My First Million: #197 with Dharmesh Shah - Frameworks for Becoming a Billionaire (From a Billionaire's Perspective)

Here's what I'm saying, here's what I even have a seven figure domain name picked out for you.

I will write the five million dollar check for you to go do it as far as a seed round

or up to five million if you want to let other people in. That's amazing.

This just got spicy. Okay. Oh my god. What's the domain name they have? I am dead serious.

All right. We just got done like 30 seconds ago talking to the guy who we're going to introduce

you to now. That was amazing. He's amazing. That guy's, Darmash is amazing. He's very cool.

So we have Darmash. I don't even know what is Darmash's last name? Darmash Shah?

I think Shah. I just know him as Darmash. He's the co-founder of

He's like Beyonce. You know, they just go with the one name at a certain point.

Ronaldo, Beyonce, Darmash. That's it. So Darmash is the co-founder of HubSpot.

He's the largest shareholder. I mean, we got pretty like into it right away. We're like,

tell us what's it like to be a billionaire. So I just googled your net worth and it appears

you're worth a billion dollars. Yeah. So how does that feel? And he's like,

no, I told him I was going to talk to him about that. So we talked to him about just like wealth,

which was let's rattle off some of the dope things he's done. So started HubSpot. HubSpot's

like a whatever, $25 billion company or something like that. But he's done some other cool things.

Early investor in coin base, Dropbox and loads of different stuff. Right. And then also just has

kind of like, he's like us. He's got that itch, that entrepreneurial itch. So he like, we talk

a little bit about, he's got like 20 domain names, some domain names that are worth like,

you know, millions of dollars and others that are, you know, just simple ideas.

Everybody has an idea. By the way, hundreds of domain names.

Right. But he's like, got ideas loaded into them like, ah, here's what you might do with this idea.

And then here's a good domain name for it. And so I think he's, you know, he's sort of like,

he's one of our people in that sense. Like he's an idea person, he's a frameworks person. So he

shared some frameworks. He shared a bunch of ideas, two, two really big ideas. One idea on air,

he goes, Sean, if you want to start this, I'll fund you right now for $5 million.

Yeah. Maybe an offer I pretty much couldn't refuse. I just had to sort of, you know,

you know, squeeze my thighs and sit still here. So, you know, but I thought it was exciting.

I thought the actual ideas were really great. So I think people are going to like that. We

talk a little bit about the, we talk a little bit about wealth. We talk a little bit about kind

of like early days, you know, HubSpot and the hustle acquisition. And then we talk a bunch

about ideas. And then we, some of those ideas are about like a new different type of LinkedIn

or remote community. We talked about, oh, he talked about his framework for evaluating if

an idea is good or not, if you should pursue it. That was actually incredibly educational. It was

awesome, dude. It was great. So we'll get to the episode. Can you guys do me a favor though?

Click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify. That would mean a lot.

Do we have to tell them anything else? Well, there's a thing going around where if you just

post on your social networks and you're just like, hey, you know, PSA to whoever needs this,

this podcast, you know, makes my commutes amazing. This is the best business podcast.

Hands down, you know, good karma comes to you in your next life. So that's just something,

if you're interested in having a good next life, I would just do that.

Yeah. And I'll reshare that for sure. I mean, because it impacts my ego and I share all,

I share all compliments. So go ahead and do that. Make sure you share the iTunes or Spotify link

with it. Thank you very much. Here's the thing about me. I like compliments. All right. Yeah.

All right. Enjoy this episode. All right. Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're

interested in right now. HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Byte.

Every week, the host relived the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell. And they break down why these pitches were winners

or losers. And each company's go to market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically, all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own. If you want to give it a listen, you can find another byte on whatever

podcast app you listen to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now. All right.

Back to the show. I don't remember what I was going to say, but right before you came on,

I was asking Darmash what he listens to and he says that he listens to us almost every day for

the past 60 days. Amazing. Has that changed you? Have you probably become a worse person?

You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days,

there's going to be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets like corrupted slightly.

You know, it's, I think that's true. That's an astute observation. It's, you know, we've just

have, I won't say like completely divergent pasts. I'm just a, yeah, it's been good though. I'm a

believer in, and like just kind of orthogonal things. That's like, oh, this is not stuff I'm like,

you know, looking at retail businesses or like, you guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think

that kind of thing like builds a different muscle group. And I think it's been, it's been useful

for me. I'll put it to you that way. It's, I think we're not separated birth by any stretch.

We have things that we have in common, but there are things that I'm just different. It'll come

out in the pods. We're on now. So this is the pod, but we, yeah, this might, I have a feeling

this might go a little long and I'm okay with that. Sean, do what you want. But we, I like,

in my world, so I was just hanging out with heat and shy yesterday and your name came up.

We were just talking to Nathan Barry the other day. Your name came up. Sean and I are in this

techs group where people talk about BitCloud. Your name comes up. Your name comes up everywhere.

Like you're, you've got, you're like a little, like you got like a spider web. Like you get your

hands and all these little things. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a

while and you're incredibly successful. But do you, so this is Darmash. Darmash is the,

you're the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO? Yes. Do you, are you active? Like,

are you working really hard at HubSpot? Like, how do you have time to have your hands and all

this different stuff? So the answer is yes. HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation.

Anything else that you see me doing, there's probably some diabolical thread that connects

it back to HubSpot. There is, right? So yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that I spend

pretty much all of my kind of non-family time, non-personal time on. So it's my,

and I just want to describe for people who are not watching. So you should go to the YouTube

channel. It's youtube.com slash I think hustle con and you'll see the videos. But so here's what I

see. So Darmash is sitting there. He's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard to his right.

And he's got a, I think a Steve Jobs piece of art behind him or is that Lenin or something

like that? I can't tell exactly who it is, John Lenin, maybe. And you're in this room. So just

describe, is this where you work on a day-to-day basis? So this is, well, yes and no. So that's

your, you're getting tricked, Sean. You're getting tricked. Listen, this is my living room. But it's

a, like a capture a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually

would be. But it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up so I can.

Oh, okay. That's pretty good. Cause usually when you have a green screen, it's like half your head

also turns into like the background. And this one's actually pretty good. I'm impressed. I've

done like a multiple green screen. So I'm sort of surrounded with it. So if I need to twist the

camera one way or the other. So you're kind of doing the oasis thing that we talked about. You

basically, you have a virtual background, but the virtual background is not just you on a beach,

like a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's like clean and perfect the way you

want it or whatever. And you're like, that's what I want my background to be regardless of the reality

of the current, whatever your current situation is. I like that. Really cool is that the keyboard

itself is actually real. That's not part of the background. So you'll see. So let me,

um, let me do like a very brief intro and like an overview of what we're going to talk about. So

Dermash sent us like a list of ideas. We're going to get into them, but I need to give a background

here. So the listeners entirely understand. So HubSpot today is like a 25 or 30. I don't know

whatever the market cap is. So $25 billion publicly traded company. You co-founded it

15 years ago, I think. Prior to that, you had another startup that you sold for a significant

amount of money. We can talk about that throughout this whole time you own, I believe millions

of millions of dollars worth of domains. Like you, um, you bought your wife like as a gift

humanism.com, which we got to talk about. That's pretty funny. You've, um, you're an angel investor

in a lot of different startups, including coinbase and things like that. You've got your hands and

all these different things. Like you, according to wallmind or wallstreetmind.com, you're worth

today $850 billion million. Uh, so like you, you do a little bit of everything in the world of

business is incredibly fascinating. And so I wanted to talk today, talk about, you might be, well,

you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm going to ask you questions

about that. Um, I don't know. It's fine. We're going to, we're going to ask you questions. It doesn't

really matter. That's the one thing I've learned. We can talk about that too. Well, that's, that's

okay if it doesn't matter. We're going to talk about it. We're also going to talk about, um, your

ideas. Uh, we're going to talk about building HubSpot. We're going to tell them about why you

invest in what you invest. And we're going to talk about, um, uh, do you ever invest in non-startup

stuff? We're going to invest about, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. Sean, what do you

think? Well, I would have asked them. Okay. So here's my question. My question is actually not

about, uh, Dharmesh. It's actually about, uh, Sam. So, uh, so you, so I've always wondered this.

So you acquired the hustle and I hope you could be as, uh, as transparent as you want here. I

think Sam will, will not care. Um, so I would say DNA wise, the hustle is kind of a unique company.

Sam's a pretty unique, uh, dude that you kind of brought into your company, different DNA probably

than the vast majority of employees there. Uh, give me kind of like, you're part of the deal too,

Sean. So you're in the book. You don't have to deal with me on a day to day basis. So, so

we're doing that deal and bringing these guys in. I guess like, I don't know, are there any

interesting observations, any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post that

had to do with, you know, Sam and the hustle? I'm just curious, kind of like, what's your view on

that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on. Yeah. And we haven't,

HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them, uh,

pretty much most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think as you,

as you observed is, um, the DNA of the hustle is different, uh, than HubSpot. And, um, and that's

both a good thing and a bad thing. So the thing that I was worried about is, um, and I, until now,

I don't think Sam and I have actually, I ever had a one-on-one chat. So this is my therapy session

for you. Yeah, this is my therapy for two people, Sean. God, Mesh and I talk a lot on Slack. We're

like buddies on Slack. But the thing I was worried about is that, um, you know, so Sam is a kind

of, what I would think of as a kind of type A personality, um, just like he's out there, he's

hustling, that's the name of the company, um, which is fine, but it's just not, uh, most of the

makeup of HubSpot is not that. We're a very, we're a, I don't know what the right, it's kind of

overly stereotype us, but we're not typing. We're like a kinder, gentler, humble, just quieter

kind of company. Um, so that's the one thing. Oh, here, let me explain it this way. So Sam would

be described as brash. I don't think anybody would ever describe HubSpot as brash. Well, today,

Kieran, the guy I work with, technically my boss, he was like, uh, you should probably hire someone

outside of HubSpot for this role for your growth. And I was like, well, why? He goes, I think you're

too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot. It's like that. That's an example. I think that was

a good advice, but, um, but it's worked out, it's worked out well. So there have been, um,

like the one kind of minor story I can recall, there was a, like a Twitter back and forth that

I think Sam had with, uh, Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this, Sam, that there was

something that was said about VCs or investment or something. Um, and Rand's been a good friend,

it's like, and, uh, but I'm like, oh, okay, well, it's fine. I'm like, okay, you know,

this is like, and not like either party was right, wrong or indifferent, but I know them,

you know, at least now a little bit, uh, both, but anyway, so it's, but it's been fine.

In my defense, I hope, and even our podcast offense, our goal is we will disagree with

people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of like disrespect or trying to like hurt

your feelings. But I will say I do put entertainment first sometimes. So sometimes I will poke the

bear for the entertainment value of it when, you know, the kinder, nicer, simpler thing to do

would be to do, to do nothing or just back away. Uh, so, so I do like to have fun either on Twitter

HubSpot too much, but the one thing I will say, this was as far as the deal itself,

it was one of the better things HubSpot has done. Um, in terms of like the strategy behind it, I

think, um, is strong in terms of like it gets HubSpot into a thing, which is where I think the

future of kind of SaaS companies has is going to be heading, which is more and more that we're

going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audience versus from other

people and recent horrors. And there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline,

but I'm a believer in companies kind of controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus

constantly just buying from buying audiences and renting them from someone else. See, this is where

you should just say, just drop a one line, be like, you know, and we got it at a fantastic price

just to drive Sam crazy for the next seven years. Just leave him constantly. No, look, look, I think

there, yeah, could we have sold for more? Definitely maybe. Like that always is a maybe, right? Um,

I think that when we sold HubSpot, I felt was undervalued. Uh, I think when, I think the day

the deal closed was, or maybe like, what was the stock in January? Was it like, it was worth like

$350 or was it even less $250? I don't remember. Today it's, today it's 600 bucks. So like our

guess, my guess was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. Um, and also I wanted to create a

reputation of someone who was like a fair deal maker. And like, like, I think people will know

that, uh, like if I built something, I sold it, the all, all parties got a good deal. And so,

okay, all right, sounds good. We can switch off the HubSpot acquisition. So let's do some ideas.

No, wait, I want to talk about one thing really quick. Can we, let's talk about money stuff.

Okay. Cause I told Darmesh I was going to ask him this. So first of all, is it weird that I know

what your net worth is today because it's like public information? Um, it's not weird for me,

honestly. Like I'm a, um, I'm generally like transparent. I believe in kind of the openness,

um, of the web. It's, um, and I'm a, in a sense, it's a publicly traded company. Like that's,

you know, what I want my bank accounts and all my accounts kind of published on the web. No,

but the fact that I'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in

the form of shares, which you can take the number of shares, which is on the public record and

multiplied by the current price and get, which is probably roughly 85, 90% of my overall net

worth. Cause that's where all my money is, um, is in HubSpot shares. Um, I don't find that weird.

Uh, it's, yeah.

Has your life changed as this, as this has like accumulated and things got different or has

it basically, so you, you had another company before this, how much did you sell that for?

Uh, 10 or 15 in that range based on how you count it.

And has your life changed since that moment significantly? Cause that's a, that's a significant

number in itself, right?

Yeah. So here, here's the thing. It's, um, and I'd like to say, you know, I, you know,

I wasn't focused on money or I'm not focused on at the time when I was younger, I was very,

very focused on money and I had very kind of modest upbringing and I was like, okay, well,

it wasn't like the money and the accumulation of it. It was the freedom. You know, ever since

I was little, I, I always want to kind of configure the universe to my liking, so to speak, because

I have got my quirks, so like these are things, the way I like to do things. Um, and having to

kind of work in a normal kind of classic job doesn't give you a whole lot of control over

your, you're a part of the universe. You don't get to control who you work with all that much

or who you hire. You don't have a lot of degrees of freedom. Um, so it had been thinking back

and then I had, you know, I kind of thought about money. Um, and like the first, I'll say

five million or so, um, has a dramatic impact, had a dramatic impact on my life, right? Because

that buys you an inordinate amount of freedom, right? You don't have to work again. Um, you can

invest in things you can do pretty as long as you're not out, you know, buying small islands

and overtaking countries. I mean, that's a decent amount of money for folks, right? Um, and then

after that, and there are other kind of, I don't know exactly what the demarcations are, where

you know, more money adds on a marginal basis, a little bit more freedom. You can do more things,

um, but, you know, like the kinds of things I do, like I enjoy food and restaurants, there's only

so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being, even if you'd like to find your

things. It's like, okay, well, unless you're trying to make a statement and spend a hundred times

with the average of a whatever X is, it's kind of hard to spend money really well, even if you have

kind of high end taste, honestly. The most common thing I've heard, I don't know if you would agree

or disagree, is like, there's these levels. So it's like first, um, in-depth, in, when you're in

debt to no debt, that's like the first jump where, oh, freedom, got this weight off my shoulders.

Then there's kind of like, you know, um, uh, what I'll call this, there's zero to one million

where it's like, oh my God, you know, mentally, I'm a millionaire. That's kind of just like a

mentally freeing concept and interesting concept. That's why we named the pod, what we did. Uh,

but also, you know, that'll, that'll forge you a certain type of lifestyle. And then the next

jump I've heard is like at 10 or 10 or 10 ish, where it's sort of like, okay, at 10 ish, you sort of,

um, you don't have to work like at a million, you still got to work at 10. You don't have to work.

You can kind of like have a couple of places to live. You could do whatever you want. You don't

really need to check the prices when you go do things. And then there's sort of like,

like a hundred or more, which is sort of like, you know, the ego gets involved. It's like, okay,

now I'm keeping score against, you know, in the, in the business Olympics against, against these

other folks. And also, you know, I could do some like, you know, like I can, I can, I can buy an

island. I can buy a piece of an NBA team. I can, I can go do these different things that are like

kind of like bucket list. And, and the joy, what I've heard is sort of like, you know, for most

people is sort of like the joy actually like de-escalates from the, from the beginning there,

like getting out of debt is sort of like the most relief, most joy. And then sort of like,

it starts to diminish sort of step by step as you go. Like the 10 to 100 feels a lot less impactful

and less sort of changes your joy and your mood than like going from zero to 10.

Yep. Just two friends I want to pull on as long as we're talking about money. So one is one thing

that's kind of helped me reconcile it in terms of, you know, having to be in the, in the net worth

now is, you know, the plan, my wife and I have talked about this, the plan is to donate 90 plus

percent of it, right? Like we have one child, we're not going to spoil him. So it's not like

we're trying to build a multi-generational dynasty. That is not the goal. And so then like,

you know, if I make a really good return on a startup or something like that, it's like, okay,

well, I'm discount 90% for my wife's foundation. That's essentially what it comes down to,

right? So most 90% of whatever it is, I mean, I don't, I think it'll end up being higher because

I just don't think we're capable of actually spending the spending the money. But yeah,

so that makes me feel better. But just kind of taking it back to the early days, one kind of

lesson I learned early, early on, and this is useful, beginning part of my career is the kind

of the relationship between time and money. And one thing is that we spend the better part of kind

of first half of our lives converting time into money, right? And you're looking for the hours,

you're looking for, yeah, you want to get that, you know, rate up as you can. And then the latter

half of you're desperately trying to buy time back with the money however best you can, right?

So that's, and it varies a little bit as to kind of when that kind of turn happens. But the thing

that I kind of learned, this was, I thought about it probably a few years after that. So I was making

$3.65 cents in my first job when I came over as an immigrant. And I worked all the way through

school to me, seven degrees to get my four, seven years to get my four year degree, I was working

full time the whole way through. And that wasn't a lot of money. And as it turns out, I had to do

pretty much as nothing was delegatable. But then once I got to the point where I was making $10,

$20, $50 an hour, it's like, okay, well now, and like all my time, I can make as much billable as I

want to as much as I'm humanly possible willing to work. There was someone willing to pay me for

that time, I was an engineer, that's how things work back then it was. And the pivotal point for

me is I got this in my early 20s, I got this bump to like $125 an hour is working as an engineer.

And that was an ungodly amount of money. I was in Birmingham, Alabama, this is the 90s. That was

like real money, right? And I was working a lot. So I was making a fair amount. So then I made the

decision that if there's anything I've been doing with my time, that could be done by spending less

than $125 an hour, I'm being an idiot by actually doing it, right? If I enjoy it, that's a different

story. But if I'm not, it's just stupid. And so I've carried that kind of idea. It's like, okay,

so what value would I place on my time? What is occupying my time that I can kind of delegate?

Or even if I'm paying a premium, it's like, okay, I could pay $75 an hour just for someone to pay,

to mow my lawn. Yeah, I hate it. But it's still profitable, right? Like, why would you do that?

It's like, I would do that every day of the week. So the one thing that's changed for me,

so now like I went back and did the math, because I knew I was going to be on this podcast,

need like, you folks like numbers. So if I, let's say I worked on average 60 hours a week,

and I've done that for about 30 years, give or take. It's my kind of professional career.

My average hourly rate across the 30 years would be like $10,000 an hour, right? And now it's

back loaded, effectively by hourly rate. And so now it's like, okay, well, if there's anything,

and I would actually pay a premium right now, right, above that, right? So I would not spend

my time even an hour on anything that wasn't worth at least that. It's like, okay, well,

like the future of me would buy it for $50, $100,000 if there was some option value on that time.

Anyway, the short message is most people don't value their time enough and don't think about it

objectively enough. And it like anything else is a resource, but it's finite, but put a number on it.

And then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not worth that?

Right. And so, Naval has this phrase in his like kind of how to get rich podcast or whatever,

how to get rich without getting lucky. He says, he gets, you know, put it up, put a,

I don't know what he calls it, like an outrageously outrageous hourly rate for yourself.

Like a super ambitious rate.

A super ambitious one, one that's way beyond wherever you're at. He's like,

ever since I was young, this was like one of the smart things I did. I just said,

$5,000 an hour, some like really aspirational hourly rate. He's like, if my friends used to

laugh and joke like, dude, you bought this blender, you're not even using it, go return it.

And he's like, no, I'm not going to go return it. I don't, I don't enjoy it. And it's going to get

me back $30 for the hour round trip, you know, going and bringing this thing at Target. So like,

I will throw it away. I'll give it away. What I will not do is I will not give my time back into

that because the hourly rate just doesn't make sense. I love that. I love that. I've done a

similar thing. And it's kind of funny to like pick that hourly mark because it sounds crazy. Like,

my mom will get mad at me. She'll come to my house and then she'll see the way I'm living. And

she's like, Oh my God, like this, this bill is late. They're going to, there's a $75 fee if you

don't do it. And I'm like, I'm not calling them and they can charge me the $75 fee. They could

charge it to me 10 times. Like, I'm not going to use this hour. Like, and I'll tell her like,

look, literally my hourly rate is X, right? It's X thousands of dollars. So, so are you,

that's my hourly rate. So I'm not going to trade that hour to go do this thing. I don't enjoy

because her other argument is, well, you go watch TV and I'm like, well, that I enjoy. So that,

that I'm actually spending the money. But Sam, I know you're a little bit different.

Like when I went to go visit Sam in Austin, he had like CVS receipts that he had been saving in

his like glove compartment of his super fancy car. Like he's a dichotomy, right? He's got,

he's got somebody who likes to spend some things, but he's also enjoys being cruel.

It's like, yeah, that makes me feel good about myself. Like, I guess the question I had for you

is, do you also have an hourly rate? Do you think about that or you don't do that, that framework?

Sam, this is for you. Oh, for me? Yeah, I have that framework. Yeah. So like,

yeah, I mean, it makes me feel good not to waste stuff. Like I feel good about myself and I feel

guilty if I waste it. So I feel, I feel happy when I do that. And I feel it's hard for me to go to

bed at night if I, if I waste something or I don't return it. Yeah, I have that hour. I mean,

I mean, I have that rate. Like I just assume that I'm going to make, I assume that I'm going to make

$3 million a year. So whatever that hourly rate is, but I think I'm going to make $3 million a year

and anything that like will make less than that, I don't want to do it. But that said,

like mowing the lawn, I get joy from that. So I have no problem. I don't like put a money thing

on anything. But like, if someone's like, Hey, will you, in fact, Sean, someone asked us to fly

to London to come speak at some event or something. And I, I'll forward it to you. But they're like,

yeah, it's October. And I'm like, I don't want to go there. I'm like, how much money would they

have to pay me to go and do this? I'm like, they have to pay me a lot. Like, right. Cause you also

hate flying. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't, that just, that just is a paper. They don't have to pay me

$100,000 to do that. And like, that does not make any sense. But I just hate, I just hate it.

And so Dermash, a couple more rich guy questions. And we like these because honestly,

you never get to ask these, even if we were just hanging out personally, I could never ask you

this. But for some reason with the podcast, it's like sort of okay for me to just like ask you

random math questions like this. And I told them when he wanted to come on, or I asked him to

come on, I go, I'm going to ask you this stuff. And we gave him an easy out. I said, if you don't

want to answer anything, just say you don't want to answer it. Right. And I'm sort of projecting

here where, you know, I guess like, I think I put myself in your shoes. What if I had more money

than I could ever spend? What would I do? And so my question to you is, what, whether you did it

or didn't, or you just considered it, what's a sort of outlandish use of funds that you've

either considered or done? Like, so for example, you know, some people are like, yeah, you know,

like, some people like jets, that's not, I'm not buying a private jet. I'm what I really care about

is I love this sock. So I bought every, I love Jordan's sneakers. So I bought every pair of

Jordan's. I have this closet in my house, just full of these things. So I always wanted it when

I was a kid, right? Or if they overspend in some area, and they're just happy to have done it,

or like, it could be like philanthropic, like I think if I had a billion dollars,

I think like two days a year, I would just wire somebody like a million dollars. I would literally

just wire random person a million dollars. And I would just see how that plays out. And I think

it would bring me like tons of joy and entertainment to do that and see how they react to what happens

and what do they do, what do they do with it? Like maybe some kid who's working on something

interesting, I would just be like, look, here, check your account. It's there. So give me something

that has, is there anything that's sort of non standard that you either have done or considered

doing? Yeah, the thing that I do is I'd like those kind of, kind of micro acts of spontaneity

that says, Oh, like someone is wants to go to this event or something like that and can't afford it

or whatever. It's like, I'll be a sponsor. Like if you can find people that want to do this,

they'll do this. I'll do that relatively regularly. I've taken this sound. So I've taken my average

tip amount up to between 50 and 100% everywhere I go. And this is partly because I want to make

up for all the time when I was younger that we did not tip well. So I'm trying to average it out.

And that's as long as I can do it without like drawing too much attention, because I don't

want to be that weirdo guy. It's like, okay, no, send sometimes the wrong signals. I want to do it.

I do that, by the way, modesty. It's like, I typically tip 50%. It makes me feel good. Yeah.

Yeah. And I've worked in the service industry before I know that those kinds of things matter.

So I'm a cheap bastard. So I'll stay silent here in terms of like, you know, large things. So

philanthropy, the running joke inside the house is my wife and I. And so she's not from the tech

world at all. But I'm really, so I want to like own the world. And she wants to save it, right?

Like so I will make the money. That's something I've been relatively good at. And she will be

able to channel it to good causes and the film for Apple efforts. So she'll be able to do that.

So I don't have any like particular specific things. I will say like I am a,

so I'm the guy that's like jacked with a matrix. So if there was a world, it's like, oh, it's like,

if this is, you know, like, I live a virtual world. So there's not a lot of physical things

that I crave or desire other than a piano, which I've wanted for a while now, now a piano.

But it doesn't excite me all that much, right? It's like, it's, and because Adams,

there's a maintenance to Adams, right? Like Adams versus Bitts. Like if you have it,

whether it's a yacht or whatever it is a plane, like that takes calories. I don't care how much

you've delegated or whatever. That's something in your life that's kind of attached to you somehow.

And I just don't like that. I don't like that idea that feels more weighty to me than kind of

joyful. So speaking of time, we, so HubSpot, 15 years old, I don't know how many people are

here, 2,500, 3,000, whatever. It seems like you guys like grew pretty fast early on, but has it

always felt like a grind? Or I mean, like when I, when I see you, I'm like, well, you don't have to

do this. Like you could delegate this, you don't have to work here, you're set, you're good.

Why are you still doing this? And does it still feel like a grind? And when has it stopped feeling

like a grind? One of the reasons why I wanted to sell to you, I was like, if I don't sell,

like in this cycle, I'll probably have to wait another five years. Do I want to put that work

in or do I want to sell now? Like that's a hard challenge. Did you face that and just walk me

through that? So a couple of things. It's not widely known, but so Brian and I as co-founders,

we had kind of hard to hard co-founder chat, which I encourage all founders to have. And we

had this list of questions we're going to go through. And I published this on my, on my on

startups blog. But one of the things was around who's going to be CEO. And we decided he's going

to be CEO because I suck at being CEO. I did that with my first startup for 10 years. I'm just not

that good at it. So that was kind of decision one. But decision two, which is much, much more

unconventional is that I have no direct reports. So what my agreement with Brian was I'm not going

to have any management responsibilities in this company. I'm going to be in it a hundred percent,

but I'm not a good manager. Now I'm reasonably smart guy. If I spent a bunch of time, I could

probably with some coaching get passively okay at management. Like I think I could get there.

I don't want to spend 10, 20, 30 years of my life getting passively good at something. I'm a big

believer in take your strengths, whatever they are, and put like all your energy into kind of

amplifying those strengths and getting really, really good at that thing. And don't worry about

your weaknesses all that much. So I don't want to want to worry about my weakness managing people.

And so we have over 4,000 people at HubSpot. I have zero direct reports. I've never had direct

reports in the 15 years. And that is partly what makes it much. I don't think of it as a grind

at all. Like it's completely discretionary and optional for me. Obviously I have a lot of

kind of vested interest in the company. But in terms of the work that I do, and I've

sort of whittled down my life at HubSpot, this has been this way for a part of a decade, is

like I get it down to like three things I'm going to work on. And that I will change those every

few years. So for a long time, it was like brand culture, and what I call boldness, which is

is the organization taking on enough risk, because the temptation is always like once you start

having customers and revenues are growing, things like that is just kind of what we call drag

the spreadsheet. It's like, Oh, like here are the numbers. This is how it's growing. We're just

going to drag the spreadsheet and the numbers will flow. Basically, it's to push the organization

so we don't do that. So what I do is I will maniacally focus on whatever those three things are

and say no to pretty much everything else. And things will swap in and out. So I've had,

you know, product in there, I've had platform in there. But on that thing, whatever it is I'm

working on. So when I had culture on my list, it's like I spent 300 hours, you know, on the

culture code deck at HubSpot. I'm going to do everything I can to learn everything I can to

try and get culture to be a thing at HubSpot. And yeah, so it's, I find it enjoyable. I get to

kind of pick the things. So my three things are different from year to year. I like to dig into

the details. I don't like floating at 50,000 feet in lofty ivory towers. I like to like,

if I'm going to work on brand, I'm in there with the marketing team, like reviewing copy and

going through the, and this is why I'm taking Sean's copywriting part, like I obsess over details.

So anyway, yeah.

Did you see Sean, that he's in your power writing course?

Yeah, I saw that. I was like, how does this guy have time to do this? This is amazing. I don't

know. Well, have you, how's it been so far?

He talks to me all the time. That's why I'm like, what do you do all day?

I found it very useful. I'll say that it's, and I think copywriting overall

is one of the most underrated skills in entrepreneurship generally. Like if people

do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, 50 hours,

and you can learn a lot of what you need just by like reading the top three books on it and

just practicing the craft, right? It's a doable thing. And the nice thing about it and one of

the things I love about it, it's like measurable. You can objectively measure whether you got better

at copywriting or not. You can look at your conversion rates or whatever numbers you're

trying to move as a result of your words. And it's a, it's a learnable skill.

One more question and we can move on, but wait, and the reason why you were able to do this,

no direct reports is I think that you were the first investor. And so like, was this,

was HubSpot your idea or was it Brian's idea? But I think you invested like half a million

dollars of your own money to like get it started. And aren't you the largest shareholder of the

company? I am. And so, so the idea of HubSpot is that you have to decouple the two things.

So HubSpot was not supposed to happen. And here's what I mean by that. When I sold my last

company, and I had been running it for 10 hours, 10 years, and working the proverbial

entrepreneurial hours as one would expect, right? It was self-funded, bootstrapped.

And I promised my wife that I would not do another startup. It's like, okay, well, you know,

the one I'm doing, I'm in, I can't not be in. The analogy, you know, I use this, it's a little bit

like being at like a gaming table in Las Vegas, right? And it's like, and you don't know the rules

of the game. This is how startup entrepreneurship works up here, if you're self-funded. It's like,

you're at the table. And the only real feedback you get is like, sometimes the chips go down,

sometimes that they go up, you're playing, you're trying to figure out the rules as you go, you

don't know. But there's one like cardinal rule is that if you leave the table, whatever chips you

have on the table, they're gone. Every now and then the house will come up to you and say, hey,

would you like to cash in your chips? They're worth X dollars. And this is the position you were in.

So I was like, okay, would you like to sell your company? Here's what someone's willing to pay for

it. And if you miss that opportunity, you have no idea when the next opportunity to cash out your

chips. And like, and so you keep playing, right? It's like, and so the thing I told my wife was

like, I have to keep playing. I did like, if I chose to get off the table, it's like, yeah,

a lot of that sense, this 100% of our net worth is invested in this. And so then eventually when I

sold, that was a decision, like, okay, I'm leaving the table, cash in my chips. I don't have to do

this anymore. So that's why I went to grad school. And my plan was go to grad school. I didn't really

get a chance to enjoy undergrad, because I was working the whole time through it. I'm going to

like, actually go to grad school, be a real student, apply myself and not do anything.

How old are you? I was 35, 36, somewhere in that range. Yep. So

So like a 36 year old college kid living the dream.

Yeah, I had a great time. It was awesome. One of the best things I did is just go back to grad

school for a variety of reasons. But anyway, so I had not planned on this. So my plan was go to

grad school, then maybe get like a PhD and then go teach. That was my kind of path that I kind of

chosen path. And then I met Brian in grad school. And we both have this kind of shared passion for

SMB. We both come from tech, different backgrounds. And so the first decision we made before we even

decided what HubSpot was going to be was that the two of us should do a company together.

And if like Brian was not going to do a company, there would be no HubSpot, right? So I had

registered a domain name. I had kind of noodled on kind of variety of things. But then we kind of

came together and said, let's do this. And by the way, all through grad school, we were noodling

on ideas, right? We're like, okay, well, we'll do this. And we had HubSpot. We went to the business

plan competition. We wrote a business plan for early versions of HubSpot. It was fun to look at.

But the idea came after like we had kind of narrowed it down to two companies. Two past

one was in marketing, which is what we ended up doing. The other one was like a Oracle for small

business like an ERP similar to NextSuite, which you folks were talking about in the last episode.

All right, a quick message from our sponsor. You know, I was thinking about the shortest day

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you grow your business at HubSpot.com. All right, so let's do some ideas because I think, you know,

one of the cool things, what I love about any technically minded person who has business success

is typically when people who are non-technical get into business, they go in one of two paths,

they sort of become a financier. They're like, great, still love business, but I don't want to

sweat anymore, so I'll invest. And lots of people invest, but they make investing the main thing.

And what I found is that a lot of people who are technical that end up being successful,

they never stop loving kind of what's new, where technology is going, how behaviors are

changing, that sort of thing. And whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live

as a user at the edge. And so tell me like, I guess, what's going to be one or two kind of

technologies or ideas right now, spaces that are most exciting to you at the moment?

Two, one is around kind of broadly defined cryptocurrency, and we haven't talked about

big cloud yet, but I'll bring that out, is a cryptocurrencies as applied to other kind of

mainstream things. So the, if I were not doing HubSpot, which I have no plans of doing anything

else, but this is the idea, I'm going to give you my pitch, Sean. Yeah, what you should do

since now you're out of Twitch is you should do a professional network that's powered by the blockchain

that I'm going to say this is kind of that people love because if people don't love the

incumbent right now, can I say my opinion? I'm just, you know, you know my opinion. Can you

cool if I say it? LinkedIn sucks. How about this? A lot of people say LinkedIn sucks.

Yes. And you're suggesting building a different one on the blockchain.

I even have a seven-figure domain name picked up for you. I will write the $5 million check

for you to go do it as far as the seed round or up to $5 million if you want to let other people

in. That's amazing. This just got spicy. Okay. Oh my God. What's the domain name that you have?

I am dead serious. I have, and you can, so, and here's why it needs to be.

Let's play this out. Yeah, keep going. So the issue right now is that, you know,

LinkedIn, yes, people don't like it. It was a product that was great for its time and times

have changed now. There's a different kind of need. And the thing I'm excited about is the

intersection of a couple of things. One is, you know, we didn't have things like big cloud or a

cryptocurrency before. Now we do, right? One of the issues with LinkedIn is like, okay, well,

you've got the kind of spam issue. You've got all this like, okay, well, how do I separate all the

noise from the signal? It's just a pain in the ass over time. The asymptotic move for LinkedIn is

like diminishing utility, right? Like it's just going to become painful. And then there's a cap

on where you can go with it. So imagine that you, and so big cloud ended up doing Twitter with the

blockchain. Imagine if there was something else that did LinkedIn on the blockchain and you have

your own kind of currency. And then you could say, Hey, you know what? I'm an engineer. That's a free

agent or whatever. And for $500, I will look at your company and apply for it. I'll do a reasonably

good job. Or for $10, I'll open your email. Or for X, I'll do this. It's like, okay, there's a

right now. There's an inherent. So the thing, the cool thing about big cloud is everybody's got a

price, right? Everybody's got every coin has certain value. And so the beauty of a professional

one would be right now, when you go on LinkedIn, it is not obvious the level of hierarchy, right?

And so you always have people who are either recruiters or people who are at the bottom of

the career ladder, trying to keep connecting and reaching out to the people at the top of the career

ladder. And they have no real incentive to do it. And so they just sort of ignore LinkedIn all

together. While you can go to this site, I'm just going to get inundated with crap that I don't really

want. And so the beauty of this is that because everybody has a coin value, you sort of inherently

have baked in the sort of like career worth career value that this person is bringing to the table

into the network. And so you know, a somebody has a way to buy attention. So they buy your coin,

which increases your price. So it's a mutual beneficialness right now. If I go pay LinkedIn,

I can send you spam in mail, you do not receive any of the revenue from me paying LinkedIn for

the right to spam you. In this case, I could say, Hey, if you want to spam me, if you want me to

read your thing, and you want me to respond to it, here's my prices. So it becomes revenue

generating for me. The second thing is that when somebody reaches out, I can quickly assess their

value in the network based on how how much other people believe in this person, how much other

people wait this person. So now it's not this kind of like every node kind of looks the same on the

surface. No, they would not look the same on the surface, which is really cool. Correct. And just

one more thing. Yeah. So yes, so that there's a kind of crypto angle where everyone's got a price.

The other angle is is we'll call it page rank for the professional graph, right? So right now,

the professional that's cool, including where it's all, it's all symmetric, right? So every person

you follow gets an equal number of follow value, whatever their account goes up by exactly one.

It's not weighted in any single way. Explain page rank a little bit. So the kind of the beauty

behind Google, the original idea that made it the powerhouse is today is they said, okay, well,

how do we determine what the best set of results are to show for a keyword search, right? And it

came down to two things. One is like the overall context of the page. So if you're searching for

real estate Boston or something like that, it'll look at all the pages that's indexed like, okay,

well, this these set of pages are about real estate and Boston to varying degrees. That's kind

of factor one in the function. So which people also just say good content? Yeah, exactly. We'll

just call it quality, like the context quality content. Yeah, but the whole thing authority,

right? And the authority is the where page rank comes in. So they say, okay, here's this individual

web page is sitting on the internet. We're going to measure its authority by how many links are

coming into that page because that's a that's a endorsement of the flesh. And the value of those

links past to that individual page, the page rank value of it, the authority that gets passed

through is based on the page rank of those pages, right? So it's a recursive function to say, oh,

well, the New York Times links to you, that's much more valuable than if Darmesh's blog links to

you because New York Times has more page rank. Last piece of the page ring thing, which is super

important to know is that the amount of page rank you pass across the links from your page are

proportional to your page rank. So let's say I have two units of page rank, I'm making the number up.

And if I link to just one person, it's your blog, Sam, all the page rank I have on that page accrues

to you by transference. If I link to 10 different people, it gets distributed across those 10 links.

Yeah, it's a weighted graph versus just a symmetrical graph where we're not. So now if you imagine

a professional network graph, where everything was graphed is like, okay, well, you know, I endorse

Sam, and I have a certain authority, I have a certain currency, if we've got a cryptocurrency

underneath it, as a result of which Sam's currency goes up by X amount. So it's not just me buying

shares, it's just by that. So I think the notion of a follow should go away. It's like, if you really,

really like that person, buy a dollar, buy $5 or something like that, right? Like that's the one

kind of. So what you're saying is just to make sure I understand. So what you were saying is,

instead of just following Sam, which you have an infinite supply and, you know, sort of is a pretty

light signal, you're saying in this case, you would be able to own some of Sam's coin, that would

be a pretty strong endorsement. And secondly, the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that

because you, a valuable person, own Sam's coin, Sam's coin goes up not just by the $5 you pay,

but by some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm, the way the algorithm waits

Sam's value now. Correct. So if you raise money, if you're a startup and you raise money from

a Andrew center Sequoia, like a million dollars or $9 million dollars is actually has an impact.

The same thing like, you know, follow should matter. The fact is, you know, that you follow me

should matter more than someone that doesn't, hasn't, that just joined Twitter or BitCloud or

whatever yesterday, right? Like that's the, doesn't make any sense. This is a tremendous idea. I'm

having trouble containing myself for the moment. This is, this is one of the more exciting ideas.

Exactly what I came here for is to put you on the spot and was like, okay, listen to this idea.

That's insane. You know, because I got excited about BitCloud and I got excited about it because

I think that we do want a social network that's inverted. So instead of one platform controlled

by one company that owns all the data, it's inverted. It's inside out. It's basically no company.

All the data is free and you own, you own your own business on top of it. And so I think that,

you know, I don't want to say, how do I say decentralized without saying decentralized? That's

my way of saying it. Okay. So I think that's exciting. And then a whole bunch of people are

like, I can't believe you're endorsing this scam project and blah, blah, blah, blah. And

is this, is this going to make me richer? Is this not going to make me rich? I was sort of like,

well, it's besides the point, it might, but it's besides the point. It's more like,

this is what the next Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook are going to look like in either one or 10 years.

I'm not sure. And in BitCloud or the next thing, I'm not sure, but I'm going to play with this one

and I'm going to like give it a ride so that when the right one does arrive, whether it's this one

or the next one, I've, I've no, I know what I'm looking at. I know what's real and what's not.

And that's why I recommended people go play with it just to see, just to be on the forefront of it.

Something like it needs to exist, right? Whether it'll be the one or not, I don't know. And so

I've been spending a fair amount of calories trying to kind of understand the mechanics of

BitCloud itself. How much money did you read on the top creators lists? I've been kind of moving

up the, up the curve, so to speak. Dude, the thing about how much have you put into BitCloud?

It's got to be a million dollars. Yeah. I, man, the thing that pissed me off about BitCloud was

I got into this, like I had, I didn't get into it because I had to, I knew I was going to get

into this thing I'm about to say, but I, I was getting to, I wanted to get into a pissing match

real fast about building cloud and because there was money in the line and yeah, I just like,

oh, I don't want to actually want to get in this race. I don't want to play that game.

And that, so that I kind of had a little, like I, one part of me is I actually fundamentally

agree with most everything you're saying. On the other part, I'm like, oh, if this exists,

I'm going to be getting in a lot of like pissing matches or whatever. And I'm going to be playing

more games. And that kind of freaks me out a little bit. Yeah. And this is one of the issues

with BitCloud right now, right? You have a bunch of like founder rewards, games and things like

that. And this is, this is what happens. This is why we can't have nice things, right? It's like

anytime something new comes along, there will be people that are trying to game the system,

whatever. So even back in the early days of Google's, like the internet wasn't a scam and Google

wasn't a scam, but there were a bunch of people trying to scan Google to kind of show up and

the results and doing kind of spammy SEO kind of stuff. You see the same thing on BitCloud,

right? And you have to sort of kind of separate that from the platform. It's like, okay,

fundamentally the idea does not feel like a scam to me. Yes, they needed to open it up and have it

listed on exchange. So you can actually take money out, you know, minor details, but it,

but they're fixing those. And I talked to the, to the founder like in, like,

one of the few calls that I've had in the last 12 months, because I don't do phone calls.

But it feels legit to me. That's not to say it's going to succeed, but I'm

relatively confident it's not a scam. That is, that is reason for being is not a scam.

So one of the things that happens with like a Google or a Facebook is, you know, like you said,

there's a big honeypot either of users or money on the line. And so then you get good people

excited about it. You got technologies, but you also get these sort of scammers and not even

scammers, but I'll call them schemers. People who are not doing anything illegal, but they're

thinking, Oh, this is a game. How do I play it? So then I get the highest score and the score is

either money or followers or whatever they're trying to game. And whether this is like, you

know, Buzzfeed and Upworthy saying, Oh, newsfeed, how do I game newsfeed to get all this monthly

traffic or, you know, Zynga doing this with games on Facebook or whatever.

With a company, you sort of have the like, you know, for as much as people hate that Facebook

and Google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from under you, they are able to like swat

down these schemers and scammers so that, you know, they don't ruin the experience for everybody.

And one thing that's interesting with decentralized platforms is that there's nobody,

there's no CEO, there's nobody in charge to do that. And so I think it's going to be very

interesting how that plays out. Do you have a sense of if that's going to be a problem or do

you think that there's a solution to that with the governance? I'm a believer in kind of self

governance over time. Like it all depends on the time horizon. Will it fix itself in a year or

two years? Maybe not. I think there's still going to be these kind of dark parts of big cloud that

people don't want to tread into. But over time, I think once big cloud kind of figures out what

it wants to be when it grows up, in terms like what's the actual right now, you know, the way I

think of it is like the kind of Twitter use case is just a way to kind of prove out the protocol.

It just so happens they pick that one, they could have picked any number of other ones.

But as people kind of build real things using that underlying kind of technology,

because it's an open protocol, I think things will settle down. People will find a way that

they can implement use cases that concretely solve a particular problem and stay away from

some of the kind of dark issues right now, which is, yeah. What's the name that you bought?

For Sean? You said you bought a seven figure domain name for this idea. I have one.

I'm in the midst of negotiating the price on it. I'm not going to reveal it. I don't want to be

outbid. How many letters is it? Seven. Okay. I'll be very curious to think about what this is going

to be. You had said two spaces. One is the crypto social network. What was the other space you're

excited about? The other one is so broadly defined natural language processing in terms of, okay,

so let me, I'll try to keep this a quick rant. So every software company that ever was has always

said, our product is intuitive and easy to use. Like, okay, well, and the reality is every one of

them lies because here's what happens in order for a human to use software. It's like, here's the

thing I want to do. And I have some amount of training and things, whatever. And I'm going to

translate the thing my intent, I'm going to translate into a series of drags and clicks and

swipes and touches to make the software do the thing I intended to do. Now imagine, if I were

Elon, I'd be like, okay, well, you should just be able to think the thought, but let's put that

aside for now. Let's just say you were like, you're in Photoshop. It's like, I want to remove the

background. You should just be able to say, well, I will remove the background. If you're in HubSpot,

you should like, how many new people signed up for our service hub product in the last 90 days?

You should just be able to type that question in because that's your intent, not like, oh,

go to HubSpot's reporting tool, build this dashboard, pull in here are the three columns you

want to ever and get to the thing you want. You should just be able to say the thing you want,

express the thing you want, the better way to state it. And the software should figure it out.

Like we have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand natural language,

human English, and other languages. And all we really need is a translation layer. And so this

is a broad based, in my mind, a mega trend to be, which is, in my mind, bigger than mobile. So mobile

was a, oh, we're good. The thing that mobile added for us, which is like, oh, well, the thing that

you used to do on your desktop, now you can do it from anywhere and enable a bunch of different

use cases. This thing is like, okay, well, the thing that now you've been trying to learn,

you're trying to use this software, whatever that you never really got good at, you never had the

time now, but a billion people can use that piece of software that wasn't even possible before,

because they don't have to learn the quits and drags and things, they can express the thing

they want and the software can do it. And then what I would do if I were an enterprising VC is

like, okay, like, so pick the categories where this thing will have the biggest impact, like,

you know, business intelligence, reporting kind of stuff, B2B software is a natural fit,

but I think can go elsewhere. And we've seen the beginnings of this on the consumer side with

things like Alexa, but like the B2B world, I think is open for just make the software

actually intuitive, make it do what I want.

Right. And have you seen anyone besides, I was gonna say, besides Alexa, have you seen

any hints of what I call a magic trick? It's when you see somebody build a piece of software and

then they're like, yeah, so you just do XYZ and boom, it's done. And you're like, holy shit,

you got that, you know, you just wove your magic wand and got that. And it's like,

when you see a magic trick, you, it's very hard to unsee and you kind of can't look at

the old software the same way anymore. It's like Instagram filters or something like that. It's

like, oh, wait, your photo looks like that. Oh, shit. Okay. Well, now all my photos in my

camera look like shit in comparison. Like, I can't even look at these anymore. So have you seen

any cool magic tricks with conversational or natural language processing?

Closest I've gotten. So I built something myself called growthbot a few years ago.

I remember that. I remember growthbot. And it was for, it was built for marketers

to be able to get marketing data out both of your kind of marketing system, something like a HubSpot

or a MailChimp, but also just other data sources. Like, oh, what are the top three keywords that

Uber buys on PPC? Like that data is out there, right? Like, we would know to kind of ask that.

And so, or like, when was this domain registered? Or like just a bunch of, and I would go through

every night and look at all the questions people asked of this thing, because there was a blank

canvas. They had no idea what the thing was capable of. And then I would go back and it's like,

okay, well, here are the repeating patterns. Wouldn't it be nice if I could go update the software

to kind of do that thing? So that's, it came close. It was, I think, a little early. I think

we're further along now. People are more used to that notion of being able to express it.

That's so funny that you do these. I'm looking at the growth. I remember growthbot,

like people were sharing it. And I just, you just made this, so you just whipped up this landing

page and you made this? I made the whole thing. Yeah, like I spent a bunch of like time just

learning about what's possible, coded the whole thing myself. God, that's so funny. Can you,

gosh, this is so funny. You see that, Sean? Yeah, yeah, I'm on it. It's great, right? Like,

it's just cool that you do this stuff. And you have within, like everything you do is

kind of related to HubSpot, right? It's all in the same world. You also like,

you're, you were, it seemed like you're really into website graders. Is that right? That business

of what? So I was talking to a heat and shot the other day. Heat and shot, started, he did

everything. He started up Nira. Yeah, Nira, he's got, which I crazy egg, quick sprout, all types

of shit. I mean, he's like, he just fucking has his hands in everything. But he and his partner,

Neil, have Neil Patel.com slash Uber suggest. And then they also had Neil Patel.com slash,

like rate your website or something like that. Why are you so into these website rating businesses

and products? What, what the hell is going on with that? I'm into, so the original thing was

called website grader. It's actually a funny story. So back when we first started HubSpot,

it was just Brian and my co-founder and I, and we would go look at people's websites and to see

if they would be a good fit for HubSpot, the software or not, right? And so we would go and

I would look at their age, like I do a view source in Chrome and then look at their source codes,

like, okay, do these, they, do they have the right meta tags? Do they seem clueless, right?

You can, there's a bunch of signals. You can look at Alexa ranking stuff that you do,

you folks do all day long right now when you research companies. Like a, like a similar web

type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And this is 15 years ago. And so we, so I was like, okay, well,

when we were all doing it, we were doing it manually. There were no tools. So it's like,

okay, so I built something. That's what I do. It's like, oh, I'm going to write this tool that

does the automatically those looks and things, the APIs will bring down the source code for the

HTML and see if they're, the tags are right and kind of give it for us, give it a score. And then

I had this, had not planned it this way. It was built as a tool for just the two of us. And it's

like, oh, I'm going to put this on the web because I think this is useful. And so like, okay, well,

what name can I give it while it grades website? I'm going to call it website grader.com. The domain

was available 15 years ago. And so I put that out there. And it, like it was on fire, like that,

like all the early leaves, like tens of thousands of people, right? And then we like, so they had a

desire to kind of grade their website. And so for your list, for the listening audience, one thing

I will say is the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense, right? This

is the thing that so website grader was not the solution. So it's not like a freemium thing is

like, oh, we're going to be a lightweight version of HubSpot. It was a thing that made you realize

you needed HubSpot. And that was super valuable. And that can be done in any industry, whether you're

in software or not. It's like, okay, I'm going to help you determine whether you have a problem or

not. Because the natural thing when we do a website where it's like, oh, I got 23 out of 100.

That sucks. I can help. Like here's what we do. We're even just like, read these blog posts. I

think you'll watch these videos. So it's, it's work. So I'm obsessed with kind of grading and

assessment. And you folks, you guys had a, an episode like 10, 20 episodes ago around like

quizzes and things like that. So one thing people are, so if you do build a diagnostic tool, the

one thing, and this is, I've learned several lessons, but one of the key ones is that relative

scores work. So website grader from its early days, like, okay, so if I give you an 87,

what that 87 actually means is that whatever calculations we're doing behind the scenes,

this particular score, you rated better than 87, 87% of the 800,000 or whatever the number was,

websites we've graded. People love that. So that's just that kind of relative score versus

an absolute one makes a big difference. A percentile score matters a lot to people. It's like,

Oh, right. I'm in the bottom 10% or the top 10% of them are awesome. But anyway,

are you a, Sean, do you see his list of ideas? Let's just start banging them out. I want to

This is two things. So first, I think the thing you just described is like a growth hack without

saying, yeah, I did it to a growth hack. You like solved your own itch, but like that's such as

we've talked about it for quizzes, quizzes, same thing, lead gen. This is an amazing lead gen tool

where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads, people who self, you know, they self assess, I

might have a problem. They go get it checked up. Your digital doctor said, Yep, you indeed do have

a problem. And then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called HubSpot, you know, here's a

little HubSpot and a little bottle for you and tell you how clueless I was back then. So I put

this thing up there. And at the time, we, we had a meeting set up with Gail Goodman, who was the CEO

of Constant Contact at that time, and she later joined HubSpot board. But we met with her like,

Oh, we're working on this company called HubSpot. It's kind of related to constant contact space.

We want to get her advice. And I showed her website graders like, Oh, here's what we do. And we can

kind of look at websites, whatever. And she loved it. But then she's, you know, you might consider

putting like a email address box on because we had no way of knowing who those people were. They

were not, they were not leading for us. We had like 100,000 people like use the tool and never

thought to collect an email address like, Oh, wouldn't it be nice to anyway, we obviously fix that.

But so I like that. And then also for this conversational thing, I think what you just said,

like we kind of, it's kind of like, sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing

that I'm like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's actually a really big idea. And I think you actually said

to I think that the crypto LinkedIn one is a big idea. And I think the second one is this idea that

if you think about one of the biggest and what some people say is the best business they've

ever seen is Google, right? People come in there. It's just a search box. It's a magic genie.

And you go ask a question and it tries to give you some answers. And the way I view this is if

somebody could actually do this, this is sort of like next level Google, where I ask it any

question. And it doesn't just give me like a list of pages where the answer might be. It's like,

it actually gives me the answer. And so this might be, you know, in the business context,

might be like a business Google, but there's many versions of this. I don't know if you've

seen this. Have you ever seen a D build? Have you ever checked out this website?

Yeah, we talked about D build. My friend, Sharif, there's a perfect example of a magic trick thing.

He was messing around with GPT three. So GPT three, new technology comes out,

he gets access right away, drops his whole startup, starts hacking on this thing at night,

right? And he throws up this, he has this idea of like, dude, you know, Squarespace, Wix,

these website builders have been around forever. Great. Everybody wants to be able to code without

having to code. But like, even now, it's still so complicated, even after Webflow, after all this

stuff. And so he's like, why can't you just describe like, you know, I want a website that's

got like kind of like two columns. And on the left, I want pictures of like places you can stay.

And on the right, I want the price of the other thing. And you could literally just type that in

and it'll build you a website that looks like Airbnb. Like it'll build a website that does that.

And he posted on Twitter, a gift, he's like, you know, I'm messing around with GPT three.

And watch this, like, you know, build a website with a photo and then add a PayPal button,

but then make it where the PayPal button can only take $5 max. And like, that's it. And then send,

send the payments to this. And then it like spit out a website that was that did that,

like the HTML and the CSS that did that. And he posted that gift. And I think off basically one

tweet with one gift, he raised like $2 million instantly from like, really smart people when

that tweet went viral, because they were like, Oh, you just showed me a magic trick. And I don't

know what the company is here. And I think he still doesn't know what the company is. But

go go down this path and see what you can find. It was pretty amazing. I remember when that tweet

went live. I mean, it went viral right away. Right. I played with the GPT three play with it for a

while across multiple things. It's it's like the closest thing to like magic that it's weird

because it's it's kind of a different vector, right? Because it originally is like a text

generation mechanism to be able to write, you know, pros based on because it's got this corpus

of data behind the scenes. And it's and I talked to, you know, Sal Maltman, the CEO of Ryan,

I had to use gracious stuff to give us some time to it's like, okay, well, like, where is this

headed? What's going on to see the impact on HubSpot in the world in general? And it's like,

that's one of those things that I right now, I don't think quite there to be able to like

implement like practical use cases to actually do the thing that people are trying to do. And I've

played with it on kind of multiple fronts. But it's one of those that is going to go from as

Peter like from a zero to a one very, very quickly. It's like all of a sudden, that wasn't

really possible and didn't really quite work well enough. And that's going to be like, holy crap,

then there's like the kind of post GPT three world phrase where it's like, you know, slowly,

slowly, then all of a sudden or something like that. Yeah, it's going to be that.

Sam, you said you like some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics.

Let's just talk about something huge. That was a huge idea. Let's talk about something small,

but still cool. So it looks like, did you buy remoteculture.com? I did. Okay. So

that's a no brainer. There's a business that will make a million dollars a year remote culture

online community for those building remote cultures. Easy, right? That's a no brainer. What

would you do there? I would start a community for remoteculture.com. This is okay. I'm going to do

a blog. I'm going to do a paid community. And it's going to be targeted at people ops and HR people

around the world that need to kind of figure out the new kind of new world order, right? We're

not going to try and sell them software. We're just going to connect them to each other. And

I'm a big believer in these kind of communities and network based businesses because they're

efficient in terms of take that much. You got to get the critical mass. That's fine. But

I think this one would work. It's a community that's necessary at this moment in time that

hasn't existed because it hasn't needed to. And I'm sure there's people out there doing it, but

random help, money helps. You can actually build something. There's one on here that I really

like. Speed round. So by the way, these are domains that you don't have an idea for it.

By the way, when I have an idea that's enough in my head, that's like, okay, well, this is kind

of cool. I don't like write it down a notebook. I go find a related domain. It's like it costs

$15 if it hasn't been taken yet or maybe I'll spend more if it's something really kind of

strengths my fancy. What's the most expensive domain you own?

Well, I haven't had them valued. I don't really sell domains. I own Birmingham,

Alabama.com. I live there. I think that's probably the seven-figured domain.

I just bought humanism.com and humanism.org. You also bought one for me.

I bought one for you. I bought the Hustle.com for you as a gift that I want to give to you

on the podcast. You don't care about domain names all that much?

No. Hold on.

It's like a deal trophy, right? Whenever you get acquired, they have this little,

I don't know, Sam, did you know about this deal trophies?

No, I want a deal trophy.

So when we got acquired, they gave us like, it took like a few months, but it was like,

hey, sorry, I meant to get this to you like, you know, when the deal closed, but I guess it's

like in the deal making world, I'm not like a mover and shaker of biz dev and like corp dev and

things like that. But I guess it is sort of a tradition of when the deals close, it's sort of

like the champagne that what you do is you get sort of like a little ornament that has some

meaning to the deal. Like in our case, our code name was like project whatever, as like,

let's just call it project sharp.

We are project H or something.

And so then they got like this kind of like cool looking knife, you know, because it's like

project sharp, whatever. Here's the deal trophy. So I think your deal trophy is this domain here.

Well, and for the record, Dermash, if you like, give that to the hustle company, we would love it.

And I actually do like domain names. My whole point about domain names was it's

Don't let it stop you.

99% of people are not like you are not like me. Like we do shit. Like you're killing it and you

just made this little rink eating project called growth bot. Like we do shit. 99% of people don't

do shit and they have stupid excuses like, well, I don't have the domain name it's taken or I do

have the domain name. Therefore I should do that. My point is don't let it stop you. But I still

think it's sick and it's awesome. And I love it. It's like saying like, just because you don't,

just because you don't have a sick gym doesn't mean you can't go out there and walk and lose weight.

I think, you know, like Justin was on the podcast last time and he was like,

there should be a dating app that matches you on like kind of your credit card spending history

or something like that. For me, that's what it's like with this podcast where it's like, if I just,

if you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually bought, but you don't have like a

live project on, if that number is, you know, greater than 10, we're going to be, we're going to be

thick as thieves. And like, you know, how many tabs do you have open right now? If I just knew

those two things, I can kind of tell you if this podcast is fit for you or not. If you're somebody

who owns zero domains, then you probably aren't going to, you know, really connect with this

podcast in a major way. I don't think I'm going to pull a biology here as I'm going to push that

conversation back. But one thing I want to make sure I get out there, because it's on the list

of things, just talking about ideas. It's like, how do you assess ideas? How do you think about

ideas? I know, Sean, you love frameworks and you do too, Sam. Here's a simple one in terms of like

assessing whether you're doing it for yourself or you're investing whatever it is. And I'll tell

you the common mistake. So the three things I look at are like profit potential, like if this

thing went exactly as planned as the founders envisioned, what could it be? Like let's just

assume all things like all the stars align, everything works the way you expect it to. And

it goes, what could it be? What's the overall potential for the project? What kind of like

passion do you have around it? It's like, okay, are you excited about it or not excited about it?

And the third one is around probability of that success that you want, right? And I'm a

quant-based guy, so I'll take each of those factors, zero to ten square and multiply them

together and I'll get a score out of a thousand, right? And you can put the weighting differently.

It's like, oh, I care more about passion than the profit potential or something else. But the

common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first and almost

exclusively as the high order bit filter. It's like, oh, I had this idea, but the likelihood is like

0.01% that that's actually going to work. And so I'm not even going to think about what the potential

could have been or how passionate it may or may not be about it. And then they just kind of discard

the idea. I think that is statistically unwise and an impractical move. And here's why, is that

the way you should be looking at ideas is you kind of take the profit potential, like here's the

possible outcome, multiply it. It's the EV, the expected value statistically of this thing. It's

like, oh, I have a 1% chance at a billion dollars. The expected value is 1% of a billion or that's

the value of that particular thing. And so you shouldn't discard something just because the

probability is low, because it may have a disproportionately high potential that makes

it more interesting than it would otherwise. So that's the, like be a little bit more structured

about how you assess things, that people throw things away too easily because, and

then the second note, I'll put in a hard one lessons, good ideas are dangerous.

And they're dangerous because what you want to find are the great ideas. That's the thing you

can kind of get behind. You don't have to find them before you start the company. We can talk about

that. So bad ideas are easy to spot. Like that's just a bad idea. Good ideas, masquerade is great

ideas. And it's hard to tell them apart. And they're the ones that end up kind of spinning a

bunch of cycles for you. And it's like, okay, well, it ended up being good, but just it's

um, yeah. Failure is not a public mediocrity is the thing everybody should be fearful of.

It was like, just get it out there, try it, see what happens. But anyway,

and but the big problem is the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource,

it wastes time, right? Because it's not going to die quickly, nor is it going to take off. So it is

a slow, long burn at a mediocre level. And so you're sort of locking in over a period of time,

a mediocre outcome. And that's why I think you're hardest about bootstrap companies,

especially tech companies that have a low kind of capital need is they can actually live forever

and not go anywhere, right? Because it doesn't take that much time. It's like, okay,

you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you. It doesn't really cost that much.

And you don't have investors pushing on you to say, oh, we need some sort of outcome. And so you

can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you

could have done was sitting right behind it, right? Like I have talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs

by this point. I have never, ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur that had just one idea.

It's like, oh, you will have more, dude. It's like, okay, try the thing. If you can sell the thing,

sell the thing, if you're not that excited about it, or you just want to cash out,

take some chips off the table, there's no harm and no shame. But yeah.

But you guys didn't raise a significant amount at HubSpot, did you?

105 million, private money before in public. HubSpot's a classic venture-backed

playbook company. And intentionally so. But that seems interesting to me because you don't seem,

you seem like a guy who likes freedom and knows that he's, knows what he is and knows that he's

a little bootstrapper is what he's trying to say. Why don't you bootstrap? I'll tell you the exact

conversation we had. So when Ryan and I started this, one of the things we were firmly agreed on

is that we didn't want, I'm not a baseball or a sports person, but like we didn't want a single

or double hit, right? Like we wanted to like swing for the fences and either we do this

and we're good at every point that we have a decision to make a fork in the road.

We are going to take the one that gives us a higher chance of being the spectacular outcome,

even if that means we're possibly going to go down and crash and burning flames, right? And so-

But was Brian, was he successful like you were? Or was he-

He didn't like need, he hadn't had like an exit because he was, he hadn't done a startup before

this was his first one. But he also was like, okay, this is my last swing at bat, right? This is

not, this is it. This is the one that's either going to do it or not going to do it. And so that

was the reason. So we weren't worried about diluting, we've been negotiating the fairest value we

could, we make sure the terms were meaningful, had good investors, but we were not worried about

what our percentage stake in the company was and how that moved over time. We're like, okay,

if this thing does what it needs to do, the valuation and all that and the equity dilution

will not matter. Like on the margin, it just, it's, we want it to be a binary outcome. Either it's

going to be this huge massive thing, which will change our lives and have a massive impact or

goes out and crash and burning flames, which is highly likely. But we weren't looking to hold

on to control. We weren't looking, it's like we wanted to be, we didn't want to be king. We want

to be rich, I guess. But when you're doing like ideation stuff though, you either, I think you

wrote, you wrote it here, you're down with starting a project with a bad idea, because

you're quite confident that you'll, you can figure out, you can make it great as you get into it,

right? My general advice is, and this is not just, you know, my personal kind of lived experience

as the new folks would say, having talked to entrepreneurs and kind of looking at the history

of them, so many of them, the thing that we know them for now is not the idea that you originally

started with. Like there are a handful of cases where, yeah, when exactly the plan, this is what

it was. And often the case is that you will not find the great idea until after you start your

company, until after you start having, you know, contact with customers and actually try to do

the thing. If you sit on the sidelines trying to assess ideas and look at market metrics and things

like that, and it's like, you're just never going to get started. That's the kind of want to be

entrepreneurs that will kind of analyze it to death. It's like, you wouldn't even know what,

what a good idea was. It's hard to tell these things until you actually try something. It's,

uh, yeah. So you just do it and try it.

Um, where do we go from here, Sean? We got, I think, we think we got a wrap. But here,

there's this, I think we have to have you on again, if you're down, because here's five

topics I want to hear about. Uh, why I don't play golf and what I do instead. Uh, I want that one.

Why I hate inefficiency in markets. Uh, why I don't believe in karma, but I believe in extended

feedback loops. Uh, sometimes faking it is making it, uh, introverted engineers guide for public

speaking. Like I need, I need all of these. So we may have to do another one. Um, I have one

question I want to wrap with in this one, uh, which is you seem like a, uh, a pretty astute

guy, like very, very good observations. And I think you, you, you know, kind of who we are

and what we care about and that we would value honestly. So I'm curious.

You can ask me the intro question, aren't you? You can ask me the intro question.

No, no, not the intro question. That, that Sam, Sam's trying to get all the interest. He can

ask you that one. I want to know, I'm, I'm trying to make the content great. So what would be

the most, uh, fair criticism you could give us on the podcast? What's your critique

of the podcast, um, for you as a listener? And there's like, you can offend.

Yeah, exactly. That's kind of what I'm taking you up for. Say whatever it is,

whatever you truly feel. All right. Um, so partly, yeah, I think you have to recognize

that you guys are multi-channel. So you're kind of solving for the audio format. I know

you have the YouTube videos and things like that. But the one tactical thing that you should fix

like next week or the week after is you should apply the Sean 25 headlines thing

for headlines for every podcast episode. Like what's the one nugget that's going to

cause people to want to listen to that episode, even if they're not subscribed, when they see

it in their YouTube feed and the YouTube recommends it's like, Oh, why this successful

entrepreneur never played golf and you shouldn't either, whatever it is, right?

Exactly. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm taking notes. Keep going.

If you do that, my, my guess is that the click through rate goes up because you can't not.

Right now you just kind of identify the episode number and who the guest is or whatever.

But there's no real, maybe the topic area, but

Right now me and Sam don't even touch the headlines. Dan does it. I don't even know.

I see a notification. It goes out and I think to my judge, the headline myself, I'm like,

that's not going to give everybody clicks or, Oh, that's a juicy one. That'll work.

I say give Dan a free pass to the, the Sean copy.

That's awesome. What else?

Okay. What else you got? Anything else?

Of course you, you have more.

To me?

Yeah. Yeah. What about more? That was a weak criticism.

Oh, yeah. That was an easy one. Okay.

Okay. Um, this is a hard one, right? Um, is around,

He's going to say, like, just change your voice.

Like your face is great.

I suppose it's yours.

So it's around the, it's around the brand.

And this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to kind of reconcile with.

So, um, a couple of issues that I have as a kind of amateur branding person

is that anything that can be reduced and acronym will be, which my first million is,

is often reduced to that.

And then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym,

anyone that comes like in the media, it's like,

they're not going to know what it is if they don't know what it is.

Yep.

And there's some value to that, but it doesn't compensate for the kind of

opportunity you have.

So that's one thing is that acronyms not good.

But the other one is that the kind of my first million, there is a

cadre cater, however that word is pronounced of people that will directly

read that topic will resonate with, like, Oh, I want to learn about that.

But I think your reach is much wider now.

And there are people, there are probably more people outside that fear that that

particular like, okay, well, it's fine that it's about that.

But really the reason I'm here is to hear folks like Bodgy, right?

Like that.

And that episode, which is, I think, one of the best episodes you've had,

had nothing to do with the first million anything.

It had to do with big ideas.

Yeah, look, we, I actually agree with the other night.

We've had this conversation.

The problem that we had was like, fuck, we're pretty deep into it.

We can't change.

The equity.

Yep.

Yep.

For what it's worth, I think we should change just because I hate the name.

So I don't really care about the brand equity.

I'm just sort of like, I don't want to have a thing that I dislike.

I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't love it.

I really don't.

It's I don't, I don't love the name.

I don't love the name of the hustle either.

If you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future,

which I do, then 90% of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet.

And so we're only offending a very small, we're only changing on a very small

population of people for the good of the long run.

That would be my, my take.

And by the way, if you think it's hard now, you realize the direction you're headed,

it does not get easier, right?

It's going to get harder and harder.

Like a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, it's like, ah,

like, should we have changed this?

Like, what would have been?

It's like, not that it's going to have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything,

but on the margin, these things matter and they kind of accrue and accumulate.

So I, and here's what I would do to make life easier for, for yourselves.

Don't decide to change the name.

Decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives.

Like, okay, am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing

a name because this one is just so much better.

If something clicks for you, great.

But make an honest, concerted effort to come up with those alternatives and options.

And then you can still decide.

It's like, yeah, these are better, but they're just marginally better.

They're not better enough to go through the headache of trying to change it.

Right.

That would be my advice.

Okay, that's great.

Sam, do you want anything else before we go?

We're going to follow up with some intros, my man.

We got Dan, Dan, do we have an update?

Are we reaching out to guests?

We got to use darn mesh.

She knows everyone.

Well, I'm curious.

I see you do know everybody who's awesome.

Who's like particularly awesome that you're just like either kind of underrated or you're just like,

you know, I don't know as many people as you think.

Like I'm kind of on the internet and I do things, but I, you know, I don't,

like, I don't leave my house, right?

So it's like, it's like, you have to be that person.

You have to sort of like interact with carbon-based life forms in real life, right?

Like I don't do that.

That's not a thing I do.

So it's hard to kind of build those kinds of relationships, but I would, on your list,

I would have, so I'm not going to be good at intros, but I, like,

Neval would be awesome to have on the podcast.

He's like a, like that kind of apology level thinker.

I think he'd be awesome.

The audience would love him.

So that would be great.

Great.

We'll take that intro.

Thank you.

He doesn't know me.

I mean, he knows me like loosely.

I'm going to start calling you Uncle Dermas.

You got to pick it up, man.

I'm willing to try it.

Don't, don't, don't get me wrong.

And I know qualms about trying to make the intro.

Just don't, uh, to manage your expectations.

It's like, well, I thought like Dermash actually could like

swing things and make shit happen.

Anyone else?

Someone I do know that I think would be good at the podcast.

Drew from Dropbox.

I know him really well.

So that's an intro I could make.

What's up?

Yeah.

That would be a good one.

I heard he's an amazing singer.

Is that true?

He's, he's a, he's a good singer for a founder.

For a founder.

Amazing for a founder is what I mean.

He's legit.

He's legit.

So Dermash, Dermash, Sean was pretty nervous coming up to this

because he was like, well, I just like to over prepare.

And I don't think good on my feet or sorry.

You're like, you know, I prepare and I don't love like

just making shit up.

I think you did an excellent job.

Dan has been texting me saying Dermash is so awesome.

I told you Dermash, I go, I told you this yesterday.

I'm going to predict the future.

You're going to come on and then you're going to start wanting

to come on like once a month, maybe I have a feeling that

that we have just accomplished that.

And that's going to be true.

You're freaking awesome.

What's your Twitter handle?

It's just Dermash.

So D-H-A-R-M-E-S-H.

You're, you're really active.

So if you want to get in touch with you,

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, pick your thing.

Anything you want to

org.dermash.net.

Anything you want to, you want to pimp out or promote?

No, I'm not a promoter kind of guy.

That's not my thing.

Well, thanks, man.

This is awesome.

We, I talked to you a lot.

I got to set up, I want to set up like times to just holler at you

because I want to learn about you more.

I want to learn about hubs.

Sam wants to be your first direct report in 15 years.

No, no, no, no.

I don't want to, I don't want that.

But this is great.

Heaton was like, you got to learn from Dermash.

Just learn what makes HubSpot tick.

So thanks, dude.

This is awesome.

We're going to have you back on.

Did it, did it turn out as good as you thought?

I love you guys.

This was, this was fun.

I, yeah, and I say it's more importantly,

I hope it ends up being useful for the audience.

That's the thing I'm solving.

Honestly, I'm looking at this doc.

I feel like we left a lot on the table.

We have a lot more that we could do.

I'm sort of regretting.

You kind of have to, I always feel this way with a guest,

by the way.

I'm like, the first 20 minutes were slow,

but it's also like, I've never met this person and like,

you know, the audience doesn't know all about this person.

So there is a certain context building that has to happen.

Yeah, you got a date.

I got to figure out why every, every single guest,

I'm like, oh, the first 25 minutes were slow,

but then it got really good.

And yeah, I don't know if that's just my own,

I'm just kicking myself for no reason,

or if other people feel that way,

and maybe we should actually do something different

and like, sort of pull the future forward.

Like just start at the, start at that 25 minute mark, basically.

This was fun, folks.

That's cool.

All right, that's a wrap.

All right.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.