Dharmesh Shah: evaluation

Transcript context

…ask, I sent an email to the company. It's like, "Hey, everyone. I'm just going to be digging into culture, so I'm going to send this survey out. I just want to get an understanding so I can..." Great. And the negativity and the visceral response to that one email was literally up until that point, it still ranks in top three, worst things I've ever... People felt so negatively and so strongly, and I was not expecting it, right? And I'll tell you, the one line that really just was gut-wrenching was like, "Dharmesh, here we're talking about culture. Next, we're going to have like posters up on the wall about excellence. HubSpot is not the company that I thought I joined." Like oh. It is just like the deep part of me is like I just did not know how overloaded that idea of culture was, right? And so then when you dig into it, it's like, oh, because so many companies had done it so poorly and just didn't walk the walk or whatever, this is why. There was a reason why there was this kind of negative response. So anyway. So I went back to my thing. It's like, "I get it. So I'm going to try to describe what we have, and I'm going to write this truth function." So I wrote the slide deck, which had exactly 16 slides, and that answered this one question, which is, if I could write a Python code, what are the factors, so what are the attributes that we would look for in humans. And the reason I came up with that particular question is that when I did the survey, I did the NPS survey, which everyone knows that you would send to customers. It's like, "Oh, on a field of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend HubSpot as a place to work?" and the other NPS question is like, "Why did you give that answer?" As it turns out, here's the thing that I've learned which was troubling, everyone was happy, and the reason they were happy is because of the other people at HubSpot. That was the number one reason, which is both good and bad. It's like okay, well, that's awesome, but that doesn't tell me anything, right? It's like, okay, well, that's a self-reinforcing kind of recursive loop. And so that's when I was like, "Okay, well, what makes the people at HubSpot the people that are at HubSpot? Let's come up with the attributes that define what it means to be one of these people that makes other people happy." And so we came up with the original set of things that were embodied in that slide deck, and I called that slide deck the Culture Code deck, and the reason I called it the Culture Code deck is not because it was a code of conduct, or a moral code, or, "This is how companies should be run." It was because if I could write code to kind of define the culture of HubSpot, this is what the code would look like. And since that point, it's like the question I keep asking myself is, if we could have an operating system that ran the company, just the geeky part of me, not that you could do that, but what would that look like, right? There are very few original ideas I've had that are any good. ave an operating system that ran the company, just the geeky part of me, not that you could do that, but what would that look like, right? There are very few original ideas I've had that are any good. One of them is this thing that culture is a product, period, and that every company builds two products, one is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team. That's what culture is, it's the product you build for your team. And let's say we stipulate that that just happens to be true. Just humor me for a minute. If you assume that's true, then a bunch of things kind of follow from that postulate, that hypothesis, which is, "Oh, well, just like we would never build a product without talking to customers, we would never build a culture without talking to the customers of the product," which are the people. So we do a repeat of that original NPS survey we've been doing every quarter now forever to figure out what the NPS of that product is, our culture product. The other thing is like, okay, well there's no product person in the history of humankind that would've said, "Oh, I built this product. It's awesome. I'm done. " No one would ever say that, and this is the number one mistake, I think, I'm biased, I think founders make, is that they say, "Oh, we have an awesome culture, and my job is to preserve the culture. " That is not the job because the needs of your customers change, the needs of the employees change, right? The culture exists to help the great people do great things for the company. That's why the culture is there, and the things they need later as the company scales are different. And so just like you would never freeze the lines of code of a product, you would never freeze the lines of code of a culture. Culture should be iterated on just like you iterate on product. And there's so many other things that kind of fall. So just like in a product, you will get feedback from the customers like, "Oh, here are the bugs," and we actually call them bugs. It's like, "Oh, here are the bugs in the culture." At the all-hands meeting, so we have this survey that comes back. Once again, transparency notion. Every single survey response, it's anonymous in terms of who submitted it, we publish it, right? The quant score of the subjective thing, everything, then we will categorize it, and then at the next all-hands meeting, we call them all-minds... Anyway, a little- I love that, all-minds. All-minds. And it's like, "Okay, so here are the things that we heard." Just like we would do for a product meeting, it's like, "Oh, the customers, here's what we're hearing back." It's like, "Here's the bug that you've identified. Here's the ones we're going to fix." And when we're going to fix some, we're going to commit like, "Oh, you said this was broken. Okay, we're going to do something about that." Here are the things that like, "Yeah, I know you don't like it that way, but it works as design," which we do in product all the time, right? And you should have the right to do that. ing about that." Here are the things that like, "Yeah, I know you don't like it that way, but it works as design," which we do in product all the time, right? And you should have the right to do that. It's like, yep, some people are going to disagree, and there may be any number of reasons why we think that needs to stay the way, we're not saying necessarily forever, but as it stands, we are not prioritizing this, we are not fixing that thing that you think needs fixing for whatever reason. So the one lesson here is, very few things I've learned that I think are universally applicable, that one, I think, is right, and just so much greatness and goodness falls out of that, is if you think of the people as customers and if you think of the culture as product, it takes away this kind of abstract nature of working on culture and then takes away this thing that I heard this back in the early commentary from the HubSpot team, is like, oh, well, culture is not something you really build because that seems fake, that seems inauthentic that you just go, it's like, "Oh, we're going to craft this culture." No, we craft in the same way. I'm not saying we're going to impose it, like we're going to do this often in isolation, but we're going to work on it, and it's something you actually do manifest, and it's not just up to the founders.…

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