Dharmesh Shah: preference

Transcript context

…Wow, what an amazing story. You're definitely getting laughs per minute for me, and I think there's at least one laugh per minute so far in this podcast. That's amazing. And I think this point you just made about your job is not to preserve the culture as a leader, I think that's really profound, because I think most people don't think that. They think their job is, "We need to maintain our culture as we grow." It's all fading away, our culture's changing, but your point is that that's good and that's great. Bringing it back to product, I think this is an important thing. This is the second order lesson learned after you start with the culture is product, is that one of the challenges almost everyone will deal with is that you have these things... And so by the way, just because culture is product does not mean there's not a sense of having what some might label as core values, right? Because we have this in product as well. There are core values that the product believes in, like we believe in our product, that we're going to hold constant through it, right? Like, "Oh, we're building for SMB. Want it to be easy to use." There's constraints that we put on ourselves that are intentional that even though we iterate, we're not going to iterate away from these things, kind of that high conviction bet thing again. But not everything that's part of your product is a core value, right? So not everything that was part of your culture in the early years. So transparency is one that has endured over a long time, right? It's part of our core value, and we preserved it even though it was troublesome through the IPO. I shared that story. And then there are things that we changed that were part of like, oh, we believe this meritocracy thing in a flat organization, but the manifestation of that was a bud with lack of titles, right? And so we changed that. It's like, "Okay, well, there are things..." And here's the other thing. It's a mixed metaphor problem because I haven't been able to come up with a good metaphor yet, but there'll be things that you have that are kind of core... And the way I describe it right now, I'm just going to put it out there, I'm kicking myself for not coming up with a better metaphor, is like federal versus state law. So there are federal laws we have here in the United States that says, "Okay, here are the things, and these are the inalienable rights of all citizens of the United States. These are the things that are core." But then we have state things, right? It's like, "Oh, for this particular state on these particular aspects, they can optimize for their particular state." It's like, "Yes, we understand this is the corollary, but for our state, we're going to do this." So we have something similar at HubSpot. We have a core set of things that are part of the culture, part of the thing that's like, "Okay, here's what we believe," and then there are things that the individual groups, so our head of engineering could come back, it's like, "Yeah, I know our overall, like the founder's leaning is X, but for my particular group, that doesn't really make sense. We're going to do this." So I'll give you an example. So one of the core things from the early years of HubSpot is like we don't care about what hours you work, like from what time to what time. It's like it doesn't matter, like literally does not matter. We didn't track it, we don't care. arly years of HubSpot is like we don't care about what hours you work, like from what time to what time. It's like it doesn't matter, like literally does not matter. We didn't track it, we don't care. But then over time, it's like, "Well, we have a support organization," and that organization, as it turns out, does matter to our customers, right? Like we need to have coverage and things like that. It's like, "Okay, well, that sort of makes sense," right? But then you sort of have to, A, pick your battles, but then fight back. For instance, transparency, there have been times where individual org leader's like, "Okay, Dharmesh, I know you believe in this transparency thing and Brian believes in this transparency thing, but it's inefficient for someone that is a SDR in the sales organization to have access to the high-order financials. It's a waste of time. It's a distraction." That was the argument. It's like, "You may be right, but the binary decision, the fact that we value transparency so much, we're going to..." Yes, maybe it is a distraction, fine. And the other one is like, "Oh, I don't want my team to have it because I just don't..." You know, we were hiring so fast and it's like, once again, that's a lot of trust to put into people or whatever. It's like yeah, but then one of the other lessons is cultures over time become self-fulfilling prophecies. So in the early setup, big lesson learned. So when I put the first version, the public-facing version of the Culture Code out there, and I got feedback from the team and like, "Dharmesh, you say this in the Culture Code deck, and it's just not true." It was not true enough for us to kind of state that as a thing. And so the thing that I did is in the deck, I have what I call these little liner notes. It's like stuff going on. It's like, "Oh, this is not really true yet, so it's more of an aspiration. This is how we want it to be, but we're not walking the walk yet on this thing." So I didn't take it out because I wanted it to be an aspiration, and here's the thing that I had not thought it through. I cannot take credit for it. What happened over the fullness of time is that those things that were aspirations became increasingly true by virtue of being in the deck because as people join, it's like, "Oh, that's something we aspire to, so I'm going to pretend that's actually the culture of HubSpot," which is exactly what we want. So it's okay to say things that are aspirational. Just call them out. Don't present things that are not true, but they'll back off of the things that you would like to be true.…

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