Scaling AI Rocketships: ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski & Lovable’s Anton Osika

17:36Anton Osika:Yeah. I built out this leadership team, which is like seven people with my co-founder. Okay. So you have seven direct reports. Yeah. Without me and my co-founder, it's five direct reports. And officially, everyone else reports into them. Yeah.

17:52Brian Halligan:Do you feel like you got that right? Or over time, it's going to get much bigger? Or where are you at on that? Leadership team. I think if Jensen Huang has 45 direct reports. You have a lot too, no? No, I didn't. I had like 10. No. Yeah. Yeah. And it's amazing to me that they get people with 45 or 50 and people with three. There's such a range. Anyway, was the five intentional or it just kind of happened?

18:15Anton Osika:It was intentional, very intentional, yeah, to add a lot more structure. And then I think generally, like if you say, okay, let's try to have a lot of structure and then it's easier to add more like chaotic things on top of that and see how that works.

18:30Brian Halligan:Okay, so we kind of worked together on that head of sales search. How are you thinking about these senior searches? How are you deciding? You know, you never run a sales org. It's a hard thing. Lots of people are in your shoes.

18:45Anton Osika:How are you making those calls? Yes, with the head of sales, I worked closely with Jenny Adexel, who had done this before many times. Okay, Danny Bruceberg from... Yeah, Danny and Jenny Adexel. exactly so and um they coached you they got they got gave me a lot of impact input on it and um i mean in the end it was me spending a lot of time with these candidates and then spending time with the team um and like presenting how they would do things and that that felt like that gave a lot of

19:16Brian Halligan:instilled still a lot of confidence okay so you had a bunch of help yeah i spoke to many people on your side, same thing. You hadn't run a sales. None of us have done what we did, but you hadn't run a sales award. You had to make a decision on a sales leader. You had a lot of qualified candidates. How did you go about it? Yeah, it's a tricky one. And especially I think for sales, the salespeople know how to sell themselves. They need to be able. So they are, so you're going to need to filter through, do they actually know how to sell, but they are all good at it. So we are in a good setup where one of the salespeople was our investor.

19:52So we've seen him actually help us advise before he became a salesperson. So when we started a company, we started getting enterprise inbound, we realized, okay, we can start something very quickly. And he already has spent so much time with us. Then it became natural. Okay, we want to bring that person in. And then as we've hired other roles, we have, of course, amazing investors across like Sequoia who are on a recent team who are helping us on that hunt. So we would partner very closely with the domain experts to help us through the network, through the back references to make sure that they are right ones.

20:28I think the back references really helps across that beyond the spending time with the team, which I think is crucial. And then the other part, which I haven't realized until later, is that for sales specifically, is that you are hiring, of course, a great individual for creating the sales playbook, helping you sell into the enterprises. but then ultimately the person you hire they will set the culture for the sales team too like a lot of the people they will hire will be so similar in their approach to that work which I didn't appreciate until after the fact so I was happy that the culture was very aligned but then you can see they are very much similar and we have Europe and US sales team they're slightly different but Europe is a lot more confident like a little bit like a lot the the European versus U.S.

21:15upbringing. So a lot more confident than our European counterparts that take more of like partner sales approach. But they have core similar values, which helps.

21:24Brian Halligan:Okay, one of the things that confuses me about life today as a CEO is like from HubSpot, from let's call it, we went public in 2012 until I stepped down in 2020. We had an annual planning cycle. And the world just didn't change a whole lot every year. how the hell do you guys plan with the changes going on underneath like what's your cycle how do you do it so we've done very little planning okay um and i think that's pretty smart

21:53Anton Osika:because uh you can like everything is changing very rapidly on at least for our i mean our b2b offerings like enterprises are uh huge ones are using our products to a huge extent um we We are just trying to give them the time they can get, as much time as they can get, and not being like, okay, this is our ICP, this is exactly the sales process, at least so far. But there's tens of thousands of people in a hackathon, many of the world's largest healthcare companies using us. And we will, I think, start taking a step back and being, okay, where are we seeing like from much better data and analytics as well, where are we going to focus?

22:43Brian Halligan:Okay, and let me push back a little bit. You just had a big release that looks amazing. You must have planned for that. You just didn't pull that out of a hackathon last week. Yeah, so on the part side,

22:53Anton Osika:I mean, we do have a launch roadmap and like it goes out six, now it goes out like six months. And it's just like, I'm sure it's going to change. Okay, so there's a lightweight

23:05Brian Halligan:six month product roadmap. Yeah. Okay, got it. And it's pretty flexible, like within that six months deep pivot.

23:11Anton Osika:Yeah, I do now at this side of the company, we are, of course, going into longer time horizon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

23:19Brian Halligan:I think it's just hard to plan more than six months right now with all the underlying platform changes. I can't, yeah, it's interesting time to be a CEO. How about over at 11 Labs? Like, what's the cycle? The cycle, so we do, so the teams have a pretty high flexibility in how they operate week to week. so they can kind of take different directions. But on a quarterly basis, we'll get the teams together. They'll spend up to a day effectively outlining what are the initiatives they want to run for the next quarter. And then it's even less for the team itself. Sometimes it helps formalize some of the ideas, but it's more valuable for the teams around so they know what to expect, so they can learn from that process.

23:58And we just came back from an offsite with the entire team where we are looking at where we would like to be as a company in 2026. in the next few years. The thing that's probably the hardest is research. So we do also the foundational part for voice. Have a lot of research teams that crank up some of the best models out there. And that's, of course, so hard to predict. So here, we don't give any timelines. We do research initiatives we want to plan. So that's the one that goes out of the cycle. These are like things you want to do. You don't know what's going to come out.

24:30Brian Halligan:It's very different than. You don't know what to do. You need to stay nimble that like the moment it comes out. That's why the small teams have been helped so much as well, because the moment something comes out either internally from our research team or from other teams, you know that this is like you have 24 hours to start integrating that into your product. That's like the most important time to really to really be ahead. OK, speaking of planning, I remember in the early days of HubSpot before we were CRM, we were a marketing app. And every year I would go to the Salesforce.com conference called Dreamforce and then sit in the audience.

25:02Brian Halligan:And our pitch, by the way, at that time was Salesforce.com is to sales as HubSpot is to marketing. And we would always think in the back of our head, until Salesforce.com wants to become the Salesforce.com of marketing. And so it would sit in the audience every year, hoping they didn't announce a marketing product. And sure enough, 2012, that was the marketing year. They bought four marketing companies and they really went for it. We ended up pivoting and going to CRM. I would imagine you have a similar feeling when Anthropics doing a big announcement or OpenAI is having a big announcement. Even HubSpot is like, we don't know, is OpenAI going to be a platform company like Google was or are they going to go build vertical apps?

25:43Brian Halligan:Are you as paranoid as I was or are you not that worried?

25:48Anton Osika:Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of distribution out of the box. So that's, it would hurt. or do you sit there like

25:58Brian Halligan:worried when they're doing their announcements

25:59Anton Osika:are they going to not really no like I have so many things to think about I catch up on the recent announcement and I'm sure they will announce something I would imagine they built something in your space it will be inferior you've got a head start

26:15Brian Halligan:but I kind of think it would be an obvious thing for them to build

26:19Anton Osika:something what we're building is this full platform where you're serving most of the product needs for an entire product engineering organization. And that takes a lot of iteration steps to get to the full thing. And unless they're building that out completely in the dark and then launching it, I don't think it's going to be a threat from the first launch.

26:42Brian Halligan:Okay, I'm very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you, like I was, paranoid, nervous about what's going to happen? Definitely a little always nervous and watching closely. I mean, they have great, great research teams. So we know that they will be pushing into the voice space. Yes. But at the same time, given the spread of work that you just mentioned, the corollary is they lack focus. And we are fully focused on voice, whether that's creating the research or products for creating voice agent or creating creative workflows, which does take a lot of iterations to actually bring that to the user to make the best experience that they require to solve their problems, solve their integrations.

27:21So I do think it's going to become increasingly competitive, especially on the research side. But that's where the product, platform, brand, the design, the taste will matter a lot more. Something we speak a little bit with Anton every so often. And that will be the big piece where companies going deep into that space will win.

27:42Brian Halligan:Okay, speaking of taste, one thing I really like about both of you is I think you have taste, particularly in your marketing. like you guys do some interesting stuff you were fantastic on twitter fantastic on twitter you're one of my favorite follows how much time are you spending doing it do you do it all yourself uh you're you're you're out there on stuff like just talk about your twitter strategy yeah sure um are you like did you tweet just before we got in here like what's the deal no but um i i just

28:17Anton Osika:spend quite some time on it and it feels like oh my god i'm doing so many things i'm a ceo i'm doing so many things and then i have to sit down every weekend and get some of this some of the posts right um but i do have a team that comes to me with ideas like every monday we go through it's 15 minutes in the calendar okay okay usually it takes my time here's the tweet that would be good no they bring me ideas like okay should we do something on this and i i like drop a lot of ideas as well in a Slack channel. But this is not their full-time job either. So it's a bit, it's like, it's not the proper function in the company.

28:53Anton Osika:It's very, very effective in my opinion.

28:56Brian Halligan:Like your brand is very strong. It is working really well. Are you actually pressing the button when the tweet goes out or is somebody doing it for you?

29:05Anton Osika:It's usually me. Okay. So there's actually a very good company called Typefully. that you can draft them in and then you can like collaborate on them okay and I usually want the one who schedule them in that okay I do the final I would keep going and getting even wackier if I

29:23Brian Halligan:were you I think you're killing it you guys um are busy I remember when I was your size um I get I got asked to do so much shit speak at my conference can you interview my daughter Can you talk to this venture capitalist, this candidate? It's just an endless like of asks. And it's chaotic. And the firm is asking you to do all that kind of stuff. How do you guys manage, just like kind of tactically manage the chaos, manage your schedule, get shit done in the hurricane of requests, inputs, chaos? Any tricks? A few tricks. A few tricks for sure. I think we run a lot of the company on Slack. So the Slack is one part.

30:15And of course, the email is especially the external piece. For email, now it's a combination of two. My brilliant assistant, Hannah, is helping and the script is helping to auto-classify a lot of emails to effectively P0, P1, P2. P0 is...

30:29Brian Halligan:Wait, somebody else is reading your emails in P0? Someone else is reading. And now we have a script as well to auto-classify them. Okay. And then P0 is like... That is interesting. It is super helpful. same day reply on a p0 p1 can wait for the week p2 not important i can i can i can take out and then i have to like unblock piece so somebody's reading your emails it's like hey you need to respond to this is p0 labels so every email gets a label and then a homo sapien by homo sapiens and a script so now it's a combination of both so script does the first pass and then the homo sapiens does the second second pass fascinating hana who is like great at that too okay and um And then you know exactly, okay, this is, I need to reply this day.

31:12This is an important customer, partner.

31:14Brian Halligan:How does she know what's important? Like I send you an email, she must be like, that's so important. You got to respond. How does she know what's important? Well, the first thing is sometimes there's, of course, new where you don't, but usually she knows me inside out. And the second thing is for a lot of the people, a lot of the clients, you, Brian, you will be in my contact list. You will have a P0 inbound. So the first moment you hit me with the email, it will auto-classify that as a P0. So I know that it's at the top and that I should reply on the same day. So that has worked tremendously across email.

31:49I think I'm very good on getting up to all the emails. How about Slack?

31:54Brian Halligan:The Slack must be a firestorm. Slack is a firestorm. Slack is a firestorm. So it's usually a combination. If I think it's taking more than five minutes, then I will remind myself later. So I'm big on the remind function. And then if it's less than five minutes, I usually try to reply straight away. Yeah. Kind of inbox zero on your Slack. Inbox zero on the Slack. Okay. What about your calendar? Calendar is at least week in advance clean in terms of like what I want to do. And then if there's like an urgent thing that comes up, then things get reshuffled. Yeah. And then I think the biggest piece that I've done over the last six months, and you mentioned the conferences, the events, is planning at least a quarter ahead which continents I'll be in.

32:39And I'm trying to never be switching the continent in the same month. So like within a month, I'm trying to stay in one place.

32:47Brian Halligan:Oh, so you go to the US for a month? I usually try to be in the US for close to a month. I see. And that helps a lot with getting on the ground, working with the team, but also working with the customers. I think it's going to decrease to two weeks now, given how distributed we are. But before that, I used to go for a few days sometimes to US. And that has been not ideal before. Okay. Your calendar must be nuts. What does it look like? And where do you build in time to actually think? That's a good question.

33:26Anton Osika:I think I think best by talking together with someone else. Okay. so it naturally like happens maybe late in the office or something with grabbing one on one time yeah I think I'm like I'm still in this like firestorm and I'm going set on innovating on what works best like there's a certain type of creativity that you also only get like when you're bored or like you get some downtime and I don't I think there's some way to program myself with the like this environment to get more of that.

34:01Brian Halligan:I did a Wednesday, every Wednesday I work from home and no meeting, it was no meeting Wednesday. That helped. I'm also a little introverted. So I needed a little time to recharge. Are you guys introverted or extroverted? Are you introverted?

34:14Anton Osika:I say that, but people around me are like, no, no, you're fake introverts. Yeah. But I mean, if I'm alone for a full day, I'm like, oh God, people, human.

34:24Brian Halligan:I'm not like that. I'm like, well, I need another alone day. Okay. Interesting. The no meetings day helps. I also have no meetings day. It usually gets meetings, but they are meetings I actually want to do rather than like are kind of proactive for the future rather than like in the moment in this given week. One of the things that really helped me was like once a month I made a to-do list of like, here's the eight things I want to get done. And I would publish that on our, we had a wiki at the time. And so everyone in the company would see what I was working on. And I would look at it every couple of days and be like, does my calendar match my to-do list?

35:00Brian Halligan:Because all the slacks and emails are everybody else's priorities imposed on you. And by putting it on there, it sort of allowed me to say no. It's just so much stuff and it was hard to say no. And so it gave me license to say, you know, it's not on my to-do list. I'm not going to do it. And then I got a hat with a big N-O on it, a no hat. and I walk around the office and people call me Dr. No because I just wanted to keep it focused on a couple things that I was trying to get done and the company was trying to get done. And I would lose focus and then it'd be a firestorm and then back. So I didn't nail it, but that was a small hack that helped a little.

35:38Okay, you two are doing an amazing job

35:43Brian Halligan:building amazing companies in Europe. My two favorite entrepreneurs. What's it like building an amazing AI company in Europe? And what are the pluses and minuses of building in Europe?

35:57Anton Osika:I think the network around you is not as mature compared to, especially Silicon Valley. That makes it more difficult with the distribution. I mean, sophisticated investors that are just one coffee away can be valuable. and then once you're staffing especially on the high slope generalists are distributed across the world but as you're staffing with people who have done it and seen it before it's trickier to find it in Europe I would say

36:37Brian Halligan:I heard you refer to building in Europe as hard mode

36:39Anton Osika:those parts are hard mode but at the same time I think I don't know maybe we would have been more successful building from from the value or something, I could see that. But I think it has been very helpful for us to be the go-to number one talent destination in Stockholm. Totally. And that's the reason I decided, no, we're gonna stay here. We're gonna stay here and bet on the, that there's much more available talent that doesn't jump around and like, they aren't entitled and spoiled. And they - They're cheaper. They're cheaper. They're yearning for a possibility to literally change the world.

37:18Anton Osika:And there's not many companies that have done it from Europe. There has not been a trillion dollar company from Europe. And being at Lemon Labs or building at Lavable is one of those very, very rare opportunities here.

37:31Brian Halligan:I agree with that. I'm going to ask you this. You've got employees in the US and Europe. Any difference? Definitely differences. And similar, I will quickly add that I think that talent in Europe can be incredible. You just need to find a talent. And you're building in London mostly or all over? All over, but London and Poland are our biggest hubs. Poland must be terrific. Poland is incredible. Like some of the best, Central Eastern Europe. Everybody must want to work for you in Poland. It's like Antonin's.com. We are heavily building the brand across Eastern Europe. And we think those engineers are just so incredible.

38:08They are yearning for something. I think they're yearning for a company that actually wants to build something generational, something big. And there's just so few of those opportunities. At the same time, the companies of Silicon Valley frequently don't give that opportunity.

38:20Brian Halligan:So it's like perfect. To build new stuff, they give like IT stuff. And so I think one of the differences, which is on a lot of Europeans, especially Eastern Europe, are very straightforward, straight to the point, very direct. sometimes too direct, which we actually really enjoy as a company. It helped to share a lot of ideas, criticism, feedback in a much better way. On the other hand, what I think you asked is going for them is that confidence of things are going to be amazing, are great, are very ambitious across the entirety of the people. And that's something that we are continuously trying to instill in some of the people across Europe too.

39:02And maybe the other thing that helps across Europe is that if you're building in Europe, you of course need to build for the global market. You cannot build just for European market. But then when you do that, then the time zone is actually perfect for catering to US, to South America, to Europe, and to Asia as well, which helped in our case as well.

39:21Brian Halligan:And the difference between American employees and European? It will be that. I think that the main one is also beyond being direct and confident i think the um entrepreneurship kind of aspiration is very different in u.s everybody knows value of equity everybody is treating that as part of like a good career in europe you kind of need to convince the employees sometimes you need to convince the families that this is the right thing yes uh in poland we need to uh frequently explain that equity is worth something yes almost force the employees to take the equity which which is like always an interesting surprise of like, how does it work?

39:58But now we've went through this cycle a few times, and the equity is worth something. We do tender offers. So people started educating other people that this is actually the right choice, which we hope will like in places like Poland and wider Europe will become more normalized and then something that people will want to do across entrepreneurship.

40:17Brian Halligan:When I was in my late 20s, I spent or in early 30s, seven years in Asia. and I worked for this company, PTC, a very good company in the US. And I had to convince Japanese people and Chinese people and Korean people that this thing called equity is going to be worth a lot. And man, it was a dogfight convincing them. I'm like, what? You're just trying to pay me less money. I remember those days. And people made a lot of money on that stock. Okay, on this topic, like 996, are you guys in office, 996, hardcore? Like one interesting thing, like my generation of CEOs, we kind of followed Steve Jobs was sort of on our Mount Rushmore.

41:00Brian Halligan:And the current generation, it feels like it's a lot more Elon. And companies are working much more like Elon's companies. Who's your Mount Rushmore? Are you 996 like Elon Plus? Like where are you guys at? Steve Jobs is great. Yeah, I think it was a good one.

41:16Anton Osika:I mean what I like about him is he really understands that like a team working better and better and better over time and like really obsessing and caring about what you're doing is what are you talking about Steve Jobs yes yes so who if I'm Steve Jobs who are you Elon who's your I mean my style can be a bit Elon I'm like this has to be here to get done now what does it take to do this faster is it Daniel A no I don't know him that well unfortunately okay he operated but But so based on reading about Elon, I have a bit of that. But I think you lose a lot of the autonomy and teams feeling of ownership of doing it too much the Elon way.

41:58Anton Osika:So I might get back to you with a bit more clear. Are you 996 plus? Me, many people in the company are 996 plus. Your company. Many people in the company, but people have family as well. So it's just we have very, very, very high expectations of everyone to drive impact. And then if you're not working many hours, you need to clearly have impact in other ways.

42:27Brian Halligan:You think that scales, like one of the problems with scale is that drive sort of wanes and that, you know, do you think that fades? And is there ideas in your head how you keep that motivation going?

42:44Anton Osika:I think it's about setting very, very ambitious goals every week. So it's one of your things. Every week you put out goals. Yeah. And then it's being very clear before someone joins on what the expectations are. And it's about evaluating impact.

43:03Brian Halligan:And have you lost candidates like VP candidates because like, you know what? Yeah, I love the mission. I love you. but I can only do 50 hours a week and I've got a life. I've got four kids.

43:18Anton Osika:I think we lost some kind of like that, but that's maybe good.

43:22Brian Halligan:Life in the big city. Okay. Who's your Mount Rushmore? It's very closer to Steve Jobs between those two. But he was always like so caring about the design, about making it kind of hiding the complexity from the user, making it easy to use. And he does have this obsessive piece, which is maybe a slightly different to how I would try to run it or work in a company. But I love what he created as his legacy. But there are amazing other CEOs there. You know, there's like more pockets from different people that are incredible. I like Jamie Dimon and his clarity and across so many things that he runs.

44:06And I think it's like half a million people under him. He feels very calm and under control. I agree with that. admirable um satya i think the way he kind of turned it out and he is like a very caring person around around uh how he runs the company i think this this is this is another great great leader um but from the 996 i think in our case are you guys 996 not in the office i think everybody is online chronically and all the time we definitely make it very explicit before you you join it's we think it's like once in a lifetime change with AI across the world, we can be the voice of the change, the voice of the technology, and everybody understands the opportunity ahead is rare.

44:50And we do lose candidates across, but then you filter. We do frequently. I mean, they frequently won't, I think, even apply. We are like very vocal in the process that it's a lot of time commitment. We never impose it or ask anyone for doing that, but they do. It's usually seven days a week, but you are not maybe working all the seven days a week, but you are online and ready to jump in, especially on the weekends, on any questions. And I think people enjoy working next to passionate people. So you kind of like get that bar higher, you run together, and then when you see results it's also motivating.

45:30Brian Halligan:In like the last 50 employees like you're from employee 250 to 500 versus 50 to 100 is there a difference in your mind in commitment and zeal and whatever? You know it's definitely some but the current employees are also on it. Like and I think the small teams helped where you have like you know you effectively joined a unit of 10 people or less. So you are seeing that everybody's running in that unit and everybody else is running too so you you are going after after that too um of course we also have people with families people that will have other other things and and that can work and uh and and and it does but usually those people are are thinking about work and how to improve um at all times what do you guys think european like what needs to happen in europe to to have like a lot more of you guys i think they're coming you do truly yes 100

46:28Anton Osika:There's like engineering schools now, you ask them, would you consider starting a startup or being part of the funding team? 80 % yes. Okay. It went up to 10x. Okay. Okay. Interesting. And that first generation will help. I think like few other companies, if we do a good job, get some people to start another set of companies. I think the second thing of what's I think missing in the European ecosystem is people that have done it before, have seen that scale, and then, of course, have got a good outcome to then make clear of, like, this is actually a really cool thing to do. Hopefully, those people can infuse additional set of startups across Europe.

47:07Brian Halligan:We started HubSpot in Boston, and it's got a lot of the same benefits of Europe, like so much talent. MIT's there. Just we were a magnet for it. But the area it fell down is as we scaled and we need to hire a head of marketing who had seen the movie before, someone who had really operated at scale. So we started hiring more people in the valley. That started to happen around 1 ,000 employees. But it feels similar. Boston feels similar to Europe in that way. Boston is conservative. It's kind of similar. any advice for all there's lots of young smart entrepreneurs listen to this pod that want to build the next level the next 11 labs any any any advice first of all i think go for it it's it's amazing to to to build a company and you know of course maybe i was in a in a lucky position where where i had savings and i could i didn't have like the dependencies but if you are in that similar situation.

48:06I think it's go for it. The learning experience you get across building a company, even if it doesn't go the way you expect, I think is so much more valuable than frequently joining other companies and being a smaller cog in a big machine. And then I think obsess about the problem, try to deeply understand what you are actually solving for, talk with customers. And the simplest advice I think is the most valuable here, which is actually working with the user and iterating very, very deeply. And then I think it's all about the team and hiring. So the people you bring across and who you build with will be defining for the company.

48:41So pick your co-founders carefully and well and know them ideally for a longer time before you decide to start something. And then as you assemble the team, you really want the trusted individuals that you want to go for the next decades together.

48:55Anton Osika:Anton? I think you want to learn things very, very fast if you're getting started. and you want to learn a lot of things. You want to learn how to hire. I mean, you don't have to be so good at managing, but having high expectations of people and giving them clear feedback. And you want to learn how to sell. You want to sell to your customers or sell to the market, to the people you want to hire. And if you want to raise investors, you're always selling. Constantly selling. You should do that all the time and fail and ask someone who you respect to give it to your heart on like how bad you are.

49:32Anton Osika:I see. Because if you're just getting started - Were you bad at it first?

49:35Brian Halligan:Yeah, of course. Okay. Focus means perfect. Yeah.

49:39Anton Osika:That's just to just go out there and try to find joy, probably by having a co-founder, as you're talking about, in the failings and the learnings. Yes. Yeah, that's the other thing, which I was thinking about your earlier question, what you don't expect as a CEO as well. You don't expect that you don't have anyone to complain to effectively. Right. so your co-founder is your like soulmate that you can speak through and then there are some sometimes amazing people on the team you can iterate through but not to the same

50:09Brian Halligan:I totally agree with that I want to congratulate you guys on all your success I admire what you guys are doing I sure hope you guys build trillion dollar companies in Europe that would be amazing good luck to you thanks for doing the pod thank you so much thank you thank you okay those two are terrific and it's nice to see them kind of blossoming before our eyes. What they have in common is they both had like seven or eight years of experience with like one good company in there. And I know it's fashionable to drop out of Harvard and start a company like Suck did. But at least for me, I did two startups before HubSpot.

50:49Brian Halligan:One was very successful in public and got very large. Man, did I learn a lot from that. and man are there a lot of lessons inside of HubSpot about scaling. But you do you, but I don't think it hurts a founder to be in a really good startup to learn before they start a company. They talked a lot about their co-founders and one of the things about being a CEO is you're a shit umbrella. Like all the shit rains on you and you've got an umbrella for your whole organization. It's hard. The other thing about being a CEO is like no one is coming to save you. In my startups, my boss would come and save me.

51:25Brian Halligan:Another team would come and save me. There was a lot of resources around. You're pretty alone and it's on you as a founder. The one person you can complain to is your co-founder. And so my advice to you would be to really get to know your co-founder because it's an incredibly important relationship for you going forward. We've gone into mechanics of the job and we've talked about delegation. And they're kind of starting to, it's interesting, they're starting to delegate. They were like, oh, we're kind of founder mode. We're not sure how to do this, but they're starting to do it. And it's impressive to see what they're doing.

51:59Brian Halligan:My experience, the way that worked as HubSpot scaled, I was very founder mode in sales and in product. And man, the rest of the organization, I was very manager mode. And I drove both constituencies crazy. The sales and product folks, I was in their shorts and they always complained I was too much in the details. All the rest of them complained that they didn't respond to their emails. So that was sort of the blend for me. I wasn't all manager mode. I wasn't all founder mode. And that kind of worked for me. And maybe that would work for you running your company. I like the way they were thinking about their teams.

52:33Brian Halligan:I ask all the CEOs on these episodes, you know, what's their span of control? And it's all over the map. By the way, I caught everyone was copying Justin Huang and having 60 direct reports. That is definitely not true. He is an N of one on that. And like Anton Helmley has five direct reports. I had 10. My T has 15. So it's a little bit all over the map. If I were you, I would think about that. What do you want your span of control to be? And I would have it as wide as you can tolerate. As you scale from 100 to 1 ,000 employees, all those layers in there really will slow you down. So you want to keep it as flat as you can.

53:12Brian Halligan:The other thing I liked about that we're thinking about teams is they were definitely starting to bring in some been there, done that people. The whole team wasn't been there, done that. The way HubSpot ended up is we had about half been there, done that, and a half homegrown. And DC's try to jam you full of been there, done that. I like that balance, having a little bit of both. The homegrown talent is underrated on your teams, most likely. We also talked about just managing the chaos. Like, they're growing crazy. They have so much opportunity. It's just a hurricane of input coming into them.

53:45Brian Halligan:And a couple things, a couple hacks I liked. Anton is really good on Twitter, by the way. If you don't follow him, he's really good. I like that every Monday morning he has a 15-minute meeting with a couple of his staff members, and they brainstorm on tweets. So he's not just coming up with that extemporaneously. He's thought about it a little bit, and he's very good at it. Most of them, or at least I, had a no-meaning day where I could actually think and get some room and work on projects. I think that's a good hack. I had it on Fridays for a while. Everyone thought I was thinking a long weekend.

54:13Brian Halligan:I moved it to Wednesdays. and they're going to have to get good at saying no. Like I was working on saying no, so I made myself this hat, my no hat, and I had a no shirt too. And I think startups are much, much more likely to die of overeating and starvation. That's probably true of yours. You might need your own no hat. You know, speaking of chaos, I asked them, are they 996? And they are both 996 plus. and I think that's interesting. I've asked all the CEOs I've been interviewing there's been 10 so far and the early stage startups are all doing 996 and the bigger ones aren't and I think that's probably life in the fast lane.

54:56Brian Halligan:As your employees start having families and you're hiring people to families, it's just hard to get people in the office six days of working nine to nine. But I think keep it going as long as you can if you're doing 996. I think it's good. I was 996 but I didn't ask my team to be 996. We talked a lot about Europe. These are two amazing companies in Europe. In Europe, we started in Boston. And Boston's a little bit like Europe. You're like outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley. And there's some real pluses and minuses to being outside of the valley. The pluses are you end up being a very large fish in a very small pond, which can help.

55:37Brian Halligan:and you have really good access to talent and not a lot of competition for that talent. So real pluses. The minuses we found out at HubSpot, and they're going to find out, is inside of Boston, there's just not a lot of scale tech companies. So we had a hard time finding executives who had seen that movie on that next level of scale. We took a couple people from Akamai and that worked out, but it was pretty lean. And so we started hiring execs out in San Francisco. So real pluses and minuses to being in a big city. If I had to do HubSpot over again, by the way, you didn't ask, but I would have, we were in Boston.

56:15Brian Halligan:I'd have a big office in Boston, big office in San Francisco. Then another big office in, I don't know, Nashville or Denver, Toronto would be pretty good. Where you can hire lots and lots of people for less money and have them be a little bit more loyal than let's say in your San Francisco office. I wouldn't let everybody work from home. I'd have three big hubs. Okay, we wound up obviously talking about Europe. They're both in Europe, really encouraging for Europe. The world could use more Silicon Valleys and the world could use, you know, a vibrant European entrepreneurial scene. I love to hear from them that the engineering schools are chock full of kids that want to start companies.

56:51Brian Halligan:I think that's going to be good for the world and good for Europe. So I'm excited about that. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I really liked it. These two are great. I will see you on the next episode of Long Strange Trip.

57:04Thank you.