The Science of Scaling & AI - Mark Roberge

**Charles Schwartz** (0:00)
Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where I don't care what you think, only what you can prove.
Normally, I go into a long list of who the person is and what's going on. Sure, I could talk about Mark exiting out of HubSpot, and the fact that he's run a fund, and the fact that he's a professor at Harvard, and the fact that he's been rigorous and broken down the science of scaling in such a way that I've already changed how I operate my businesses after I got off the call with him. But that's not the exciting part of this episode.
This episode is absolutely my favorite of the year, because he breaks down not only where AI is going to be for the next 30 minutes, but where it's going to be in the next 30 days, and more so the next 30 years. How it's a fundamental change of how we run our orgs, how it changes leadership, and how it changes scaling across the board. This is one of those episodes where you stop, take a breath, and then re-listen to it. That show starts now. All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. Mark, I'm excited to have you on, man.

**Mark Roberge** (0:51)
Thanks, Charles. Great to be able to jam with you here.

**Charles Schwartz** (0:54)
So for the four or five people on this planet that don't actually know who you are, which is wild to me. Can you give a little bit of heads up? Who are you? What have you done?

**Mark Roberge** (1:01)
Oh, come on. There's a lot of people that don't. Yeah, I guess at the foundation, I'm a tech entrepreneur. I've just found variant ways to express it. So in the first part of my career, probably about 15 years, I started three companies, three or four.
The last one is the one I'm most known for, HubSpot. I was the fourth employee there, joined as the first salesperson, and then was the founding CRO through the IPO over a nine-year period. That ended back in like 2013
In the goal to take a minor break, I was fortunately recruited to join the faculty full-time at Harvard Business School to teach sales to the MBA program, build and teach the sales program, which I still do 13 years later. So that's been a blast and has been quite instructive to some of the things that we're going to talk about here, the pattern recognition that comes from that post. And then eight years ago was approached by a gentleman at Bessemer Venture Partners to start the first VC firm running back by the best sales and marketing leaders in tech, which we have done, it's called Stage 2 Capital. We have four funds that we have raised and deployed across 150 startups. And that also has been quite instructive to what we're about to talk about today.

**Charles Schwartz** (2:21)
Yes, there's a lot there. There's HubSpot, there's Harvard, there's Stage 4 There's a bunch of stuff you're doing that's moved around. You and I have started at the same start line, but then you outran me within about three seconds. So thank you for that.

**Mark Roberge** (2:34)
Oh, come on, Dan.
Just different expressions. Actually, I forgot Charles, which partially we're talking about today too. I've written two books, one, The Sales Acceleration Formula 12 years ago after HubSpot, and more recently published The Science of Scaling, which we can weave in today. We'll talk a little bit about it. I've donated the proceeds to both of them to different causes. The most recent one with Science of Scaling, 100% is donated to mental health. So we might be able to take a little tangent on why there during our session.

**Charles Schwartz** (3:04)
Let's go ride into that tangent if you want to.

**Mark Roberge** (3:06)
Let's talk about why you're donating it to mental health. We'll do it toward the end. It's all good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Charles Schwartz** (3:10)
All right. So everyone talks about the scaling and how important this is and all that, but most people are terrified of AI right now, and they don't understand that artificial... It doesn't mean artificial intelligence. It means always incorrect at the moment, but that's going to change in the next 12 to 36 months.
How do you scale and leverage AI versus just being terrified of it that's going to eat you alive?

**Mark Roberge** (3:31)
Oh yeah. Everyone's talking about that right now. I have to do a lot of thinking about that. It's a part of my job. It's also a part of my just natural curiosity. I love tech and the way it can change society for better and for worse, and I'll lean in to the better and mitigate the worse, and that's part of what we're trying to do. Let me give you a construct. Probably, it's hard to know how long of a period this construct is. I think when we had the shot heard around the world in November of 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, the version that went viral. I mean, at the time, if you remember, people were predicting no humans would have jobs in 18 months. I think historically so far, I feel like Silicon Valley has been probably a little too aggressive on their prediction on timing. So we have that backdrop. This is going to take longer than the techies are predicted.