Billion Dollar Business Philosophies With Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah

If you're a startup, you're like an ant in this world. Does the ant care what's going on with the presidential election? No ... Build a product. Get a customer. Get 10 customers. It doesn't matter. If the economy is bad, if you can't get 10 customers, it's not going to work anyways.

Sometimes, the bigger you go, the easier something can be, because nobody else is even trying to do it.

One of the things a founder has to kind of get good at is convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing, which is join you in your startup. And if you can't, if you can't make that sale, which is the most important sale you'll make, being able to attract people... it's not going to work.

I think the outcome is a combination of dreaming really big and iterating really small—having tight feedback loops.

The salary/compensation is just one vector of value that you get from a company that you join.

We made a deliberate decision not to hire what we call 'press release hires.' Press release hires are when you hire someone, and then you feel compelled to issue a press release ... If we felt like we ever hired someone that was worthy of a press release, we did it wrong.

I've made, roughly, I think, a little over 100 investments now across my angel investment—I won't call it a career, but my activities—and 80 to 90% I've never actually talked to the founders or ever met with them.

As you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at.

People conflate, sometimes, skill versus talent ... Skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Talent is the rate at which you could acquire a particular skill.