbesrat take. So thanks, dude. This is awesome. We're going to have you back on. Did it turn out as good as you thought? I love you guys.

This was fun. Yeah. And I say it's more importantly, I hope it ends up being useful for the audience. That's the thing I'm solving. Honestly, I'm looking at this doc. I feel like we left a lot on the table.

We have a lot more that we could do. I'm sort of regretting. You kind of have to. I always feel this way with a guest, by the way. I'm like, the first 20 minutes were slow, but it's also like, I remember Brett's person. And like, you know,

the audience doesn't know all about this person. So there is a certain context building that has to happen. Yeah, you got a date. I got to figure out why every single guest, I'm like, oh, the first 25 minutes were slow, but then it got really good. And yeah, I don't know if that's just my own. I'm just kicking myself for no reason or if other people feel that way. Maybe we should actually do something different and like sort of pull the future forward.

Just start at that 25 minute mark, basically. This is final books. That's, yeah. All right. That's a wrap. All right. I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like no days off On the road, let's travel, never looking bad