Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:40:54 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:40:54] S1: Is there a story of that that comes to mind that is interesting and worth getting into? [00:40:58] S0: There was a lot of them. But I remember in 2000, it was the last day of March in 2019, and we had a really bad outage all day. And we never really had one of those, and it was bad. Customers were unhappy, a lot of customers canceled. I had a lot of customers yelling at me. And I remember that company meeting, I cried in front of the whole company, they couldn't believe it happened to us. And I remember using the Next Play slide on that one. Yeah, we made a lot of mistakes at HubSpot, a lot of bad things happen to companies, and most of them are self-inflicted. And a lot of them are the old saw-like, companies are far more likely to die of overeating than indigestion. Usually it was when we were trying to do too much. [00:41:54] S1: I haven't heard that version, I've always heard most companies die have suicide versus homicide. Though indigestion- [00:41:59] S0: That's true too, by the way. [00:42:02] S1: Oh man. Okay, so next Halliganism, "Never waste a good crisis." That's something that people hear, I'm curious just what's the lesson here, and then is there an example of this where you learned this lesson?
00:42:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:42:02] S1: Oh man. Okay, so next Halliganism, "Never waste a good crisis." That's something that people hear, I'm curious just what's the lesson here, and then is there an example of this where you learned this lesson? [00:42:16] S0: I'll just follow on to, most of the good things that happened in HubSpot came out of a crisis because we would take pretty drastic measures to fix it and make sure we didn't do the same thing again. And so, in this particular case, we really rethought how we deployed software, how we thought about making software in a way that was incredibly healthy. And we haven't had a serious outage since. The quality is much better. And kind of an interesting thing with HubSpot is we started as a marketing software company, and we pivoted, had Salesforce came into our market, we pivoted into CRM. And one thing that... If your marketing software goes down, if your workflow, if there's a bug in the workflows or something like that, it's bad, but you survive it, you wait a little bit. If your CRM goes down, particularly on the last day of the quarter, you're really impacting your customer's ability to do business. So, that was a mindset shift that we hadn't quite come to terms with of how important we were to our customers. And so, we made a lot of changes based on that crisis. Usually very good things came out of crises. [00:43:26] S1: So, there's the lesson there, something's going wrong, is it just like over-correct? Use this as a way to- [00:43:31] S0: Yes. We always over-corrected. Yeah, we almost, we purposely swung the pendulum hard the other way.
00:43:31 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:31] S0: Yes. We always over-corrected. Yeah, we almost, we purposely swung the pendulum hard the other way. [00:43:38] S1: Which connects to the first Halliganism of, "If you're eating a shit sandwich, don't nibble." It's almost like go all the way, go even further. [00:43:46] S0: Yes. Make it really obvious to everyone what's going on. [00:43:50] S1: Okay, another Halliganism, "If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it."
00:43:55 · Brian Halligan
[00:43:55] S0: I love this one, it's very true. Let's say, Lenny, you bought a new beautiful plant for your office, and then you went away for a month to Turks and Caicos because your AI agent's doing your podcast, and you asked two of your friends, "Hey, would you mind watering my plant?" And there's one of two outcomes what happens to the plant. The plant would either be over-watered and die, or not watered at all and die. And every CEO in the adults' table has gone through this, and they are religious about the DRI. Everyone talks about DRI in the kids' table, but once it gets to the adults' table, people get deep religion on it. And I think it makes sense. When you're small, and you're in startup mode, everyone's in the room, everyone knows exactly what's going on. So, let's say you're running a pilot project with a big account. You're running that pilot project, everyone's on the same page, the sales person, the service person, developer, everyone's on the same page, and you go out and do it and you execute well. When you get it scale, you've get a sales organization, you've get your [inaudible 00:44:56] deployed engineer organization, you've got your product management organization, you've got some developers working on it. Everyone's kind of separate, no one knows really what's going on in the other departments. And so, let's say you want to really have a good pilot process, you want to rethink it because you're scaling. Everything important happens cross-functionally inside a company at scale, and you need someone powerful to own it. So, let's say it's a sales person, they need the power to tell people in other divisions what to do, even if they don't own it. So, almost every CEO I deal with is like a zealot on the DRI idea, and it doesn't bite you until you get to some sort of scale.
00:45:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:45:34] S1: To be super clear about that advice here, it's one person is responsible for a goal, a metric, some outcome you want, versus it may feel like, okay, we have two people on this, it'll be awesome, they'll work together. [00:45:45] S0: Yes. [00:45:45] S1: Your advice here is that doesn't work? [00:45:47] S0: Communities never work. Yes. [00:45:48] S1: Yeah. [00:45:49] S0: Yes. And DRI is directly responsible individual. [00:45:53] S1: The way I always thought about this is just having someone's ass on the line for something makes them so motivated to get it done, versus spreading the responsibility and the upside and the downside, it just doesn't work. [00:46:06] S0: I totally agree with you. [00:46:08] S1: Awesome. Okay, another Halliganism, I don't know if you put it this way, the way I think about it is this idea of, "There's no such thing as a silver bullet, it just takes a lot of lead bullets to get something done." I think the way you wrote about it is it's always one step forward, two steps back. Talk about your advice there.
00:46:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:46:08] S1: Awesome. Okay, another Halliganism, I don't know if you put it this way, the way I think about it is this idea of, "There's no such thing as a silver bullet, it just takes a lot of lead bullets to get something done." I think the way you wrote about it is it's always one step forward, two steps back. Talk about your advice there. [00:46:24] S0: Yeah, I always thought, incorrectly, that we would have one hire or one investor or one event or one product release that would... I was wrong about this, but it'd be a silver bullet. And the reality inside the HubSpot machine, the way it felt to me, it looks from the outside, over a long time up into the right, and smooth, but inside it was two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. And a lot of times it was a crisis that caused that step back. So, we just didn't have that. The thing about being a founder/CEO is no one, especially when you're in your 20s, there's no one there to rescue you. Your parents aren't going to rescue you, your VC is not going to rescue you, your teacher, your thesis advisor, you're on your own and you got to figure it out. And that hits you when you hit your first crisis, it's on you. You can get some help, but it's on you. [00:47:23] S1: Sometimes they have you in their corner, if they're lucky at Sequoia. Plug, plug. [00:47:27] S0: Yep. I can't solve it oftentimes, I can be the shoulder they cry on, and I can give them advice, but it's still on them.