#125 - Brian Halligan and Kevin Hale

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Brian Halligan and Kevin Hale. Kevin's a partner at YC and co-founder of Wufoo. Brian's the CEO and co-founder of HubSpot. HubSpot builds software for marketing, sales and customer service. You can try it out at hubspot.com. Brian is on Twitter at BHalligan, and Kevin is at I Like This.
All right, here we go.
So Brian, I've listened to a few of your podcasts and on one of them, you described yourself as an introvert who likes to work from home. That being said, you manage a public company. How do you mesh those two things together?

**Brian Halligan** (0:39)
That's a good question. I am an introvert, and I just try to manage it as best I can. It's hard to be an introvert as CEO. I'll tell you one thing that's interesting about HubSpot is both founders are introverted, but one is far more introverted than the other. So I'm kind of introverted.
And one of you has to be the front man to the band, basically, and Dharmesh6, my co-founder, does not want to be that. So I have to kind of play the front man to the band.
And so I have to manage my introversion a little bit more carefully than he does.

**Craig Cannon** (1:07)
And so what practices do you put into place?

**Brian Halligan** (1:09)
Well, I have to manage my energy because people drain energy from me. So a couple of hacks I have. Every Wednesday, I work from home all by myself, just my dog and I.
And no meetings, no calls, no Zooms, no nothing. I just work on projects, try to get caught up and recharge my batteries. That helps a lot. I tend to take a nap pretty much every day, around this time, actually.
Take a little snooze and we have a nap room at HubSpot. And I kind of think of a nap as like, your brain is just running around and lots of things are going on in your brain. And it's a time for your brain to just kind of settle down. And I pictured these little mini men with like brooms going around, sweeping up all the stuff and organizing it. Everything gets settled down in my brain and then back to work a half hour later. That works like a charm for me.

**Kevin Hale** (2:00)
How does that affect your calendar management? Like normal CEOs, there's nonstop barrage of sort of meetings and people you need to interact with. And so how does that affect you or how do you handle your calendar differently when you're an introvert?

**Brian Halligan** (2:14)
Yeah, I basically just block all that day Wednesday so no one can book a meeting there. I have an admin that manages my calendar and she'll typically manage little breaks in the afternoon, maybe at two or three or four, which she'll know if I have a packed day, I'm gonna need a little breathing room to kind of catch my breath, take a nap, catch up on some emails and kind of get back at it.

**Craig Cannon** (2:33)
And then on a daily schedule basis, do you leave in blocks for like solid focus work or do you just leave it open to like, okay, I can interact with everyone every 15 minutes, you know, like that maker schedule, manager schedule.

**Brian Halligan** (2:45)
I typically leave in like blocks of time where I can recharge and think and catch up an email and do some of that stuff.

**Craig Cannon** (2:51)
Yeah. That's always the part I struggle with, like the required socializing as someone who's introverted. Like it's part of the job, but I don't like to recognize it all the time.
Yeah.

**Kevin Hale** (3:00)
At one point, did you realize you were going to have to do something differently to make that work for you? Like when you guys both got started.

**Brian Halligan** (3:08)
You know what?
When we both got started, there was a, we were in a, it was called CIC in Cambridge, Mass. It was sort of like pre-WeWork. And there was a couch outside our, just happened to be a couch outside our office. And every day I took a nap and everyone gave me crap for it.
But I don't know, it just worked for me. I think what helped a lot of introverts, I don't know about you guys, is when that lady wrote that, what was her name? Wrote that book.

**Craig Cannon** (3:31)
Susan Cain.

**Brian Halligan** (3:31)
Susan Cain wrote that book. It's like, oh, I'm not as strange as I thought I was. Lots of people are like this. And I didn't feel as badly about wanting to take this time away. Didn't feel as badly as it was saying, you know, I've been in meetings all day. I know we're supposed to have dinner tonight.