The company-building conrnerstones every founder needs to focus on - Advice from HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah
Cornerstone #1: Choosing a co-founder. Shah has strict directives to approach your co-founder assessment with as much rigor as you give to evaluating your startup ideas. His advice? Have the hard conversations now, rather than using a more lackadaisical, wait-and-see approach.
In our personal relationships, you’ll often date for a long time before you make a lifelong commitment. But when it comes to co-founders, people aren’t as deliberate about getting to know potential partners.
Cornerstone #2: Figuring out your role. While much has changed over the course of his 15 years as co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, through it all Shah has never taken on a direct report. He’s got guidance for other founders for leaning into your strengths, rather than trudging through your weaknesses.
So early on, when it was just the two co-founders, it was decided that Shah would be an individual contributor, 100% focused on the business — rather than taking on the engineering org. To this day, zero of HubSpot’s thousands of employees report to Shah. “I decided early on to focus on my strengths, rather than trying to mitigate my weakness with managing. Had HubSpot not made that call, I don’t think I would have lasted long at the company,” he says.
Don’t force people into management in order to progress at the company, just because conventional wisdom says your value is a function of how many people report to you on the org chart.
Cornerstone #3: Hiring the early team. Countless column inches have been devoted to the topic of making your first hires, but Shah has his own unique take to add — namely, MBAs have a lot more to offer to early-stage startups than you might think.
- Whether it’s analyzing pricing, go-to-market or tradeoffs on tech platforms, having someone on the team who’s off-the-charts analytical brings a necessary skill-set to the table. “There are technology geeks who want to dive deep into the tech side. Then there are business geeks who are deeply committed to their craft, just like a tech geek. Great MBAs have an engineer’s mindset that is applied to other aspects of the business,” he says.
Cornerstone #4: Scaling yourself as a founder. Don’t just rely on your company’s board members to provide a steady stream of feedback — implement your own annual feedback process and be clear about the personal bugs that are actually a feature.
- As a product and engineering guy, Shah treats it as a bug report. “I will literally ask people, ‘I’m writing a product review of Brian. What features are working? What features would you like to fix and let’s rank the severity,’” he says. His #1 tip here? Try to keep it open-ended. “Don’t say: ‘I want to collect feedback on how Brian interacts with the engineering team. Sometimes people have useful feedback outside of their immediate role,” says Shah.
- The next step, after presenting the feedback packet, is giving the recipient space to respond in written form: “Here’s what I heard from the feedback”, “Here are the things that I’m going to tackle over the course of the next year”, “Here are the things I’m not tackling”.
- That final piece of the response may not be expected, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. “Pre-pandemic, I often received bugs that folks said they didn’t see enough of me at the office. My response has always been that this works as designed. I understand the value of in-person interaction, but the cost of fixing that particular bug is exceptionally high for me emotionally, which means it’s exceptionally high for HubSpot. As a super-introvert, that two hours of in-person time will zap my energy for the rest of my day,” he says. “If you choose not to tackle a particular bug, it’s important to explain why.”
Cornerstone #5: Codifying the culture. You may not expect the most introverted person at the company to take on Chief Culture Officer duties, but Shah makes a compelling case that it’s actually the right approach. He shares tips for applying an engineer’s mindset to treating company culture like a product.
- For folks looking to get started (without drafting 128 slides) he suggests beginning with this prompt: Who are the kinds of people that we think we want to work with? “These can’t be platitudes that everyone would say yes to. Like, we want to hire smart people. Intelligence can’t be a core cultural value because no one would say they want to hire stupid people. You have to pick things that not everyone would pick, for instance, our transparency value,” he says. “One of our values is humility. Not everyone would pick that because often people associate that with the lack of confidence.”
- But HubSpot took a radically transparent approach in the early days. “We published bank balance, burn rate, valuation of the last round, strike price — everything,” he says. While plenty of founders think that transparency is at best counterproductive and at worst risky, Shah believes this is misguided on two fronts: