Thread by @bhalligan

Literally everything I learned about building teams at HubSpot. 🧵

Times change, teams change: Our original management team at HubSpot was brilliant and I just assumed it would be the same crew we’d be in the trenches with for the whole run. That turned out not to be true.  If you step back, you’d see that we are probably on our third or fourth management team – all were good in their respective stage.  It turns out that people kind of self-select for stage. Those early leaders we had were super risk seeking and really well suited to that phase and have all gone on to do awesome stuff in that early stage. I’m super proud of them.…My advice is not to sweat it too much if you need to replace leaders on your team as you grow. The company and the leader are likely both better off.

Home grown talent is underrated:  I’ve noticed that the vc playbook when a new round is done is to recommend “upleveling” some of the home grown talent.  In some cases this might be right, but I think folks over index on it.  If you look at the executive teams of some of the best companies (i.e. Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, etc) they are full of people who have been there a long time.  HubSpot’s current management team has a lot of “home grown” talent.

Recruit from companies just a few years ahead of you: I’ve found this applies to board members and executives. When we hire folks from companies that are several orders of magnitude larger than HubSpot (i.e. Microsoft, Google), there is an impedance mismatch. They are dealing with different issues at a different scale. We’ve had good luck with hiring folks who are at companies we admire that are just a few steps ahead of us.

Avoid compliments. Find complements: If I put 100 calories into getting better at something I was already kinda good at and enjoyed, I would get 1000 out. If I put 100 calories into getting better at something I was kinda bad at and didn’t enjoy, I would get 101 out. I stopped obsessing about fixing my weaknesses and started hiring folks that could plug them. Don’t hire in your own image! Hire folks who are complementary.

Five compliments for every criticism is bull-shiitake: Management gurus will tell you that you need to give five pieces of positive feedback from every correction. If this is true, I had it all wrong and so did everyone I ever worked for.…Related to this, the feedback sandwich, the one where you surround your negative feedback with positive feedback before and after it is also bull-shiitake. Everyone knows this game—it doesn’t work anymore.…I’ll be pilloried for this, but this was my lived experience.

Jensen Huang is mostly right about management, imho: In the early days of HubSpot, I liked big, relatively infrequent meetings (monthly, not weekly) where everyone could hear what was on my mind, avoided the weekly 1:1, and I would criticize and compliment in public.  As time went on, I started doing closed weekly meetings, having 1:1s, and I stopped criticizing in public.  Listening to how Jensen runs Nvidia leads me to believe I wasn’t completely crazy to run it the way I did back then.

Analytical skills are overrated. Taste is underrated. Almost everyone these days has pretty good analytical skills. Vanishingly few people have taste. Figure out who has it and give them power.

Exec Hiring Success Rates Are Lower Than You Think:  If I look at all of our executive hires over time, I’d guess that 18 months after that senior hire happens, around 60% of them have “stuck” and we end up churning about 40%.  This is similar across most of the CEOs of companies I coach. Senior level hire candidates are very good at interviewing.  Interviewers of senior level hires, including myself, overestimate their skill in interviewing.  My advice would be to reduce your interview panel and hire the folks who have great strengths (4/4s) and maybe some weaknesses (2/4s) while avoiding the candidates who are all “good” (3/4s).  In other words, hire for strengths, rather than for a lack of weakness.  …If you whiff on one or two big hires, don’t sweat it too much.