Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
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.