Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:57:45 · Brian Halligan
[00:57:45] S1: Okay, hope you liked that episode with Chase. He is a very legit CEO scaling that business really well. I'll give you a couple of my takeaways. My first takeaway is kind of on him as a homo sapien. He's a person who really likes hard challenges. And, like, when I recruit and I fund CEOs, that's definitely a quality that I look for. I liked how we talked about just how much the CEO job changed. He had never done anything like that before. He's eight years into the journey. And, man, he's a learning machine. He read a lot about it. He hired a coach. It sounds like his coach was really useful. And I coach a bunch of Sequoia CEOs, and, you know, some of it is giving them advice, but a lot of it is gaining context and listening to the problems and empathizing and really kinda being like a therapist. So he benefited a lot from that. The other thing he worked hard on, sounds like his public speaking, he's very smooth, like, really articulate and smooth. And sounds like that wasn't his default setting. He's had to really work at that, and I think that's important. Like, if if you're up in front of your company, you're up in front front of investors, I don't think it hurts to be articulate and smooth. I like the way he talked about competition. He said something we used to say at HubSpot all the time, you're much more likely to die of suicide than murder. It was very much our case. It sounds to me he's really into competition, and I think a lot of founders frown on that. We had major competition over many, many years with Salesforce dot com, so I wouldn't shy away from that. The other thing I always did is I always got to know our competitors just because you never know. And so don't don't be afraid to reach out your... To your competitors and have coffee. The last thing I took that I really liked is as the organization gets bigger, and I felt this at HubSpot, everyone wants to give you good news. You're the CEO, and they expect you wanna hear good news. And you really want the opposite. You want to hear the bad news and you want to train the organization to give you that bad news so almost encouraging people when they push back at you and when they give you bad news inside of a, you know, a pretty good sized setting. I think that's a really important quality in CEOs.
01:00:03 · Brian Halligan
The other thing that I think is an important CEO quality that I think he does and you might too, but he has very strong opinions as you've heard. But if the facts change, he's willing to change his mind. And being stubborn is a really tough quality in a CEO. It makes you quite hard to follow. Anyway, those are some of my takeaways. I thought he was great. He's an amazing business. He's an amazing CEO. I hope you liked it, I'll see you next time on Long Strange Trip.