Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:53:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:53:56] S1: This is hard because people's performance reviews are based on their goals, KPIs, it's always like, here's what I got to drive. Other than putting posters on the wall, and this is our, just HubSpot growth above all is what matters, or our customers, I guess in your case. Is there anything tactically that was useful in helping people prioritize enterprise value? [00:54:14] S0: This was explicitly called out in the form for the employee when you got your review, this was part of it. And so, they get a score of one to, I forget, 10 on that. I would talk about it constantly. And when we first started HubSpot, I ran it a little bit like Jensen runs NVIDIA, where I didn't do one-on-ones, and I gave a lot of good and bad feedback publicly in large management team meetings, and I definitely would go out of my way to criticize people if I felt like they were solving for TV over EV. And people got a sense for that. And then, every quarter we did a really well-produced company meeting, we spent a lot of time on it, and at the end of the company meeting, we gave out, we called them the Champaigner Awards, it was a bottle of Veuve, that my co-founder and I signed. And we'd read something nice about them and give it to them, and usually there was an EV team in that. And so, we did different things to kind of beat that into people's heads. [00:55:11] S1: Amazing. So, here is just celebrate people that focus on this, and also included in their valuation performance reviews. [00:55:19] S0: Yep.
00:55:19 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:55:19] S0: Yep. [00:55:19] S1: Okay. That's a good segue to another Halliganism where you talk about how companies are either customer-centric or investor-centric, and it's really important to know which you are. And you guys actually shifted there. What's your insight there?
00:55:35 · Brian Halligan
[00:55:35] S0: Okay. We were very employee-centric, more than customer-centric in the first several years of HubSpot. So much so that the company was number one on Glassdoor's best place to work, I was the number one CEO on Glassdoor, and as I look back at that, I'm not sure that's a good thing. Wanting to be liked I don't think is a good feature of a CEO, and wanting to be the best place to work probably isn't the right way to go. If you look at Tobi from Shopify, his scores aren't that good, but that company is doing really, really well. And so, we over-indexed on it, and part of the reason we over-indexed on it is my co-founder was really strong in this, and we had an incredibly powerful head of HR, named Katie Burke, and we just worked on it. We spent a lot of time on it. And when we'd have a management team meeting, and let's say it's four hours long, two of the four hours would be on employee stuff. And at some point I was like, why are we spending so much time on employee net promoter scores? Let's say our employee net promoter score was 60, and our customer net promoter score is 25, I was like, we need to take... I would give up 10 points of employee net promoter score to get 10 points of customer net promoter score. And so, over some time we shifted the center of gravity to customers, and we still of course, worried about employees, but the center of gravity from HubSpot moves very much to customers. And we did that in a few ways. Every time we had a management team meeting... We had our management team meetings once a month, not once a week, and we would have a customer panel come on, and that customer panel, I would run the panel, and ask very tricky questions to the customers, and pull out the bad news from that. And then, we still do this, we have a customer panel at our board meetings. Our whole board can ask questions. And my favorite question is, what do you love about HubSpot? And then... And then, what do you hate about HubSpot? And they kind of look at their shoes. And you're like, come on. And it's a great way... So, the employee's voice is here, those company meetings, we have the customers at the company meetings. We changed the comp plan, so the management team got paid not on revenue but on retention and net promoter score. And so we worked very hard and swung the pendulum to customer-centric.
00:57:56 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
But I do think companies have one center of gravity or another. [00:58:00] S1: There's a really interesting thread throughout this conversation of just, when do you want to change how you operate you have to go really far to a whole other... And to almost over-correct to... Yeah, it's a really interesting of just how much work it takes to change culture, to change your norms. [00:58:15] S0: Yes. And the bigger it is, the more obvious you have to make it. And the other thing about being a CEO, Lenny, is you got to say the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. It just doesn't sink into people's heads, you have to just be incredibly repetitive on it before it sinks in. Same thing with marketing, but internally, and that happens. The other weird thing about being a CEO, Lenny, is as it gets bigger... When it's small, everyone's giving you shit, and you're all on the same level. But as it gets bigger, you didn't interview everyone, you have thousands of employees, you don't know everyone, and people put you on a pedestal that you don't deserve. And let's say you're in the hallway, and you're just kind of shooting the shit with a bunch of people, and you're like, ah, it'd be cool if we had a product that did... Somebody inevitably would go home and build that thing, and be like, Brian wants this as a big initiative. So, people really lock in on what you said. And it turns out you have to be very repetitive and you have to be very careful what you say.
00:58:15 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:58:15] S0: Yes. And the bigger it is, the more obvious you have to make it. And the other thing about being a CEO, Lenny, is you got to say the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. It just doesn't sink into people's heads, you have to just be incredibly repetitive on it before it sinks in. Same thing with marketing, but internally, and that happens. The other weird thing about being a CEO, Lenny, is as it gets bigger... When it's small, everyone's giving you shit, and you're all on the same level. But as it gets bigger, you didn't interview everyone, you have thousands of employees, you don't know everyone, and people put you on a pedestal that you don't deserve. And let's say you're in the hallway, and you're just kind of shooting the shit with a bunch of people, and you're like, ah, it'd be cool if we had a product that did... Somebody inevitably would go home and build that thing, and be like, Brian wants this as a big initiative. So, people really lock in on what you said. And it turns out you have to be very repetitive and you have to be very careful what you say. [00:59:12] S1: Dharmesh was on the podcast, your illustrious co-founder, and he developed a whole system to avoid this sort of thing. Flash tags, where it's like, this is just an FYI.
00:59:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:59:12] S1: Dharmesh was on the podcast, your illustrious co-founder, and he developed a whole system to avoid this sort of thing. Flash tags, where it's like, this is just an FYI. [00:59:22] S0: We had a whole system. Because we would say something on an email to the management team, or Slack, and everyone would be like, okay, this is what they want, let's do it. And sometimes it is like, you need to do this, and sometimes it is like, we should talk about doing this, and sometimes it is, this is just kind of an FYI, we're thinking about it. And because it got big, we came up with that rubric of, we needed to tag each email with, do you want me to get this done this week, or is this something we should talk about, or is this something that's just FYI, I'm thinking about? [00:59:51] S1: I love that... One of them is plea. Pleading you to do it. I'm not telling you to do this, I'm just pleading that you do what I ask. Oh man. Okay. This all connects. And by the way, you guys were co-founders for 20 years, you shared something before we started recording. So, Dharmesh famously did not ever want direct reports, he's just like, Brian, I want to start this with you, but I don't want to ever manage anyone. And you were talking about how you had to take on engineering, which didn't make any sense.