Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
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
00:24:28 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski, Anton Osika
[00:24:28] S2: These are like things are out. It's very different than [00:24:31] S1: You don't know. You need to stay nimble that the moment it comes out. That's why the small teams, I think, helps so much as well. Because the moment something comes out, either internally from our research team or from other teams, you know that you have twenty four hours to start integrating that into your product. That's the most important time to really be ahead. [00:24:50] S2: Okay. Speaking of planning, I remember in the early days of HubSpot, before we were CRM, we were a marketing app. And every year I would go to the salesforce.com conference called Dreamforce, and I'd sit in the audience. And our pitch, by the way, at that time was salesforce.com is to sales as HubSpot is to marketing. And we would always think in the back of our head, until salesforce.com wants to become salesforce.com marketing. And so we'd sit in the audience every year, hoping they didn't announce a marketing product. And sure enough, 2012 was their, that was the marketing year. They bought four marketing companies and they really went for it. We ended up pivoting and going to CRM. I would imagine you have a similar feeling when Anthropic's doing a big announcement or OpenAI's having a big announcement. Even HubSpot is like, we don't know. Is OpenAI going to be a platform company like Google was? Or are they going to go build vertical apps? Are you as paranoid as I was? Or are you not that worried? [00:25:48] S0: Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of distribution out of the box, so that's... It would hurt.
00:25:48 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan
[00:25:48] S0: Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of distribution out of the box, so that's... It would hurt. [00:25:56] S2: Or do you sit there like worried when they're doing their announcements? [00:26:00] S0: Are they gonna... Not really, no. Like, I have so many things to think about. I catch up on, like, on the recent announcement, and I'm I'm sure they will announce something. I would imagine that it [00:26:09] S2: will be [00:26:10] S0: It will be inferior. Yes. You've got [00:26:13] S2: a head start. [00:26:14] S0: Yeah. And [00:26:15] S2: that's But you the closest kind of like, I kind of think it would be an obvious thing for them to build. [00:26:18] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Something like, what we're building is this full platform where you're serving most of the product needs for the entire product engineering organization. And that takes lot of iteration steps to get And to the full unless they're like building that out completely in the dark and then launching it, I don't think it's going to be a threat from the first launch. [00:26:42] S2: Okay, I'm very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you paranoid, nervous about what's going on?
00:26:42 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski, Anton Osika
[00:26:42] S2: Okay, I'm very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you paranoid, nervous about what's going on? [00:26:49] S1: Definitely a little, always nervous and watching closely. I mean, have great research teams. So we know that they will be pushing into the voice space. At the same time, given the spread of work that you just mentioned, the corollary is they lack focus and we are fully focused on voice, whether that's creating the research or products for creating voice agent or creating creative workflows, which does take a lot of iterations to actually bring that to the user to make the best experience that they require to solve their problems, solve their integrations. So I do think it's going to become increasingly competitive, especially on the research side, but that's where the product platform, brand, the design, the taste will matter a lot more. Something we speak a little bit with Anton every so often. And that will be the big piece where companies going deep into that space will win. [00:27:42] S2: Okay. Speaking of taste, one thing I really like about both of you is I think you have taste, particularly in your marketing. Like, you guys do some interesting stuff. You are fantastic on Twitter. Fantastic on Twitter. You're one of my favorite follows. How much time are you spending doing it? Do you do it all yourself? You're you're you're out there on stuff. Just talk about your Twitter strategy. [00:28:09] S0: Yeah. Sure. No, sure. Are you, like, did [00:28:11] S2: you tweet just before we got in here? Like, what's the deal?