Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)

**Dharmesh Shah** (0:00)
Some of the best startup advice I've heard is, startups should focus on one thing and be really, really exceptionally world class at that one thing. And one of our early zigs is we are going to do exactly the opposite of that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:11)
You have no direct reports, and I don't believe you've ever had direct reports at HubSpot.

**Dharmesh Shah** (0:15)
I could become passively okay at management with some training, with some coaching. I don't want to spend any years of my life becoming passively okay at something.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
What was that process like to define the culture?

**Dharmesh Shah** (0:26)
My co-founder and I were having a lot of our founders meetings, and he said, oh, Dharmesh, I hear this culture thing is really important. By the way, can you go do that? I'm like, okay, right. Well, all the people and all of me is like, I am like the worst possible person. It's not that I don't like people, I just don't like being around them a whole lot.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:40)
Something that's really unique and interesting about you is you're obsessed with comedy and keynote prep.

**Dharmesh Shah** (0:44)
It comes down to this metric that stand-up comedians use called LPM laughs per minute. I have custom software that I've written that will say, okay, here are the points at which the audience laugh.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
Today, my guest is Dharmesh Shah. Dharmesh is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot and also one of the most fascinating and first principled thinkers I've ever met. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground. Dharmesh's hilarious and ingenious approach to putting together a talk, including measuring laughs per minute, his biggest lessons from being a public company exec for over 10 years now, especially while being a startup guy at heart, how he approached creating and scaling the culture of HubSpot, which you'll find both hilarious and inspiring, why founders and product teams are all fighting the second law of thermodynamics, how to zig while everyone else is zagging, how and why Dharmesh leans into his strengths, including never having a single direct report during his 18 years of running HubSpot, and so much more. This episode is so fun and will expand your mind in many ways. With that, I bring you Dharmesh Shah after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.
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Dharmesh, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Dharmesh Shah** (4:15)
Thanks for having me Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:16)
It's my honor and thank you for joining me. You are a wildly fascinating human. And so I thought it'd be fun to start with just a bunch of fun facts that I found about you online.
And what I'm thinking is I'll just walk through them. Tell me if they're true as I walk through them. And then this is going to lead to a bunch of different topics that I want to talk about. How does that sound?