7 Brutal Questions for a $20B Founder

we were constantly like salesforce is going to crush us tomorrow did you see their announcement weren't bed please so many i feel like got could rude world know i could be what i going to put at all in in like a days i'm excited to be on your show never it's kind of our show brian yeah it's true you consider yourself tired i don't think i'll ever be retired but you're not the ceo of a company no i have a whole bunch of interesting stuff going on are you happier in this phase your life than when you were running a twenty or thirty billion dollar company or how about happier compared to when you are running a ten million dollar company where where's like your levels of happiness bin because you've founded a company that is now has i don't know five six seven thousand employees billions in revenue now you're retired and you're not retired but you're not running a company and you're a little bit of a vc and adviser so tell me about your happiness levels between each one okay i'm gonna give you like a grading system in my head for a number of employees zero like two to ten employees i was like c i didn't really i i i could write cob covid but no one wanted it like i didn't you don't have a lot of value at that face ten to hundred i was like an a i felt like i knew what i was doing i had been in you know scale ups before a hundred to a thousand you know maybe a minus like i kinda felt like i knew what was doing a thousand to ten thousand i didn't enjoy the the secret lives enjoying the passage time i wasn't really enjoying the passage of time if it's a lot of i was just working on a lot of stuff i wasn't that interested in so yeah so it did depended on where i was in the in the history of hubspot and like i i had sort of ceo market fit between ten and a thousand that's like you're you're you're putting a hundred to a thousand in the same category that's kind of astounding to me that doesn't seem like those should be the same category so you enjoyed that whole range equally yeah i work when i my first job at of school i was the first bd at a company called ptc it's cad software company and i joined it was like three million in revenue and when i left it was you know billions in revenue so i sort of saw that journey and i was part of that machine and so you know i took a lot of that and brought it with me into hubspot and i just felt like i knew what i was doing in there and i was working on things i really enjoyed there's a lot of changes between a hundred and a thousand i just sort of remember being quite motivated and happy with my day to day in there very little wary in that phase about what the nominee gov committee of the board thought very little interaction with our compliance and legal folks things like that mostly just working on you know are the employees productive and happy are the customer's productive and happy like really focused on that and i i like that type of work can you go okay so your categories were two to ten ten to a hundred hundred to a thousand and then a thousand to ten thousand what about how hard you are working like in terms of hours you know people talk about nine nine six that was at least that for bolt jar mesh and i we were were pedals to the medal the entire time and if we were working we were thinking about working it's not for the fe of heart and like if you look at my life it's kind of interesting like i'm fifty eight in the years i should have gotten married and had a bunch of kids hyatt had hubspot i'm still single and yeah you're kinda married to your company and you're you're full on like the nine nine six thing it's at least that for the founders and i work with a lot of founders today it's that's a minimum for the founders i would say these days and and you got you guys said something on a tweet that i thought was you said it that i thought was kind of interesting like when you're a founder like ninety percent of the times stuffs broken and you're dealing with problems and things kinda suck i'm angry i'm angry most of the angry mostly of ten percent of the time is like we got this we got it everything's going our way the winds that are back but it's pretty rare and like you live your day looking at your slack and your inbox in your text and it's mostly bad news in there well so tell me once a company gets to a hundred or a thousand employees or ten thousand employees does that a emotion go away same it's the same ratio it's still mostly you should sandwich in in your march did you feel essential threat like my business we have plenty of money and very profitable whatever but for some reason i still feel like an existential threat all the time where it's like if we don't do this well we're going out of business we were constantly like sales force is going to crush us tomorrow did you see their announcement we're dead wait said that so many times yeah we tend to overestimate where our competitors do and underestimate what we do maybe there's a correlation between like how like shitty you think you are and how good of an entrepreneur you make because maybe there's no correlation but there's like a relationship be people who start businesses because i noticed that i have like i personally have very negative self talk where it's like you're shit you're nothing you have to prove them wrong you are horrible you barely grow you can't do this you have to like my and and it wears people out there because i actually think that that's negative that's a pretty poor way to motivate people but it motivates me i'm the same and that people say you know you wanna be very positive and positive and motivate the people i tend to be paranoid i still after all these years have impostor syndrome i'm a little nervous talking to you today believe it or not really why yeah i'm not it's given all the success i've had my confidence doesn't even remotely like eat could bear to it and my not monologue is life he got so much to prove dude don't fuck it up does da match feel the same way yeah i i can't say for sure but i i i think very much so do most other so you run in a circle with some of the best entrepreneurs on earth the most successful entrepreneurs on earth is that the common thread yes almost all i interview all these ceos and i asked them during the interviews you know do you have a posture syndrome and they him and unlock because they don't wanna say they do they do almost all of let me ask you one more question about all this and then i wanna know about what you're like more of the sequoia stuff because i think that's super fascinating knit sometimes i think that with being an entrepreneur the hard part i been thinking about this a and i've talked about it a lot which is the hard part emotionally isn't the risk taking the risk taking is actually not that challenging because in a lot of cases the wrist is not that big and you could like like even if you go big you can kinda land somewhere and be alright the hard part is the uncertainty and like asking yourself am i spending time for the next six or twenty four months on this thing and will it actually make my life better or get me to where i think i want to go that that uncertainty part is quite challenging looking back was dedicating all this time like do you look back at the last twenty years and you're like that was a life well lived or would you have changed anything no i think it was i'd i'll take the trade off it was just a lot of fun i mean there was just a lot of joy and it's the people at hubspot are maze and the customers are made i think partners are amazing so many so many happy times a lot of down days but like the days definitely outweigh it i'm super proud of what we built i'm you know yeah i i i wouldn't trade it the thing i would say about hubspot that it's it's a little bit of what you said but is i think of it as like hubspot was like two steps for one step back two steps were one step back it it looks like oh if you look at the grass like oh that was that was an easy ride it wasn't like we have lots of issues and lots of problems and lots of setbacks along the way and it's a little bit i think what good entrepreneurs do is they just stick with it like there's problems and issues and that step back and they don't fold they just like we're gonna get through it we're gonna rally the troops we're gonna figure out we're gonna learn from that mistakes and go forward almost all the step were self and inflicted alright a few episodes ago i talked about something and i got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper to explain and that's what i'm about to do so i told you guys how i use chat gb as a life coach or a thought partner and what i did was i uploaded all types of amazing information so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that i like issues going on in my personal life and businesses i uploaded so much information and so the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so i worked with hub spot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that i used to make this the information that i had chat ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like i said i use this like ten times a today it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it again ten to twenty times a day alright so check it out the link is below in the description back to the episode what would you have done differently to not make that mistake what are the things we did that worked we had a thing that that we did call the pothole hole report and we live in boston in this like this time of years potholes everywhere and that was the analogy we used at hubspot like we would create these potholes holes and sometimes he kinda bounced through the pothole and heard a little bit sometimes pothole got so big like you drive your whole damn card it and and oftentimes there was a series of decisions or a series of data that we could have avoided the pothole hole so the pothole report was every time we had a pothole we look back and like how how should we have handled this a year ago so that wouldn't have happened what data do we wish we have now give me an example of it we had a pothole in like two thousand eleven one of the things we did at hubspot is we hired really good support people and our secret sauce and hiring a support is would walk into an apple store would buy an iphone it went hired the kid who sold us the iphone and they wouldn't let me in the apple store cambridge marketing there so many people and so and the value prop was great it's like you make a little bit more money but how'd you like to sit down at work it's a really good value prop how many support people did you have we must have had the four thirty forty and then what we would do is we use that support group to promote into cs into sales into products so we fed the whole company really these apple store people that were terrific and in this one particular period of time over like a few months like we promoted a bunch of people out congratulate the promoted them and then we were a little behind on hiring and the customer numbers are way up and so we pride ourselves on like answering the call within thirty seconds and then staying on as long as they wanted and you know our wait time went to like twenty minutes and customers are like what the hell is going on that was a very sol predictable problem that you know if you had if you just looked this one chart we won't make them yeah we'd never make that mistake again so so many things like that along the way and as you grow if you're going fast everything breaks you know people break processes these breaks systems break like everything's just breaking breaking breaking with what i've noticed particularly talking to people on m is that it really takes like eight or nine years to see something become a real thing yeah it takes a lot longer than people think i think hub but if i remember correctly i think you guys were at twenty million dollars in revenue by year six which is like pretty huge i think that what we're seeing right now about software companies growing faster i don't think a lot of those guys are gonna last i think that there is a correlation between how fast something grows and potentially how fast and die but i do think that in order to build something that's a second mountain business and so i referred to second mountain business as something that's beyond just making your initial like financial security number that really does take decades do you think i'm wrong there i don't know i i spent a lot of time these companies are go zero to twenty and six months no i've been shocked our shocked perhaps these companies are growing and there's a lot of them and some of them are going to flame out and some are going yet disrupted by the model companies but some aren't like some of them are like pretty legit in selling to non tech companies in building real businesses so like if i look back like assuming we're in a bubble today i look back to the bum in ninety nine that i lived three hundred years ago it was a little bit of the same man the thing that's different is the sharp back then they were only selling to each other and when the kinda of house the cards sell it kinda of fell on everybody and they really have much growth too much revenue it's it that's what different month today like and i think the difference is the products are different like you think about saas or you think about mobile like saas kinda started like you know salesforce starting in two thousand nine hubspot you know whatever to you know for in a ten year period a whole bunch of companies have started not much happened after that ten year period and not much came out that was like oh my god that is amazing the customers were blown away that they could grow that fast the platforms are sort of set same thing with mobile it all happened within like a couple of years i kinda think the same with ai i think most of the big ai companies were already founded it and it's gonna settle in relatively quickly in the next year or two and i the thing i think it'll be different too is like out of the last one amazon came out google came out ebay came out salesforce came out they're like four legit lasting great companies that came out i think there'll be a lot more in this time this this bum will pop but i think a lot more companies looking about the other side sequoia is the best of the best you guys see everything and you see the best companies what are the trends that you're seeing right now amongst the companies that are rocket ships but also you thinking they're gonna be durable are there any trends that you're noticing amongst the entrepreneurs that sets them apart versus previous generations okay i i came up with like a rubric first so i i see a lot of pitch so many pitches and i'm trying to you know what's my unfair advantage and my unfair advantage is like i spend a lot of time with ceo thinking about ceo seeing about job and i've ben i've done that so i thought about like what is like a rubric i can come up with and i came up with a thing i call flock f is is is that when the fatter pitch is you get the sense their first principled thinking or they're just derivative in thinking ale is are they lovable like in the question i ask myself is if i were twenty seven graduating from sloan would i walk over broken glass to work for this ceo which i think it's a pretty good question were you lovable i don't know you tell me you work for me when i talk to people who used to work for you they describe you i think it's material where they're like yeah you could be like really happy but i but i only know you as a nice like a we only have cordial relation career cordial relationship they would say when he was angry he would get really really angry very true i was up and down and it reflected my mood my mood was up and down and i had a hard time kind of hiding it and i had i had great passion that passion really showed up in an aggressive way and i was definitely like der was the teddy bear i was sort of the the back cop a little bit like i was definitely tougher than da and i think that yin yang kinda work for us but lovable one and by the way these these criteria i don't match a hundred percent to all of them oh is obsessed like i like founders who have been thinking about the damn problem for a long time and then they finally start the company and they are just obsessive compulsive and i like to see a founder that was obsessed with something earlier in their life maybe it was they're the world's best you know northeast new england you know ping pong player whatever it would be something where they had to go very very deep down a rabbit hole you very aid something i think that's good quality i like the chip on the shoulder i had a bit of a chip on my shoulder i think our mesh did too and i like founders who have shipped like if it's an baby kinda skeptical whether they're gonna stick through the ups and downs and then are they deeply knowledgeable do they have do they have you know founder market fit do they know everything about this industry or they kind of a tourist in the industry so that i call it flock and if you have all of those money talent partners customers will kind of flock to you and nobody's a ten out of ten on all of them but that's kind of my rubric i use today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com if you were young and getting after it at a new company your twenty you're this twenty six year old kid with flock what what interest you right now based off everything you're seeing i i one of the things i'm seeing in sequoia is like you know the hardware companies are kinda set the model companies are kinda set all that infrastructure layer set if the app level is really starting is now starting to really fly you know precursor is the fairly obvious one but like harvey and legal ro for investment banking like every kind of job now has an app company that's doing pretty well and so i think that's the area i would be interested in i'm a common app guy i don't really like infrastructure software that much of that exciting but i like software that people use and can change your lives improve organizations i think that's where i would live i like this company ro which is like think cha bt but for an investment banker and is doing very well i like harvey which is like lawyers i like profound which is it's ae like instead of seo how do you get found in these sort engines i like delphi i built a clone on delphi and i think people are gonna have clones more and more clones like what i really want as the as a consumer it's not here yet and i i'm waiting for it it's like i built this clone people can talk to my clone all they want it's pretty good it's getting better every day i want that i wanna train that clone not just on what's out there in the internet with me but train on my email and my slack and like all my calls and i wanted to train to really know a lot about me and instead of sending a listener to a meeting i send my clone to a meeting that listens and you know the first six months it just listens but then people can start to ask my clone a question here brian what do you think about this in prime will answer and then eventually it's just like i don't need to get that meeting i'm gonna send my clone to that meeting and you know i have a lot of meetings every week i don't really have time for more meetings it's just like send the clone out i think that's the future of office working and for some reason i don't see anyone really doing that i want the opposite of that i don't wanna clone to me i want the better version of me to do all the work or like you know i don't want another mediocre me i want the best version of me to be to be answering all the emails i asked my clone questions and it answers them much better than i would because it's sitting on top of chat it's sitting on top of all kinds of knowledge it's very very smart already it as the models underneath get much better and as more content goes in there it's gonna be very very smart of course you're still gonna have your c copilot like i think of chat and now i use gemini mostly as like even better a coworker than a lot of my coworkers so you definitely have that but i think knowledge work is going to change and i think my vision of the future i don't know if it's five years i think something like that happens can you tell me how you're using gemini right now on a daily basis the the weird thing is out i've been using chat bt for so long it really knows me it knows everything about me all my health stuff like all the projects working on like everything and so it's tricky for me because i trained it so much but man gemini is so much better than i'm starting to use gemini kind of ur irritating that i'm gonna have to train it on myself but that thing i use that i really like are the projects functionality so for example on my pod have all these different guests and you know i have the ceo of goldman sachs coming on like give me a bio the ceo o of goldman sachs listen to all my podcasts i've done already create me a list of twenty good questions or topics to ask kin and then kinda go back and forth on i do that for every pod is super super super useful use case i i went to function health and i got all my blood work i got up seoul like like they took like gallons of blood out of me but i know everything about it uploaded all that collaborated on that stuff like that it's incredibly valuable these days i just i just i think you know i just come out of the new book my marketing lesson than a grateful day we created a very very cool set of videos around it that our ai generated they're super super cool that i like a lot so i've been busy with it and it's given me a massive productivity boost i feel like there's two of me already i find it to be very helpful as like a like a daily coach and a therapist of like how should i react or how should why do i feel this way about this particular particular situation when it comes to creative stuff i find it to be a helper but it's it it's not even close to being hands off but think about it like two years ago it was fifty percent and the year ago it was sixty five and now it's eighty like keep drawing that curve like tears your now gonna be really much much better than this today yeah and it makes me think that i'm not gonna be investing in an entrepreneur anymore i'm gonna be investing in a machine that it can just do all this stuff like i do think i think sam alt said he's like if open ai isn't the first company that has an ai as the ceo then i'd be pretty upset and i do think that that's sort of gonna happen i think that the haves and the haves not have not in terms of money is gonna like separate further and i asked da mash when he came on because da you know is heavily involved with or he's an ambassador of of open ai and is a deep on this stuff i was like how is this gonna turn out and he was like it's probably not gonna be as good or bad as you think and i was like okay that makes me feel better but i don't know if i i don't know if i believe his assessment yet even though he's probably the person i know best to has the best judgment on this topic i kinda think the way it plays out is people who are very high agency motivated it unleashes their creativity and potential people who aren't might be unemployed are you happy that you've made it already no i think if i were twenty six at an entrepreneur i'd make it again yeah this isn't a very good time to be an entrepreneur and like an outstanding me because it's like never been a better time never been a better time the history of of homo sapiens to start a company might be yeah i think i agreed dude some of these young kids so seem crazy like i don't remember when i was in san francisco back in twelve it was it was a much calmer environment than what it seems like now do you think that's an accurate assessment yes everyone's here is on fire i think that's gonna make a lot of unhappy people i think if i think it's a bubble and every time there's a bubble like taurus entrepreneurs come in they're all coming into san francisco which kind bum me out and and it kinda makes sense because google's is there and open eyes here and they fro that downtown but man are people moving in and there's a lot of tourists in there similar it happened in two thousand one similar what happened in the late nineties and i think it's peak bubble i don't know why it pops it pops at some point a lot of those tourists just get washed out so my my advice entrepreneurs for is like if it's a bubble what you what should you do i'm not sure maximize evaluations the i call but let's say you wanna do that because you like the headline i almost every entrepreneur even starting series a taking money off the table they're selling some of their own shares which is way earlier than you app and and selling a lot what's the definition of a lot you know what typical if the series b companies is ripping they're taking off five ten million bucks and then i would just raise more like if you look at two thousand one lots of good companies raise and then it crashed in like not many companies made it out of that value of debt i think you should raise a lot so you can kinda make it through like hey i was gonna go like this and then get down and keep going another profile i entrepreneur see a lot of yeah that i hadn't seen before i call them like a five tool ceo where they think code they have tastes they can sell they can fund they can recruit they're like the kind of perfect entrepreneur so like brett taylor is one of those there's a bunch of them out there the ro ceo i just mentioned the delphi ceo that's kind of a new breed we never saw like before you saw a lot of der me like the the introvert like being yin and the yang now you're seeing i see a lot more of these like superhero showing up i don't understand like i've met some of these guys and this guy brett taylor in particular i don't know him but i would love to have him on like when i when i hear someone like him talk i just think how an earth can one person be so smart and so good at so many different things i totally agree i totally agree with you well whatever i like whenever i see shaq and like you know like a five ten late or a five four lady i'm like how are these how are these both humans yeah but that's what i feel about what i see what i hear brett taylor talking me i'm like how are we like made up of mostly the same stuff yeah and there's a bunch of the early stage ceos are like that they're charismatic they can sell they can recruit they pitch man they can code and they have tastes like it's an impressive new breed that's showing up i've i just got done reading this like sales book on how to run a sales team and the intro was talking about how it was your hubspot first first head head of sales mark yeah and then i read another one and it was like i was hubspot first seo person and there's like four more like that and it seems like your first fifty employees are now like pretty big baller doing their own thing or are experts and people look up to them what do you think made you so good at recruiting how did you do it i bake in the early we were very first principled so we were like marketing is totally broken outbound dead no one's listening to any of these ads or any these cold calls or any emails you have to inbound and so we had a contra view most people that were wrong but enough people thought were right and we had a mission the mission was to apply that idea to helping small businesses grow and lots of people grew up in a small business family and wanna help small businesses to grow it's a mission you can kinda get behind helping millions of small businesses grow better i think that helped early we we just sucked out of mit like we were two slow that started the company so like our first ten employees a of the first ten where classmates meets ours we sucked over that help mark bare was our ta actually the guy who wrote that book you were talking about and then we worked on culture we had a unique culture we thought of our our product is like you gotta make a unique product relative to comp you gotta make a quality product if you do that it pulls customers in our culture like you need to make a unique culture and you need to make a high quality culture and if you do that you pull and retain employees so we were you know we were kind of first principles all on a along a few different lenses we also kinda zig where the world was zag the world said you gotta go to enterprise you know that's where all the money is we said know we're gonna do smb and we're gonna rethink this we're gonna make the model work in smb even though everyone thinks were wrong we're and then we said we're gonna go after salesforce dot com when salesforce dot com was like una unacceptable everyone was like get crazy they'll never beat them we weren't after them so the bunch of points in hubspot histories where we kinda zig when everyone else you know p tl is a aligned like you need to be right about something and that a lot of people disagree with you need to be right about something that everyone thinks are wrong about and we had a couple of those not a lot but we had a couple important ones did jim cave at the consensus no we had we had a real conviction on the smb thing it cost us like we we would raise we would go raise our rounds i we go up down in san hill we had all knows like we had we never the only easier rounds is the ipo round nobody liked the thesis nobody bought the and smb thesis no one else had done other than intuit and we were we were convicted us i think part of the reason we were convicted is both of us had spent our whole lives previously selling to enterprise cios and it's kind of soul crushing work selling to enterprise c cios and was like let's do something a little bit more fulfilling something they can get us energized in the morning helping these small businesses grow better the salesforce thing we got a lot of pushback on that but we didn't feel like we had a choice you know salesforce wins our really good ally and our pitch was you know salesforce dot com was s for sales and hubspot was for marketing for a long time that worked and then salesforce dot com one day woke up that says we wanna be the salesforce dot com marketing and so we were like either we need to pivot and kinda come after them or eventually just gonna get crushed and pushed out and sold private equity i'm trying to become a better ceo and i know that you guide a lot of ceos at sequoia what did you do at hubspot that you think as a ceo that you think was wrong and you advise people to avoid or attributes to change of of themselves one of the things that i think really work that's actually underrated is paul graham founder mode article and i remember reading that article in thinking that was what i did early those were my instincts and i kinda got talked out of a lot of it over time and the guy who i think has it right is is like you know back of my day it was jack welch and i was j well and jensen does this got sixty direct reports he's tough like i was and he gives public and private feedback he doesn't get private feedback all the all the feedback positive negatives and and and then he does a new one on was and like i did all of that early in hubspot and sorta to get talked out of them like no no brian mature ceo does a one on one with each manager every week no no no brian you need a staff meeting with just your direct reports you should only have nine direct reports no no brian you should you should praise publicly and criticized privately so as time went on i got worn down on that stuff and then i watch what jen is doing today and i read the founder remote stuff and i'm like i should have stuck with my convictions on some of that stuff i regret kind of i kinda managed i got more manager modi as time went on i got that of the manager mode stuff what do you think it actually works i mean we did we find we got our we got our shit together on planning like we were very shoot from the hip for many many years and we got a really good planning process down which is very manager modi we did bring in some execs from the outside that were very very good and really leveled us we probably did too much of that and i think a mistake a lot of founders make is they go and hire that whatever cmo from microsoft whatever and they're really proud of it they do a press release and we're excited we have this amazing cmo but the cmo gets in the company are like where's my secretary where's my coffee wears the reports whereas all my stuff it's in bit wasp and sea in this startup up and they're miserable and their colleagues are miserable so i see that as a big failure condition particularly higher aren't people for much much bigger comes is i think people underestimate how good their homegrown talent is and it's like the red sox like i'm a big red sox guy guy the red sox dramatically over value players and other teams relative to their own talent i think every baseball and sports team does this and every ceo does this so there's this i i i i intimately and deeply remember this one phase when we were selling to you guys basically it was you know my company was only like thirty people so it was basically just me doing the deal i didn't have like an hr team or anything like that and the and hubspot had like five or six employees of which one of them is now like on the board of asana so these big shots and then you guys had like seven or eight like lawyers who are probably making too grand an hour and then you had seven or eight k g accountants and they were asking me all these questions and they asked two questions that i like it was laughable the first question they were like asking for like invoices or no what they asking you for they're asking if i they're like what's this fifty dollar charge and i was like i had some guy on five do like a logo or something and they're like did he sign an nda i'm like dude his name was like big baller boy sixty nine on five like i i didn't get him i'm sorry i just i i don't know and then the second thing they were like what's your like five year plan like do you have like projections i'm like do you guys my companies like four years old you know like the projections like we do it quarterly by quarterly but like shit changes and they were pretty cool where they were like okay we understand like you know they were treating this like you know like thirty million dollar deal like it was a three three billion dollar deal which is understandable it was a weird deal though like we bought a content company and it's kind of a weird acquisition we did and i think when came up everyone was like what are we doing here and they were trying to like you know make sure that they doing their diligence and stuff but i remember thinking like i don't plan that far out i'm so sorry like i don't even know what the company's gonna exist in two years let alone like what the financials they're going to be and that was like pretty funny and it like it rattled the because the people i was talking to were just hires like they had never like founded a company and then like i remember it it like kinda of rattled them that i didn't plan and i was like how do you guys understand that and there is this of like a huge distinction between me just being still in entrepreneur mode and them being in like i'm only used to this a little bit more corporate setting and i thought that was funny i think people get too corporate too early i think startups have nothing to lose nothing this is literally no assets no revenue nothing to lose and as they get bigger they are more to lose and the lawyers get more involved because they wanna you know cross the t's and dot eyes i think startups they grow up too fast the lawyers get too much power too fast and i think people think okay we hit a billion in mark cap we have a lot to lose where i think the mice it should be like how do we get to a hundred billion and how do we how do we continue that risk seeking appetite the other thing that gets messed up in these scale ups most companies break at one fifty hundred and fifty employees and that dunbar mars number in all kinds of shit goes wrong there the director layer shows up so i was like one more layer between the ceo and the customer and that kinda messes this stuff up the people joining are a little more mercenary and a little less missionary who changes things quite a bit your whole value prop you're giving to an employee you're attracting someone who's sort of risk of first at one fifty versus fifteen someone who's really risk seeking and that just bleeds into the whole company and the certain points it's like only the founders or the people who are risk seeking and that that protect what we have versus go get something new is interesting and what it's happening in silicon valley that i think interesting is more in the ceo of rip doing this very aggressively more and more ceos are hiring you know failed founders like or doing very cheap hires and kinda seeing their whole company with founders like rip got over a hundred ex founders on their team and i think that's good becky that keeps you like focused on the long haul in res seeking you gotta keep the risk seeking up for long long period of time this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but you're still a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you away because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find the biggest risk is not failing you have a company and it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew in business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works it can change your life the change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com you're so fascinating to me because you've one of the very few people on earth who's built the company to be worth tens of billions of dollars and yet you're this grateful dead love and hippie and you're telling people don't grow up too fast don't be too corporate but you're you're you're you're an onion man there's layers that's why i i i think it's if i i think you're fascinating let's talk about let let's let's talk about jerry e garcia here for a second he's like the not the first but what are the first in the in the very classic silicon valley entrepreneur the come do you know where the company was founded yeah i well in the the house across the street from ben jerry's and hit ash right was i was like it was founded in palo alto oh interesting it like right down the street from stanford and the first concert was in a pizza place raid in palo alto and so it's like a he's a classic silicon valley founder like first principles completely first principal everything he didn't care what anyone thought he was like this is the way we're going to go where did he say to go for example at the time rock and roll was new and there were lots on rock and roll bands at the time and and there were jazz bands there were country bands when he built his team his team was very spiky very silicon valley spiky and his his base player was actually a an avant guard trumpet player that learned the base his keyboard player was actually a blues harmonic guy that was the blues dj in town his main singer was a country recruiter and his drummer was like a drum major rhett so he brought together this very spiky team and instead of creating rock and roll he created a whole new genre called jam band and loud fish and so many other bands copied them and so hops hubspot did the same thing yet we said this outbound thing is dead we're gonna create the genre called inbound marketing so very first principled the way he thought the other thing he did that was super clever beyond the music was his marketing so if you go to go to a rolling stones concert let's say in nineteen eighty you bring in all your equipment to the concert big camera you microphone phone whatever you go walk in the concert this get out of here with all your equipment this is our ip this is rolling stones zone get out the grateful dead if an idiot like me showed his camera and all recording quiz boom mike brian come on it so right here up in the front we've got a deeper section for you and so people like me would go to boston hartford new york philly dc and record all the concerts we get back home we have the tape to tape thing and the best concert would make fifty copies of and then with trade we weren't allowed to sell the tapes that was part of the calls where you trade the best tapes with all your friends so you pick up pick up their best stuff and my best stuff i told you i used to share an office with ne dot net the marketplace where they would trade the tapes right and then you'd be at a you'd be at a like a party on campus and somebody put your boot you put your boot on and the person makes be like why everyone dancing this crazy chips what is this weird g music gifts grateful dead they're were coming they're were coming on town come on tour with us and so they're grateful they were the first silicon valley viral inbound marketers so he's very first principle about his music and his market there's a lot more stuff about his marketing and i think it's very interesting yeah i mean i've been my parents were dead heads and they traveled with them like you know show a show i'm i'm i'm just google them while you're talking how old you said your fifty eight yep i was i'm a very young dead head dude this guy looks like thirty years older than you but he died when he was only fifty two or fifty three oh garcia y yep he was he did not take he's not like the silicon of valley people like brian johnson peter andrew hue in fan he he his his major food groups were twenties twinkies and twinkies yeah he looks like he parties what's the name of the book called marketing lessons from the grateful dead buy it in trip you gotta buy that for your parents did you get to meet them when you're right it i met bob weir yes and we we told i told bob we like here's what we're doing he's was like i was wondering if anyone would right about that that's pretty cool he was like that was his his was reaction is if you google i think if you google your name and grateful dead like one the first thing is it comes up is that you bought you know his guitar at an auction yep i have j i've considered myself the steward of his guitar is very unique guitar i played it all through the seventies and y'all own it and let it out like john mayer played like everybody and their brothers anyone who wants to borrow it we can borrow it but yeah i i i enjoy being the steward of of a little piece of jericho i garcia it i love talking to you because i just think that like i think that like the world needs more people who have this perfect balance of being like a shark and hard hitting but also like polite and kind i think that there's like a there's like kinda rare and i aspire to be like that and i think that when i think of like all the people who i you know admire you're it's kinda like me and brian h kinda like where i wanna go but in a handful of years so i i love talking to you i hope we can do it in in person next time appreciate you and my friend i i wanna be like you and i grow up so alright god bless thank you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put it all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright everyone if you're listening to m you probably want to make more money well i wanna tell you about a podcast you might wanna check out it's called the sales evangelist and it's hosted by donald kelly each week donald interviews the world's best sales experts who share their strategies to succeed in sales they share actionable insights and stories that will encourage challenge and motivate you to hustle your way to the top if you're someone looking to raise your income level check out the sales evangelist you can find it wherever you get your podcasts