Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:17:36 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:17:36] S0: Yeah. So I built out this this leadership team, which is like seven people with my [00:17:41] S2: coffin. Okay. So you have seven direct reports? [00:17:43] S0: Yeah. So with without me and my coffin, it's five direct reports. Yeah. And officially everyone else reports something into them. Yeah. And do you [00:17:52] S2: feel like you got that right or over time it's going get much bigger [00:17:55] S0: or where you at? Like [00:17:57] S2: I think if Jensen Huang has 45 direct reports and You did [00:18:00] S1: a lot too, no? [00:18:01] S2: No, didn't. I had like 10. No. Yeah. And it's amazing to me that they get people with 45 or 50 and people with three. There's such a range. Anyway, was the five intentional or it just kind of happened? [00:18:15] S0: It was intentional, very intentional, to add more a structure. And then I think generally, like if you say, okay, let's try to have a lot of structure and then it's easier to add more like chaotic things on top of that. Yeah. And see how that works. [00:18:30] S2: Okay, so you're hiring, we kind of worked together on that head of sales search. How are you thinking about these senior searches? How are you deciding? You know, you never run the sales org. It's a hard it's a hard thing. Like, lots of people are in your shoes. Like, how are you making those calls? [00:18:47] S0: Yeah. So with the head of sales, I worked I worked closely with Jenny Adixael, who had done this before many times. [00:18:54] S2: Okay. Dani Hirsberg from Spain.
00:18:54 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika, Mati Staniszewski
[00:18:54] S2: Okay. Dani Hirsberg from Spain. [00:18:56] S0: Yes. Jenny Adexel, exactly. And they coached you. They got got to give me a lot of impact input on it. And I mean, in the end, it was me spending a lot of time with these candidates and then spending time with the team and presenting how they would do things. And that felt like that gave a lot of instilled a lot of confidence. Okay. [00:19:19] S2: So you had a bunch of help. [00:19:21] S0: Yeah. I spoke to many people. [00:19:23] S2: And how about on your side, same thing. You hadn't run a sale... You haven't... None of us have done what we did, but you hadn't run a sales award. You had to make a decision on the sales leader. You had a lot of qualified candidates. How did you go about it? [00:19:35] S1: Yeah. It's it's a tricky one. And especially, I think, for sales, the salespeople know how to sell themselves. [00:19:40] S2: They
00:19:40 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:19:40] S1: need Very to reliable. Be So you're going need to filter through, do they actually know how to sell, but they are all good at it. So we are in a good setup where one of the salespeople was our investor. We've seen him actually help us advise before he became a salesperson. So when we started the company, we started getting enterprise inbound. We realized, okay, we can start something very quickly. And he already has spent so much time with us. Then it became natural. We want to bring that person in. And then as we've hired other roles, we have of course amazing investors across like Sequoia and Andreessen team who are helping us on that hunt. So we would partner very closely with the domain experts to help us through the network, the back references to make sure that they are right ones. I think the back references really helps across that beyond the spending time with the team, I think is crucial. And then the other part, I haven't realized until later, that for sales specifically, is that you are hiring, of course, a great individual for creating the sales playbook, helping you sell into the enterprises. But then ultimately, the person you hire, they will set the culture for the sales team too. Like a lot of the people they will hire will be so similar in their approach to that work which I didn't appreciate until after the fact. So, I was happy that the culture was very aligned, but then you can see they are very much similar. And we have Europe and US sales team. They're slightly different. Europe is a lot more confident, a little bit like a lot of European versus US are bringing. So a lot more confident than our European counterparts that take more of like partner sales approach. But they have core similar values, helps.
00:21:24 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:21:24] S2: Okay. One of the things that confuses me about life today as a CEO is like from HubSpot, from let's call it, we went public in 2012 until I stepped down 2020. We had an annual planning cycle and the world just didn't change a whole lot every year. How the hell do you guys plan with the changes going on underneath? Like, what's your cycle? How do you do it? [00:21:47] S0: We've done very little planning. [00:21:50] S2: Okay. [00:21:51] S0: And I think that's pretty smart because you can like, everything is changing very rapidly on... As as at least for our... I mean, our b to b offerings, like enterprises are huge ones are using our products to a huge extent. We are just like giving... Trying to give them the time they can get, like, much time as you can get, and not being like, okay, this is our ICP. This is exactly the sales process, at least so far. Mhmm. But there's like tens of thousands of people in a hackathon, that's how many of the world's largest healthcare companies are using us. And we will, I think, start taking a step back and being, okay, where are we seeing, like from much better data analytics as well, where are we going to focus? [00:22:43] S2: Okay. And let me push back a little bit. You just had a big release that looks amazing. You must have planned for that. You just didn't pull that out of hackathon last week. Yeah. [00:22:52] S0: So on the product side, I mean, we we we do have a launch roadmap, and like it goes out six now, it goes out like six months. And it's just that I I'm sure it's going to change.
00:22:52 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:22:52] S0: So on the product side, I mean, we we we do have a launch roadmap, and like it goes out six now, it goes out like six months. And it's just that I I'm sure it's going to change. [00:23:03] S2: Okay. So there's a there's a lightweight six month product roadmap. [00:23:07] S1: Yeah. [00:23:07] S2: Okay, got it. And it's pretty flexible, like within that six months deep pivot? [00:23:11] S0: Yeah, I do now at this size of the company. We are of course going into longer time horizons. Yeah, yeah, [00:23:20] S2: I think it's just hard to plan more than six months right now with all the underlying platform changes. I can't, yeah, it's an interesting time to be a CEO. How about over at ElevenLabs? Like what's the cycle?
00:23:20 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:23:20] S2: I think it's just hard to plan more than six months right now with all the underlying platform changes. I can't, yeah, it's an interesting time to be a CEO. How about over at ElevenLabs? Like what's the cycle? [00:23:31] S1: The cycle, so we do, So the teams have a pretty high flexibility in how they operate week to week so they can kind of take different directions. But on a quarterly basis, we'll get the teams together. They'll spend up to a day effectively outlining what are the initiatives they want to run for the next quarter. And then it's even less for the team itself. Sometimes it helps formalize all the ideas, but it's more valuable for the teams around so they know what to expect so they can learn from that process. And we just came back from an off-site with the entire team where we are looking at where we would like to be as a company in 2026 and in The the next few thing that's probably the hardest is research. We do also the foundational part for voice and have a lot of research teams that crank up some of the best models out there. And that's of course so hard to predict. So here we don't give any timelines. We do research initiatives we want to plan. So that's the one that goes out of the cycle. [00:24:28] S2: These are like things are out. It's very different than