#153 - Selling The Hustle for Millions: How The Hustle & Hubspot Deal Happened

**Shaan Puri** (0:20)
Okay, we are live. I'm back, Sam is here. And Sam, who's this other gentleman we got?

**Sam Parr** (0:25)
All right, so we have Kieran here, Kieran Flanagan, who is gonna be speaking from HubSpot's perspective.

**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
He's your what?

**Sam Parr** (0:33)
He is my new boss.

**Shaan Puri** (0:36)
Nice, how many years has it been since you had a boss?

**Sam Parr** (0:39)
A long time, a very long time. People said to me, I can't imagine you having a boss. And you know what?
I'm excited because I'm ready to learn new stuff. I'm ready not to focus on the stuff I didn't wanna focus on. I'm excited to learn, so I'm pumped. Kieran, I hope you're pumped.

**Kieran Flanagan** (0:54)
So what does someone worry most about about having a boss when you haven't had a boss? What are the nightmares?

**Sam Parr** (0:59)
I don't think I even know good hygiene of having a boss, like good hygiene of working at a company. I'm still gonna learn that. I don't know everything. I feel like I'm a kid who was at a orphanage and now has a real mom and dad, and I'm like, wait, how do you do this?

**Shaan Puri** (1:17)
Right, right, we celebrate Thanksgiving.

**Sam Parr** (1:19)
Or like a wild dog who now has an owner. I'm like, what do you do now?

**Shaan Puri** (1:25)
Right, right.
I'm not cold all the time. I'm inside. Yeah, I actually also, so I currently have a boss, this guy, Doug, and Doug is great. He's a great guy and like super, super nice, smart guy. But the other day he was like, hey, can you send me like an update every week on what you're up to? And I was like, oh yeah, that's what I always ask people who kind of report to me. I just hadn't reported to anyone so long that I was used to only writing like an investor update every month or every quarter. And this guy was probably like, how come this guy doesn't talk to me at all?
And now I was like, oh yeah, shit, my bad. I got you.

**Sam Parr** (2:01)
So we had the deals done. I got that approved by the way. I can say that Kieran. We announced it last week. It was announced last week. It's kind of just now set in. I haven't talked to you, Shaan. So I wanted to talk to you about it.
And we actually, I wanted Kieran to come on because we could have his perspective because I think this was him and the CMO of HubSpot. I think it was their original idea to acquire a media company.
And I think most people understand it, but it was very, very, very weird when I first told people. And I thought it would be cool to have his perspective because I think this is going to happen a ton. And me and Kieran and the rest of the folks at HubSpot, we were like, I don't care about awards.
I don't know if they do or not, but I don't care about being like doing something to win an award or to have a case study written about us. But I do think it is kind of cool that we're gonna do, it's gonna have a ton of cool stuff. And maybe one of the byproducts is like, this is actually like the first of many and it could be like the roadmap. So we could talk about that.

**Shaan Puri** (2:58)
So there's a few of these, right? Because I saw this in the Trends group and then I stole it and tweeted it. But basically like Robinhood bought Snacks, which was like a kind of a media company. So Robinhood, this exchange, not a media company buys a media company. Stripe bought IndieHackers, right? Stripe, not a media company bought IndieHackers, this community of kind of makers.
HubSpot buying The Hustle.
And there's a few other ones that are actually like, somewhat prominent. Spotify buying like let's say The Ringer or things like that. There's a few different examples of this.
So Kieran, take us back.
So I'm less interested in the like, oh, what's the future look like? Because there's a part of that that's interesting, but I think for most people, that's gonna sound like HubSpot propaganda basically. So what I wanna know is, and I genuinely wanna know, is I've been on the other side trying to sell my company. And the whole time I was like, how do I get these mother effers to buy me? Like what's going on in those meetings? Who raises their hand and says, hey, maybe we should look at this company, maybe we should buy it. How do they think about that? So can you take us back? And I want to know if you remember even the specific day where you were like, you know what, maybe we should buy The Hustle. Who said it? Was it you? Who did you say it to? How does that go down on the buyer side?