Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:52:39 · Brian Halligan
By the way, I thought everyone was copying, Justin Huang and having 60 direct reports. That is definitely not true. He is an n of one on that. And, like, Anton Helmley has five direct reports. I had 10. Mati has 15. So it's a little bit all over the map. If I were you, I would think about that. What do you want your span of control to be? And I would have it as wide as you can tolerate. As you scale from a 100 to a thousand employees, all those layers in there really will slow you down. So you wanna keep it as flat as you can. The other thing I liked about that we're thinking about teams is they were definitely starting to bring in some been there, done that people. The whole team wasn't been there, done that. The way HubSpot ended up is we had about half been there, done that, and a half homegrown. And VCs try to jam you full of been there, done that. I like that balance having a little bit of both. The homegrown talent is underrated on your teams most likely. We also talked about just managing the chaos, like they're growing crazy. They have so much opportunity. It's just a hurricane of of input coming into them. And a couple things, couple hacks I liked. Anton is really good on Twitter, by the way. If you don't follow him, he's really good. I like that every Monday morning, he has a fifteen minute meeting with a couple of his staff members and they brainstorm on tweets. So he's not just coming up with that extemporaneously. He's thought about it a little bit and he's very good at it. Most of them, or at least I had a no meaning day where I could actually think and get some room and work on projects. I think that's a good hack. I had it on Fridays for a while. Everyone thought it was a long weekend. They moved it to Wednesdays. And they're gonna have to get good at saying no. Like, I I was working on saying no, so I made myself this hat, my no hat, and I had a no shirt too. And I think startups are much, much more likely to die of overeating and starvation. That's probably true of yours. You might need your own no hat. You know, speaking of chaos, I asked them, are they nine nine six? And they are both nine nine six plus. And I think that's interesting. I've I've asked all the CEOs I've been interviewing. There's been 10 so far. And the early stage startups are all doing nine nine six, and the bigger ones aren't.
00:54:52 · Brian Halligan
And I think that's probably life in the fast lane. As your employees start having families and you're hiring people to families, it's just hard to get people in the office six days of work working nine to nine. But I think keep it going as long as you can. If you're doing nine nine six, I think it's good. I was nine nine six, but I didn't ask my team to be nine nine six. We talked a lot about Europe. There's two amazing companies in Europe. In Europe, so we started in Boston, and Boston's a little bit out like Europe. You're, like, outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, and there's some real pluses and minuses to being outside of the valley. The pluses are you end up being a very large fish in a very small pond, which can help, And you have really good access to talent and not a lot of competition for that talent. So real pluses. The minuses we found out at HubSpot and they're gonna find out is inside of Boston, there's just not a lot of scale tech companies. So we had a hard time finding executives who had seen that movie on that next level of scale. Like, we took a couple people from Akamai and that worked out, but it was pretty lean. And so we started hiring execs out in San Francisco. So real pluses and minuses to being in a big city. If I had to do HubSpot over again, by the way, you didn't ask, but, I would have... We were in Boston. I'd have a big office in Boston, big office in San Francisco, then another big office in, I don't know, Nashville or Denver or Toronto would be pretty good where you can hire lots and lots of people for less money and have them be a little bit more loyal than, let's say, in your San Francisco office. I wouldn't let everybody work from home. I'd have three big hubs. Okay. We wound up obviously talking about Europe. They're both in Europe. Really encouraging for Europe. The world could use more Silicon Valleys, and the world could use, you know, a vibrant European entrepreneurial scene. I love to hear from them that the engineering schools are chock full of kids that want to start companies. I think that's going to be good for the world and good for Europe. So I'm excited about that. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I really liked it. These two are great. I will see you on the next episode of Long Strange Trip.