Frameworks to Become a Billionaire with HubSpot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah | My First Million #197

Time, Money, and a Blockchain LinkedIn - July 7, 2021 (over 3 years ago) • 01:20:59

This episode of My First Million features Sam and Shaan interviewing Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. Dharmesh shares his insights on wealth, entrepreneurship, and idea generation, offering a unique perspective shaped by his journey with HubSpot and other ventures. He also provides actionable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders.

  • Dharmesh's Background and HubSpot Acquisition of The Hustle: Sam introduces Dharmesh and recaps his career, including co-founding HubSpot, angel investing in companies like Coinbase and Dropbox, and owning numerous domain names. Dharmesh explains his focus on HubSpot and how it connects to his other activities. He discusses the acquisition of The Hustle, highlighting the strategic rationale behind the deal and the cultural differences between the two companies.

  • Wealth and Time Management: Sam, Shaan, and Dharmesh discuss wealth and its impact on life. Dharmesh emphasizes the freedom that wealth provides and shares his plan to donate a significant portion of his wealth. He also discusses the relationship between time and money, highlighting the importance of valuing one's time and delegating tasks that can be done by others for less than one's hourly rate.

  • The Blockchain-Powered Professional Network Idea: Dharmesh proposes a new type of LinkedIn built on the blockchain, which incorporates a cryptocurrency element and a weighted professional graph similar to Google's PageRank. This network would allow users to buy and sell attention, providing a more efficient way to connect professionals and assess their value within the network. Dharmesh even offers to fund Shaan $5 million to pursue this idea.

  • Natural Language Processing in B2B Software: Dharmesh expresses excitement about the potential of natural language processing to revolutionize B2B software. He envisions software that understands user intent expressed in natural language, eliminating the need for complex interfaces and making software truly intuitive. He cites his own project, GrowthBot, as an example of this concept and encourages VCs to invest in this area.

  • Website Graders and Diagnostic Tools: Sam and Dharmesh discuss their shared interest in website graders and diagnostic tools. Dharmesh explains how he created Website Grader as an internal tool for HubSpot, which unexpectedly became a valuable lead generation tool. He emphasizes the power of diagnostic tools in any industry and offers advice on using relative scores for greater impact.

  • Idea Assessment Framework: Dharmesh shares his framework for evaluating ideas, which includes assessing profit potential, passion, and probability of success. He cautions against discarding ideas solely based on low probability, emphasizing the importance of considering expected value. He also warns about the danger of good ideas masquerading as great ones and encourages entrepreneurs to start with a good idea and iterate towards greatness.

  • HubSpot's Funding and Growth: Sam and Shaan ask Dharmesh about HubSpot's funding and growth. Dharmesh explains their decision to seek venture capital and their focus on achieving a spectacular outcome. He discusses his unique role within HubSpot, having no direct reports and focusing on a few key areas at a time.

  • Podcast Feedback and Future Plans: Shaan asks Dharmesh for feedback on the podcast. Dharmesh suggests improving the headlines of podcast episodes to increase click-through rates. He also critiques the podcast's name and branding, recommending exploring alternative names to better reflect the show's content and reach a wider audience. Dharmesh suggests Naval Ravikant and Drew Houston as potential future podcast guests.

Transcript:

Start TimeSpeakerText
Dharmesh Shah
Here's what I'm saying: I even have a 7-figure domain name picked out for you. I will write the $5,000,000 check for you to go do it as far as a seed round, or up to $5,000,000 if you want to let other people in. That's amazing!
Shaan Puri
this just got spicy okay
Sam Parr
oh my god what's the doe date did you have
Dharmesh Shah
I am I am dead serious
Sam Parr
Alright, we just got done, like, 30 seconds ago, talking to the guy who we're going to introduce you to now. That was amazing! He's a... that guy, Darmesh, is amazing.
Shaan Puri
he's very cool
Sam Parr
so we have dharmesh I don't even know his what is dharmesh's last name dharmesh shah
Shaan Puri
I think shah
Sam Parr
I just know him as dharmesh he's the cofounder of
Shaan Puri
He's like Beyoncé, you know? They just go with the one name at a certain point. Ronaldo, Beyoncé, Dharmesh... that's it.
Sam Parr
So, Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. He's the largest shareholder. I mean, we got pretty into it right away. We're like, "Just tell us, what's it like to be a billionaire?" It's like...
Shaan Puri
so I just googled your net worth and it appears you're worth $1,000,000,000
Sam Parr
yeah so we
Shaan Puri
have how does that feel and he's like
Sam Parr
no I told him I was gonna talk to him about that so we talked to him about just like wealth which was
Shaan Puri
Let's rattle off some of the dope things he's done. So, he started HubSpot. HubSpot's like a $25 billion company or something like that. But he's done some other cool things as an early investor in...
Sam Parr
coinbase dropbox and loads of different stuff
Shaan Puri
Right, and then also he's just kind of like us. He's got that *entrepreneurial itch*. So we talk a little bit about how he's got like 20 domain names. Some domain names that are worth, you know, millions of dollars, and others that are just simple ideas. Everybody has an idea.
Sam Parr
by the way hundreds of domain names
Shaan Puri
Right, but he's got ideas loaded into them. Like, "Here's what you might do with this idea," and then, "Here's a good domain name for it." So I think he's... you know, he's sort of like one of our people in that sense. He's an idea person, he's a frameworks person. So he shared some frameworks, he shared a bunch of ideas. Two really big ideas, in my opinion.
Sam Parr
On air, he goes, "Sean, if you want to start this, I'll fund you right now for $5,000,000." Yeah.
Dharmesh Shah
he made
Shaan Puri
[They] made me an offer I pretty much couldn't refuse. I just had to sort of... squeeze my thighs and sit still here. So, you know, I thought the actual ideas were really great. I think people are going to like that. We talked a little bit about wealth, we talked a little bit about the early days, you know, HubSpot and the Hustle acquisition, and then we talked a bunch about ideas.
Sam Parr
And then we... Some of those ideas are about like a new different type of LinkedIn or remote community. We talked about... Oh, he talked about his framework for evaluating if an idea is good or not, if he should pursue it. That was actually incredibly educational. It was awesome, dude. It was great. So we'll get to the episode. Can you guys do me a favor though? Click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify. That would mean a lot. Do we have to tell them anything else?
Shaan Puri
Well, there's a thing going around where if you just post on your social networks and you're just like: > "Hey, you know, PSA to whoever needs this: This podcast makes my commutes amazing. This is the best business podcast, hands down." You know, good karma comes to you in your next life. So that's just something... if you're interested in having a good next life, I would just do that.
Sam Parr
Yeah, and I'll reshare that for sure. I mean, because it impacts my ego. I hit... I share all compliments, so go ahead and...
Dharmesh Shah
do that
Sam Parr
make sure you share the itunes or spotify link with it thank you very much
Shaan Puri
the thing about me I like compliments alright yeah alright enjoy this episode
Sam Parr
I don't remember what I was going to say, but right before you came on, I was asking Darmesh what he listens to. He says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days. Amazing!
Shaan Puri
Has that changed you? You've probably become a worse person. You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days, there's gonna be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets... like corrupted slightly.
Dharmesh Shah
You know, I think that's true. That's an astute observation. We just have... I won't say completely divergent paths. I'm just a... yep, it's been good though. I'm a believer in... like this is kind of orthogonal. It's like, "Oh, this is not stuff I'm looking at." Retail businesses or like you guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think that kind of thing builds a different muscle group, and I think it's been useful for me. I'll put it to you that way. I think we're not kind of separated by these directions. We have things that, you know, we very much likely have in common. But there are things that I'm just... and it'll come out in the pod. So, I'm a weird dude.
Sam Parr
We're on now, so okay. Alright, this is a pod, but I have a feeling this might go a little long, and I'm okay with that. Sean, do what you want. I like in my world... I was just hanging out with Heath and Shaw yesterday, and your name came up. We were just talking to Nathan Barry the other day, and your name came up, Sean. I am in this text group where people talk about BitCloud, and your name comes up everywhere. You're like a little spider web; you have your hands in all these little things. I think part of it is because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. So, this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO?
Dharmesh Shah
yes cto
Sam Parr
Do you... are you active? Like, are you working really hard at HubSpot? How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff?
Dharmesh Shah
So the answer is yes, HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Anything else that you see me doing, there's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot. That's the number one thing, right? So yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that I spend pretty much all of my non-family time, non-personal time on. So it's my... [primary focus]
Shaan Puri
And I just want to describe for people who are not watching... so you should go to the YouTube channel, it's youtube.com/hustlecon (I think) and you'll see the videos. But here's what I see: Darnash is sitting there. He's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard, to his right. He's got a piece of art behind him - I think it's Steve Jobs, or is that Lennon? I can't tell exactly who it is... maybe John Lennon. And you're in this room. So, is this where you work on a day-to-day basis?
Dharmesh Shah
so this is well yes and no so this is
Sam Parr
my you're getting tricked sean you're getting tricked listen
Dharmesh Shah
This is my living room, but it's like I captured a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually would be. But it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up so I can [use it as a background].
Shaan Puri
Oh, okay, that's pretty good. Usually, when you have a green screen, it's like half your head also turns into the background. This one's actually pretty good. Alright, I'm impressed.
Dharmesh Shah
I've done multiple green screens. I'm sort of surrounded by them, so if I need to twist the camera one way or the other, I can still do that.
Shaan Puri
So you're kind of doing the Oasis thing we talked about. You basically have a virtual background, but the virtual background is not just you on a beach or a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's clean and perfect, the way you want it. And you're like, "That's what I want my background to be," regardless of the reality of your current situation.
Dharmesh Shah
I like that! It's really cool. The keyboard itself is actually real; that's not part of the background. So if I go here, you'll see nothing to be pressed. It sounds so it's kind of cool.
Sam Parr
So, let me do a very brief intro and an overview of what we're going to talk about. Damesh sent us a list of ideas, and we're going to get into them, but I need to give some background here so the listeners can fully understand. HubSpot today has a market cap of around $25 billion. You co-founded it 15 years ago. Prior to that, you had another startup that you sold for a significant amount of money. We can talk about that throughout this discussion. I believe you own $1 million worth of domains. You even bought your wife a gift: humanism.com, which we definitely need to talk about—that's pretty funny! You're an angel investor in a lot of different startups, including Coinbase and others. You've got your hands in all these different things. According to WallStreetMind.com, you're worth today $850 million. So, you do a little bit of everything in the world of business, and it's incredibly fascinating. I wanted to talk today because you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm going to ask you questions about that—I don't know...
Dharmesh Shah
that's okay it's fine it's
Sam Parr
we're gonna we're gonna ask you questions
Dharmesh Shah
about doesn't really matter that's the one thing I've learned we can talk about that too
Sam Parr
Well, that's okay if it doesn't matter. We're gonna talk about it. We're also gonna talk about: - Your ideas - Building HubSpot - Why you invest and what you invest in - Do you ever invest in non-startup stuff? We're gonna talk about a lot of stuff. Sean, what do you think?
Shaan Puri
Well, I would have asked him... Okay, so here's my question. My question is actually not about Darnesh, it's actually about Sam. So, I've always wondered this: you acquired The Hustle, and I hope you could be as transparent as you want here. I think Sam will not care. So I would say, DNA-wise, The Hustle's kind of a unique company. Sam's a pretty unique dude that you kind of brought into your company. [He has a] different DNA probably than the vast majority of employees there. Give me kind of like...
Sam Parr
well and you do you're you're part of the deal too sean so you're in the
Shaan Puri
You don't have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis, so... Doing that deal and bringing these guys in, I guess... Are there any interesting observations or entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post that had to do with, you know, Sam and The Hustle? I'm just curious, kind of like, what's your view on that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on.
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, and we haven't... HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them, and pretty much most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think, as you observed, is the DNA of The Hustle is different than HubSpot's. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. So the thing I was worried about is... and I don't think Sam and I have actually ever had a one-on-one chat until now, so...
Shaan Puri
that's okay this is my therapy session for you guys
Dharmesh Shah
like therapy for 2 people shadi
Sam Parr
shadi and I talk a lot on slack he's like we're like buddies on slack
Dharmesh Shah
Talk... but the thing I was worried about is that, you know, so Sam is kind of what I would think of as a Type A personality. He's out there, he's hustling. That's in the name of the company, which is fine, but it's just not most of the makeup of HubSpot. We're not that. We're a... I don't know what the right... I'm going to overly stereotype us, but we're not Type A. We're like a kinder, gentler, humble, just quieter kind of company. So that's the one thing I...
Sam Parr
oh here let me explain it this way
Shaan Puri
so sam would be described as brash I don't think anybody would ever describe hubspot as brash
Sam Parr
Well, today Kieran, the guy I work with (technically my boss), he was like, "You should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role for your growth." I was like, "Well, why?" He goes, "I think you're too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot." It's like... that's an example.
Dharmesh Shah
I think that was good advice, but it's worked out well. There have been like one kind of minor story I can recall. There was a Twitter back and forth that I think Sam had with Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this, Sam, but there was something that was said about VCs or investment or something. Rand's been a good friend. It's like, and I was like, "Oh, okay, well, it's fine." I'm like, "Okay, you know, it's like..." Not like either party was right, wrong, or indifferent, but I know them, you know, at least now a little bit both. But anyway, so it's been fine.
Sam Parr
In my defense, I hope—and even in our podcast's defense—our goal is that we will disagree with people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of disrespect or... no.
Dharmesh Shah
it didn't no
Sam Parr
I'm trying to like hurt your feelings
Dharmesh Shah
no no I will say
Shaan Puri
I do put entertainment first sometimes. So, sometimes I will *poke the bear* for the entertainment value of it when, you know, the kinder, nicer, simpler thing to do would be to do nothing or just back away. So... I do like to have fun either on Twitter or the podcast.
Dharmesh Shah
HubSpot is too much, but the one thing I will say is that, as far as the deal itself, it was one of the better things HubSpot has done. In terms of the strategy behind it, I think it is strong. It gets HubSpot into a space that I believe is where the future of SaaS companies is heading. More and more of them are going to control their own distribution versus renting audiences from other people. There have been other deals done around the same timeline, but I am a believer in companies controlling their destiny in terms of distribution, rather than constantly buying or renting audiences from someone else.
Shaan Puri
see this is where you should just say just drop a one line
Dharmesh Shah
be like
Shaan Puri
You know, we got it at a fantastic price just to drive Sam crazy for the next 7 years. Just leave him constantly questioning himself.
Sam Parr
Look, I think there... yeah, could we have sold for more? Definitely. Maybe, like, that always is a maybe, right? I think that when we sold HubSpot, I felt it was undervalued. I think the day the deal closed, it was... or maybe like, what was the stock in January? Was it worth like $350 or was it even less, $250? I don't remember. Today, it's $600. So, my guess was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. Also, I wanted to create a reputation as someone who was like a fair deal maker. I think people will know that if I built something and sold it, all parties got a good deal. So, okay.
Shaan Puri
alright sounds good we can we can switch off the hubs the hustle acquisition so let's do some ideas
Sam Parr
no wait I wanna talk about one thing really quick can we let's talk about money stuff
Shaan Puri
okay
Sam Parr
Because I told Dharmesh I was going to ask him this, is it weird that I know what your net worth is today? It's like public information.
Dharmesh Shah
It's not weird for me, honestly. I'm generally transparent. I believe in the openness of the web. Since it's a publicly traded company, I don't want my bank accounts and all my accounts published on the web. However, the fact that I'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares—which you can take the number of shares that are on the public record and multiply by the current price to get—probably represents roughly 85 to 90% of my overall net worth. That's where all my money is: in HubSpot shares. I don't find that weird. It's... yeah.
Sam Parr
Has your life changed as this has accumulated and things got different? Or has it basically stayed the same? So, you had another company before this. How much did you sell that for?
Dharmesh Shah
10 or 15 in that range based on how you count it
Sam Parr
And has your life changed since that moment significantly? Because that's a significant number in itself, right?
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, so here’s the thing. I’d like to say, you know, I wasn’t focused on money, or I’m not focused on it now. At the time when I was younger, I was very, very focused on money. I had a very modest upbringing, and I was like, “Okay, well, it wasn’t just about the money and the accumulation of it; it was about the freedom.” You know, ever since I was little, I always wanted to kind of configure the universe to my liking, so to speak, because I have my core values. These are the ways I like to do things. Having to work in a normal, classic job doesn’t give you a whole lot of control over your part of the universe. You don’t get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire. You don’t have a lot of degrees of freedom. So, I’ve been thinking back then. I kind of thought about money, and I’ll say the first $5,000,000 or so had a dramatic impact on my life. That amount buys you an inordinate amount of freedom. You don’t have to work again; you can invest in things. You can do pretty much anything, as long as you’re not out, you know, buying small islands and overtaking countries. I mean, that’s a decent amount of money for folks, right? After that, there are other kinds of... I don’t know exactly what the demarcations are, but you know, more money adds on a marginal basis a little bit more freedom. You can do more things. But, you know, like the kinds of things I do—like I enjoy food and restaurants—there’s only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being. Even if you’d like to find finer things, it’s like, “Okay, well, unless you’re trying to make a statement and spend 100 times the average of whatever X is, it’s kind of hard to spend money really well, even if you have high-end taste.”
Shaan Puri
The most common thing I've heard—I don't know if you would agree or disagree—is that there are these levels. So, it's like first, there's being in debt to no debt. That's like the first jump where, "Oh, freedom! I've got this weight off my shoulders." Then there's kind of like, you know, what I call the "0 to 1,000,000" phase, where it's like, "Oh my God! Mentally, I'm a millionaire." That's kind of just a mentally freeing and interesting concept. That's why we named the podcast what we did. But also, you know, that will afford you a certain type of lifestyle. Then the next jump I've heard is around $10 million. At this point, you sort of realize you don't have to work. At a million, you still have to work, but at $10 million, you don't have to work. You can have a couple of places to live, do whatever you want, and you don't really need to check the prices when you go do things. Then there's sort of like $100 million or more, which is where the ego gets involved. It's like, "Okay, now I'm keeping score against these other folks in the business Olympics." Also, you know, I could do something like buy an island or a piece of an NBA team. I can go do these different things that are kind of like bucket list items. The joy, what I've heard, is that for most people, the joy actually deescalates from the beginning. Getting out of debt is sort of like the most relief and the most joy. Then, as you go up the scale, it starts to diminish step by step. The jump from $10 million to $100 million feels a lot less impactful and changes your joy and mood less than going from $0 to $10 million.
Dharmesh Shah
Yep, just two threads I want to pull on as long as we're talking about money: 1. One thing that's kind of helped me reconcile it in terms of having to be in the net worth now is... you know, the plan my wife and I talked about this: **the plan is to donate 90+% of it**. Right? Like, we have one child, we're not going to spoil them. So it's not like we're trying to build a multi-generational dynasty. That is *not* the goal. 2. And so then, like, you know, if I make a really good return on a startup or something like that, it's like, "Okay, well I'm..." [sentence trails off]
Shaan Puri
discount 90% I think this
Dharmesh Shah
Is for my wife's foundation. That's essentially what it comes down to, right? So, every... most 90% of whatever it is, and I don't think it'll end up being higher because I just don't think we're capable of actually spending the money. But yeah, that makes me feel better. Just kind of taking it back to the early days, one kind of lesson I learned early on—and this was useful in the beginning part of my career—is the relationship between time and money. One thing is that we spend the better part of the first half of our lives converting time into money, right? You're looking for the hours, you're looking for... yeah, you want to get that rate up as high as you can. Then, in the latter half, you're definitely trying to buy time back with the money however best you can, right? So, that varies a little bit as to when that kind of turn happens. The thing that I kind of learned was... I thought about it probably a few years after that. I was making $3.65 in my first job when I came over as an immigrant. I worked all the way through school. It took me seven years to get my four-year degree. I was working full-time the whole way through, and that wasn't a lot of money. As it turns out, I had to do pretty much... nothing was delegatable. But then once I got to the...
Dharmesh Shah
Where I was making 10 20 dollars50 an hour it's like okay well now and like all of my time I can make as much billable as I want to as much as I'm humanly possible willing to work there was someone willing to pay me for that time I was an engineer that's how things work back then it was and and the the pivotal. For me is I I got this it was in my early 20s I got this bump to like $125 an hour working as an engineer and that was an ungodly amount of money I was in birmingham alabama this is the 90s that was like real money right and I was working a lot so I was making a fair amount so then I made the decision that if there's anything I've been doing with my time that could be done by spending less than $125 an hour I'm being an idiot by actually doing it right if I enjoy it that's a different story but if I'm not it's just stupid and so I carried that kind of idea it's like okay so what value would I place on my time right what is occupying my time that I can kind of delegate or even if I'm paying a premium it's like okay I could I could pay $75 an hour just up for someone to pay you know to mow my lawn yeah I hate it but it's still profitable right like you like why would you do that it's like I would do that every day of the week so the one thing that's changed for me so now like I went back and did the math because I knew I was going to be on this podcast and you you folks like numbers so if I let's say I work on average 60 hours a week and I've done that for about 30 years give or take it's my kind of professional career my average hourly rate across the 30 years would be like $10,000 an hour right and now it's back loaded right that is effectively my hourly rate and so now it's like okay well if there's anything and and I would actually pay a premium right now right above that right like so I would not spend my time even an hour on anything that wasn't worth at least that it's like okay well like the future me would buy for 50 a $100,000 if there's some option value on that time anyway the the short message is most people don't value their time enough and don't think about it objectively enough and if like anything else is a resource but it's finite but put a number on it and then ask yourself like what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not worth that
Shaan Puri
Right, and so Naval has this phrase in his "How to Get Rich" podcast - or whatever it's called, "How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky." He says, you know, "Put... I don't know what he calls it... like an outrageously high hourly rate for yourself."
Sam Parr
like an a super ambitious rate
Shaan Puri
Ambitious. One that's way beyond wherever you're at. He's like, "You know, ever since I was young, this is like one of the smart things I did. I just said $5,000 an hour, some really aspirational hourly rate." He's like, "And my friends used to laugh and joke, 'Dude, you bought this blender, you're not even using it. Go return it!'" And he's like, "No, I'm not gonna go return it. I don't enjoy it, and it's gonna get me back $30 for the hour round trip, you know, going and returning this thing at Target. So, like, I will throw it away, I will give it away. What I will not do is I will not give my time back into that because the hourly rate just doesn't make sense."
Dharmesh Shah
I I love that I love that so I've
Shaan Puri
Done a similar thing, and it's kind of funny to pick that hourly mark because it sounds crazy. My mom will get mad at me. She'll come to my house and then she'll see the way I'm living, and she's like, "Oh my God! This bill is late. They're going to charge a $75 fee if you don't do it." I'm like, "I'm not calling them. They can charge me the $75 fee. They could charge it to me 10 times. I'm not going to use this hour." I'll tell her, "Look, literally my hourly rate is X, right? It's X thousand dollars. So, that's my hourly rate. I'm not going to trade that hour to go do this thing I don't enjoy." Her other argument is, "Well, you go watch TV." I'm like, "Well, that I enjoy, so I'm actually spending the money." Yeah, but Sam, I know you're a little bit different. When I went to visit Sam in Austin, he had CVS receipts that he had been saving in his glove compartment of his super fancy car. He's a dichotomy, right? He's got some money, he likes to spend on some things, but he also enjoys being frugal. It's like, how... what a hobby!
Sam Parr
yeah that makes me feel good about myself right do you do that
Shaan Puri
I guess the question I have for you is: do you also have an hourly rate? Do you think about that, or you don't use that framework? Sam, this is for you.
Sam Parr
Oh, for me, yeah, I have that framework. It makes me feel good not to waste stuff. I feel good about myself, and I feel guilty if I waste it. I feel happy when I do that, and it's hard for me to go to bed at night if I waste something or I don't return it. Yeah, I have that hourly rate. I just assume that I'm going to make $3,000,000 a year, so whatever that hourly rate is. I think I'm going to make $3,000,000 a year, and anything that will make less than that, I don't want to do it. But that said, like mowing the lawn, I get joy from that, so I don't put a money thing on anything. But, like, if someone asks, "Hey, will you..." In fact, Sean, someone asked us to fly to London to come speak at some event or something, and I'll forward it to you. But they're like, "Yeah, it's October," and I'm like, "I don't want to go there." I'm like, "How much money would they have to pay me to go and do this?" I'm like, "They have to pay me a lot," like, right?
Shaan Puri
because you also hate flying yeah
Sam Parr
Yeah, exactly. I just don't... it just doesn't make sense. They don't have to pay me $100,000 to do that. I just hate... I just hate it.
Shaan Puri
And so, Damesh, a couple more rich guy questions. We like these because, honestly, you never get to ask these. Even if we were just hanging out personally, I could never ask you this. But for some reason, with the podcast, it's sort of okay for me to just ask you random questions like this.
Sam Parr
And I told him, when he wanted to come on, or I asked him to come on, I said, "I'm going to ask you this stuff." We gave him an easy out. I said, "If you don't want to answer anything, just say you don't want to answer it."
Shaan Puri
And I'm sort of projecting here. You know, I guess I think I put myself in your shoes. What if I had more money than I could ever spend? What would I do? So my question to you is, whether you did it or just considered it, what's an outlandish use of funds that you've either considered or done? For example, some people are like, "Yeah, you know, some people like jets." That's not me; I'm not buying a private jet. But what I really care about is I love socks. So I bought every pair of Jordans. I have this closet in my house just full of these things because I always wanted them when I was a kid. Or if they overspend in some area and they're just happy to have done it. It could be philanthropic too. I think if I had a billion dollars, I would just wire somebody like $1,000,000 two days a year. Yeah, I would literally just wire a random person a million dollars and see how that plays out. I think it would bring me tons of joy and entertainment to do that and see how they react and what happens. What do they do with it? Maybe some kid who's working on something interesting—I would just be like, "Look, check your account; it's there." So, give me something. Is there anything that's sort of nonstandard that you either have done or considered doing?
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, the thing that I do is I like those kind of micro acts of spontaneity. For example, if someone wants to go to an event but can't afford it, I'll say, "I'll be a sponsor." If you can find people that want to do this, they'll do it. I do that relatively regularly. I've taken my average tip amount up to between 50% and 100% everywhere I go. This is partly because I want to make up for all the times when I was younger that my family did not tip well. So, I'm trying to kind of average it out. As long as I can do it without drawing too much attention, because I don't want to be that weirdo guy. It's like, "Okay, no." Sometimes that sends the wrong signals. I want to do it.
Sam Parr
I do that by the way
Dharmesh Shah
modesty it's like it's just
Sam Parr
I typically tip 50% it makes me feel good
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, it's... I've worked with the service industry before. I know that those kinds of things matter.
Shaan Puri
I'm a cheap bastard so I'll stay silent here
Dharmesh Shah
In terms of philanthropy, the running joke inside the house is that my wife and I have different perspectives. She's not from the tech world at all, but I am. I want to own the world, and she wants to save it. So, I will make the money—something I've been relatively good at—and she will be able to channel it to good causes and the film for our efforts. I don't have any particular specific things I want. I am the guy who's jacked with a matrix. If there were a world like that, I live in a virtual world, so there aren't a lot of physical things that I crave or desire, other than a piano, which I've wanted for a while. I now have a piano, but it doesn't excite me all that much. It's because atoms come with maintenance. Atoms versus bits—if you have something, whether it's a yacht or a plane, it takes calories. I don't care how much you've delegated; that's something in your life that's attached to you somehow. I just don't like that. It feels more weighty to me than joyful.
Sam Parr
So, speaking of time, HubSpot is 15 years old. I don't know how many people are here—25, 100, 3,000, whatever. It seems like you guys grew pretty fast early on, but has it always felt like a grind? I mean, when I see you, I'm like, "Well, you don't have to do this. You could delegate this. You don't have to work here. You're set. You're good." Why are you still doing this? Does it still feel like a grind? When has it stopped feeling like a grind? One of the reasons why I wanted to sell to you is that I thought, "If I don't sell in this cycle, I'll probably have to wait another 5 years." Am I willing to put that work in, or do I want to sell now? That's a hard challenge. Did you face that? Just walk me through that.
Dharmesh Shah
yeah so a couple of things it's not widely known but so brian and I as cofounders we had a kinda heart to heart cofounder chat which I encourage all founders to have and we had this list of questions we're gonna go through and I published this on my on my own startups blog but one of the things was around who's gonna be ceo and we decided he's gonna be ceo because I suck at being ceo I I you know I did that with my first startup for 10 years I'm just not that good at it so that was kind of decision 1 but decision 2 which is much much more unconventional is that I have no direct reports so what my agreement with brian was I'm not going to have any management responsibilities in this company I'm going to be in it a 100% but I'm not a good manager now I'm reasonably smart guy if I spent a bunch of time I could probably do some coaching get passively okay at management like I I think I could get there I don't wanna spend 10 20 30 years of my life getting passively good at something I'm a big believer in take your strengths whatever they are and put like all your energy into kind of amplifying those strengths and getting really really good at that thing and don't worry about your weaknesses all that much so I don't want don't wanna worry about my weakness managing people and so we have over 4,000 people at hubspot I have zero direct reports I've never had direct reports in the 15 years and that is partly what makes it much I don't think of it as a grind at all like I it's completely discretionary and optional for me obviously I have a lot of kind of vested interest in the company but in terms of the work that I do and I've sort of whittled down my life at hubspot this has been the this way for better part of a decade is is like I get it down to like 3 things I'm gonna work on and that I will change those every few years so for a long time it was like brand culture and what I call boldness which is is the organization taking on enough risk because the temptation is always like once you start having customers and revenues are growing things like that is just to kinda what we call drag the spreadsheets like oh like here are the numbers this is how it's growing we're just gonna drag the spreadsheet and the numbers will flow basically is to push the organization so we don't do that so what I do is I will maniacally focus on whatever those three things are and say no to pretty much everything else and and things will swap in and out so I've had you know product in there I've had platform in there but on that thing whatever it is I'm working on so when I had culture on my list it's like I spent 300 hours you know in the on the culture code deck at hubspot like I'm going to do everything I can to learn everything I can to try and get culture to be a thing at hubspot and yeah so it's I find it enjoyable I get to kind of pick the things so my three things are different you know from year to year I'd like to dig into the details I don't like kinda floating at 50,000 feet in lofty ivory towers I like to like if I'm gonna work on brand I'm in there with the marketing team like reviewing copy and going through the and this is why I'm taking sean's copywriting part like I I obsess over details so anyway yeah
Sam Parr
did you see sean that he's in your power writing course
Shaan Puri
yeah I saw that I was like how does this guy have time to do this this is amazing I I don't know
Dharmesh Shah
well have
Shaan Puri
you how's it been so far
Sam Parr
He talks to me all the time. That's why I'm like, "What do you do all day?"
Dharmesh Shah
I found it very useful. I'll say that copywriting, overall, is one of the most underrated skills in entrepreneurship. Generally, people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, or 50 hours learning it. You can learn a lot of what you need just by reading the top three books on it and practicing the craft. It's a doable thing, and the nice thing about it—one thing I love about it—is that it's measurable. You can objectively measure whether you got better at copywriting or not. You can look at your conversion rates or whatever numbers you're trying to move as a result of your words. It's a learnable skill.
Sam Parr
One more question and we can move on, but... With the reason why you were able to do those "no direct reports" is, I think, that you were the first investor. So, like, was this... Was HubSpot your idea or Brian's idea? But I think you invested like half a million dollars of your own money to get it started, right? And aren't you the largest shareholder of the company?
Dharmesh Shah
I am... so the idea of HubSpot is that you have to decouple the two things. HubSpot was not supposed to happen, and here's what I mean by that. When I sold my last company, I had been running it for 10 years and working the proverbial entrepreneurial hours, as one would expect. It was self-funded and bootstrapped. I promised my wife that I would not do another startup. It's like, "Okay, well, you know the one I'm doing, I'm in. I can't not be in." The analogy I use is a little bit like being at a gaming table in Las Vegas. You don't know the rules of the game. This is not how startup entrepreneurship works. If you're self-funded, it's like you're at the table, and the only real feedback you get is that sometimes the chips go down, sometimes they go up. You're playing, trying to figure out the rules as you go. You don't know. But there's one cardinal rule: if you leave the table, whatever chips you have on the table are gone. Every now and then, the house will come up to you and say, "Hey, would you like to cash in your chips? They're worth X dollars." This is the position you were in. So I was like, "Okay, would you like to sell your company? Here's what someone's willing to pay for it." If you miss that opportunity, you have no idea when the next opportunity to cash out your chips will come. So you keep playing, right? And the thing I told my wife is, "I have to keep playing." If I chose to get off the table, a lot of investments were in this; 100% of our net worth was invested in this. Eventually, when I sold, that was a decision. It's like, "Okay, I'm leaving the table, cashing in my chips. I don't have to do this anymore." So that's why I went to grad school. My plan was to go to grad school. I didn't really get a chance to enjoy undergrad because I was working the whole time through it. I'm going to actually go to grad school, be a real student, apply myself, and not go do anything.
Sam Parr
I'm gonna do how old were you
Dharmesh Shah
I was 35 36 somewhere in that range yep so so
Sam Parr
a third like a 36 year old college kid living the dream
Dharmesh Shah
I did! I had a great time. It was awesome. One of the best things I did was go back to grad school for a variety of reasons. Anyway, I had not planned it. My plan was to go to grad school, then maybe get a PhD, and then go teach. That was my chosen path. Then I met Brian in grad school, and we both have this shared passion for SMB (small and medium-sized businesses). We both come from different tech backgrounds. The first decision we made, before we even decided what HubSpot was going to be, was that the two of us should start a company together. If Brian was not going to do a company, there would be no HubSpot. I had registered the domain name and had noodled on a variety of ideas, but then we came together and said, "Let's do this." By the way, all through grad school, we were noodling on ideas. We were like, "Okay, we'll do this." We had HubSpot and went to the business plan competition with early versions of HubSpot. It is fun to look at. The idea came after we had narrowed it down to two companies. One was in marketing, which is what we ended up doing. The other one was like an Oracle for small businesses, similar to NetSuite, which you folks were talking about in the last episode.
Shaan Puri
Alright, so let's discuss some ideas. I think one of the cool things about any technically minded person who has achieved business success is that typically, when non-technical people get into business, they tend to follow one of two paths. They either become a financier, saying, "Great, I still love business, but I don't want to sweat anymore," so they invest. Many people do invest, but they make investing the main focus. What I've found is that a lot of technical people who end up being successful never stop loving what's new, where technology is going, and how behaviors are changing. Whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live as a user at the edge. So, tell me, what are one or two technologies or ideas right now that are most exciting to you at the moment?
Dharmesh Shah
2.1 is around broadly defined cryptocurrency, and we haven't talked about Big Cloud yet, but I'll bring that out. Cryptocurrency is applied to other mainstream things. So, if I were not doing HubSpot—which I have no plans of doing anything else with—this is the idea. I'm going to give you my pitch, Sean. What you should do, since you're now out of Twitch, is create a professional network that's powered by the blockchain. I'm going to say this kindly: people love it because they don't love the incumbent right now.
Sam Parr
can I can I say my opinion I'm just you know you know my opinion can are you cool if I say it
Dharmesh Shah
yeah yeah yeah go ahead
Sam Parr
linkedin sucks
Dharmesh Shah
a
Sam Parr
Or how about this? A lot of people say LinkedIn sucks, and you're suggesting building a different one on the blockchain. Yeah.
Dharmesh Shah
so we'll talk about it
Shaan Puri
so yeah
Dharmesh Shah
Okay, so here's what I'm saying: I even have a 7-figure domain name picked out for you. I will write the $5,000,000 check for you to go do it as far as a seed round. Or up to $5,000,000 if you want to let other people in. That's amazing!
Shaan Puri
this just got spicy okay
Sam Parr
oh my god what's the domain name that you have
Dharmesh Shah
I am dead serious. I have... anything. Yeah, so, here’s why it needs to wait.
Sam Parr
let's play this out yeah keep going
Dharmesh Shah
So the issue right now is that, you know, LinkedIn... Yes, people don't like it. It was a product that was great for its time, but times have changed. Now there's a different kind of need. The thing I'm excited about is the intersection of a couple of things. One is, you know, we didn't have things like BitClout or cryptocurrency before; now we do, right? One of the issues with LinkedIn is, okay, you've got the kind of spam issue. It's like, how do I separate all the noise from the signal? It's just a pain in the ass over time. The asymptotic move for LinkedIn is like diminishing utility. It's just going to become painful, and since then, there's a cap on where you can go with it. So imagine that BitClout ended up doing Twitter with the blockchain.
Sam Parr
imagine if
Dharmesh Shah
There was something else that did LinkedIn on the blockchain. You have your own kind of currency, and then you could say, "Hey, you know what? I'm an engineer that's a free agent," or whatever. For $500, I will look at your company and apply for it, and I'll do a reasonably good job. Or for $10, I'll open your email, or for X, I'll do this. It's like, okay, there's a right now in the market.
Shaan Puri
There’s still an inherent aspect to consider. The cool thing about big cloud is that everybody has a price. Every coin has a certain value. The beauty of a professional network is that right now, when you go on LinkedIn, it is not obvious what the level of hierarchy is. You always have people who are either recruiters or those at the bottom of the career ladder trying to connect and reach out to people at the top. They have no real incentive to do it, so they just sort of ignore LinkedIn altogether. They might think, "Why would I even go to this site? I'm just going to get inundated with crap that I don't really want." The beauty of this system is that because everybody has a coin value, you inherently have this sort of career worth or career value that each person brings to the table within the network. For example, if someone has a way to buy attention, they can buy your coin, which increases your price. It’s mutually beneficial. Right now, if I pay LinkedIn, I can send you spam InMail, but you do not receive any of the revenue from me paying LinkedIn for the right to spam you. In this case, I could say, "Hey, if you want to spam me, if you want me to read your thing and respond to it, here are my prices." So it becomes revenue-generating for me. The second thing is that when someone reaches out, I can quickly assess their value in the network based on how much other people believe in this person and how much weight others give to them. Now, it’s not that every node looks the same on the surface; they would not look the same, which is really cool.
Dharmesh Shah
Correct. And just one more thing. Yeah, so, yes, there's a kind of crypto angle where everyone's got a price. The other angle is, we'll call it page rank for the professional graph, right? So right now, the professional graph...
Sam Parr
that's cool
Dharmesh Shah
Including Twitter, it's all symmetric, right? So every person you follow gets an equal number of follow value. Whatever their account goes up by exactly 1. It's not weighted in any single way.
Sam Parr
yeah you you got drake explain page drake a little bit
Dharmesh Shah
Okay, so the beauty behind Google - the original idea that made it the powerhouse it is today - is they said, "Okay, well how do we determine what the best set of results are to show for a keyword search?" And it came down to two things: 1. The overall context of the page. So if you're searching for "real estate Boston" or something like that, it'll look at all the pages it's indexed and think, "Okay, well this set of pages are about real estate in Boston to varying degrees." That's kind of factor one in the function.
Sam Parr
so all which people also just say good content
Dharmesh Shah
yeah exactly we'll just call it quality like the context
Sam Parr
quality content yeah which is the whole this whole thing
Dharmesh Shah
Authority, right? The authority is where PageRank comes in. They say, "Okay, here's this individual web page that's sitting on the internet. We're going to measure its authority by how many links are coming into that page." That's an endorsement, in fact, and the value of those links passed to that individual page. The PageRank value of it, the authority that gets passed through, is based on the PageRank of those pages. So, it's a recursive function to say, "Oh, well, if The New York Times links to you, that's much more valuable than if Dharmesh's blog links to you," because The New York Times has more PageRank.
Shaan Puri
mhmm
Dharmesh Shah
Last piece of the PageRank thing, which is super important to know, is that the amount of PageRank you pass across the links from your page is proportional to your PageRank. So, let's say I have 2 units of PageRank—I'm making that number up. If I link to just one person, it's your blog, Sam. All the PageRank I have on that page accrues to you by transference. If I link to 10 different people, it gets distributed across those 10 links. Yeah, so it's a weighted graph versus just a symmetrical graph. Now, if you imagine a professional network graph where everything is graphed, it's like, "Okay, well, you know, I endorse Sam, and I have a certain authority. I have a certain currency." If we've got a cryptocurrency underneath it, as a result, Sam's currency goes up by X amount. So, it's not just me buying shares; it's just by that. I think the notion of a follow should go away. If you really, really like that person, buy a dollar, buy $5 or something like that, right? That's the one kind of...
Shaan Puri
So, just to make sure I understand, what you're saying is: Instead of just following Sam, which you have an infinite supply of and is sort of a pretty light signal, you're saying in this case you would be able to own some of Sam's coin. That'd be a pretty strong endorsement. Secondly, the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that because you, a valuable person, own Sam's coin, Sam's coin goes up. Not just by the $5 you paid, but by some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm... the way the algorithm weights Sam's value now.
Dharmesh Shah
Correct. So first, if you raise money, if you're a startup and you raise money from Andreessen or Sequoia, like $1,000,000, is that $1,000,000?
Shaan Puri
that comes
Dharmesh Shah
From [followers] actually has an impact, the same thing. You know, follow[ers] should matter. The fact that you follow me should matter more than someone that doesn't... hasn't... that just joined Twitter or Big Cloud or whatever yesterday, right? Like, that doesn't make sense.
Shaan Puri
This is a tremendous idea! I'm having trouble containing myself at the moment. This is one of the more exciting ideas because people know I'm...
Dharmesh Shah
Here exactly what I came here for is to put you on the spot. It was like, "Okay, listen to this idea."
Shaan Puri
So that's insane, you know, because I got excited about Big Cloud. I got excited about it because I think that we do want a social network that's inverted. So instead of one platform controlled by one company that owns all the data, it's inverted. It's inside out. It's basically no company; all the data is free, and you own your own business on top of it. Sure, and so I think that... you know, I don't want to say... How do I say "decentralized" without saying "decentralized"? My way of...
Dharmesh Shah
saying it
Shaan Puri
Okay, yeah, so I think that's exciting. Then a whole bunch of people are like, "I can't believe you're endorsing this scam project," and blah, blah, blah. Is this going to make me richer? Is this not going to make me richer? I was sort of like, "Well, it might, but it's besides the point." It's more like this is what the next Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebooks are going to look like in either 1 or 10 years. I'm not sure. In Bitcloud or the next thing, I am not sure, but I'm going to play with this one, and I'm going to give it a ride. So that when the right one does arrive, whether it's this one or the next one, I know what I'm looking at. I know what's real and what's not. That's why I recommended people go play with it, just to see, just to be on the forefront of it.
Dharmesh Shah
You know, something like it needs to exist, right? Whether it'll be *the one* or not, I don't know. So I've been spending a fair amount of calories trying to understand the mechanics of Big Cloud itself. Now I have three on the top creators list, so I've been kind of moving up the curve, so to speak. Oh my god, yeah!
Sam Parr
dude the thing about how much have you put into bigclout
Dharmesh Shah
it's gotta be a $1,000,000 give
Shaan Puri
or take $1,000,000 yeah
Sam Parr
I mean, the thing that pissed me off about BigClout was that I got into this... like, I didn't get into it because I had to. I knew I was going to get into this thing I'm not about to say, but I wanted to get into a pissing match real fast about building clout because there was money on the line. And yeah, I just thought, "Oh, I don't actually want to get in this race." I didn't want to play that game. So, I kind of had a little... like, one part of me actually fundamentally agrees with most everything you're saying. On the other part, I'm like, "Oh, if this exists, I'm going to be getting into a lot of pissing matches or whatever, and I'm going to be playing more games." That kind of freaks me out a little bit.
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, I'm... and this is one of the issues with Bitcloud right now. You have a bunch of founder rewards, games, and things like that. This is what happens; this is why we can't have nice things, partly. It's like anytime something new comes along, there will be people trying to game the system. Even back in the early days of Google, the internet wasn't a scam, and Google wasn't a scam, but there were a bunch of people trying to scam Google to kind of show up in the results and doing kind of spammy SEO stuff. You see the same thing on Bitcloud. You have to sort of separate that from the platform. It's like, okay, fundamentally, the idea does not feel like a scam to me. Yes, I needed to open it up and have it listed on an exchange so you can actually take money out... you know, minor details. But they're fixing those. I talked to the founder in one of the few calls I've had in the last 12 months because I don't do phone calls. But it feels legit to me. That's not to say it's going to succeed, but I'm relatively confident it's not a scam. That is... like, that is reason for being is not a scam.
Shaan Puri
So, one of the things that happens with companies like Google or Facebook is, you know, like you said, there's a big honeypot—either of users or money on the line. You get good people excited about it. You get technologists excited about it. Joel said you get these sort of scammers, and not even scammers, but I'll call them schemers. These are people who are not doing anything illegal, but they're thinking, "Oh, this is a game. How do I play it so that I get the highest score?" The score is either money, followers, or whatever they're trying to game. Yep. Whether this is like, you know, BuzzFeed and Upworthy saying, "Oh, news feed! How do I game the news feed to get all this monthly traffic?" or, you know, Zynga doing this with games on Facebook or whatever. With a company, you sort of have the—like, you know, for as much as people hate that Facebook and Google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from under you, they are able to swat down these schemers and scammers so that they don't ruin the experience for everybody. One thing that's interesting with decentralized platforms is that there's nobody in charge—there's no CEO to do that. So, I think it's going to be very interesting how that plays out. Do you have a sense of whether that's going to be a problem, or do you think that there's a solution to that with the governance?
Dharmesh Shah
I'm a believer in kind of self-governance over time. It all depends on the time horizon. Will it fix itself in a year or two years? Maybe not. I think there are still going to be these kind of dark parts of BitCloud that people don't want to tread into. But over time, I think once BitCloud figures out what it wants to be when it grows up, in terms of what's the actual use case, the way I think of it is like the Twitter use case. It's just a way to kind of prove out the protocol. It just so happens they picked that one; they could have picked any number of other ones. As people build real things using that underlying technology, because it's an open protocol, I think things will settle down. People will find a way to implement use cases that concretely solve particular problems and stay away from some of the dark issues right now.
Sam Parr
what's the name that you bought
Dharmesh Shah
for for sean
Sam Parr
you said you bought a a 7 figure domain name for this idea
Dharmesh Shah
I have one in I'm I'm in the midst of negotiating the price on it I'm not gonna reveal it
Sam Parr
I
Dharmesh Shah
don't wanna be outbid but how
Sam Parr
many how many letters is it
Dharmesh Shah
7 okay
Sam Parr
I'll be very interested with it what what this is gonna be
Shaan Puri
You had said two spaces, and one is the crypto social network. What was the other space you're excited about?
Dharmesh Shah
the other one is so broadly defined natural language processing in terms of okay so let me I'll do a try to keep this at a quick rant so every software company that ever was has always said our product is intuitive and easy to use like okay well and reality is every one of them lies because here's what happens in order for a human to use software it's like here's the thing I wanna do and I have some amount of training and things whatever and I'm gonna translate the thing my intent I'm gonna translate into a series of drags and clicks and swipes and touches to make the software do the thing I intended to do right now imagine if you know if I were elon I'd be like okay well you should be able to think the thought but let's put that aside for now let's just say you were like you're in photoshop it's like I wanna remove the background you should just be able to say well remove the background if you're in hubspot you should I want you should it's like you know how many new people signed up for our service hub product in the last 90 days you should just be able to type that question in because that's your intent not like oh go to hubspot reporting tool build this dashboard pull it here the 3 columns you want whatever and get to the thing you want you should just be able to say the thing you want express the thing you want better way to state it and the software should figure it out like we have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand natural language human english and other languages and all we really need is a translation layer and so this is a broad based in my mind a megatrend to be which is in my mind bigger than mobile so mobile was a oh we're good the the thing that mobile added for us which is like oh well the thing that you used to do on your desktop now you can do it from anywhere and enabled a bunch of different use cases this thing is like okay well the thing that now you've been trying to learn you're trying to use this software whatever that you never really got good at you never had the time now but a 1000000000 people can use that piece of software that wasn't even possible before because they don't have to learn the clicks and drags and things they can express something they want and the software can do it and then what I would do if I were an enterprising vc is I was like okay let's so pick the categories where this thing will have the biggest impact like you know business intelligence reporting kind of stuff b b to b software is a natural fit but I think can go elsewhere yep and and we've seen the beginnings of this on the consumer side with things like alexa but like the b two b world I think is open for just make the software actually intuitive make it do what I want have have
Shaan Puri
Have you seen anyone besides... I was going to say besides Alexa. Have you seen any hints of what I call a "magic trick"? It's when you see somebody build a piece of software and then they're like, "Yeah, so you just do X, Y, Z, and boom, it's done." And you're like, "Holy shit, you got that!" You just wove your magic wand and got that. When you see a magic trick, it's very hard to unsee. You kind of can't look at the old software the same way anymore. It's like Instagram filters or something like that. It's like, "Oh wait, your photo looks like that? Oh shit, okay, well now all my photos in my camera roll look like shit in comparison. I can't even look at these anymore." So, have you seen any cool magic tricks with conversational or natural language classes?
Dharmesh Shah
I've built something myself called **GrowthBot** a few years ago that was closer than I've gotten.
Sam Parr
I remember that I remember growthbot
Dharmesh Shah
You could type, and it was built for marketers to be able to get marketing data out of both of your kind of marketing systems, something like HubSpot or Mailchimp. But also just other data sources, like, "Oh, what are the top three keywords that Uber buys on PPC?" That data's out there, right? We would know to kind of ask that. Or like, "When was this domain registered?" Just a bunch of questions. I would go through every night and look at all the questions people asked about this thing because there was a blank canvas. They had no idea what the thing was capable of. Then I would go back and say, "Okay, well, here are the repeating patterns. Wouldn't it be nice if I could go update the software to kind of do that thing?" So that's it. It came close. I think it was a little early. I think we're further along now. People are more used to that notion, right, of being able to express it.
Sam Parr
Dude, that's so funny that you do this! I'm looking at the... I remember GrowthBot. Like, people were sharing it, and I just... You just made this? Did you... So you just whipped up this landing page and you made this?
Dharmesh Shah
I made the whole thing. Yeah, like I spent a bunch of time just learning about what's possible. I coded the whole thing myself.
Sam Parr
God, that's so funny! Can you... gosh, this is so funny. You see that, Sean?
Shaan Puri
yeah yeah yeah I'm on it
Sam Parr
It's great, right? It's just cool that you do this stuff, and everything you do is kind of related to HubSpot. It's all in the same world. Do you also... it seemed like you're really into website graders. Is that right? That business of web... So, I was talking to Dharmesh Shah the other day. Dharmesh Shah started the...
Shaan Puri
and everything startup neera
Sam Parr
yeah nira he's got which I've crazy
Shaan Puri
egg
Sam Parr
Just crazy. Egg, egg, quick sprout, all types of stuff. I mean, he's like you; he just has his hands in everything. But he and his partner, Neil, have [neilpatel.com](http://neilpatel.com) / Ubersuggest, and then they also had [neilpatel.com](http://neilpatel.com) / like rate your website or something like that. Yep. Why are you so into these website rating businesses and products? What the hell is going on with that?
Dharmesh Shah
I'm into... So, the original thing was called Website Grader. It's actually a funny story. Back when we first started HubSpot, it was just Brian, my co-founder, and I. We would go look at people's websites to see if they would be a good fit for HubSpot, the software, or not. We would go and I would look at their... I'd do a "View Source" in Chrome and then look at their source code. Like, okay, do they have the right meta tags? Do they seem clue-ful? There's a bunch of signals you can look at: - Alexa ranking - Stuff that you folks do all day long now when you research companies
Sam Parr
but like a like a similar web type of thing
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, yeah, and this is, you know, 15 years ago. So, we were all doing it manually; there were no tools. I thought, "Okay, I’ll build something." That's what I do. I thought, "Oh, I'm going to write this tool that automatically goes, looks, and pings the APIs. It will bring down the source code for the HTML, see if the tags are right, and kind of give it a score." I had not planned it this way. It was built as a tool for just the two of us. Then I thought, "Oh, I'm going to put this on the web because I think this is useful." So, I asked myself, "What name can I give it?" I decided to call it **WebsiteGrader.com**. The domain was available since 50 years ago. I put that out there, and it was like it was on fire! All the early leads—tens of thousands of people—came in. They had a desire to grade their website. For your listening audience, one thing I will say is the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense. Website Grader was not the solution; it wasn't like a freemium thing. It was more like, "Oh, we're giving you a lightweight version of HubSpot." It was a thing that made you realize you needed HubSpot, and that was super valuable. This can be done in any industry, whether you're in software or not. It's like, "Okay, I'm going to help you determine whether you have a problem or not." Because the natural thing when we do website grading is, "Oh, I got a 23 out of 100. That sucks!"
Shaan Puri
right
Dharmesh Shah
How I can help? Here's what we do, or you can even just read these blog posts. I mean, you can watch these videos. It's work, so I'm obsessed with kind of creating an assessment. You folks had an episode like 10 or 20 episodes ago around quizzes and things like that. One thing people are interested in is if you build a diagnostic tool. The one thing—and this is something I've learned through several lessons—but one of the key ones is that **relative scores work**. Website Grader, from its early days, was like, "Okay, if I give you an 87, what that 87 actually means is that whatever calculations we're doing behind the scenes, this particular score means you graded better than 87% of the 800,000 or whatever the number was of websites we've graded." People love that! It's like, "Oh, that kind of relative score versus an absolute one makes a big difference." A percentile score matters a lot to people. It's like, "Oh right, I'm in the bottom 10% or the top 10%," and that's awesome. But anyway...
Sam Parr
are you sean do you see his list of ideas let's just start banging them out I wanna
Shaan Puri
I like it. So this is two things: First, I think the thing you just described is like a growth hack without saying "Yeah, I did it to growth hack." You solved your own itch, but that's such a... We've talked about it for quizzes. Quizzes are the same thing - lead generation. This is an amazing lead gen tool where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads. People who self-assess, "I might have a problem," they go get it checked up. Your digital doctor said, "Yep, you indeed do have a problem," and then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called HubSpot. You know, here's a little bottle for you.
Dharmesh Shah
I'm going to just tell you how clueless I was back then. So, I put this thing up there, and at the time, we had a meeting set up with Gail Goodman, who was the CEO of Constant Contact at that time. She would later join the HubSpot board. We met with her and said, "Oh, we're working on this company called HubSpot. It's kind of related to the Constant Contact space, and we want to get your advice." I showed her Website Grader and said, "Oh, here's what we do. We can kind of look at websites," and she loved it. Then she suggested, "You might consider putting an email address box," because we had no way of knowing who these people were. They were not leading for us. We had like 100,000 people using the tool.
Shaan Puri
unintentional road pack
Dharmesh Shah
I had never thought to collect an email address. Like, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to?" Anyway, we obviously fixed that.
Shaan Puri
So, I like that. And then also for this conversational thing, I think what you just said is kind of like... sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing that I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's actually a really big idea." I think you actually mentioned two. I think the crypto LinkedIn one is a big idea, and I think the second one is this idea that if you think about one of the biggest, and what some people say is the best business they've ever seen, is Google. Right? People come in there, it's just a search box. It's like a magic genie. If you go ask a question, it tries to give you some answers. The way I view this is if somebody could actually do this, it would be sort of like next-level Google, where I ask it any question and it doesn't just give me a list of pages where the answer might be; it actually gives me the answer. So, this might be, you know, in the business context, it might be like a business Google, but there are many versions of this. I don't know if you've seen this. Have you ever seen Debuild? Have you ever checked out this website?
Sam Parr
mm-mm yeah we talked about debuild
Shaan Puri
Sharif is a perfect example of a magic trick. He was messing around with GPT-3, a new technology that had just come out. He got access right away, dropped his whole startup, and started hacking on this thing at night. He had this idea: "Dude, you know Squarespace and Wix? These website builders have been around forever. Everybody wants to be able to code without having to code, but even now it's still so complicated, even after Webflow and all this stuff." So he thought, "Why can't you just describe what you want? Like, I want a website that's got two columns. On the left, I want pictures of places you can stay, and on the right, I want the price of the thing." You could literally just type that in, and it would build you a website that looks like Airbnb. It would create a website that does that. He posted on Twitter a GIF, saying, "You know, I'm messing around with GPT-3. Watch this: build a website with a photo, then add a PayPal button, but make it so the PayPal button can only take $5 max. And then send the payments to this." It spit out a website that did that, with the HTML and CSS to support it. He posted that GIF, and I think off basically one tweet with one GIF, he raised $2,000,000 instantly from really smart people when that tweet went viral. They were like, "Oh, you just showed me a magic trick." I don't know what the company is here, and I think he still doesn't know what the company is, but go down this path and see what you can find.
Sam Parr
It was pretty amazing. I remember when that tweet went live. I mean, it went viral right away.
Dharmesh Shah
Yeah, I played with GPT-3 for a while across multiple things. It's like the closest thing to magic. It's weird because it's kind of a different vector, right? Originally, it was a text generation mechanism designed to write prose based on a corpus of data behind the scenes. I talked to Solomon, the CEO, and Brian was gracious enough to give us some time. I asked, "Okay, well, where is this headed? What's going on?" I wanted to see the kind of impacts on HubSpot and the role in general. Right now, I don't think we're quite there to implement practical use cases to actually do the things that people are trying to do. I've played with it on multiple fronts, but it's one of those things that is going to go from, as Peter said, from a 0 to a 1 very, very quickly. All of a sudden, something that wasn't really possible and didn't quite work well enough will change, and then it's going to be like, "Holy crap!" Then there's the kind of post-GPT-3 world.
Shaan Puri
What's that phrase where it's like, "You know, slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden" or something like that? Yeah, it looks...
Dharmesh Shah
like it's
Shaan Puri
gonna be that sam you said you like some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics let's just
Dharmesh Shah
go back a little bit we we
Sam Parr
We just talked about something huge, that was a huge idea. Let's talk about something small but still cool. So, it looks like, did you buy RemoteCulture.com?
Dharmesh Shah
I did
Sam Parr
Okay, so that's a no-brainer. There's a business that will make $1,000,000 a year: a remote culture online community for those building remote cultures. Easy, right? What would you do there?
Dharmesh Shah
I would start a community for RemoteCulture.com. This is okay, I'm going to do a blog and I'm going to create a paid community. It's going to be targeted at people in operations and HR around the world who need to figure out the new kind of "new world order." We're not going to try and sell them software; we're just going to connect them to each other. I'm a big believer in these kinds of communities and network-based businesses because they're efficient. In terms of getting to critical mass, that's fine, but I think this one would work. It's a community that's necessary at this moment in time and hasn't existed before. I needed it, and now it does exist. I'm sure there are people out there doing it, but rather than just help with money, you can actually build something meaningful.
Shaan Puri
There's one on here that I really like: speed round. So, by the way, these are domains that you don't have an idea for.
Dharmesh Shah
Here's a hack, by the way: When I have an idea that's developed enough in my head that it's like, "Okay, well this is kinda cool," I don't write it down in a notebook. Instead, I go find a related domain. It costs about $15 if it hasn't been taken yet, or... maybe I'll spend more if it's something that really strikes my fancy.
Sam Parr
what's what's the most expensive real ideas what's the most expensive domain you own
Dharmesh Shah
Woah, you haven't had them valued? I don't really sell domains. I own Birmingham-Alabama.com. I live there, I think that's probably a 7-figure domain. [I] just bought Humanism.com and Humanism.org.
Sam Parr
you also bought bought one for me
Dharmesh Shah
bought one for you I bought the hustle.com for you as a as a gift I was gonna give to you on the podcast
Sam Parr
so so learn that
Dharmesh Shah
you don't care about domain names all that much
Sam Parr
no no
Shaan Puri
Hold on, a deal trophy, right? Whenever you get acquired, they have this little... I don't know, Sam, did you know about these deal trophies?
Sam Parr
no I want a deal trophy
Shaan Puri
So, when we got acquired, they gave us... it took like a few months, but it was like, "Hey, sorry, I meant to give this to you when the deal closed." But I guess in the deal-making world—I'm not a mover and shaker of business development and corporate development and things like that—but I guess it is sort of a tradition. When the deals close, it's sort of like the champagne. What you do is you get a little ornament that has some meaning to the deal. In our case, our code name was like "Project Whatever," and it was like, "Let's just call it Project Sharp."
Sam Parr
wasn't we're we're we're project h
Dharmesh Shah
or something
Shaan Puri
And so then they got this cool-looking knife, you know, because it's like Project Sharp. Whatever. Here's the deal trophy. I think your deal trophy is this domain here.
Sam Parr
Well, and for the record Dharmesh, if you'd like to gift that to The Hustle company, we would love it. I actually do like domain names. My whole [thing] about domain names was...
Shaan Puri
don't let it stop you
Sam Parr
99% of people are not like you or me. We do things... You're killing it, and you just made this little rinky-dink project called Growth Bot. That's... we do things. 99% of people don't do anything, and they have stupid excuses like, "Oh, I don't have the domain name, it's taken," or "I do have the domain name, therefore I should do that." My [advice] is: don't let it stop you. But I still think it's sick, and it's awesome, and I love it. It's like saying, "Just because you don't have a sick gym doesn't mean you can't go out there and walk and lose weight." That's... that's [the point].
Shaan Puri
I think, you know, like Justin was on the podcast last time and he was like, "There should be a dating app that matches you based on your credit card spending history or something like that." For me, that's what it's like with this podcast. If you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually bought but don't have a live project on, if that number is greater than 10, we're gonna be thick as thieves. And like, how many tabs do you have open right now? If I just knew those two things, I can kind of tell you if this podcast is a fit for you or not. If you're somebody who owns zero domains, then you probably aren't going to, you know, really connect with this podcast in a major way. I don't think.
Dharmesh Shah
one thing I'd like I'm gonna pull up balaji here as I'm gonna push that conversation on the stack but one thing I wanna make sure I can get out there because on the list of things just we're talking about ideas it's like how do you assess ideas how do you think about ideas I know sean you love frameworks you do too sam here here's a simple one in terms of like assessing whether you're doing it for yourself or you're investing whatever it is and and I'll tell you the common mistake so the three things I look at are like profit potential like if this thing went exactly as planned as the founders envisioned what could it be like let's just assume all things like all the stars align everything works the way you expect it to and and it goes what could it be what's the overall potential for the project what kind of like passion do you have around it it's like okay are you excited about it or not excited about it and the third one is around probability of of that success that you that you want right and I I'm a quant based guy so I'll take each of those factors 0 to 10 square and multiply them together and I'll get a score out of a 1,000 right and you can put the weighting differently it's like oh I care more about passion than you know the profit potential or something else but the common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first and almost exclusively as a high order bit filter it's like oh I had this idea but the likelihood is like 0.01% that that's actually going to work and so I'm not even gonna think about what the potential could have been or how passionate I may or may not be about it and then they just kinda scarred the idea I think that is statistically unwise and a impractical move and here's why is that the way you should be looking at ideas is you kinda take the profit potential like here's the possible outcome multiplied this it's it's the ev the expected value statistically of this thing it's like oh I have a 1% chance at a $1,000,000,000 the expected value is 1% of a $1,000,000,000 that's the value of that particular thing and so you shouldn't discard something just because the probability is low because it may have a disproportionately high potential that makes it more interesting than it would otherwise so that's the like being a little bit more structured about how you assess things that people throw things away too easily because and and the second note I'll put it as hard one lessons good ideas are dangerous and they're dangerous because what you want to find are the great ideas right that's the thing you can kinda get behind you don't have find them before you start the company we can talk about that so bad ideas are easy to spot off that's just a bad idea good ideas masquerade as great ideas and it's hard to tell them apart and they're the ones that end up kinda spinning a bunch of cycles for you and it's like okay well it ended up being good but just it's yeah failure is not a problem like mediocrity is a thing everybody should be fearful of it's like just get it out there try it see what happens but anyway
Shaan Puri
And mediocrity is the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource: it wastes time. Right? Because it's not going to die quickly, nor is it going to take off. So it is a slow, long burn at a mediocre level, and you're sort of locking in, over a period of time, a mediocre outcome. And that's why mediocrity is the [worst outcome].
Dharmesh Shah
The biggest risk, I think, the hardest about bootstrap companies, especially tech companies that have a low capital need, is that they can actually live forever and not go anywhere. Right? Because it doesn't take that much to operate. It's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you $50. It doesn't really cost that much, and you don't have investors pushing on you to say, "Oh, we need some sort of outcome." So you can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you could have pursued was sitting right behind it. I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs about this. I have never, ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur that had just one idea. It's like, "Oh, you will have more." Dude, it's like, okay, right? You know, try the thing. If you can sell the thing, sell the thing. If you're not that excited about it, or you just want to cash out and take some chips off the table, there's no harm and no shame. But yeah.
Sam Parr
did you did you but you guys didn't raise a significant amount at hubspot did you
Dharmesh Shah
105,000,000... oh, private money before we went public. Yeah, wow! HubSpot's a classic venture-backed playbook company. It's like there's a... and intentionally so, it's...
Sam Parr
But that seems interesting to me because you don't seem... You seem like a guy who likes freedom and knows who he is, and knows that he's a little bootstrapper.
Shaan Puri
is what he's trying to say why don't why don't you bootstrap
Dharmesh Shah
I'll tell you the exact conversation we had. So when Brian and I started this, one of the things we were firmly agreed on is that we didn't want... I'm not a baseball or a sports person, but like we didn't want a single or a double hit. We wanted to swing for the fences. Either we do this and we're good at every... We have a decision to make. Up front, we are going to take the one that gives us a higher chance of being the spectacular outcome, even if that means we're possibly gonna go down and crash in burning flames, right?
Sam Parr
but was was was brian was he successful like you were or was he still
Dharmesh Shah
Like, he didn't need an exit because he hadn't done a startup before. This was his first one. But he also was like, "Okay, this is my last swing at bat." This is it. This is the one that's either going to do it or not going to do it. So that was the reason. We weren't worried about dilution. We negotiated the fairest value we could. We made sure the terms were meaningful and had good investors. But we were not worried about what our percentage stake in the company was and how that moved over time. We were like, "Okay, if this thing does what it needs to do, the valuation and all that, and the equity allocation will not matter." On the margin, it just... we want it to be a binary outcome. Either it's going to be this huge, massive thing which will change our lives and have a massive impact, or it goes down in crashing, burning flames, which is highly likely. But we were looking to hold on to control. We weren't looking to be kings; we wanted to be rich, I guess.
Sam Parr
But when you're doing ideation and stuff, though, you... I think you wrote it here: you're down with starting a project with a bad idea because you're quite confident that you can figure out how to make it great as you get into it, right?
Dharmesh Shah
And my general advice is, and this is not just my personal lived experience, as new folks would say, having talked to entrepreneurs and looking at the history of them: so many of them, the thing that we know them for now is not the idea they originally started with. There are a handful of cases where, yes, the plan was exactly what it was. Often, the case is that you will not find the great idea until after you start your company. Until after you start having contact with customers and actually try to do the thing. If you sit on the sidelines trying to assess ideas and look at market metrics and things like that, it's like you're just never going to get started. Those are the kind of wannabe entrepreneurs that will analyze it to death. It's like you wouldn't even know what a good idea was. It's hard to tell these things until you actually try something.
Shaan Puri
it's a matter of fact just
Dharmesh Shah
just do it and try it
Sam Parr
where do we go from here sean we got I
Shaan Puri
I think we gotta wrap here. I believe we have to have you on again if you're down, because I have five topics I want to hear about: 1. Why I don't play golf and what I do instead. 2. Why I hate inefficiency in markets. 3. Why I don't believe in karma, but I believe in extended feedback loops. 4. Sometimes faking it is making it. 5. An introverted engineer's guide for public speaking. I need all of these, so we may have to do another one. I have one question I want to wrap with in this one, which is: you seem like a pretty astute guy. You have very good observations, and I think you know kind of who we are and what we care about, and that we would value honesty. So I'm curious...
Dharmesh Shah
can ask me the intro question aren't you you can ask me the intro question no
Shaan Puri
No, not the intro question. That... Sam's trying to get all the intros he can. Ask you that one. I wanna know... I'm trying to make the content great, so what would be the most fair criticism you could give us on the podcast? What's your critique of the podcast for you as a listener?
Sam Parr
and there's like you can offend
Shaan Puri
yeah exactly that's kind of what I'm teeing you up for say whatever it is whatever you truly feel
Dharmesh Shah
Alright, so partly, yeah, I think you have to recognize that you guys are multichannel. You're kind of solving for the audio format. I know you have the YouTube videos and things like that. But the one tactical thing that you should fix, like next week or the week after, is you should apply the Sean 25 headlines thing for headlines for every podcast episode. What's the one nugget that's going to cause people to want to listen to that episode, even if they're not subscribed? When they see it in their YouTube feed and YouTube recommends it, it's like, "Oh, why this successful entrepreneur never played golf, and you shouldn't either." Whatever it is, right? Exactly.
Sam Parr
I'm I'm on a I'm I'm I'm taking notes keep going
Dharmesh Shah
If you do that, my guess is that the click-through rate goes up. Because right now, you just kind of identify the episode number and who the guest is, or whatever, but there's no real... maybe the topic area, but...
Shaan Puri
right right now me and sam don't even
Dharmesh Shah
want people to click that's me
Shaan Puri
And Sam doesn't even touch the headlines when Dan does it. I don't even know. I see a notification, it goes out, and I think to myself, I judge the headline. I'm like, "That's not gonna give everybody clicks," or "Oh, that's a juicy one, that'll work."
Dharmesh Shah
I I say give dan a free pass to the the sean copywriting board did have it like putting my
Shaan Puri
back yesterday
Sam Parr
that's awesome
Shaan Puri
what else what else you got anything else
Sam Parr
of course you you have more
Dharmesh Shah
who me
Sam Parr
yeah yeah what about what more that was a weak criticism yeah
Dharmesh Shah
That was an easy one. Okay, this is a hard one, right? It's around...
Sam Parr
he's gonna say like just change your voice
Dharmesh Shah
yeah yeah he's like your
Shaan Puri
face isn't great pose it's yours
Dharmesh Shah
So, it's around the brand, and this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to reconcile with. A couple of issues that I have as an amateur branding person are that anything that can be reduced to an acronym will be. My "First Million" is often reduced to that, and then you kind of lose the punch. When it comes down to an acronym, anyone that comes in immediately is not going to know what it is if they don't know what it is. Yep, and there's some value to that, but it doesn't compensate for the kind of opportunity you have. So, that's one thing: acronyms are not good. The other issue is that there is a cadre of people—however that word is pronounced—who will directly resonate with that topic. They will say, "Oh, I want to learn about that." But I think your reach is much wider now. There are quite a few more people outside that sphere who think, "Okay, well, it's fine that it's about that, but really the reason I'm here is to hear folks say 'biology,' right?" That episode, which I think is one of the best episodes you've had, had nothing to do with the "First Million" or anything. It had to do with big ideas.
Sam Parr
I actually agree with you, and we've had this conversation. The problem that we have is like, "Fuck, we're pretty deep into it. We can't change it."
Dharmesh Shah
yep yep
Shaan Puri
I, for what it's worth, think we should change it just because I hate the name. I don't really care about the brand equity. I'm just sort of like, I don't want to have a thing that I dislike.
Dharmesh Shah
I don't... yeah, I don't love it. I really don't. I don't love the name. I don't love the name.
Sam Parr
of the hustle either
Shaan Puri
If you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future, which I do, then 90% of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet. So we're only offending... we're only changing a very small population of people for the good of the long run. That would be my... [thought process].
Dharmesh Shah
And by the way, if you think it's hard now, realize the direction you're headed. It does not get easier; it's going to get harder and harder. A year from now, two years from now, five years from now, you're going to think, "Ah, should we have changed this?" You know, it’s not that it’s going to have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything, but on the margin, these things matter and they kind of accumulate. So, here’s what I would do to make life easier for yourselves: don’t decide to change the name. Instead, come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives. Ask yourself, "Am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better?" If something clicks for you, great! But make an honest, concerted effort to come up with those alternatives and options. Then you can still decide, "Yeah, these are better, but they're just marginally better. They're not better enough to go through the headache of trying to change it." That would be my advice.
Shaan Puri
okay that's great sam do you want anything else before we go
Sam Parr
We're going to follow up with some introductions, my man. Do we have an update? Are we reaching out to guests? We gotta use Dharmesh; he knows everyone.
Shaan Puri
Well, I'm curious. Do you know anybody who's awesome? Like, particularly awesome, that you're just like... either kind of underrated or you're just like, you know?
Dharmesh Shah
Number one, I don't know as many people as you think. I'm kind of on the internet because I do things, but I don't leave my house, right? So, like, in order to kind of be that person, you have to sort of interact with carbon-based life forms in real life, right? I don't do that. That's not a thing I do. So, it's hard to kind of build those kinds of relationships. But I would, on your list, I would have... I'm not going to be good at intros, but I think Naval would be awesome to have on the podcast. He's like that kind of biology-level thinker. I think he'd be awesome, and the audience would love him. So that would be great.
Shaan Puri
great we'll take that intro thank you
Dharmesh Shah
yeah he doesn't know me I mean like he knows me like loosely I would I'm not
Sam Parr
sure I'll call you uncle darmes you gotta pick it up man I mean
Dharmesh Shah
Come on, I'm willing to try. Don't get me wrong, I have no qualms about trying to make the intro. Just don't imagine your expectations. It's like, "Well, I thought Dharmesh actually could swing things and make shit happen." I... that's the truth.
Sam Parr
anyone else
Dharmesh Shah
Someone I do know that I think would be good on the podcast is Drew from Dropbox. I know him really well, so that's an intro I could make. What's up, Dropbox?
Sam Parr
yeah that
Dharmesh Shah
would be a good one
Shaan Puri
I heard he's an amazing singer is that true
Dharmesh Shah
He's a good singer and a good founder.
Shaan Puri
amazing for a founder is what I mean
Dharmesh Shah
he's legit he's legit yeah
Sam Parr
So, Dar, Dharmesh... you, Dharmesh, Sean was pretty nervous coming up to this because he was like, "Well, I just like to overprepare and I don't think well on my feet." Or, sorry, you were like, "I prepare and I don't love just making stuff up." I think you did an excellent job! Dan has been texting me saying, "Dharmesh is so awesome." I told you, Dharmesh, I go, "I told you this yesterday. I'm going to predict the future: you're going to come on and then you're going to start wanting to come on like once a month." Maybe I have a feeling that we have just accomplished that and that's going to be true. You're freaking awesome! What's your Twitter handle? It's just Dharmesh, so D-H-A-R-M-E-S-H. You're really active, so if you want to get in touch...
Dharmesh Shah
with you everywhere linkedin twitter facebook pick your thing
Sam Parr
anything you wanna dot
Dharmesh Shah
com dharmesh dot org dharmesh dot net but yeah
Sam Parr
anything you wanna you wanna pimp out or promote
Dharmesh Shah
no I'm not a promoter kind of guy that's not my thing but
Sam Parr
Well, thanks, man! This is awesome. I talked to you a lot. I gotta set up... I want to set up a time to just holler at you because I want to learn more about you. I want to learn about HubSpot.
Shaan Puri
wants to be your first direct report in 15 years
Sam Parr
No, no, no, no. I don't wanna... I don't want that. But yeah, this is great. Heaton was like, "You gotta learn from Dharmesh, just learn what makes HubSpot tick." So thanks, dude. This is awesome. We're gonna have you back on. Did it turn out as good as you thought?
Dharmesh Shah
I love you guys! This was fun. Yeah, and I'd say, more importantly, I hope it ends up being useful for the audience. That's the thing I'm solving for.
Shaan Puri
Honestly, I'm looking at this doc and I feel like we left a lot on the table. We have a lot more that we could do. I'm sort of regretting... You kinda have to... I always feel this way with a guest, by the way. I'm like, "The first 20 minutes were slow," but it's also like I've never met this person and... you know, the audience doesn't know all about this person. So there is a certain context building that has to happen.
Sam Parr
yeah you gotta date
Shaan Puri
I gotta figure out why, with every single guest, I'm like, "Oh, the first 25 minutes were slow, but then it got really good." Yeah, I don't know if that's just my own... I'm just kicking myself for no reason, or if other people feel that way. Maybe we should actually do something different and sort of pull the future forward. Like, just start at that 25-minute mark basically.
Dharmesh Shah
this is fun folks that's great
Sam Parr
alright that's a wrap
Shaan Puri
alright