This Week in Startups - HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah on empowering entrepreneurs, HubSpot’s journey, and AI automation | E1781

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist Fitbod. Tired of doing the same workouts at the gym? Fitbod will build you personalized workouts that help you progress with every set. Get 25% off your subscription or try out the app for FREE when you sign up now at fitbod.me/TWIST. * Today’s show: HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah joins Jason to discuss his angel investing origin and strategies (2:36), HubSpot’s journey from a startup to a public company (6:19), the potential of generative AI (42:03), and much more! * Time stamps: (00:00) HubSpot Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah joins Jason (2:36) Dharmesh explains what prompted his angel investing journey (6:19) HubSpots journey from startup to where it stands today (8:48) Dharmesh’s decision to focus on Small Minus Big (SMB) investing (11:12) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (12:19) SMB investing conversation continued (16:08) The difference in cycles between big and small businesses (17:45) The best reason to start a company (21:25) Ways to go about assessing ideas (23:29) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist (28:34) Breaking down the entrepreneurial work ethic (34:15) Anticapitalist sentiment in the U.S. (38:11) Fitbod - Get 25% off at https://fitbod.me/twist (39:40) Starting a business in a downturn (42:03) AI’s impact on business and Business Process Automation (BPA) (46:39) Dharmesh’s thoughts on the next stage of AI and the effect on jobs (54:41) How AI will lead to more efficient organizations and increase margins * Follow Dharmesh: https://twitter.com/dharmesh * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

And the truth is, even when you start with an idea that you're super passionate about, in greater than 50% of chances, you thought you were starting a jazz trio and you made a, you know, a rock band or a southern rock band, whatever it is. You'll find your sound and you'll find it by doing it. You have to play the music. And so waiting for the perfect idea is the enemy of success in a lot of ways. Yeah. Well, and waiting for the perfect idea is actually the barrier to finding the perfect idea. Oh, even better said. It happens after you start.

Once you come into contact with customers in the market, you work together, and you start, I love your analogy, as you start playing, is when you kind of really discover, kind of discover yourself and what's out there. This weekend startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. CrowdBotics, great ideas can change the world.

And CrowdBotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. And FitBod. Tired of doing the same workouts at the gym? FitBod will build you personalized workouts that help you progress with every set. Get 25% off your subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now. at FitBod.me slash twist. All right, welcome back to the program, everyone.

Today, we have another amazing guest, one of my favorite people on the pod or just outside the pod. Darmesh Shah is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. He was on the show 10 years ago this year, episode 3, 3,4. He is an incredible supporter of founders, angel investors, thinker, and friend of the pod. Welcome back, sir. Thanks for having me.

Glad to be here. you and I became friends because we share a passion for entrepreneurship and writing those 25K, 50K checks, 100K checks into early startups. I think we were both in Raul's first company. I think we were, yeah. Rapleaf, I think it was called. It was called Reportive. That's right. Rapleaf was the other one that was doing APIs around social media.

But Reportive got sold to LinkedIn. And then you and I were the first investors in Superhuman. And it's one of the great things about having a reputation as a supporter of founders early is they always remember. Yes. They support their first company and they always have room for you in the next one. Maybe you could talk about, we've got so much to talk about with AI and HubSpot and all the great things going out of the world. But I wanted to start just with what you learned being an angel investor and, you know, supporting other founders in relation to building your own company and keeping your own mind sharp. Yeah. So I'll tell you a quick story of how I got started angel investing in the first place because I was in grad school at MIT here in the Boston area. And I had just sold my last startup. And I had promised my wife I was not going to do any more startups. And that's why I went back to grad school. It's like, okay, I'll get my master's, maybe get a PhD and go teach. That was the original plan. And as fate would have it, I think the entrepreneurial genetic flaw is very real. It's hard to stop it just once.

I was having withdrawal symptoms months into the, into selling my last startup. And so I'm like, okay, here's what I'll do. I will start doing angel investing, which I'd never done before. I didn't really know anything about it to live vicariously through other founders. Like, I don't have to have my own startup, but I can at least participate.

It's a little bit like having a niece or a nephew where you get to play with them. They're fun. It's awesome. But then you hand them back to their parents and you can go to bed and get some sleep. So that's why I started angel investing early on, you know, in my second year of grad school. And then, you know, ended up starting HubSpot, which I wasn't supposed to start after I met my co-founder in grad school. And then just kept up with it.

But I have a very kind of atypical style to my investing because I'm a very big believer in focus. And once we start a HubSpot, I'm like, okay, well, this angel investing thing is really not going to work because it's kind of hard to do both things. So I set a bunch of rules up for myself, which is I'm going to solve for time, which is reduction of time, not money, not return. So I don't meet with founders. I don't take calls. Don't sit on boards. Don't do all the things that might contribute to kind of increasing the amount of time, no due diligence, try to make my decision in 24 hours. And so kind of kept up that policy because that was the only mechanism by which I could continue to angel invest and feel like it was not taking away from my kind of primary activity, which.

is, as you know, a startup's can be or should be almost all-consuming. So, yeah, I've done, I think, not as prolific as you have done a little bit over 100 now over the years. I'm at 300, I think, but I have a firm now. And what you pointed out, the stack of things that eat your time, due diligence,

and then post-investment support, and then making decisions on pro rata. And then all of the anxiety that comes with the fact that, you know, and your child, you know, and kids and grandkids kind of analogy is really apt. And it is the case that the problem child, if you have five kids, the child who is a rebel or who gets involved in shenanigans and has trouble at school is the one that takes all your time. And then the two or three that are just absolutely gifted and rocking it, or the one or two,

they don't get your time. It's a very hard conundrum that I do not have an answer for because you're kind of judged on your reputation. And then the people, like all detractors, and, you know, from having HubSpot and doing marketing, your detractors are really important to keep an eye on. Because they'll keep you from having future success and you got to really try to control the number of detractors. Even if you have a great product, somebody has a bad experience in your restaurant, you could be three Michelin Stars. But that detractor is going to destroy you. every day of their life until they get their perceived retribution. It's a really strange thing.

Talk to me a little bit about where HubSpot's at, where it started, and where it's at today. It's been pretty rough road in terms of the public markets. But you seem to have weathered the storm and have a very solid product that people feel is indispensable, if I was going to use a word. When I talked to startups, and you guys are really generous to startups with your startup program, but it's kind of indispensable, I think,

and affordable. So talk a little bit about the state of the company today and who are the customers and what do they use the product for primarily? Sure. So HubSpot is now 17 years old, so it's been a while time flies. They grew up so quickly.

And we're about 7,000 employees, and as you noted, it's publicly traded, about a $25 billion market cap based on which week you look. And it's been a interesting journey. We can talk about kind of the pre-IPO times and going through the IPO process. And our kind of primary offering is we offer a CRM platform. So it consists of marketing, sales, service, software operations, everything you need to kind of manage your go-to-market and manage your relationship with your customers.

Offered as a pure SaaS product. One thing that makes HubSpot-Spot, kind of noteworthy and remarkable, is for all of our 17 years, we've been focused on the SMB market. Despite every quarter since our existence, everyone always asks us, including our investors and would-be investors, like, okay, it's fine that you start an SMB, but what's the plan to go into the enterprise? Because that's kind of a natural, I think of this reverse gravity that happens in software where outside of any kind of intervention or pullback, you always get pulled up in the market over time, right? The product gets more powerful. And as you move up market, usually, all the numbers that you care about will look better. Your LTV goes up, the term goes down. All the numbers look better.

Average revenue per customer. Yeah, pick your metric of choice. And usually as you move up market, it gets better. But we very deliberately chose not to allow ourselves to get pulled up and stay focused on SMB, which at the time was relatively controversial and hard to get funding around. It's now gotten better, including. Pupspotters, other companies that have the kind of succeed in SMB, but back then, there were not a whole lot of software companies that had kind of built big global brands,

multi-billions of dollars of market cap, you know, focus exclusively on SMB. So that's, it's been a lot. Why did you make that decision? What was the reason to go after the wisdom, the collective wisdom at that time? Yeah, a couple of reasons. One is I've been in enterprise software before, so I've done an enterprise software company. And there are good things about it. But the bad thing is that you have these kind of long extended sales cycles.

You have a high degree of influence on your larger customers on the product roadmap and things like that. And quite frankly, it's just not that fun. You know, you're serving the Fortune 500. And it's kind of very niche. I didn't find it to be that fun. It's lucrative. At least it was back in the day and probably still is. And so if you look at the other modality, right, so you can have like serve the Fortune 500 or you can build a consumer app,

consumer software company. The issue with consumer software companies is that they have very bimital outcomes. Either you're the next Facebook, the next Google, the next whatever, and you're worth a bazillion dollars, or you're nothing at all, right? It's hard to incrementally build something in the consumer world because often it's kind of subsidized through advertising and things like that. And the nice thing about SMB is that it has the elements of both, right?

It's got the elements of enterprise software where you can solve a problem and charge money for a product, the old-fashioned way, make money that way. but it's got the scale of consumer where there's millions of businesses out there. You don't have revenue concentration. You can control your destiny. So once you sort of figured out how to make the physics and the math work, it's actually a fun kind of business to run and grow. That's kind of part number one.

That's the analytical side of me saying this is a reason to be an SMB. The emotional side of me is we thought there was an underserved market. Both my co-founder and I are kind of champions of small business, hence my kind of startup investment activity. And there are enough companies catering to the Fortune 500. Those folks will always have options. We wanted to create something that helped, like in our kind of early version, it was primarily marketing software, which is, oh, there's this new thing called the

internet and every small business should be benefiting from it. And not enough were. So we're like, how do we democratize access to this kind of new technology? How do we educate? How do we build products that are easy enough to use for people to kind of benefit from this thing called the internet? And we've kind of stuck to that mission for all 17 years, which is, you know, how do we help millions of organizations grow better using the Internet and using whatever technology happens to be available at the time. If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, then you need to be, uh, SOC2 compliant.

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That's not the choice. If you can have a thousand. people, a thousand seats or three seats, well, you're going to play for the long ball and try to spend the extra six months to get the thousand seats as opposed to trying to get 3333 people to sign up for three seats each. But man, if you do make it work, there's nothing like a startup that enables somebody to create a business. Shopify, eBay, Airbnb, Etsy, gosh, even, you know, to a lesser extent, Uber, DoorDash, like people create, you know, sort of micro businesses. these businesses are just amazing in terms of the amount of creativity, the people who you enable, because then that informs the product, doesn't it? People start using your product in ways that you probably didn't anticipate, and they are this incredible focus group.

You know, that's the great thing about having these really, you know, what's the word? You know, they're really scrappy. Yes. And so they're going to give you some great idea. I'm sure some of the best ideas have come from the customers? Most. Yeah. So HubSpot has, you know, 170,000 plus customers now, right?

Had we been in the enterprise market, that would have been more like 1,700, right? Like multiple wars of magnitude difference. So we get all the better. And it's just a lot of fun because I'm a big believer in terms of product development in fast iterations, short feedback loops, being able to act on things. And when you have thousands of customers, you know, joining every month, you're able to then kind of, can I get that feedback very consistently, get ideas in, kind of iterate on the product.

You're not dealing with six-month, 12-month sales cycles and figuring out whether there's something will or will not work. You can run better experiments. Yeah, just lots of positive to it. Once you can make the math work, and for all folks in the audience listening, if we were having this conversation, let's say 15 years ago,

been our early years of HubSpot, you know, I would say, okay, well, you know, it still remains to be seen whether HubSpot is successful or not, and SMB is hard, so I wouldn't recommend it. Now I would actually recommend it, especially as a startup, right, if you look,

so in the kind of 90s and 2000s when I first kind of got started in software and tech, enterprise software was on a relative basis relatively easier. But now we've gotten, I'll say like a glut of products,

very, very discerning buyers. It's hard to kind of make money and kind of get things through as it once was in the 90s. And so for a startup, It's like, okay, you're getting out. It's like if it's going to take you three, six, nine, 12 months to kind of get those early customers and you're trying to iterate and maybe pivot if you need to. Doing that in the enterprise market is really hard.

Doing that in SMB is much easier. And one of the reasons that made SMB so hard is that they were expensive to get to back then. Yes. It was just hard to reach them. How do you make the kind of LTV? I did knock on the door. I mean, that was traveling sales. You know, that was out.

And literally, that was actually the term. Now that I remember, you had inside sales and outside sales. that outside sales was knock on doors. And there were so many of them back in the 90s. It said no solicitations, please. We're not coming here and sell something. Now that we have Shopify, there's HubSpot, there's proof points. Even if you're raising money, which we can talk about that,

whether you know, good and bad of venture capital. But I think SMB is still a vibrant market for entrepreneurs to kind of tackle because it's easy to get started. Everyone knows 20 people that are entrepreneurs or small businesses, you know, were one degree removed, so they're not sitting in some ivory tower that you're going to spend six months just trying to get a meeting with the decision maker. The decision maker is usually the founder's CEO. And it's much easier.

It's a much more fun business. I suppose the small businesses too do not have cycles to waste. So you can get to a very quick decision. I need this. I don't need this. I don't have time for this. Whereas if you go to a big company, and I worked at a big company for like a minute or two, AOL and Sony,

saw one company and then starting my career a year at each, there would be meetings and committees. And there were middle managers who I realized, all they did was go to meetings all day. And I was like, what do you do?

I'm going to meetings. You saw Toby's awesome at Shopify his awesome calculator this week. This meeting cost $2,000. Yeah, that was awesome. They should put that meeting on. Whoever sets up the meeting, it should be billed to their department.

They should get the bill for that. If you're going to pull in six developers for $200 an hour or whatever they cost, she gets the bill for it. It's not just that they're having kind of meetings and they have these committees. They have this, like you need just one relatively influential person in the company that's going to say no, that can veto that potential deal for whatever, whatever reason, right? It could be, you know, stay in the market. And so you're just kind of jumping through these, you know, 12 flaming hoops,

hoping that, okay, I got through this committee, I got this person to prove it. I've got my champion doing this, whatever, and then ultimately maybe you get a sale six, 12 months in. Whereas in the small business world, it's like you've got one person who's generally an optimist. They're an entrepreneur. They took a risk. They're used to that. You don't have people whose entire job or most of their job is saying no to things, right? That's not, which in the enterprise world, you get all the time. Let's wide in the discussion here. What is your advice to founders or potential founders, not people who have done it, before, but people who haven't. We have

massive layoffs in tech. I don't have here in my notes if you did a riff, but I'm assuming you probably did if you were part of the over-hiring trend. We were all hiring for explosive growth. We'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the lessons there, but putting that aside, a lot of people had jobs at Uber or Google

or Microsoft suddenly find themselves with a decade of experience and two or three friends who were getting paid. Dignormous salaries, huge options. And now they don't have four offers competing for their services, they got zero. So some of them are looking and gone,

huh, these offers aren't great. Maybe I should start a company. Best reason to start a company? Who should start a company? Why should they start a company? So I think two reasons to start a company. I don't think that should be one of them. I mean, if you were already considering it,

that can be one of the factors. This is, okay, well, my opportunity cost was too high. I've had good ideas. But the two reasons to start is you've got a passion for a particular kind of problem that you want to solve in the world, you know, for whatever, you know, set of customers. Or you've got a set of people that you know that you'd love to work with and do something with, right? And HubSpot actually falls in the latter camp.

HubSpot, we had not actually decided on what the final idea was going to be until after we started the company. The first decision we made was that Brian I, my co-founder and I were actually going to start something. And it's like we were loosely, we were looking at several ideas. One was going to be like an Oracle for SMBs, like an ERP kind of thing. We've looked at marketing. And so my advice to founders here would be like on the idea front, I'll give you my kind of quick framework for, we'll talk about the idea and we can talk about kind of founder selection. On the idea front, one of the mistakes I think would be entrepreneurs make is they assume that in order to kind of take the leap of faith and start a startup, they have to have this really great perfect idea. And I don't think that's true.

And even if you happen to have a really great near perfect idea, you wouldn't know it a priori at the time. Until you start a company, the kind of greatness of the idea does not really reveal itself. And often if you kind of study startup history, a lot of the kind of success stories that we've seen actually became successful for an idea that was not the original founding idea. They kind of pivot along the way in something very different happened over time, either a full-on pivot or at least increase. incrementally, the company looks very different from the early idea. So the corollator here would be is like, okay, well, if most successful startups end up with an idea that was not the original idea, then how much does that original idea matter? Should that preclude you from starting?

Okay. So that's kind of thing. There's a very important insight, I think, for founders to understand because, as you said, hey, if you got three people you like to play music with, they just start playing music, start the band, you know? You're going to love it. And the truth is, even when you start with an idea that you're super passionate about, in greater than 50% of chances,

you thought you were starting a jazz trio and you made a, you know, and a, you know, a rock band or a southern rock band, whatever it is, you'll find your sound and you'll find it by doing it. You have to play the music. And so waiting for the perfect idea

is the enemy of success in a lot of ways. Yeah. Well, and waiting for the perfect idea is actually the barrier to finding the perfect idea. And the perfect idea happens after you start once you come into contact with customers in the market, you work together, and you start, I love your analogy, as you start playing, is when you kind of really discover, kind of discover yourself and what's out there.

So let's talk a little bit, I think, about, you know, ways I used to kind of assess an idea. And I think in framework it's a little bit. So there's, I think, three things to look at. And there's a common mistake that happens. One is the kind of potential that particular idea has. So let's say everything goes your way. It's like, everything works. Like, it's like, and you execute and.

and things happen, what could this potentially be? What's the overall potential magnitude of the outcome here? And there's no kind of right or wrong answer, you know, based on your, you know, if this is your third startup versus your first one, things vary. But like that's kind of thing number one is what's the overall potential? The second thing is what's the probability of success of achieving that potential? How hard is this to actually execute on and get to the actual potential? The mistake I think entrepreneurs make is they start with the probability question.

what are the likelihood of me pulling this off? And if that's too low, they never even think about the potential. And you play poker or into stats and kinds of things. For instance, if you have a 10% chance at a billion dollar outcome, right, the expected value of that is 10% of a billion dollars. It's worth $100 million, right? Just putting everything else aside all things being equal. If you have a 50% chance at a million dollar outcome, yes, you have 50% chance at a million,

that's worth $500,000, worth far less. obviously a lot of it has to do with what you can put at risk and all those things. But all things being equal, just putting an idea aside simply because the probability is too low is short-sighted. You should also look at, number one, what's the potential? And the last thing is, to what degree do you have passion or proximity to this idea? Don't just pick it based on those numbers to say, oh, I really have a passion for solving this problem. Or I've been working in this particular area for a long time. I've got what I call proximity.

So a combination of those three things helps you kind of pick amongst the idea that. that you might pursue, look at the right mix of, okay, here's something I'm passionate about, that's got decent potential, and is a level of risk in terms of the probability that I can, I'm willing to accept. And then you kind of pursue it. All right, we all know the one thing that separates

great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean? Product velocity, fancy term, right? You've got your product and your velocity. Speed, the speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates? Can you release new features? Can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface?

Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly because you're not alone? You have competitors and your customers have choices. They may solve their problems by writing their own custom code or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, okay, yeah, we want to go faster, but you got to go faster intelligently.

And crowdbotics is going to help you do that. they're your CTO as a service. Basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible. You'll have access to an on-demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. CrowdBotics can work with your in-house dev team, or you can just have them work independently and you own all the IP, you own all the source code.

Let the folks at CrowdBotics supercharge your product velocity today, no more waiting. Get a free build plan at CrowdBotics.com slash twist. That's a $499 value just for the Twist listeners. You get that for free. That's C-R-O-W-D, B-O-T-I-C-S dot com slash twist for a free build plan. It's such a great framework. I think one of the things I've seen over and over again is people will pitch me what is essentially a service business, you know, maybe in a wrapper with a little bit of software

or software-enabled services, whatever. And if you think about the expected value, something we talk about in poker, if I do call this bet or I do hit it on the river or I do hit my magic card on the turn do I get that person's whole stack? Do I get three people's whole stack? Is everybody going to come in?

You really have to think about that. And what I tell founders, you know, which is largely based on your framework here is you're going to put in 60, 70, 80 hours a week for your startup. It's just the nature of it. It's going to be all encompassing.

If you're an entrepreneur, you're going to put everything you have into a service business, you're going to get it to $10 million a year in revenue. If you put everything, you got, you know, into a software business or a marketplace or a fintech company and, you know, pick a platform company. You know, the potential revenue is billions of dollars. And there's just a

natural cap to some businesses. You pick D to C. It's going to be a low margin grind. Yeah, sure. You get a bowling branch once in a while or an eight sleep. There are outliers that can do it, but man, it's hard. And then I love yours passion and proximity to the idea. Yeah. The other thing is, especially if you're early in your entrepreneurial career, let's say you're doing your first one. The other reason to kind of lean a little bit more towards kind of potential for the idea is that you want like several, if you can, several steps up to bat. So you may not get it exactly right the first time, right? But if you do a service business, you're sort of in there for the grind. You're going to be there for five, 10, 15, 20 years. And that's sort of going to be

it. Like it's not going to probably die, right? It's going to make revenue. You'll have a comfortable living. But it's unlikely you're going to have this kind of breakout success, which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But, you know, if you really feel like this kind of entrepreneurial drive to kind of take your swinging bat and swing for the fences, you're better off doing a product-oriented company. And as it turns out in my experience, and this is a little bit paradoxical, it's often easier to pursue a larger idea than is a smaller one. And the reason is that a larger idea will attract better people that are more ambitious, that will kind of thrive on that. I was like, oh, we're going to do this thing that's really, really hard.

That's the way to get people kind of into the company that will help you increase the odds of your, of your success. Whereas if you're going at a, oh, we have a high potential. It's like a 70% we're going to all make money here. It's going to make, you know, be a million dollars, five million dollars, whatever it is. That's fine, but you're going to find other people that are kind of mitigating risk a little bit too early. So if you're kind of early in the entrepreneurial career, you know, as much as you're kind of willing to stomach. I'd say take your shot, right? Of course.

I mean, and when you get to our age, you and I got the gray hairs coming in, you realize more and more that the finite commodity in the world is time. And you have a certain amount of time to get this done. And to just build off of our, you know, jam band analogy here, you know, if you say, hey, I'm looking for some studio musicians to play backup at the studio and I'm going to open a studio and we're going to do backup musician, you're going to get a certain type of person. A conservative person who wants a steady salary.

If you say, hey, I want to, I want to build the largest rock and roll band in the world and go on tour and do stadiums and have the number one hits, you're going to get people who are like, yeah, let's do it. And one group of people is going to write their own music and wants to write their own songs and own the IP and go big. And the other group wants to punch a clock

and get out of their on time. And, you know, the more I look at it, I feel like there are people in the world who are wired for either group. And a lot of the tension in our, society that we see, the anti-capitalist kind of underpinnings that we see in the United States today or clearly in Europe or wealth disparity. A lot of it has to do with this, live to work, work to live, or my life is my work. And this disconnect that people just don't understand

that for entrepreneurs, there is no other way. They have to be building something. They have to be the person playing lead guitar. They have to be the lead singer. They can't play any other role. you think that's right? Do you think like there's just different type of people in the world? Yeah, this is not a popular opinion, but I'll put it out there anyway. HubSpot has 7,000 people,

and we have the entire broad spectrum of people of various stages of life, various temperaments, which is great. Well, that's one of the values to scale is that we can kind of support whichever modality you have. So there are people that are kind of, like I want, you know, more balance in my life.

I want this and I want, and that's fine. I think that's totally okay. where things start to not be okay is when you pick a particular mode that is incongruous with what your expectations are. So let me give an example. In every competitive endeavor that humans will ever undertake, there's always sacrifice to be in the kind of top 1% top 1% as far as outcomes. Right? If you're in the Olympics, you don't say, you know what? I was born with this talent.

I can really run fast or jump high or whatever. And so I don't really have to work all that hard because I've got all this talent. No one shows up for the Olympics without sacrifice, without having, getting to that point and even then continuing to do that as an Olympic athlete. Same for music. Same for any competitive endeavor, right? Where you're trying to be in this kind of small percentage of outliers. And not everyone necessarily needs to do that, but it's like if you're expecting the outcome of one of those outliers, but you're not willing to make that sacrifice, that's when conflict starts to occur. It's like, okay, it's fine to pick one path or the other, but you can't say, well, you know, I want 100. hundreds of thousands of adoring fans, but also I really don't want to practice,

you know, five times a week or seven times a week. I don't want to be famous. I want to have 80,000 people pay $200 a ticket for my show. I'm Taylor Swift. I want to go on a tour, but I don't want people to ask for a selfie. It's like,

you're going to get asked for a selfie. You know what? To her credit, she does that fan service, but there are people who are like, ah, they want it. They don't want it. Mark Knopfler from Dias Straits.

Man, when they hit the peak and they were the largest tour, in the world. They had two different sets. And this is when he said, when you own your own stage, that's when you know it's gotten too far. And they owned two stages. And in San Paulo, in Brazil, and then in Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, you know, Southern California, the stages were moving while they were playing three nights at the next place. And they were doing 250 gigs a year. They were printing money. But he said, it was now a beast. And he just disbanded dire straits at the to become, you know, a folk singer, basically. And he did his solo albums, and I still love him for both arrows,

Mr. Irish traits, but I think you do need to know, it's like the, it's the absolute perfect example. If your expectations are set right, and at a big company, you need people who are steady and long term, and you don't need them to come in every weekend. Go, if you're the sales team and you hit your numbers, God bless. Spend time with your kids. If you got to leave at 435, 30, pick up your kids.

That's great. But in my, when you were a 19 person HubSpot, I guarantee you people were there at 10 o'clock at night and on the weekends, yeah? Yeah. Yes. And one thing to be clear on is that, you know, I'm not like a big fan of kind of the aggressive hustle culture, right? It's like you, there are times where you need to kind of spike if you've got some

deliverable, but that in my mind is not long term sustainable. So, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for 30 years now across, now, you know, HubSpot's my third. I've always valued sleep. You know, my average sleep time, which I've attracted is, you know, has approximated like seven to seven and a half hours for all those 30 years. Right. So I don't agree.

And it's not that I don't work hard. It's not that I'm not committed or whatever. But it's so you have to you have to find that balance because same thing. Once again, going back and I have never played professional sports of any kind, or sports of any kind for that matter. But Olympic athletes also recognize, right? That there's, um, it's unhealthy and they cannot sustain. It's like, oh, they're not going to go practice, you know, 14 hours for eight days straight or whatever.

It's going to harm their money. Diminishing returns. Yeah. Or negative returns, not even just diminishing. You get no returns. It actually causes you harm. Injure yourself, right. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah, I have gotten wise about this in my older years. You know, as a, we're a, I guess, 19 person company now for our investment firm that also does a podcast. And I tell everybody, if we want to be great, it's a fixed 50, solid 60 a week to be really great in venture. servicing companies. But if you start getting to 70, 80 hours a week, you're going to resent the job, you're going to quit. So just, you know, it doesn't have to be a marathon every week,

but it's got to be a brisk pace. And then what I look at more is, how responsive are you to the founders we invest in, you know, when they need us? So if they call on a Saturday night or they have a term sheet on a Sunday, are you the type of person who will respond? Or do we leave them out in the cold on the weekend? And, you know, the maturation I've had

is not being resentful of people who don't want that. Yeah. It's informing people on the way, in that that's how it is. And there's 10% or 20% of people who want that. And then when I take those 20% of people in, half of them didn't realize they don't want it. Yeah. And so you keep half the people you hire, and I think that's probably, I think, okay.

Do you worry in society right now about the sort of anti-capitalist kind of sentiment going on here in this bifurcation where, you know, you and I grew up. up. We're both, I think, exactly the same age. I was born in 1970. I have a 30-year career as well. So what year were you born? 67. Okay. So we're like literally within three years of each other. And we grew up in a time when we were in our teens where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Mitch Kippur and just like it was incredible. Like these were incredible entrepreneurs crushing it and they were idolized and studied, you know, and it was the best of America. Now we're in this weird place where it's like,

yeah the standard of living is better than it's ever been but you won so somehow you either cheat it or you don't deserve it and we have to sort of maybe vilify people who succeed

what do you think about all this you concerned at all? It does. I think it's very real that kind of divided culture we've seen that show up in all sorts of different places but like the optimist in me

believes that over the fullness of time, that we go through these cycles and that we will, as a society, kind of figure out that maybe this one is lasting longer than anyone would have liked, but that there is a, like, a truth function at the end of it all that says, like, here's a thing that makes sense, is as a species that likes to achieve, likes to produce, likes to progress, like, here's what that means. And then, you know, for those that are, against capitalism, we've tried a bunch of other possible systems. I'm not particularly politically politically savvy, but they haven't really worked, right?

So it's, you know, the, so anyway, I'm a good believer, and this is just my kind of neat personality is that I'm a builder and like to build things. And I think, yeah, society will value that. Yeah, it's right now, it's, it's an odd time in the world. Isn't it? It's very strange that, yeah, so much tension.

And I think it does not need to be that way because, objectively, the standard of living has just increased a sense of safety, actual safety in the world. If you read Stephen Pinker's work, is just the chances of being murdered or attacked and violently dying or being incarcerated unfairly. You know,

we know of all the cases when it does happen and we put them onto social media and becomes the number one story of the day. So our brains are now getting programmed to see all the horribleness in the world, the edge cases essentially. And we just don't see the average case that, you know, the incredible bounty we have

than that things just keep getting better and better and better. Yeah. I met Stephen Pinker, I think, earlier this year, a small gathering. And so if for those listening, once again, read Pinker's Enlightenment Now. If you really want to kind of understand objectively why we should be optimist and feeling positive about where we are versus where we used to be, that's a very good, well-thought-out book on things are better, like as much as they may seem like they're not. Yeah, I just think it's the media.

Yeah, both social and mainstream that has just taken us down this terrible path where you doomscroll and you see all the bad things. Yeah. And your feed is people fighting on the street or Karen's ratting out people and social injustice and everything. And you just believe that's the default state. Yeah. And actually the default state is, you know, most Americans actually get along. And if you met a couple of Republicans and Democrats and independents, religious people, atheists, could all sit and have a piece of pie together and a cup of coffee and have a great. grand all time.

Yeah. And that's why, and people are like, how could you be friends with David Sachs? I'm like, because we have a hilarious fun time together. Right. You know, like, because we love each other. We have a great time. And they're like, but you disagree? And it's like, okay.

Over what? Ice cream flavors, beverages, politics, who cares? All right. You know, I've been on a health kick over the past year. And you know, I care about data-driven solutions. And if you'll listen to this podcast, I bet you do too. So let me tell you about FitBod. This is a data-triven.

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FitBod can create a perfectly optimized workout for me based on these parameters. And it'll do it for you, too. Check it out. It's amazing. The design of this app is extraordinary. I was able to invest in it. That's how impressed I was with it. FitBod takes the guest workout of fitness. Just open the app and start making progress. You deserve it. Get 25% off your FitBod subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now at FitBod.m.m.m.m. slash twist. That's F-I-T-B-O-D dot M-E-W-I-S-T for 25% off. What about the downturn and starting a business in the trow, which you and I have done, and we've invested in businesses in the trough. It's a little bit counterintuitive, is it not? It is. But in my mind, you know, that like the oscillations of the market up, you know, up turns, down turns, there's really never a bad time to start a business. There are bad reasons to start a business, right? If you're saying, oh, I'm going to do this because I want to make millions of dollars, there are easier ways to make millions of dollars with higher, you know, likelihood of success, you know, based on your background and things like that. But in terms of like down market versus up market, I think the net net of it is, you know,

I think we've seen, there's probably data that exists somewhere, that the number of startups and successful startups that were started in down years or whatever is probably comparable. I don't think there's like two standard deviations of difference between one versus the other. So right now I think is, and we'll have to talk about AI at some point because I think that's the other thing. Next question. Let's do it. To me, it's less about the economic kind of movements and the fluctuations which we see. Because, you know, in the downturn, they're, you know, they're about. things, right? It's like obviously it's like things are hard. Customers are hard to get to. People are not spending money.

People are tightening their belts. Their austerity measures being put in place. People don't want to spend money. On the positive side, right? It's rents are cheaper. Access to the talent is more readily available. People that may never have considered joining a startup because they work for Facebook or whatever now would do that. So the pool of talent that you have available to now is much better than you would have had in a kind of booming up economy. So let's, we'll stipulate for now. I could be wrong, that those things kind of cancel each other out. I would agree with that. They balance each other out. Well, yeah,

it's, I literally was looking at an office space yesterday. Like, I'm looking for a place from my startup accelerator, and I was going to have a little garage. Um, and they wanted $2 change a square foot per month. And the guy told me like,

you know, there's like places that have $3 a square foot, class A office space. Yeah. And I was like, really? He's like, they'll do anything to get anybody.

Yeah. Uh, at one third the price. I was like, wow, that's incredible. I can literally be sitting in a Class A office base with views of the bay for three bucks a month. Yeah. Hilarious. But yeah, you're totally right.

And then AI puts this huge wrinkle into it. What's the number one impact AI is going to have on running a business in your mind? I think it's going to have positive impact because as technologies in the past have done, at any time we've seen kind of major shifts in the kind of technology paradigm, And it basically lifts productivity. It allows us to, quote, unquote, produce more, build more than we were able to do before. So I think it's going to be kind of a net boon. I think in the short run, it's going to, as things have done in the past, you know, create,

create some pain for pockets of people and pockets of businesses. But on the whole, I think it's going to help. I think it's sort of like, you know, when first, you know, when computers first came along, there were a lot of things that went from kind of manual to being digitized. It's like, oh, now I can do this. I have something called a spreadsheet that lets me as an accounting person or whatever do things much more productively. So I possibly need fewer accounts. We'll come back and talk about that.

The internet came along and opened up another kind of pool of things that could be done now that weren't possible when everyone wasn't connected. And I think AI is another thing sort of like that, which is it kind of amplifies what can be done and the kinds of things we can automate. And to me, right now, it's less about kind of automating people away. It's about automating tasks. So the way I think about it, it's like if I were to walk into or chat with Zoom was more likely, someone at HubSpot is like, by the way, you know, I'm going to give you

budget to hire two assistants because you're doing a great job and I need you to help me more with this thing that has more impact on the business than higher value that I think you're exceptionally good athlete. Hiring the two assistants will free up your time. If I went there, they would see that as a unequivocally positive thing. It's like, yeah, of course I can use two assistants because I do all this thing, whether it's meeting, notes, whatever is scheduling. That's what the...

AI, we should think of as that. It's like you're going to now be able to hire assistance, quote unquote, in the form of software that will do things that were taking up time that were either wrote, that were repetitive, that does not require your degree of acumen and creativity, thereby freeing up your time to be able to work on those things and create more value and over the, once again, the fullness of time, the value that you is an individual drive from the company, drive from the market at large, is a function of the value that you create. It's going to be some fraction thereof, right? And this allows you to kind of raise

that value that you're kind of contributing to the business or to society. So yeah. We had a name for this in the 80s and 90s that you well know, business process automation, BPA. And there were Gartner Group or, I don't know, consultants going around Boston, the consulting group, they would study your business, IBM would come in and they'd say, okay, this piece of paper, workflow, Lotus notes, all these pieces of software. This is how this piece of paper runs

from the ninth floor to the seventh floor and then down to the typing pool and the backup to the CEOs desk and gets filed. And they're like, we can actually do that on a piece of software. And my initial reaction to all of this amazing chat GDP 4.0 and software, I made everybody buy it in the organization

because you only buy it personally. 20 bucks each, 400 bucks a month, $5,000 a year. And we use Notions AI and some other AI assistance. And I have them look at the task they do every day and they said,

start sharing, because you can share on chat GPT, start sharing when you do your end of day report. We do like a little start of day, end of day report to keep each other accountable and slack. I said, I want you to link to your chat GPT threads.

And if you don't do any, that's okay. But other people can suggest to you, you know, hey, I should do that. And we had one person who's ambitious in the company, Brian.

And he did it for the sales team. And he showed them when they were doing some event sales, hey, here's how I would do these prompts. And I saw the salespeople's heads go, like, that was four hours of work. And once you start getting into this, I don't know if you've been doing like the prompt. Have you started doing like prompt optimization yet? Oh, yeah. I am deep down that rabbit hole, Jason. Oh, boy, is this exciting. You are an SEO expert. You are an event. I literally did this for my event because I come up with creative ideas for like all in summit parties and so like that. And I was like, you're an event manager. You're doing a J.A.

Bond theme party, what are some activation stations that would delight the customers and make it memorable? I was like, you should do casino games. You should do a photo booth. And I was like, yep, that's everything I would have suggested. And then there were three that I was like, didn't think of that. Yep. Let's do those two. So what have you gotten to? That's the role. What do they call that? Like, roll something in prompt engineering? Agent-based things I think is an agent. Oh, agent-based thing. Yeah. So you set up a role. You are a lawyer. You are an SEO. What else have you started to learn here? So I think, so the evolution has been, you know, when we first, and it feels like an eternity

ago, but. In December. Yeah. It was a kind of a single shot. You kind of typed in a prompt and you got a response back. Then chat GPT launched in November of 2020 last year. And that made it more conversational. So you could actually have it back and forth and say, oh, well, give me that, but tweak this or do

this or do this. right? So it's a multi-step thing. I think the next wave of kind of evolution is going to be around moving to this a truly kind of agent-based thing that says you have higher order kind of goals or tasks. Instead of saying, oh, write me a blog post, it's like, I'm going to launch a new event in six months. So it can then functionally decompose that task and say, here's the thing I'm trying to do. Okay, well, in order to do that, we need a social media strategy.

We need this. We need a website. We need this. It's like, okay, for a social media. strategy. We need these five things. We need to figure out which channels, whatever. Now we need a calendar that it's like it can continually go down. And over time, uh, so in the early days, maybe it just gives you a list of things broken down, looking at the kind of tree. Here's the kind of the project map. Over time, more and more of those tasks that need to be done can just simply be done in an automated way. So I think what we're going to do is kind of raise the level of abstraction that we work in instead of having this, uh, very kind of task oriented, you know,

The task oriented thing is like having a really super smart intern. Brilliant, really quick. Pips things out very quickly. It's well-read, well-knowled. Go get a Starbucks for everybody. They're going to have to give them very detailed instructions in order to really get the thing that you want. And what we're going to move to is kind of a higher order, someone that can have discretion, someone that can look at their own output and say, yeah, I did this, but it's not quite not good yet.

And I think, you know, we talked about role-based things. So imagine agents, and there's like, here's how I think about it. I'll stop after this one, but I think this is- Keep going. You're cooking right now. What I think of is like creator agents, right? And that's what we sort of know right now. It's like someone that can write, an agent that can write a blog post, can do or create an image. Marketing plan.

Like a graphic designer. Yep. Then there are what I think of as like curator agents. And what curator agents are is like, oh, I had these automated agents go off and create 100 different designs for my slide deck for this cover image because it's super important or for my blog post, whatever it is. The curator says, I don't know how to create things, but I know how to pick. the best one based on the context that I have available about the business. And you can separate

those two things. One creates, the other one picks of the creations. And that's sort of what we do as humans. And the third one is around coordination to say, okay, I have access to creators. I have access to curators. And either is a kind of master agent like a manager almost that says, I'm going to try and put all these pieces together and get the output in a form that is applicable for you. It's like, okay, well, I don't just want a list of my competitors, a competitive strategy or how it's like, I want a 30-page PDF that actually gives me, like a McKinsey report might do, and gives me all those things. And I don't know or need to know all the pieces that had to come together and kind of deliver on that kind of high order desired outcome. And I think that's where we're, and we're still very, very early in that evolution.

But the rate at which things are moving, this is a thing. It's like, okay, well, three years ago, had we described to someone what was now possible that we know is possibly because we use it. You and I would have laughed. every day, right? A hundred million people have been exposed to it. They would have thought, oh, no, no,

that's going to be decades out. That's what everyone was saying, right? And so this kind of thing, this kind of agent-based model, in a normal world, I would have said maybe that's five, 10, 20 years out. No, I'm not so sure.

Five, ten, 20 months out is probably, yeah. So we'll see. I think the way you framed it is exactly correct. What I've learned is that you start to think of this as, like you're saying, the intern, where the associate, hey, here are some tasks. I don't want to do them.

Find me locations for the event, write a couple blog posts, find a list of speakers. But then, hey, you're an event producer, make me a marketing plan. Okay, now execute on the marketing plan. And hey, we have somebody who's our metrics person. Look at the signups, look at the data, and tell me, when we look at that data, how we should change the marketing plan. So now we're at a different thing. The data is coming in and it's reacting to its own marketing

plan and learning. And when we get to that phase, where you have multiple agents, as you're sort of sort of envisioning here, which I think is next year sometime, um, now everybody in the organization's job, I would say between 30 and 75% of what people do on a task basis get subtracted away. You think I'm about right in terms of percentages? You're probably right. Um, either on the percentage or the timeline, maybe both, uh, we'll see. It's, yeah, um, it's, moving really quickly. And bring it, so one thing I think, um, in terms of like the here and now, the stuff that's already here and already happening. So right now, a lot of the excitement in generative AI is around,

because of the word generative, around generating things that are meant for humans. It's like, oh, I'm going to generate a blog post, I'm going to generate image, I'm going to generate audio, video, whatever happens to me. And that's where 90% of the kind of energy and excitement is. I think 90% of the opportunity is around generative AI models being used to generate things that computers will actually use, not humans. I mean by this is that for the entire history of the software industry that as long as I've known it, which has been a long time, most software companies will say, oh, we create like easy to use simple, intuitive UI, right?

That's whizziwig, yeah. We'll say that. And the truth is, it's not intuitive at all because every piece of software that has existed, it's like, okay, well, you have the thing you're trying to do in your head that says, oh, I want to do this in Photoshop or I want to do this in HubSpot. I want a report of all my customers last quarter from Europe that spent more than the same. $5,000, whatever it happens to be. You have to take that question that you have in your head, your intent, and translate that into a series of clicks and drags and swipes and touches, and you have to have some knowledge of the software that you're using. That's not intuitive at all. No. What generative AI now makes possible for the first time in human history is to compress

that gap. So right now, most software works in what I call, engineers would call an imperative model. You go step by step. It's like I go to this screen and I then type this in and I click that button, I drag this over here and then ultimately I get the thing I'm looking for. That's the imperative model. Step by step, here's what I'm going to need to do. Generative AI makes possible a declarative model. The declarative model says, just tell me what you want.

I want a report of all my customers from Europe that spent more than $5,000 last quarter. And you express that exactly as it's in your head and you just type that in or you say it doesn't really matter. And now the software can produce that outcome because it can take that natural language, translate it, into effectively code. So imagine you have a really smart, super capable developer just sitting at your beck and call. It's like, oh, just write the code for me. I don't know.

There's a 10x developer next to everybody's desk. And then run that code in real time. It's a single use one time. So every prompt that you type in is an on-the-fly app being generated effectively and then run in real time that gets the data you want and gives it back to you. And that's the world we're living in now. That's the thing I'm kind of personally very excited about and working on myself.

You're writing code yourself, I hear. I am. Every night until 2 a.m. Every night. I'm so excited. Wow. The most excited I've been about anything, work-related.

You know, it's so interesting. I am doing a secret project at inside.com. I won't talk about it, but it's my newsletter business. I'll talk to you about it offline and get your thoughts. And I am super engaged.

I'm like hanging out with five or six developers and I'm doing crazy prompt engineering and I'm like, hmm, how is the news business going to change? I'm like, I have some ideas. You start thinking about agents, you start thinking about journalists and fact checkers and all this stuff.

Like, you start to think, huh, maybe AI on news could do some good in the world. And, huh, let me see how I can make people even faster and better at all of that. And the thing that I find it's super exciting, I'm sure you do as well, is internally, I've asked people, before we write a job wreck, I want to see how much of the job could be done

with software specifically AI. And then let's look at everybody's job in the company. And if everybody gets 30% better a year, about 30%. That means every two years, you've doubled your set, right? Because the rule is 72, if you're compounding interest. Sure. That, to me, is going to lead to an efficiency in organizations.

Like you mentioned earlier, like cloud computing edit, you don't have to rack and stack or we work, you don't have to get a huge lease and put a letter of credit down. You don't have to write the Twilio API if you want to do stuff. You don't have to write a storage. You don't have to put up storage if you use S3 or whatever. It's kind of really interesting to me, the efficiency that could be coming from organizations that embrace this. Are you seeing something similar?

I think that should make us optimistic. And this is, so imagine we woke up tomorrow, and this is actually true. And all the developers at HubSpot started using GitHub co-pilot and were, let's say, 25% more productive. Does that mean we're going to hire 25% fewer developers? And the answer is no. If all of a sudden, salespeople became 25% more productive, does that mean HubSpot hires 25% fewer salespeople? The answer is no.

Actually, my inclination to hire developers that are 25% more productive than they are now, I would hire more developers because the opportunity is out there. Same for sales. Same for most things because there's not a finite opportunity that you're dividing up between the humans that are available. It's like, oh, the only reason we have X number of developers is in order for me to get a return on that developer time based on their cost, I'd have to produce why amount of software or make Z number of sales for salespeople.

If I can drive that efficiency up, I think increases our investment in humans that can do those things because those humans are more productive and more efficient. That's my... You would feel more confident hiring the next 10 developers, knowing you're not going to have to sort through them, monitor them to make sure that they actually get enough done or the salespeople. Even somebody who maybe was a little bit of a neophyte or a little bit more green as a salesperson, think they quickly catch up, right?

So I think what the margins are on business is going to be pretty phenomenal. And the number of people it takes to start a company, and therefore the number of long-tale opportunities, like, did we ever think there would be a market for a meditation app? com.com. As people don't know this, my return on com.com, because I own, you know, over 5% of the company, will be greater than my Uber return, even though it's 50 times bigger because I own so much less of Uber. And you start looking at, like, could a meditation app ever be built, not before Web 2.0

in the app store? Now you think, well, what's further down, you know, the long tail, like the pickup, you know, the golf app, the, you know, whatever, paddleboard out. You know, there are so many great ideas there that could become a $10 million or $25 million business that we would never pursue as venture capitalist or investors. But, you know, if it only takes five people to get it there, that's probably worth doing. And it will be so, so much easier. And you start thinking about your growth. I mean, you guys have had spectacular, consistent growth since inception.

Listen, you can't make forward-looking statements, but I can't. I think for SaaS businesses that control costs and then deploy this, that's why I'm buying a lot of public at-scale companies stocks, even as I have access to the greatest private companies, but the public companies, I think, are undervalued in some cases because of AI. and the amount they're going to get done with less. Yeah. And there's two starts that I agree with all of that,

which is, you know, SaaS companies will become more efficient and I think that'll be great. But the other thing that AI opens up is allowing software companies to do things that weren't really possible before. Or it's not a matter of efficiency or making something 25 or 50% more productive,

more efficient. It's like, one of the things, and we're thinking about this, you know, every day now, like, okay, well, as a CRM platform company, what can we now make available to customers that two years ago just couldn't be done. Like at any price, this was not possible. It opened up new opportunity for new products, new services.

So I think I'm very bullish on the opportunity, especially for entrepreneurs. This is a great time. Learn about AI, figure out where the gaps are, find some target market. Everyone, just like the internet was back in the day, it left no business untouched, right? Like now, it's like, okay,

AI will leave no industry, no business untouched. And there's a ocean of opportunity out there. It's an exciting time. Yeah, it's, it's, it's so clear to me that you're 100% correct on this. And I just look at where developers and entrepreneurs start moving their energy. And I think there's like pre-2020, or pre, let's say chat GPT, we'll give them credit at Open Eye.

Pre-chat GPT, 3.5 enabled stuff and post. I won't give the exact startup idea here, but I got somebody in the accelerator. And their business is based upon meetings that occur in the world. world. Now, these meetings are, there's a lot of them going on. And they're hours long. And while the videos exist of these meetings and access to them is public, the transcripts and the analysis is not. To put analysts on these tiny little meetings that are occurring would be cost prohibitive. There's no way you would ever do it. And just even the transcribing it. Or I was pitched a couple years ago, somebody said, hey, I can take this week in startups and I can

dub somebody speaking Spanish and have somebody, you know, play the character, you know, of Darmesh and we'll have a Spanish thing. It went in. It was like, it's going to cost a thousand an episode, two thousand an episode. I was like, yeah, not economically viable to spend a million dollars a year on that or whatever. Just got a startup. That's doing it. Yeah.

I was going to cost about 50 bucks an episode to just do a little polishing or whatever, and that'll be five bucks next year. And it's just something like, well, I think they're building this into YouTube. So this conversation on YouTube, you'd be able to, if you were in Japan or, you know, wherever, just change our, change us to speaking in Japanese. And man, is it powerful when you think about that, you know, 100 million people who are in Japan and don't speak English, being able to watch content in real time? Yeah. And then, you know, from the business owner's perspective, from your perspective, it's like now it takes the existing investment you had already made in creating content and now amplifies the value of that content, right?

At marginal cost in the grand scheme of things. like, oh, I've already done all the hard work. I've had the guests on. I've done the thing, done the prep work. Here it is. And now I can make it available to a global audience. And global, not just in the sense of language, right? Because the way these LLMs are headed, you can say, I want it culturally appropriate

for this particular context, right? It's like, okay, when the examples are there, instead of just translating word for word with the language is actually saying, let's come up with local sports team examples. Let's come up with this versus something else, right? Like we can now kind of personalize for an audience of one, which was just not possible economically before, but it's... Well, and you think, like, a lot of times on the podcast, I'll explain what CPI is, right?

Or I'll explain what SAS is. But on this biggest, far, I don't want to explain what SAS is. But if somebody didn't know and you're like, you're at Neophyte, it would literally take a moment to have me and my voice, say SaaS, software as a service. Yeah. That's software that's available for rent per month that you can cancel. All right, listen, Darmesh, amazing to have you back on.

I can't wait to see all the stuff you're building at Hub, spot, I know you're deep in the lab. There's no announcements yet, right? Not yet. But I know you got announcements dropping. You're publicly traded CEO now, so we've got to be careful. But you got to promise me when they drop, you come back on. We got a deal?

All right, that's it. All right, my friend. Have a great summer. Great to see you. What a great hour together. Congratulations on all your success. And I'm just thrilled to have you back on the pod. And I cannot wait.

If you don't use HubSpot, well, you're probably not running a business. certainly not a startup. And just thanks for how gracious you are to startups. A lot of my startups are in the startup program. What's the deal you give them? Because you and I talked about some early days, and I was like, hey,

I don't think this is viable for startups. You're pricing. You're like, oh, I'll fix that. And sure enough you did. I think it's like 90% off for the first year, the first two years.

Just like, I'm not close enough details. Anyway, I appreciate you doing that because all of our founders take advantage of it. Just type in HubSpot Startup program. You'll find it. All right. All right.

All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you.