Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:56:41 · Luca Ferrari
[00:56:41] S0: Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't built a company in San Francisco, so I can't really tell for sure. It does strike me as a place... If you have the coolest, highest potential, best resourced company on the planet, I think that's where you want to build it. You can probably absorb the most talent the fastest there than anywhere else. If you are more of a middling project then it may be harder there than in many other locations. In any case, we chose Italy, Milan. Today we're an international company. We're hiring way more people outside of Italy than in Italy at this point, but including now more and more in The States. I think we'll probably open offices there in the next year. Yes, we started it in Milan, Italy, on purpose. We actually were in Denmark with my co founders where we had completed our engineering studies and launched and then shut down our AI startup. We had two main reasons. One was extremely, you know, commercial and selfish. Basically what you described, we thought Italy 60,000,000 people excellent education, relatively few amazing companies, certainly very few, if any, up and coming tech companies be a win win for us in the town. Like we brought a lot of ambition, we thought an idea that made a lot of sense, a project that we thought was exciting. And so a lot of people would otherwise be relegated to joining a inferior business or moving abroad, but they had their family there, they loved it, there could actually stay and have, you know, everything both an exciting job and stay with their families. And so we thought we'd be able to build a better team basically for the same dollars or you know, or, you know, a an equally good team for cheaper, which I think has proven to be true. And a significant advantage. The other reason was more missionary we I believe that I think my co founders did did too. And we certainly believe so today that the world in general is a better place if knowledge, opportunity, wealth are a little bit better distributed. I think it's totally fine and probably even a good thing that you have one or two hubs like Silicon Valley that are one notch above. I think the world probably needs that to achieve maximum, you know, prosperity.
00:59:01 · Luca Ferrari, Brian Halligan
But I think if the gap becomes immense, and basically everything that matters happens in one or two places, it's a really big problem, including for the people who live in those places in the long run. And so we wanted to do our part, you know, 1% make a 1% change by showing you can build a world beating company, with massive ambitions in in an unlikely place, Italy being one of many clearly, but you know, we are Italian, it was easy, we understood the culture better. So that was it. And we don't regret it. I think it was a good move. You can never AB test life. So I cannot definitively say that we would have done less well had we started in Silicon Valley. But I do suspect that this has been a better choice for us. [00:59:47] S1: My last question. So I interviewed three of the founders, didn't interview, I called three of the founders of companies you acquired. And all three of them said the same thing. They said, you are exceptionally high integrity. I don't hear that a lot about CEOs necessarily. And I don't hear that a lot in preparation for these calls. Are there some principles around that you live by? And what are they? And what can we borrow from you?
01:00:17 · Luca Ferrari
[01:00:17] S0: I don't know that it's, it's up to you to determine whether it's worth borrowing, but it's not a point of experience. It's a moral point. So that morality is very personal. At some point early in my adult life, I decided that I never so I mean, I can be transparent about it. It's not. So I my early early 20s, I cheated on my girlfriend at the time. And, and I was so ashamed. Sometimes I think making a big mistake is a better way of learning than rationalizing how you should conduct yourself. I was so ashamed of myself that I made a promise to myself to never lie, but also never omit something important that people should know, even if it's to my detriment. So I've tried to extend that to all aspects of my life. I suspect that although it's sometimes costly in the short run, it tends to pay off in the long run. I'm very glad you just made my day sharing that feedback. Didn't know you talked to them. But I'm glad you did, and I'm glad they said that over praising my looks or something. Jokes aside, it really matters to me. It's a life mission I set for myself to be that kind of person you can trust is telling you things as they are, at least as I think they are. And yeah, I think it does pay off in the long run when you become known as someone who can be trusted. It's easier to have a good life, you know, make good friends and relationships that lasted matter do you know, do business, know, like people will come to you and say, okay, we're looking to sell. We believe you guys, your word means something. So but it's not a it doesn't come from a place of seeking experience. It's really just a moral point for me. And it's very subjective in that regard.
01:02:18 · Brian Halligan, Luca Ferrari
[01:02:18] S1: I love that. [01:02:19] S0: And we'll [01:02:19] S1: leave it there. Congratulations on building something really special. Good luck to you on your journey to a trillion dollars, my friend. [01:02:26] S0: All the best. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.
01:02:31 · Brian Halligan
[01:02:31] S1: Okay. I thought Luca was really interesting. His company is doing really well and the guy beats to his own drummer. Just to stick on the ending there. I mean, for CEOs, integrity is really an underrated thing. You are what your word is. You've got a reputation probably, but you do one stupid thing and you can kind of have that crash down. So I like that. I like that he's like, I never lie and I never omit important info. And he could have just said that and I'd be like, that's a bunch of BS. But I had three of the companies he acquired kind of say the same thing. It reminds me of my last interview with Ali Goetz from Databricks, where he's like, the worst thing you can be as a CEO is conflict averse. And like, if you're never going to omit important information when talking to someone, you're going have conflict. And so that just sort of reinforces that in my mind. Other things I really thought were unique was like the way he does hiring is really unique along a lot of different levels. I mean, he's very conscious about the top of his funnel and how he brings people in. He's very conscious about his employee brand. This does rhyme with HubSpot. We had a woman named Katie Burke who, she was a marketer actually, that we moved into run HR and she was excellent at it. And she treated it like marketing. Like how do we create a flywheel? How do we pull people in and create a real employee brand? And now she's the COO actually at Harvey. But I think that's really important for scaling companies, create a hiring brand. Getting very good at hiring, think is important. He's got a whole darn data science team looking at hundreds or thousands of signals, trying to find the right candidates. And it sounds like he does lots of interesting things in that process. One of the least interesting things it sounds like he does is the interview itself. I kind of agree with that. When I interview, everyone's good at being interviewed now. And so I discount that a little bit relative to other signals. So I thought that was pretty interesting. I mean, he's pretty obsessive on talent. He said it on this pod. I've heard him say it other times, you just can't drop the bar. And as companies scale, they inevitably do drop the bar. And it sounds like he really hasn't and he's stuck on that.
01:04:45 · Brian Halligan
It causes a lot of suffering and a lot of people working very long hours, but he sticks with that. And he weighed in on the age old battle that I hear from CEOs all the time. Should I hire for experience or slope? And he's at a pretty big scale and he's still like full on slope over experience. I think his management team's probably, other than his founders, all in their 20s and high fives slope, and it's working for him. I'm not saying that's the answer. I think for some people experience matters. He also buys a lot of companies in the, in like the PLG type sales motion where, you know, it's not necessarily enterprise sales or maybe some experience might be useful, but that's where he comes in on that. He talks so much about team, team, team. But then at one point he's like, actually, you can have a mediocre team if your strategy is really good, which I thought hurt my head a little bit. And then he also talked about when he buys a company, is it more his picking or his operating? So operating, you know, he's a really good operator. I think the reality is you have to be really good at all of that stuff. You need to have a really compelling strategy and that's unique relative to your competitors and is compelling to your potential customers. You need to be an amazing operator and you need to have an amazing team. There's not really any shortcut on any of that stuff. Anyway, that's Luca. I thought he was really interesting and smart and I hope you liked it.