Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…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. Wow. There's so many lessons there. It reminds me of Airbnb, actually. I was there when they created the original, there's these six core values of Airbnb. One of them was simplify, it turns out. And then, I don't know, some number of years later, the founders realized, "We're not actually good at this," and values should reflect who you are not aspire to be, and I like this middle ground you found of like, "I'm going to put in here, but I'll note this isn't necessarily who we are. " We didn't do that. That would've been a smart move. So they removed that core value. They're like, "We're not actually this," and going from six to four. There's another one they removed. So I was really impressed because we're like, "Okay, wait." Because it comes up in meetings. They're like, "Simplify. No, this is actually really complicated." Okay, so what I'm going to do, I have one more question about AI, and to make this work timing-wise, I'm going to cut the lightning round, so hope that's okay. Totally fine. Okay. I know AI is very top of mind for you. By the way, this is my diabolical plan to have to skip the lightning round because that's the thing I'm not good at, like I'm not [inaudible 01:31:05]. Anyway, you know I was dreading the most.…

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