The HubSpot Culture Code [slides]

Can you imagine having to sit through 128 slides of this.

BLM is a grassroots movement. The BLM Global Network Foundation is an organization with a website. Few people in the BLM movement pay any attention to the BLM Global Network Foundation.

Disclosure: I worked at HubSpot for two years and my first startup was aqcui-hired by them in 2013. Dharmesh Shah is also an investor in my current startup.

tl;dr - Like any job, HubSpot was both a good and bad experience for me. Disrupted is 25% accurate, 65% embellished garbage, and 10% Dan's ego. The Culture Code is at its core aspirational marketing collateral, but it's more true than not true.

So, funnily enough, I started around the same time as Dan Lyons and was also smuggled in through the back door by the founders. I read Disrupted and agree with parts of it, but also disagree with many other parts of it. My takeaway is that Dan had a huge ego and went in there knowing he'd write a negative, satirical book about his experience. Why the founders let a fox into the hen house is another discussion.

Also, I haven't read this latest version of the Culture Code, but I have read previous versions and know the gist.

My job at HubSpot was to actively try to "disrupt the company from within." The entire team for the first year was myself and one other person. We built a "startup" inside the company to mimic what an outside startup would do to try to kill HubSpot. We started with a Wordpress plugin called Leadin and it pretty much worked. With our plugin, Wordpress, and Mailchimp's (new at the time) marketing automation, you could replace all of HubSpot's two lowest plans for $80/month vs. $800/month. We also leveraged a touchless/freemium sales model, which was diametrically opposed to HubSpot's inside sales model at the time. That meant, we could underprice them by an order of magnitude with working unit economics (aka we didn't have to pay the CAC of a sales person.)

As you can imagine when you're trying to destroy a company from the inside, you develop a healthy dose of skepticism for "the other side." I would even say that I had a near identical mindset to Dan Lyons that first year, thinking, "this is a cult" and "how does no one realizes how great all the stuff we're working on is while most of their stuff is crappy?"

About a year in, I almost quit. But I really believed in what we were building and didn't want to give up on it just yet. So instead of writing every one off as stupid, I decided to get to actually know the rest of the company. And guess what? They were all genuinely good people who were just trying to do their jobs well to grow the company and help customers. Really, the problem was me and my pessimistic attitude. Once I took the time to actually build relationships, people started to want to work with our team more. We got more resources. There was an excitement about what we were working on by people who wanted to help it grow. It took some educational effort, but eventually the rest of the company started to understand product-led growth.

My time there ended on both a high point where our product was launched on the stage at the company conference as HubSpot's new freemium marketing offering, but I was also severely burnt out from the internal politics I had to deal with to get there. I quit about two years to go work on my own company where I actually had real ownership.

I think they've since learned how to help the "founder types" wrap up their personalities into their projects (which they don't actually own...) succeed more internally. There are choices I could have made differently that would have helped me succeed better too.

But if I had to do it all over again, I would. I learned a ridiculous amount about how to actually run a company and made some good friends along the way.

Like all companies, HubSpot has its flaws and makes trade-offs. But I can without a doubt say that it's genuinely a thoughtful company run by compassionate people who care about their employees and customers.

Dharmesh Shah is also one of the highest-quality human beings I've had the privilege to get to know over the years. I'm positive he's reading every single comment in this thread, taking it to heart and is earnestly mulling it over.

I agree the cynicism is deserved. People make excuses for brilliant jerks all the time though. Some even make them role models. Think of Steve Jobs for example.

It's not really the English language per se, but over-corrected American political correctness. For example, "African-American" is often used to describe any black person in America. But what if you're a native Ugandian who lives here but not yet a citizen? That term is useless. Had a good friend from school who came over from Nigeria to study here, and he hated the term because he neither identified with Americans blacks, nor did he want to.

The fact that we're now back at just Black is where we should have been all along.