#197 with Dharmesh Shah - Frameworks for Becoming a Billionaire (From a Billionaire's Perspective)

Here's what I say. Here's what I even have a 7-figure domain name picked out for you. I will write the $5 million check for you to go do it as far as a seed round or up to $5 million if you want to let other people in. That's amazing.

This just got spicy.

Okay. Oh my God. What's the domain name that you have?

I am dead serious. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

All right.

We just got done like 30 seconds ago talking to the guy who we're going to introduce you to now. That was amazing. He's amazing. That guy's— Dharmesh is amazing.

He's very cool.

So we have Dharmesh. I don't even know what is Dharmesh's last name. Dharmesh Shah, I think.

Shah.

I just know him as Dharmesh. He's the co-founder of—

He's like Beyoncé. You know, they just go with the one name at a certain point. Ronaldo, Beyoncé, Dharmesh. That's, that's it.

So Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. He's the largest shareholder. I mean, we got pretty like into it right away. We're like, just tell, like, tell us what's it like to be a billionaire?

So I just Googled your net worth and it appears you're worth $1 billion.

Yeah.

So we asked, how does that feel?

And he's like, uh, no, I told him I was going to talk to him about that. So we talked to him about just like wealth, which was—

let's rattle off some of the dope things he's done. So started HubSpot. HubSpot's like a whatever, $25 billion company or something like that. But he's done some other cool things.

Early investor in Coinbase, Dropbox, and loads of different stuff.

Right. And then also just has kind of like, he's like us. He's got that itch, that entrepreneurial itch. So he, like, we talk a little bit about, he's got like 20 domain names, some domain names that are worth like, you know, millions of dollars and others that are, you know, just simple ideas. I've already got an idea, by the way, hundreds of domain names, right? But he's like got ideas loaded into them. Like, ah, here's what you might do with this idea. And then here's a good domain name for it. And so I think he's, you know, he's sort of like, he's one of our people in that sense. Like he's an idea person. He's a frameworks person. So he shared some frameworks. He shared a bunch of ideas, two really big ideas.

One idea on air, he goes, Sean, if you want to start this, I'll fund you right now for $5 million.

Yeah, he made me an offer I pretty much couldn't refuse. I just had to sort of, you know, squeeze my thighs and sit still here. So, so, you know, but I thought it was exciting. I thought the actual ideas were really great. So I think people are going to like that. We talked a little bit about the— we talked a little bit about wealth. We talk a little bit about kind of like early days, you know, HubSpot and the Hustle acquisition. And then we talk a bunch about ideas.

And then we, uh, some of those ideas are about like a new different type of LinkedIn or remote community. We talked about, um, oh, he talked about his framework for evaluating if it's, uh, if an idea is good or not, if he should pursue it. Uh, that was actually incredibly educational. It was awesome, dude. It was great. So, uh, we'll get to the episode. Can you guys do me a favor though? Click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify. That would mean a lot. Uh, do we have to tell them anything else?

Well, there's a thing going around where if you just post on your social networks and you're just like, hey, you know, PSA to whoever needs this, this podcast, you know, makes my commutes amazing. This is the best business podcast hands down. Um, you know, good karma comes to you in your next life. So that's just something if you're interested in having a good next life, I would just do that.

Yeah. And I'll reshare that for sure. I mean, because it impacts my ego and we hit, I hit, I share all, I share all compliments. So go ahead and do that. Make sure you share the iTunes or Spotify link with it. Thank you very much. Here's the thing about me.

I like compliments. All right. Yeah. All right. Enjoy this episode.

I don't remember what I was going to say, but right before you came on, I was asking Dharmesh what he listens to, and he says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days.

Amazing. Has that changed you? Have you— you probably become a worse person. You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days, there's going to be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets like corrupted slightly.

You know, it's, I think that's true. That's an astute observation. It's, you know, we've just have, I won't say like completely divergent paths. I'm just a, yeah, it's been good though. I'm a believer in, and like just these kind of orthogonal things. That's like, oh, this is not stuff I'm like, you know, looking at retail businesses or like, you guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think that kind of thing like builds a different muscle group. And I think it's been, it's been useful for me. I'll put it to you that way. It's, I think we're not, separated birth by any stretch. We have things that, you know, we have in common, but there are things that I'm just different. It'll come out in the pod. I'm a weird—

well, we're on now, so this is the pod. But we— yeah, this might— I have a feeling this might go a little long, and I'm okay with that. Sean, do what you want. But we— I like— in my world, so I was just hanging out with Heaton Shaw yesterday, and your name came up. We were just talking to Nathan Barry the other day. Your name came up. Sean and I are in this text group where people talk about BitCloud. Your name comes up. Your name comes up everywhere. Like you're, you got, you're like a little, like you got like a spider web, like you get your hands in all these little things. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. But do you— so this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the, you're the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO?

Yes.

Do you, are you active? Like, are you working really hard at HubSpot? Like, how do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff?

Stuff. Uh, so the answer is yes, uh, HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Uh, anything else that you see me doing, uh, there's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot. There is, right? Um, so yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that, uh, I spend pretty much all of my kind of non-family time, non-personal time on.

Um, so it's my And I just wanna describe for people who are not watching, so you should go to the YouTube channel. It's youtube.com, I think, HustleCon, and you'll see the videos. But, uh, so here's what I see. So Dharmesh is sitting there, he's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard to his right. Uh, he's got a, I think a Steve Jobs, uh, piece of art behind him, or is that Lennon or something like that? I can't tell exactly who it is. John Lennon maybe. Um, and you're in this room. So just describe, is this where you work on a day-to-day basis?

Uh, so this is— well, yes and no. So that's my—

you're getting tricked, Sean. You're getting tricked.

Listen, this is my living room, uh, but it's a, a, like a capture a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually would be. Uh, but it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up so I can—

oh, okay, that's pretty good because usually when you have a green screen, it's like half your head also turns into like the background, and, uh, this one's actually pretty good. All right, I'm impressed.

I've done like a multiple green screen, so I'm sort of surrounded with it. So if I need to twist the camera one way or the other, um So you're kind of doing the Oasis thing we talked about.

You basically, you have a virtual background, but the virtual background is not just you on a beach, like a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's like clean and perfect the way you want it or whatever. And you're like, that's what I want my background to be regardless of the reality of the current, whatever your current situation is.

I like that. Really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real. That's not part of the background. So you'll see that the key presses make sounds. So it's just kind of cool.

So let me, um, Let me do like a, a very brief intro and like an overview of what we're gonna talk about. So Dharmesh sent us like a list of ideas. We're gonna get into 'em, but I need to give a background here so the listeners entirely understand. So HubSpot today is like a $25 or $30, I don't know, whatever the market cap is. Uh, so $25 billion publicly traded company. You co-founded it 15 years ago, I think. Prior to that, you had another startup that you sold for a significant amount of money. We can talk about that. Throughout this whole time, you own, I believe, millions and millions of dollars worth of domains. Like, you, you bought your wife, like, as a gift, humanism.com, which we got to talk about. That's pretty funny. You've— you're an angel investor in a lot of different startups, including Coinbase and things like that. You've got your hands in all these different things. Like, you, according to Wallmine or wallstreetmine.com, you're worth today $850 million. Uh, so like, you, you do a little bit of everything in the world of business. It's incredibly fascinating. And so I wanted to talk today, talk about— you might be, well, you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm gonna ask you questions about that.

Um, I don't know, it's fine.

We're gonna, we're gonna ask you questions.

It doesn't really matter. That's the one thing I've learned. We can talk about that too.

Well, that's That's okay if it doesn't matter.

We're going to talk about it.

We're also going to talk about, um, your ideas. Uh, we're going to talk about building HubSpot. We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. And we're going to talk about, um, uh, do you ever invest in non-startup stuff? We're going to invest about, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. Sean, what do you think?

Well, I would have asked him.

Okay.

So here's my question. My question is actually not about, uh, Dharmesh. It's actually about, uh, Sam. So, uh, so you, so I've always wondered this. So you acquired The Hustle. And I hope you could be as, uh, as transparent as you want here. I think Sam will, will not care. Um, so I would say DNA-wise, The Hustle is kind of a unique company. Sam's a pretty unique, uh, dude that you kind of brought into your company. Different DNA probably than the vast majority of employees there. Uh, give me kind of like—

well, and you too, you're part of the deal too, Sean, so you're in the book.

Sure, you don't have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis. So, so doing that deal and bringing these guys in, I guess, like, I don't know, are there any interesting observations, any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or— that had to do with, you know, Sam and The Hustle. I'm just curious, kind of like, what's your view on that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on.

Yeah. And we haven't— HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them. Pretty much most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think, as you, as you observed, is the DNA of The Hustle is different than HubSpot. And, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. So the thing I was worried about is And I, until now, I don't think Sam and I have actually ever had a one-on-one chat.

So that's okay. This is my therapy session for you guys.

Therapy for two people.

Ramesh and I talk a lot on Slack. We're like buddies on Slack.

But the thing I was worried about is that, you know, so Sam is a kind of what I would think of as a kind of Type A personality. Just like he's out there, he's hustling. That's hence the name of the company. Which is fine, but it's just not, most of the makeup of HubSpot is not that. We're a very, we're a, I don't know what the right, it's gonna overly stereotype us, but we're not Type A. We're like a kinder, gentler, humble, just quieter kind of company. So that's the one thing I—

Oh, here, let me explain it this way.

So Sam would be described as brash. I don't think anybody would ever describe HubSpot as brash.

No. Well, today, Kieran, the guy I work with, technically my boss, he was like, you should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role, for your growth. And I was like, well, why? He goes, I think you're too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot. It's like, that's an example.

I think that was good advice, but, um, but it's worked out. It's worked out well. So the— there have been, um, like the one kind of minor story I can recall, there was a, like a Twitter back and forth that I think Sam had with, uh, Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this, Sam, that there was something that was said about VCs or investment or something. Um, and Rand's been a good friend, it's like, and, uh, but I was like, oh, okay, well, it's fine. I'm like, okay, you know, it's like, correct. And not like either party was right, wrong, or indifferent, but I know them, you know, at least now a little bit, uh, both. But anyway, so it's— but it's been fine.

Well, in my defense, I, I hope— and even our podcast defense— our goal is we will disagree with people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of like disrespect or trying to like hurt your feelings.

Nope.

But I will say I do put entertainment first sometimes. So sometimes I will poke the bear for the entertainment value of it when, you know, the kinder, nicer, simpler thing to do would be to do nothing or just back away. So I do like to have fun either on Twitter or the podcast.

HubSpot too much. But the one thing I will say, this was, as far as the deal itself, it was one of the better things HubSpot has done in terms of like the strategy behind it. I think is strong in terms of like it gets HubSpot into a thing, which is where I think the future of kind of SaaS companies is going to be heading, which is more and more of them are going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people. And recent horses, and there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline, but I'm a believer in companies kind of controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying audiences and renting them from someone else.

See, this is where you should just say, just drop a one line, be like, you know, and we got it at a fantastic price just to drive Sam crazy for the next 7 years. Just leave him constantly questioning himself.

Look, I think There.

Yeah. Could we have sold for more? Definitely. Maybe. Like, that always is a maybe, right? I think that when we sold HubSpot, I felt was undervalued. I think when— I think the day the deal closed, it was— or maybe like, what was the stock in January? Was it like it was worth like $350 or was it even less? $250? I don't remember. Today it's $600. So like our guess, my guess was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. Um, and also I wanted to create a reputation of someone who was like a fair dealmaker and like, like I think people will know that, uh, like if I built something, I sold it, that all, all parties got a good deal. And so, okay.

All right. Sounds good. We can, we can switch off the hustle acquisition. So let's do some ideas.

No, wait, I want to talk about one thing really quick. Can we, let's talk about money stuff.

Okay.

Cause I told Dharmesh I was going to ask him this. So first of all, is it weird that I know what your net worth is today because it's like public information?

Um, it's not weird for me, honestly. Like, I'm a, um, I'm generally like transparent. I believe in kind of the openness, um, of the web. It's, um, and I'm a— in a sense, it's a publicly traded company. Like, that's, you know, would I want my like bank accounts and all my accounts kind of published on the web? No. But the fact that I'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares, which you can take the number of shares which is on the public record and multiply it by the current price and get, which is probably roughly 85-90% of my overall net worth because that's where all my money is, is in HubSpot shares. I don't find that weird.

Yeah. Has your life changed as this has accumulated and things got different? So you had another company before this. How much did you sell that for?

10 or 15 in that range based on how you count it.

And has your life changed since that moment significantly? Because that's a, that's a significant number in itself, right?

Yeah. So here, here's the thing. It's, um, and I'd like to say, you know, I, you know, I wasn't focused on money or I'm not focused on at the time when I was younger, I was very, very focused on money and I had very kind of modest upbringing. And I was like, okay, well, it wasn't like the money and the accumulation of it. It was the freedom. You know, ever since I was little, I always want to kind of configure the universe to my liking, so to speak, because I have got my quirks. I'm like, these are things. The way I like to do things. And having to kind of work in a normal kind of classic job doesn't give you a whole lot of control over your part of the universe. You don't get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire. You don't have a lot of degrees of freedom. So I had been thinking back and then I had kind of thought about money and like the first, I'll say $5 million or so has a dramatic impact, had a dramatic impact on my life, right? Because that buys you, an inordinate amount of freedom, right? You don't have to work again. Um, you can invest in things, you can do pretty— as long as you're not out, you know, buying small islands and overtaking countries. I mean, that's a decent amount of money for, for folks, right? Um, and then after that, and there are other kind of— I don't know exactly what the demarcations are where, you know, more money adds on the marginal basis, uh, a little bit more freedom, you can do more things. Um, but know, like the kinds of things I do, like I enjoy food and restaurants. There's only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being, even if you like the finer things. It's like, okay, unless you're trying to make a statement and spend 100 times what the average of a whatever X is, it's kind of hard to spend money really well, even if you have kind of high-end tastes.

Honestly, the most common thing I've heard, I don't know if you would agree or disagree, is like there's these levels. So it's like first in debt, when you're in debt to no debt, that's like the first jump where, oh, freedom, got this weight off my shoulders. Then there's kind of like what I'll call the zero to $1 million, where it's like, oh my God, mentally, I'm a millionaire. That's kind of just like a mentally freeing concept, an interesting concept. That's why we named the pod what we did. But also that'll afford you a certain type of lifestyle. And then the next jump I've heard is like at $10 or $10-ish, where it's sort of like, okay, at $10-ish, you don't have to work. Like at $1 million, you still got to work. At $10 million, you don't have to work. You can kind of like have a couple places to live. You could do whatever you want. You don't really need to check the prices when you go do things. And then there's sort of like 100 or more, which is sort of like the ego gets involved. It's like, okay, now I'm keeping score against in the business Olympics against these other folks. And also I could do some, like, I can buy an island, I can buy a piece of an NBA team, I can go do these different things that are kind of like bucket list. And the joy, what I've heard is sort of like for most people is sort of like the joy actually deescalates from the beginning there. Like, getting out of debt is sort of like the most relief, most joy, and then sort of like it starts to diminish sort of step by step as you go. Like, the 10 to 100 feels a lot less impactful and less sort of changes your joy and your mood than, uh, like going from 0 to 10.

Naval has this phrase in his, like, kind of how to get rich podcast or whatever, How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. He says I don't know what he calls it, like an outrageously outrageous hourly rate for yourself.

Like a super ambitious rate.

Ambitious one that's way beyond wherever you're at. He's like, ever since I was young, this is like one of the smart things I did. I just said $5,000 an hour, some really aspirational hourly rate. He's like, my friends used to laugh and joke like, dude, you bought this blender, you're not even using it, go return it. And he's like, no, I'm not going to go return it. I don't enjoy it. And it's going to get me back $30 for the hour round trip going and returning this thing at Target. So I will throw throw it away. I will give it away. What I will not do is I will not give my time back into that because the hourly rate just doesn't make sense.

I love that.

I love it. I've done a similar thing, and it's kind of funny to pick that hourly mark because it sounds crazy. My mom will get mad at me. She'll come to my house and then she'll see the way I'm living and she's like, oh my God, this bill is late. There's a $75 fee if you don't do it. And I'm like, I'm not calling them. And they can charge me the $75 fee. They could charge it to me 10 times. I'm not going to use this hour. And I'll tell her, look, literally my hourly rate is X, right? It's X thousands of dollars. So, so are you— that's my hourly rate. So I'm not going to trade that hour to go do this thing I don't enjoy. Um, because her other argument is, well, you go watch TV. And I'm like, well, that I enjoy. So that, that I'm actually spending the money. Um, but Sam, I know you're a little bit different. Like when I went to go visit Sam in Austin, he had like CVS receipts that he had been saving in his like glove compartment of his super fancy car. Uh, like he's a dichotomy, right? He's got, he's got money. He likes to spend some things, but he's also enjoys being frugal.

It's like, yeah, that makes me feel good about myself.

I guess the question I had for you is, do you also have an hourly rate? Do you think about that or you don't do that, that framework? Sam, this is for you.

Oh, for me? Um, yeah, I have that framework.

Yeah.

So like, uh, yeah, I mean, it makes me feel good not to waste stuff. Like I feel good about myself and I feel guilty if I waste it. So I feel, I feel happy when I do that. And I feel it's hard for me to go to bed at night if I, if I waste something or I don't return it. Um, yeah, I have that hour. I mean, I mean, I have that rate. Like, I just assume that I'm going to make, um, I assume that I'm going to make $3 million a year. So whatever that hourly rate is, but I think I'm going to make $3 million a year. And, um, anything that like will make less than that, I don't want to do it. But that said, like mowing the lawn, I get joy from that. So I have no problem. I don't like put a money thing on anything, but like, if someone's like, hey, will you, uh, in fact, Sean, someone asked us to fly to London to come speak at some event or something. And I, um, I'll afford it to you. But they're like, yeah, it's October. And I'm like, I don't want to go there. I'm like, how much money would they have to pay me to go and do this? I'm like, they have to pay me a lot.

Like, right. Because you'll say, hey, fine.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I just don't, it just, that just is a pain. They'd have to pay me $100,000 to do that. And like, that does not make any sense, but I just hate, I just hate it.

And, uh, so Dharmesh, a couple more, uh, rich guy questions. And we like these because honestly, um, you never get to ask these, even if we were just hanging out personally, I could never ask you this, but for the, for some reason with the podcast, it's like sort of okay for me to just like ask you random ass questions. Questions like this.

And I told him, I— when he wanted to come on, or I asked him to come on, I go, I'm going to ask you this stuff. And we gave him an easy out. I said, if you don't want to answer anything, just say you don't want to answer it.

Right. And I'm sort of projecting here where, um, you know, uh, I guess like I think I put myself in your shoes. What if I had more money than I could ever spend? What would I do? And so my question to you is, um, what— whether you did it or didn't, or you just considered it— what's a sort of outlandish use of funds that you've either considered or done? Like, so for example, you know, some people are like, yeah, you know, like some people like jets. That's not— I'm not buying a private jet. But what I really care about is I love this sock. So I bought every— I love Jordan's sneakers. So I bought every pair of Jordans. I have this closet in my house just full of these things because I always wanted it when I was a kid, right? Or they overspend in some area and they're just happy to have done it. Or it could be philanthropic. I think if I had a billion dollars, I think 2 days a year I would just wire somebody like a million dollars. I would literally just wire a random person a million dollars and I would just see how that plays out. And I think it would bring me tons of joy and entertainment to do that. And see how they react and what happens and what do they do with it. Like maybe some kid who's working on something interesting, I would just be like, look here, check your account, it's there. So give me something that— is there anything that's sort of non-standard that you either have done or considered doing?

Yeah, the thing that I do is I like those kind of micro acts of spontaneity that says, oh, like someone wants to go to this event or something like that and can't afford it or whatever. It's like, I'll be a sponsor. Like, if you can find people that want to do this, go do this. I'll do that relatively regularly. I've taken— this is the sound— so I've taken my average tip amount up to between 50 and 100% everywhere I go. And this is partly because I want to make up for all the time when I was younger that my family did not tip well. So I'm trying to average it out. And that's— as long as I can do it without drawing too much attention, because I don't want to be that weirdo guy. It's like, okay, no, it's like, right. Send sometimes the wrong signals. I want to do it, um, I do that, by the way, modesty. Um, it's okay.

It's just, I typically tip 50%. It makes me feel good.

Yeah. Um, it's, it's, yeah. And I've worked in the service industry before. I know that those kinds of things matter.

Um, so I'm a cheap bastard, so I'll stay silent here.

In terms of like, you know, large things. So philanthropy, the running joke inside the house is, uh, my wife and I, and so she's not from the tech world at all, but, um, so I'm really, so I want to like own the world and she wants to save it, right? Like, she— so I will make the money. Yeah, that's something I've been relatively good at, and she will be able to channel it to good causes and the Film for Africa effort. So she'll be able to do that. Um, so I don't have any, like, particular specific things. Um, I will say, like, I am a— so I'm the guy that's, like, jacked with the Matrix. So if there was a world, like, oh, it's like, this is, um, you know, like, I live a virtual world, so there's no— not a lot of physical things that I crave or desire other than a piano, which I've wanted for a while. I have now a piano, but it doesn't excite me all that much, right? It's like, it's— and because atoms, there's a maintenance to atoms, right? Like atoms versus bits. Like if you have it, whether it's a yacht or whatever it is, a plane, like that takes calories. I could take— I don't care how much you've delegated or whatever, that's something in your life that's kind of attached to you somehow. And I just don't like that. I don't like that idea. It feels more weighty to me than kind of joyful.

But so speaking of time, we, um, so HubSpot, 15 years old. I don't know how many people are here, 2,500, 3,000, whatever. Um, it seems like you guys like grew pretty fast early on, but has it always felt like a grind? Or, I mean, like when I, when I see you, I'm like, well, you don't have to do this. Um, like you could delegate this. You don't have to work here. You're set. You're good. Why are you still doing this? And does it still feel like a grind? And when has it stopped feeling like a grind? One of the reasons why I wanted to sell to you I was like, if I don't sell, like in this cycle, I'll probably have to wait another 5 years. Am I— do I want to put that work in or do I want to sell now? Like, what do I— like, that's a hard challenge. Did you face that? And just walk me through that.

Did you see Sean that he's in your power writing course?

Yeah, I saw that. I was like, how does this guy have time to do this? This is amazing. I don't know. Well, have you attended? How's it been so far?

He talks to me all the time. That's why I'm like, what do you do all day?

Um, I, I found it very useful. I'll say that. It's, uh, and I think copywriting overall is one of the most underrated skills, uh, in entrepreneurship generally. Like if people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, 50 hours And you can learn a lot of what you need just by like reading the top 3 books on it and just practicing the craft, right? It's a doable thing. And the nice thing about it, and one of the things I love about it, it's like measurable. You can objectively measure whether you got better at copywriting or not. You can look at your conversion rates or whatever numbers you're trying to move as a result of your words. And it's a learnable skill. That's— yeah.

One more question and we can move on. But when— and the reason why you were able to do this, no direct reports, is I think that you were the first investor in— so like Was this— was HubSpot your idea or was it Brian's idea? But I think you invested like half a million dollars of your own money to like get it started. And aren't you the largest shareholder of the company?

How old are you?

I was 35, 36, somewhere in that range. Um, yep.

So, so like a 36-year-old college kid living the dream.

Yeah, I did. It was, I had a great time. It was awesome. Uh, one of the best things I did, um, is, is go back to grad school for a variety of reasons. But anyway, so I had not planned on that. So my, my plan was go to grad school, then maybe get like a PhD and then go teach. That was my kind of path, uh, that my kind of chosen path. Uh, and then I met Brian in grad school.. And we both have this kind of shared passion for SMB. We both come from tech, different backgrounds. And so the first decision we made before we even decided what HubSpot was going to be was that the two of us should do a company together. And if like Brian was not going to do a company, there would be no HubSpot, right? Like I, so I had registered the domain name. I had kind of noodled on kind of a variety of things, but then we kind of came together and said, let's do this. And by the way, all through grad school, we were noodling on ideas, right? We're like, okay, well, we'll do this. And we had HubSpot. We went to the business plan competition, wrote a business plan for early versions of HubSpot. It is fun to look at. Um, but the idea came after, like, we had kind of narrowed it down to two companies, um, two paths. One was in marketing, which is what we ended up doing. The other one was like an Oracle for small business, like an ERP, uh, similar to NetSuite, which you folks were talking about in the last episode.

Uh, all right, so let's do some ideas because I think, you know, one of the cool things, uh, what I love about any technically minded person, uh, who has business success is typically when, when people who are non-technical get into business, they go in one of two paths. They, um, you know, sort of become a financier. They're like, great, still love I love business, but I don't want to sweat anymore, so I'll invest. And lots of people invest, but they make investing the main thing. And what I found is that a lot of people who are technical that end up being successful, they never stop loving kind of what's new, where technology is going, how behaviors are changing, that sort of thing. And whether they start a new company or not, they sort of live as a user at the edge. And so tell me, like, I guess, what's— give me one or two kind of technologies or ideas right now, spaces that are most exciting to you. At the moment?

Uh, two. One is around kind of broadly defined cryptocurrency, um, and we haven't talked about Big Cloud yet, but I'll bring that out, is cryptocurrencies as applied to other kind of mainstream things. So the— if I were not doing HubSpot, which I have no plans of doing anything else, but, um, this is the idea. I'm gonna give you my pitch, Sean. Yeah, what you should do since now you're out of Twitch, um, you should do a professional network, um, that's powered by the blockchain that— I'm going to say this as kindly as— that, uh, people love. Um, because if people don't love the incumbent right now—

can I, can I say my opinion? You know, you know my opinion. Can you— cool if I say it?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

LinkedIn sucks. Uh, how about this? A lot of people say LinkedIn sucks. And, um, You're suggesting building a different one, um, on the blockchain.

So let's sketch it out.

This just got spicy. Okay.

Oh my God. What's the domain name that you have?

I am dead serious. I have, uh, and you can, yeah. Um, so, and here, here's why it needs to—

wait, let's play this out.

Yeah.

Keep going.

So the issue right now is that, you know, LinkedIn, yes, people don't like it. It was a product that was great for its time and times have changed. Now there's a different kind of need. And the thing I'm excited about is the intersection of a couple of things. One is, you know, we didn't have things like Big Cloud or cryptocurrency before. Now we do. Right. One of the issues with LinkedIn is like, okay, well, you've got the kind of spam issue. You've got all this like, okay, well, how do I separate all the noise from the signal? It's just, it's just a pain in the ass over time. Right. Asymptotic move for LinkedIn is like diminishing utility, right? It's like it's just going to become painful and then there's, there's a cap on where you can go with it. So imagine, uh, that you— and so BitCloud ended up doing Twitter with the blockchain. Imagine if there was something else that did LinkedIn on the blockchain and you have your own kind of currency, and then you could say, hey, you know what, I'm a free— I'm an engineer that's a free agent or whatever, and for $500 I will look at your company and apply for it. I'll do a reasonably good job. Or for $10 I'll open your email, or for X I'll do this. Is like, okay, there's a—

Correct. And just one more thing. Yeah. So yes. So there's a kind of crypto angle where everyone's got a price. The other angle is, is we'll call it PageRank for the professional graph. Right.

So right now the professional— that's cool.

It's all, it's all symmetric. Right. So every person you follow gets an equal number of follow value, whatever their account goes up by exactly one. It's not weighted in any single way.

Explain PageRank a little bit.

So the kind of the beauty behind Google, the original idea that made it the powerhouse it is today is they said, okay, well, how do we determine what the best set of results are to show for a keyword search? Right. And it came down to two things. One is like the overall context of the page. So if you're searching for real estate Boston or something like that, it'll look at all the pages that's indexed. It's like, okay, well, this— these set of pages are about real estate in Boston to varying degrees. That's kind of factor one in the function.

So which people also just say good content.

Yeah, exactly. We'll just call it quality, like the context.

Quality content. Yeah. Which is the whole—

which is the whole thing. Authority, right? And the authority is where PageRank comes in. So they say, okay, here's this individual web page sitting on the internet. We're going to measure its authority by how many links are coming into that page, because that's a, that's an endorsement of— and the value of those links passed to that individual page, the PageRank value of it, the authority that gets passed through, is based on the PageRank of those pages, right? So it's a recursive function to say, oh, well, if the New York Times links to you, that's much more valuable than if Dharmesh's blog links to you, because New York Times has more PageRank. Last piece of the PageRank thing, which is super important to know, is that the amount of PageRank you pass across the links from your page are proportional to your PageRank. So let's say I have 2 units of PageRank, I'm making the number up. And if I link to just one person, it's your blog, Sam, all the PageRank I have on that page accrues to you by transference. If I link to 10 different people, it gets distributed across those 10 links. Yeah. Right. So it's a weighted graph versus just a symmetrical graph where we're not. So now if you imagine a professional network graph where everything was graphed, it's like, okay, well, I endorse Sam and I have a certain authority. I have a certain currency. If we've got a cryptocurrency underneath it, as a result of which Sam's currency goes up by X amount. So it's not just me buying shares, it's just by that. So I think the notion of a follow should go away. It's like if you really, really like that person, buy a dollar, buy $5 or something like that. Right? That's the one kind of—

So what you're saying is, just to make sure I understand. So what you were saying is instead of just following Sam, which you have an infinite supply and Um, you know, sort of as a pretty light signal, you're saying in this case you would be able to own some of Sam's coin. That'd be a pretty strong endorsement. And secondly, the fact that your coin is worth a lot would mean that because you, a valuable person, own Sam's coin, Sam's coin goes up not just by the $5 you paid, but by some multiple of that in terms of the overall algorithm, the way the algorithm weights Sam's value now.

Correct. So for instance, if you raise money, if you're a startup and you raise money from Andreessen or Sequoia, like a million dollars is not a million dollars. Exactly. Actually has an impact. The same thing, follow should matter. The fact that you follow me should matter more than someone that just joined Twitter or Bitcloud or whatever yesterday, right?

This is a tremendous idea. I'm having trouble containing myself at the moment.

This is one of the more exciting ideas because people know exactly what I came here for is to put you on the spot and was like, okay, listen to this idea, Sean.

That's insane because I got excited about Bitcloud and I got excited about it because I think that we do want a social network that's inverted. So instead of one platform controlled by one company that owns all the data, it's inverted. It's inside out. It's basically no company. All the data is free and you own your own business on top of it. And so I think that— I don't want to say— how do I say decentralized without saying decentralized? That's my way of saying it.

Okay.

So I think that's exciting. And then a whole bunch of people were like, I can't believe you're endorsing this scam project and blah, blah, blah, blah. And is this going to make me richer? Is this not going to make me rich? I was sort of like, well, it's besides the point. It might, but it's besides the point. It's more like this is what the next Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebooks are going to look like in either 1 or 10 years. I'm not sure. And Bitcloud or the next thing, I'm not sure, but I'm going to play with this one and I'm going to like give it a ride so that when the right one does arrive, whether it's this one or the next one, I know what I'm looking at. I know what's real and what's not. And that's why I recommended people go play with it just to see, just to be on the forefront of But you—

something like it needs to exist, right? Whether it'll be the one or not, I don't know. And so I've been spending a fair amount of calories trying to kind of understand the mechanics of Bitcloud itself.

Um, how much money did you—

on the, uh, top creators, uh, list. So I've been kind of moving up the, up the curve, so to speak.

Yeah, dude, the thing about— how much have you put into Bitcloud?

Uh, it's got to be a million dollars.

Give or take a million dollars.

Yeah, I I, man, the thing that pissed me off about big clout was I got into this, like I had, I didn't get into it cause I had to, I knew I was going to get into this thing I'm about to say, but I was getting to, I wanted to get into a pissing match real fast about building clout and because there was money on the line and yeah, I just, I was thinking, oh, I don't want to actually want to get in this race. I don't want to play that game. And that, so that I kind of had a little, like I, one part of me is I actually fundamentally agree with most everything you're saying. On the other part, I'm like, oh, if this exists, I'm going to be getting in a lot of like pissing matches or whatever, and I'm going to be playing more games. And that kind of freaks me out a little bit.

Yeah. And this is one of the issues with BitCloud right now, right? You have a bunch of like founder rewards games and things like that. And this is, this is what happens. This is why we can't have nice things, partly, right? It's like anytime something new comes along, there will be people that are trying to game the system, whatever. So even back in the early days of Google, it's like the internet wasn't a scam and Google wasn't a scam, but there were a bunch of people trying to scam Google to kind of show up in the results and doing doing kind of spammy SEO kind of stuff. You see the same thing on BitCloud, right? And you have to sort of kind of separate that from the platform. It's like, okay, fundamentally the idea does not feel like a scam to me. Yes, they needed to open it up and have it listed on exchange so you can actually take money out, you know, minor details. But, um, it— but they're fixing those. And I talked to the, uh, to the founder, like, in like one of the few calls I, I've had in the last 12 months because I don't do phone calls, um, but it feels legit to me. That's not to say it's going to succeed, but it's— I'm relatively confident it's not a scam, that this reason for being is not a scam.

So one of the things that happens with like a Google or a Facebook is, you know, uh, like you said, there's a big honeypot either of users or money on the line. And so then you get good people excited about it, you get technologists excited about it, but you also get these sort of scammers— and not even scammers, but I'll call them schemers— people who are not doing anything illegal, but they're thinking Oh, this is a game. How do I play it so that I get the highest score? And the score is either money or followers or whatever they're trying to game. And whether this is like, you know, BuzzFeed and Upworthy saying, oh, newsfeed, how do I game newsfeed to get all this monthly traffic? Or, you know, Zynga doing this with games on Facebook or whatever. With a company, you sort of have the, like, you know, for as much as people hate that Facebook and Google can sort of censor and pull the rug out from under you, they are able to like swat down these schemers and scammers so that, you know, they don't ruin the experience for everybody. And one thing that's interesting with decentralized platforms is that there's nobody in— there's no CEO, there's nobody in charge to, to do that. And so I think it's going to be very interesting how that plays out. Do you have a sense of if that's going to be a problem, or do you think that there's a solution to that with the, the governance?

I'm a believer in kind of self-governance over time. Like, it all depends on the time horizon. Will it fix itself in a year or two years? Maybe not. I think there's still going to be this kind of dark parts of BitClout that people don't want to tread into. But over time, I think once BitClout kind of figures out what it wants to be when it grows up, and like, what's the actual— right now, you know, the way I think of it is like the kind of Twitter use case is just a way to kind of prove out the protocol. It just so happens they picked that one. They could have picked any number of other ones. But as people kind of build real things using that underlying kind of technology, because it's an open protocol, I think things will settle down. People will find a way that they can implement use cases that concretely solve a particular problem and stay away from some of the kind of dark issues right now, which is— yeah.

What's the name that you bought for Sean? You said you bought a 7-figure domain name for this idea.

I have one. I'm in the midst of negotiating the price on it. I'm not going to reveal it. I don't want to be outbid.

How many letters is it?

Set?

7. Hmm, okay, I'll be very curious to hear what, what this is going to be.

You, you had said 2 spaces, and one, one is the crypto, crypto social network. Uh, what was the other space you're excited about?

Have you seen anyone besides— I was gonna say besides Alexa— have you seen any hints of what I call a magic trick? It's when you see somebody build a piece of software and then they're like, yeah, so you just do XYZ and boom, it's done. And you're like, holy shit, you got that, you know, you just wove your magic wand and got that. And it's like when you see a magic trick, you— it's very hard to unsee, and you kind of can't look get the old software the same way anymore. It's like Instagram filters or something like that. It's like, oh wait, your photo looks like that? Oh shit. Okay, well now all my photos in my camera roll look like shit in comparison. Like, I can't even look at these anymore. So have you seen any cool magic tricks with conversational or natural language processing?

Closest I've gotten. So I built something myself called GrowthBot a few years ago.

I remember that.

I remember GrowthBot. And it was built for marketers. To be able to get marketing data out, both of your kind of marketing system, something like a HubSpot or a Mailchimp, but also just other data sources like, oh, what are the top 3 keywords that Uber buys on PPC? Like, that data's out there, right? Like, we already know to kind of ask that. And so, or like, when was this domain registered? Or like just a bunch of— and I would go through every night and look at all the questions people asked of this thing because it was a blank canvas. They had no idea what the thing was capable of. And then I would go back and it's like, okay, well, here are the repeating patterns. Wouldn't it be nice if I could go update the software to kind of do that thing? It came close. It was, I think, a little early. I think we're further along now. People are more used to that notion of being able to express it.

That's so funny that you do these. I'm looking at the growth. I remember GrowthBot, like people were sharing it and I just— you just made this. Did you? So you just whipped up this landing page and you made this?

I made the whole thing.

Yeah.

Like I spent a bunch of like time just learning about what's possible, coded the whole thing myself.

God, that's so funny. Can you— gosh, this is so funny. You see that, Sean?

Yeah, yeah, I'm on it.

It's great, right? Like, it's just cool that you do this stuff and you have within— like, everything you do is kind of related to HubSpot, right? It's all in the same world. You also like— you were— it seems like you're really into Website Graders. Is that right? That Business of Web. So I was talking to Heaton Shaw the other day. Heaton Shaw.

Kissmetrics.

He did everything.

He's got a startup, Mira.

Yeah, Mira. He's got, which I've—

Crazy Egg.

Kissmetrics.

Crazy Egg. Quick Sprout. All types of shit. I mean, he's like you. He just fucking has his hands in everything. But he and his partner Neil have neilpatel.com/ubersuggest. And then they also had neilpatel.com/rateyourwebsite or something like that.

Yeah.

Why are you so into these website rating businesses and products? What, what the hell is going on with that?

I'm into— so the original thing was called Website Grader. Um, it was actually a funny story. So back when we first started HubSpot, uh, it was just Brian, my co-founder, and I, and we would go look at people's websites and to see if they would be a good fit for HubSpot, the software, or not. Right. And so we would go and I would look at their— like, I'd do a view source in Chrome and then look at their source code. It's like, okay, do these they, do they have the right meta tags? Do they seem clueful, right? You can— there's a bunch of signals you can look at. Look, Alexa ranking, stuff that you do, you folks do all day long right now when you research companies.

Like a, like a SimilarWeb type of thing.

But anyway, are you, uh, Sean, do you see his list of ideas? Let's just start banging them out.

I want to—

I like this. There's two things. So first, I think the thing you just described is like a growth hack without saying, uh, yeah, I did it to grow. Thank you. Like solved your own itch. But like, that's just— we've talked about it for quizzes. Quiz is the same thing. Lead gen. This is an amazing lead gen tool where you basically got a bunch of qualified leads, uh, people who self, you know, they self-assess, I might have a problem, they go get it checked up, your digital doctor said, yep, you indeed do have a problem. And then all you had to do is prescribe a solution called HubSpot. You know, here's HubSpot in a little bottle for you.

And I would tell you how clueless I was back then. So I put this thing up there, um, and at the time, uh, we, we had a meeting set up with Gail Goodman, who was the CEO of Constant Contact at that time, and she later joined the HubSpot board. But we met with her, we're like, oh, we're working on this company called HubSpot, it's kind of related to Constant Contact space, um, and we want to get her advice.. And I showed her Website Grader. It's like, oh, here's what we do. And we can kind of look at websites, whatever. And she loved it. But then she says, you know, you might consider putting like an email address box on because we had no way of knowing who these people were. They were not leads for us. We had like 100,000 people like use the tool.

Unintentional growth hack.

I never thought to collect an email address. Like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to— anyway, we obviously fixed that.

So I like that. And then also for this conversational thing, I think what you just said, it's kind of like sometimes guests on this podcast say something in passing that I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's actually a really big idea. And I think you actually said two. I think that the crypto LinkedIn one is a big idea. And I think the second one is this idea that if you think about one of the biggest and what some people say is the best business they've ever seen is Google, right? People come in there, it's just a search box. It's Magic Genie. If you go ask a question and it tries to give you some answers. And the way I view this is if somebody could actually do this, this is sort of like next level Google where I ask it any question and it doesn't just give me like a list of pages where the answer might be. It's like it actually gives me the answer.. And so, um, this might be, you know, in the business context might be like a business Google, but there, there's many versions of this. Uh, I, I don't know if you've seen this. Have you ever seen, uh, DBuild? Have you ever checked out this website?

Mm-mm.

Yeah, we talked about DBuild, didn't we?

So my friend Sharif, uh, this is a perfect example of a magic trick thing. He, um, was messing around with GPT-3. So GPT-3, new technology comes out, he gets access right away, drops his whole startup, starts just hacking on this thing at night, right? And, uh, he throws up this, he has this idea of like, Dude, Squarespace, Wix, these website builders have been around forever.

Everybody wants to be able to code without having to code. But even now it's still so complicated, even after Webflow, after all this stuff. And so he's like, why can't you just describe, I want a website that's got kind of like two columns and on the left I want pictures of places you can stay and on the right I want the price of the thing. And you could literally just type that in and it'll build you a website that looks like Airbnb. It'll build you a website that does that. He posted posted on Twitter a GIF. He's like, you know, I'm messing around with GPT-3 and watch this. Like, you know, build a website with a photo and then add a PayPal button, but then make it where the PayPal button can only take $5 max and like, that's it. And then send the payments to this. And then it like spit out a website that did that, like the HTML and the CSS that did that. And he posted that GIF. And I think off basically one tweet with one GIF, he raised like $2 million instantly from like really smart people when that tweet went viral because they were like, Oh, you just showed me a magic trick and I don't know what the company is here. And I think he still doesn't know what the company is, but go down this path and see what you can find.

It was pretty amazing. I remember when that tweet went live. I mean, it went viral right away.

Yeah, right. I played with the GPT-3, played with it for a while across multiple things. It's like the closest thing to like magic that it's weird because it's it's kind of a different vector, right? Because it originally is like a text generation mechanism to be able to write prose based on, because it's got this corpus of data behind the scenes. And I talked to, you know, Sal Maltman, the CEO, Brian and I had a, he was gracious enough to give us some time to, it's like, okay, well, like, where is this headed? What's going on to see the kind of impacts on HubSpot in the world in general? And it's like, that's one of those things that I, right now, I don't think quite there to be able to like implement like practical use cases to actually do the thing that people are trying to do.. I've played with it, uh, on kind of multiple fronts, but it's one of those that it's going to go from, as Peter, like, from a 0 to a 1 very, very quickly. It's like all of a sudden that wasn't really possible and didn't really quite work well enough, and then it's gonna be like, holy crap, then there's like the, uh, kind of post-GPT-3 world.

What's that phrase where it's like, you know, slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden, or something like that? Yeah, it looks like it's gonna be that. Uh, Sam, you said you like some of the ideas on this list or some of the topics.

Let's just go back a little bit. We, we just talked about something huge. That was a huge idea.

Let's talk about something small but still cool.

So So it looks like— did you buy remoteculture.com?

I did.

Okay, so that's a no-brainer. There's a business that will make $1 million a year. Remote culture, online community for those building remote cultures. Easy, right?

That's a no-brainer.

What would you do there?

There's one on here that I really like. Speed round. So, uh, so by the way, these are, these are what, these are domains that like you don't have an idea for?

By the way, when I have like a, an idea that's enough in my head that it's like, okay, well, this is kind of cool, I don't like write it down a notebook. I go find a related domain. Um, it's like it costs $15 if it hasn't been taken yet, or, or maybe I'll spend more if it's, you know, um, something really kind of strikes my fancy.

What's, what's the most expensive ideas? What's the most expensive domain you own?

Well, um, you haven't had them valued. I don't really sell domains. I own birminghamalabama.com. I live there. I think that's probably the 7-figure, uh, domain. Just bought humanism.com and humanism.org.

You also bought, bought one for me.

Bought one for you. I bought thehustle.com for you as a gift that I was going to give to you on the podcast. So, so later learn that you don't care about domain names all that much.

No, no, hold on. A deal trophy, right? Uh, whenever you get acquired, they have this little tro— I don't know, Sam, did you know about this deal trophies?

No, I want a deal trophy.

So when we got acquired, they gave us like, uh, it took like a few months, but it was like, hey, uh, sorry, I meant to get this to you like, you know, when the deal closed. But I guess it's like in the deal-making world, I'm not, I'm not like a mover and shaker of biz dev and like corp dev and things like that, but I guess it is sort of a tradition of when the deals close, it's sort of like the, the, the champagne. What you do is you, you get sort of like a little ornament that has some meaning to the deal. Like in our case, our code name, uh, was like Project Whatever, and it was like, let's just call it, uh Project Sharp.

It wasn't— I think we were Project H or something.

And so then they got like this like kind of like cool looking knife, uh, you know, because it's like Project Sharp, whatever. Here's the, here's the, the deal trophy. So I think your deal trophy is this domain here.

Well, and, and, and for the record, Dharmesh, if you like gift that to the Hustle Company, we would love it. And I actually do like domain names. My whole point about domain names was it's—

don't let it stop you.

99% of people are not like you or not like me. Like we do shit. Like you're killing it and you just made this little rinky-dink project called GrowthBot. Like, that's a way to do shit. 99% of people don't do shit and they have stupid excuses like, well, I don't have the domain name, it's taken, or I do have the domain name, therefore I should do that. My point is, don't let it stop you. But I still think it's sick and it's awesome and I love it. It's like saying, like, just because you don't— just because you don't have a sick gym doesn't mean you can't go out there and walk and lose weight.

That's—

I think, you know, like, Justin was on the podcast last time and he was like, there should be a dating app that matches you on like kind of your credit card spending history or something like that.

For me, that's what it's like with this podcast.

Cast where it's like, if I just— if you just tell me how many domains you own that you actually bought but you don't have like a live project on, if that number is, you know, greater than 10, uh, we're gonna be— we're gonna be thick as thieves. And like, you know, how many tabs do you have open right now? If I just knew those two things, I can kind of tell you if this podcast is a fit for you or not. If you're somebody who owns zero domains, then you probably aren't gonna, you know, really connect with this podcast in a major way, I don't think.

But, uh, anyway, and mediocrity is the big problem because it wastes the most valuable resource. It wastes time, right? Because it's not going to die quickly, nor is it going to take off. So it is a slow, long burn, uh, at a mediocre level. And so you're sort of locking in over a period of time a mediocre outcome. And that's why mediocrity is the biggest risk.

I think the hardest about bootstrapping companies, especially tech companies that have a low kind of capital need, is they can actually live forever and not go anywhere, right? Because it doesn't take that much to— it's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you— it doesn't really cost that much. And you don't have investors pushing on you to say, oh, we need some sort of outcome. And so you can run that company indefinitely and waste a bunch of your time when the next idea that you could have done was sitting right behind it, right? Like, I have— I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs by this point point. I have never, ever in my entire life met an entrepreneur that had just one idea. It's like, oh, you will have more, dude. It's like, okay, try the thing. If you can sell the thing, sell the thing. If you're not that excited about it or you just want to cash out, take some chips off the table, there's no harm and no shame. But yeah.

Did you— but you guys didn't raise a significant amount at HubSpot, did you?

But that seems interesting to me because you don't seem— you seem like a guy who likes freedom and knows that he's—

knows what he is and knows that he's a little bootstrapper is what he's trying to say. Why don't you bootstrap?

Was Brian successful like you were, or was he—

He didn't need He hadn't had like an exit because he hadn't done a startup before. This was his first one. But he also was like, okay, this is my last swing at bat, right? This is it. This is the one that's either going to do it or not going to do it. And so that was the reason. So we weren't worried about diluting. We negotiate the fairest value we could. We made sure the terms were meaningful, had good investors, but we were not worried about what our percentage stake in the company was and how that moved over time. We're like, okay, if this thing does what it needs to do, to do, uh, the valuation and all that and the equity dilution will not matter. Like, on the margin, it just— it— it's— we want it to be a binary outcome. Either it's going to be this huge massive thing which, um, will change our lives, uh, and have a massive impact, or it goes down in crashing burning flames, which is highly likely. But, um, we weren't looking to hold on to control. We weren't looking— it's like, we wanted to be— we didn't want to be king. We want to be rich, I guess.

Uh, but when you're doing like ideation and stuff though, you, you either— I think you wrote— you wrote it here— you're down with starting a project with a bad idea because you're quite confident that you'll, you can figure out, you can make it great as you get into it.

Where do we go from here, Sean?

We got— I think we got to wrap it here. There's this— I think we have to have you on again if you're down, because here's 5 topics I want to hear about. Why I don't play golf and what I do instead. I want that one. Why I hate inefficiency in markets. Why I don't believe in karma, but I believe in extended feedback loops. Sometimes faking it is making it. Introverted engineer's guide for public speaking. Like, I need all of these. So we may have to do another one. I have one question I want to wrap with in this one. Which is you seem like a pretty astute guy, like very good observations. And I think you know kind of who we are and what we care about and that we would value honesty.

So I'm curious. You can ask me the intro question, aren't you? You can ask me the intro question.

No, not the intro question. Sam's trying to get all the intros. He can ask you that one. I want to know. I'm trying to make the content great. So what would be the most fair criticism you could give us on the podcast? What's your critique of the podcast for you as a listener?

Listener.

And there's like, you can offend.

Yeah, exactly. That's kind of what I'm teeing you up for. Say whatever it is, whatever you truly feel.

I'm, I'm on a, I'm, I'm, I'm taking notes.

Keep going. If you do that, my, my guess is that the click-through rate goes up because you can't not, um, right now you just kind of identify the episode number and who the guest is or whatever, but there's no real, maybe the topic area, but right now me and Sam don't even, me and Sam don't even touch the headlines.

Dan does it. I don't even know. I see a notification, it goes out and I think to, I judge the headline myself. I'm like, ah, that's Oh, that's not gonna give very many clicks, or, oh, that's a juicy one.

That'll work. I say give Dan a free pass to the Sean Copywriting course.

I put him in the course yesterday.

That's awesome.

What else? What else you got? Anything else?

Of course you have more.

Who, me?

Yeah. Yeah. What about more? That was a weak criticism.

Oh yeah. That was an easy one. Okay. This is a hard one, right? Is around—

He's gonna say like, just change your voice.

Voice. Yeah.

He's like, your face is great, but I suppose it's yours.

So it's around the, it's around the brand. And this is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to, to kind of reconcile with. So, uh, a couple of issues that I have as a kind of amateur branding person is that anything that can be reduced to an acronym will be, which, uh, My First Million is often reduced to that. Uh, and then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym, anyone that comes like in the media, it's like they're not gonna know what it is if they don't know what it is. And there's some value to that, but it doesn't compensate for the kind of opportunity you have. So that's one thing is acronyms, not good. But the other one is that the kind of my first million, there is a cadre, cadre, however that word is pronounced, of people that will directly, that topic will resonate with like, oh, I want to learn about that. But I think your reach is much wider now. And there are people, there are probably more people outside that sphere that that particular like, okay, well, well, it's fine that it's about that, but really the reason I'm here is to hear folks like Balaji, right? Like that. And that episode, which is I think one of the best episodes you've had, had nothing to do with the first million anything. It had to do with big ideas.

Look, we, I actually agree with you and I, and we've had this conversation. The problem that we had was like, fuck, we're pretty deep into it.

We can't change.

Brand equity. Yep. Yep.

I, for what it's worth, I think we should change just because I hate the name. So I don't really care about the brand equity. I'm just sort of like, I don't want to have a thing that I dislike.

I don't— yeah, I don't, I don't love it. I really don't. It's—

I don't, I don't love the name. I don't love the name of the hustle either.

If you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future, which I do, then 90% of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet. And so, uh, we're, we're only offending a very small— we're only changing on a very small population of people for the good of the long run. That would be my, my—

and by the way, if you think it's hard now you realize the direction you're headed, it does not get easier, right? It's gonna get harder and harder than like a year from now, 2 years from now, 5 years from now. You're gonna— it's like, ah, like, should we have changed this? Like, what would have been? It's like, not that it's gonna have a dramatic impact on the numbers or anything, but on the margin, these things matter and they kind of accrue and accumulate. And here's what I would do to make life easier for yourselves: don't decide to change the name, decide to come up with alternatives, and then objectively measure those alternatives. Like, okay, Okay, am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the, the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better? If something clicks for you, great, but make an honest, concerted effort to come up with those alternatives and options, and then you can still decide. It's like, yeah, these are better, but they're just marginally better. They're not better enough to go through the headache of trying to change it, right? That would be my advice.

Okay, that's great. Uh, Sam, you want anything else before we go?

We're going to follow up with some intros, my man. We got— Dan, Dan, do we have an update? Are we reaching out to guests?

Can we—

got to use Darmesh. She knows everyone. Everyone.

Well, I'm curious, actually, you do know everybody who's awesome, who's like particularly awesome that you're just like either it's kind of underrated or you're just like, so, you know, I don't know as many people as you think.

Like, I'm kind of on the internet and I do things, but I, you know, I don't, like, I don't leave my house, right? So it's like, you have to, in order to kind of be that person, you have to sort of like interact with carbon-based life forms in real life, right? Like, I don't do that. That's not a thing I do. So it's hard to kind of build those kinds of relationships. But I would, on your list, I would have, so I'm not gonna be good at intros, but I like Naval would be awesome to have on the podcast. He's like a, like that kind of biology level thinker. I think he'd be awesome. The audience would love him. So that would be great.

Great. We'll take that intro.

Thank you. He doesn't know me. I mean, he knows me like loosely.

I'm gonna start calling you, we'll call you Uncle Dharmesh. You gotta hook it up, man.

Come on. I'm willing to try it. Don't get me wrong. I have no qualms about trying to make the intro. Just don't, just manage your expectations. It's like, wow, I thought like Dharmesh actually could like swing things and make shit happen. I, I, I—

Anyone else?

Someone I do know that I think would be good on the podcast, Drew from Dropbox, I know really well. So that's an intro I could make. What's up? Dropbox? Yeah, that would be a good one.

I heard he's an amazing singer. Is that true?

He's, he's a, he's a good singer for a founder.

Amazing for a founder is what I mean.

He's legit. He's legit. Again.

So Dharmesh, Dharmesh was pretty nervous coming up to this because he was like, well, I just like to overprepare and I don't think good on my feet. Or sorry, you're like, you know, I prepare and I don't love like just making shit up. I think you did an excellent job. Dan has been texting me saying Dharmesh is so awesome. I told you, Dharmesh, I told you this yesterday. I'm going to predict the future. You're going to come on and then you're going to start wanting to come on like once a month Maybe I have a feeling that, that we have just accomplished that and that's going to be true. You're freaking awesome. What's your Twitter handle? It's just Dharmesh, so D-H-A-R-M-E-S-H. You're really active, so people want to get in touch with you everywhere.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, pick your thing.

Anything you want to—

Dharmesh.org, Dharmesh.net.

But yeah, anything you want to, you want to pimp out or promote?

No, I'm not a promoter kind of guy. That's not my thing.

Well, thanks, man. This is awesome. We— I talk to you a lot. I got to set up— I want to set up like times to just holler at you because I want to learn about you more. I want to learn about HubSpot.

Sam wants to be your first direct report in 15 years.

No, no, no, no, I don't want to—

I don't want that.

But, uh, uh, this is great. Heaton was like, you got to learn from Dharmesh, just learn what makes HubSpot tick. So, uh, thanks dude, this is awesome. We're gonna have you back on.

Did it—

did it turn out as good as you thought?

I love you guys. This was— this was fun. This was— I— yeah. And I think it's— it's more importantly, I hope it ends up being useful for the audience. That's the thing I'm solving for.

Honestly, I'm looking at this doc, I feel like we left a lot on the table. We have a lot more that we could do. I'm I'm sort of regretting, uh, you kind of have to— I always feel this way with a guest, by the way. I'm like, the first 20 minutes were slow, but it's also like, I've never met this person, and like, you know, the audience doesn't know all about this person, so there is a certain context building that has to happen.

Yeah, you gotta date.

I gotta figure out why every, every single guest I'm like, oh, the first 25 minutes were slow, but then it got really good. And, um, yeah, I don't know if that's just my own— I'm just kicking myself for, for no reason, or if other people feel that way, and maybe we should actually do something different and like sort of pull the future forward. Like, just pull, just start at the, start at that, uh, 25-minute mark, basically.

This is fun, folks. That's, uh, yeah.

All right, that's a wrap.

All right.