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They like people who can get along well with others, “the kind of people that I’d like to go have a beer with after work.” I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with Wingman after work, but he seems nice enough.
HubTalk, which is what HubSpot calls its speaker series,
But Halligan knew how to sell. Among his first hires were a head of marketing and a head of sales.
The vast majority of HubSpot’s employees work not in engineering or software development, but in sales and marketing.
The kids are in the living room, fighting. They fight all the time, and with such passion that sometimes I think we should find an exorcist.
Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult.
The truth is that we’re selling software that lets companies, most of them small businesses, sell more stuff.
the billions of emails that we blast into the world do not constitute email spam. Instead, those emails are what we call “lovable marketing content.” That is really what our trainers call it. That is the exact term they use. The convoluted logic behind this is that “spam” means unsolicited email, and we only send email to people who have handed over their contact information by filling out a form and giving us their permission to be contacted.
Did you know that it’s harder to get hired at HubSpot than it is to get accepted at Harvard?”
test tweet
HubSpot prides itself on having numbers for everything—it’s a data-driven organization
Most companies put sales reps on a quarterly or annual quota. At HubSpot the quotas are monthly, which means sales reps never come up for air. The sales department churns through these young hires. Bring them in, burn them out, toss them away, find new ones—that’s the model.
In every aspect of life, we’re told, there is a HubSpotty way of doing things.
because at HubSpot we’re supposed to always solve for the customer, or SFTC.
I want to tell Zack that they all need to STFU because WTF does any of this have to do with how ordinary human beings actually speak to one another. Instead, I try a more diplomatic approach.
Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults, the creation of special language being one example.
The use of the word we in the subtitle of the code—“Creating a company we love”—implies a sort of consensus. In reality, Dharmesh is creating a company that he loves and hoping to persuade his employees to love it along with him.
Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three.
One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.”
The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up.
DISC is based on concepts created in 1928 by a psychologist named William Marston, who also created the comic book character Wonder Woman. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about DISC.
Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.
having a bunch of people from HubSpot suddenly flood Twitter with exactly the same messages at exactly the same time doesn’t strike me as the smartest way to promote an article. On the Internet, ginning up fake grassroots support is called astroturfing, and the tactic is generally frowned upon.
(The name of Shah’s teddy bear, Molly, is a blend of Mary and Ollie.)
“How weird are you, on a scale from one to ten?” is an actual question that HubSpot’s twenty-something managers ask job candidates during interviews,
she tried to use the BTG to generate ideas for Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and received the following: WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!) and MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON
She looks at me as if I’m an imbecile. “It’s a hackathon,” she says. “I know,” I say, “but why have a hackathon? If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?” She pauses. She really is a very nice young woman, and I like her a lot. “There’s food,” she says. I go home.
I don’t want to think about what kind of fearless things these people have come up with. I have visions of things like jumping out of airplanes, wrestling bears, or seeing who can stand on the subway tracks for the longest time.
At home that night, I tell my kids about this and show them the photos of the paintings. They think this is hilarious.
The following Monday, when I leave for work, they taunt me: “Have a good day at kindergarten, Daddy! Have fun making your paintings!”
A third Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, has a net worth of $200 million and since leaving Twitter has launched two companies, Jelly and Super. Nobody, including Stone himself, seems to understand what these companies do.
“I tell my board as little as possible,” he says. “I treat them like mushrooms, I keep them in the dark and feed them shit. I don’t want them meddling in my business and telling me what to do.”
Employees at HubSpot are told that the needs of the company are more important than their own. “Team > individual” is how Dharmesh expresses this in his culture code, whose subtitle is “Creating a company we love.” Who falls in love with a company? Especially when that company tells you that we’re not a family?
Paige, thirty-five, gets tossed on a Friday morning, a few weeks shy of her one-year anniversary, when her first batch of options would vest. Ironically, Zack fires her during Fearless Friday, our feminist empowerment team-building exercise.
Based on what I’m seeing, we’re in trouble. Sure, Benioff is full of shit, but so are we, and Benioff is way better at being full of shit than we are.
The old W. C. Fields line “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”
Halligan is not the only tech CEO who prefers to hire young people; he’s just the only one dumb enough to admit it.
bubble refers to a period when valuations of companies are no longer connected to their financial performance,
“Even turkeys can fly in a strong wind.” Kleiner Perkins was founded in 1972 and is one of the oldest, most respected VC firms in Silicon Valley.
My theory is that when investing in start-ups required the ability to understand technology, he was without peer, but when the Valley turned its attention to social networks, photo filters, and games for teenagers, Doerr was out of his element, and so he started chasing fads.
After all, we’re the best marketing team on the planet! People would kill to have us teach them about marketing!
“You’re fucking with a company that’s worth a billion and a half dollars.
