What Founders Can Learn About Excellence From MIT President Sally Kornbluth

19:38Brian Halligan:I thought you handled the aftermath. And I think this is a lesson for every CEO through crises. Like you clarified your remarks and you got to focus back on the coalition. You just got to focus back. Now I was - That was one good thing. The second thing happened is the board publicly came out and backed you. That's what I was going to say. And the other two stepped down shortly after those remarks. That's right. So talk about both those things. Let's start with the remarks, the clarification. Who did you call? How did you think about that? It was very quick. Like that was excellent. That was excellent leadership.

20:09You know, I tried to not create another news cycle. And I think one thing we did for quite a long time was to be very quiet about it. I mean, you know, I wasn't about to start like showing up on TV shows. And I was just very clear with our community. I think that's the first thing. But the other thing in terms of our board or corporation being supportive, that is actually the pivotal moment in terms of me surviving at MIT. Because they were like, we just hired her. It was fine. Go away. And that really created an environment that I felt I had a lot of support. I could keep moving on with what we were doing at MIT.

20:55And, you know, to this day, when I do something, I don't look over my shoulder and think, oh, my God, are they going to fire me over this? Because, you know, we have a great relationship. Now, that doesn't mean they won't fire me for something someday. But at the moment, I will say I feel like transparency, great interchange. And I knew right away they were supportive. The other thing is many, many people on our board did listen to the whole thing, did read the whole transcript. And when people would come to them and say, oh, my God, how could you not fire her? They would say, did you listen to the whole thing?

21:29And then they would distribute it or talk to people about it. And so it wasn't only that we're being supportive in voice. They actually were propagating the correct message. So I think that made a huge difference.

21:42Brian Halligan:My takeaways were you were calm. You were in a crisis. You were calm. You had a good board that backed you, which is invaluable. and you clarified your statements in a thoughtful way. And I think that's a best practice right there that all CEOs can kind of learn from. Okay, there's been some similar, I wouldn't say crisis, like actually crisis averted. The federal government sent you the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Ed. They sent it to 11 institutions, including us. You were the first to respond, which was interesting, way before the deadline. and you basically very politely said no, and here's why.

22:23Brian Halligan:Why were you first? Well, so a couple of reasons. First of all, when I received the compact, I looked at it and I said, there's no way I'm signing this thing. Okay, right away. Right away. And I called Mark Orenberg, the chair of the corporation. I said, Mark, I'm not signing this thing. And he goes, who's going to make you sign this thing? So right away, I knew I had the chair's support and we went to the executive committee. Everyone was supportive. and then eventually the whole board. So that was the first thing. Part of the reason I think we came out quickly was rather than collectively is because this has been true throughout all these crises.

22:58Every school has a little bit of a different story to tell. And the crux of this, coming back to your first question, was about merit. You know, I didn't care what the particulars of the letter were. They talked about giving preferential funding based on behaviors or commitments, not on scientific merit. And to me, the bedrock of scientific excellence in this country is scientific merit. Now, MIT has a great story to tell in terms of merit.

23:26Brian Halligan:Awesome story. Awesome story to tell. No legacy admissions, no development admissions, under 200K family income, free tuition. We reinstated the SATs before other schools, et cetera. We had such a great story to tell that in terms of merit, I didn't really have any hesitancy. We didn't have to think, well, how can we couch this? The story sort of told itself. So I wasn't trying to, you know, you know, make a huge statement or speak for anyone else. I just felt like we had a good story to tell and we're going to tell it. The other thing is I didn't want to poke anyone in the eye. I thought the tone that we were striving for was thanks, but no thanks.

24:06Like we'll compete with other people.

24:08Brian Halligan:The letter was extremely well written. Who wrote that? Okay. So we have a fantastic writer, Martha Edison. Okay. Is she on the PR team? Should all CEOs have one of these? Well, someone should have a great writer to help them. I'll tell you that. But what Martha did was generate a long draft on all these points. And then four or five of us iterated for multiple days around the clock. Okay. You know, so I would not have written everything she wrote by scratch, But there are pieces of that that I did write myself. There are pieces of that that various members of the team wrote. And actually, we came down to a very few words at the end that actually took us a couple extra days.

24:47And we were sitting with the executive committee of our board discussing the letter. And we wanted to get some of the words exactly right. And so we were arguing about different things. And I remember our EVP, Glenn Shore, who was a financial person, finally came up with a phrase and everyone was like, OK, we're done here. So there was a lot of group thinking about this. And I think we came to a common message because we hang together well as a team and we were able to be blunt. You know, Martha will write something. I'm like, that is not what we want to say.

25:18Brian Halligan:Okay. You know, she's like, okay, tell me what you want to say. You brought up the board a bunch, more than I thought you would. And all my CEOs have to build boards before they go public. Yes. Advice on building a board and managing a board. Yeah. So I obviously didn't build this board, but I do have input via our governance committee now in terms of who joins the board. You know, first of all, we have a very large board, 75 people. So that is not like most, you know, most companies. But you must have a core group. We do, the executive committee. Look, you want a range of expertise, but fundamentally you want people who are smart with integrity and open to arguments.

25:58You know, if people come in with very strong views and they're unwilling to think about other viewpoints, it's going to be incredibly frustrating. Part of the reason I brought it up, honestly, is because it's unusual to have a board that you sync with so easily. I have friends all over the country and some of them are great boards. Some of them don't and have to always kind of be maneuvering. What I really like is their governance, but not management. And so they let me sort of do my job. And so I've been, you know, I've been pretty lucky that way. That doesn't mean we agree on everything. In fact, some of the things in the compact letter, I had a lot of phone calls with people and said, no, I'm not going to do that or no, I'm not going to say that.

26:39But it's kind of an open exchange. I don't really feel like I have to parse my words and I don't think they do either. That's what I think is critical. People that you can be honest with, that'll be honest with you. And it's not existential. Like if someone is really feeling like -

26:54Brian Halligan:Sounds like they were all also calm in a crisis. And boards all deal with crises. They were calm and many of them have been CEOs or are CEOs. It's not like you want to fill your whole board with CEOs, but you want people who have navigated crises, been on other boards, been in high-stakes situations, and understand that staying calm is a huge piece of managing to navigate the crisis. Okay. Just kind of bringing it back to MIT. It's a pretty decentralized place, like really decentralized. How do you decide when it's like, no, that thing that's on the edge, I'm going to bring that in the center and we're going to centralize that.

27:36Brian Halligan:And then how do you decide, You've got some big initiatives you're pushing out there. How do you decide? Yeah. So the centralization thing is a lot thornier than the what initiatives you're going to do. Everybody wants one of their own everything. And when you're in a budget crisis or you really have to, getting rid of duplication is incredibly difficult. Everyone views their own research program, their own team as like their personal babies, right? And so it's hard. So we try to do it when it's absolutely necessary, either for efficiency or financial reasons or because the function will just work way better.

28:12And then you kind of navigate the noise until people realize like, yeah, actually, this is kind of better. In terms of the initiatives at a place like MIT, a lot of it is from the bottom up in that we look around, we see what great work is going on, and we try to capture it.

28:27Brian Halligan:I see. So what I wanted to do with these initiatives, we have a suite of presidential initiatives now. I wanted to encourage interdisciplinarity. And that comes back to everybody being at a high level. So whoever you collaborate with, you're going to get good partners. Can I interrupt you on that? Yes. Every CEO I talk to asks me, what do I do with the prima donna, the brilliant asshole? Sorry. Yep, yep, yep. Every place has them. We have a lot of prima donnas at MIT. How do you deal with the prima donnas? So, you know, most I've, look, I've encountered prima donnas in my career. Most of the prima donnas that I've seen at MIT, and there's not that many compared to some places, at least they have the goods.

29:09Brian Halligan:Okay. The worst thing is like someone who thinks they're great when they're not. Like if someone wants to come to me and say, my program is really important. This is really, you know, critical, fantastic. And like, you know, they've just won a Nobel Prize. I'm not going to argue with them. I mean, the stuff here is really amazing. I really haven't had someone come to defend something that I thought was really like low quality. But that does make it harder to take things away. How do you take things away? Like CEOs all the time, they're like, we're decentralized, decentralized. And it's like, no, no, no, we're going to start.

29:41Brian Halligan:Yeah, it's hard. Particularly now there's a thing called founder mode. Yeah. You've heard of it. Yeah. And like you look at Jack Dorsey, for example, he just laid off 40 % of employees. Lots of people. Yeah. Micromanagement's in style. What's your take on all that? First of all, remember that a big part of our workforce is tenured. Right. So that's a very different, you know, environment to navigate in. You know what I found all along? These roles, like you want to say yes a bunch of times, but you have to say no a huge amount of your time. And I found if you engage someone and really give them a good rationale, you've really thought through it.

30:19It's not just like, I don't like you or I don't want to do this. Most people will ultimately accept it. Not all people. I'm sure there are people out there that hate me because I said no or took something away. But in general, I think people understand that you have to make these decisions.

30:34Brian Halligan:Yeah. Okay. Education's at a funny point. It's an interesting time to interview you. My world, there's a lot of criticism of higher ed between the Teal Fellowships and Marc Andreessen saying to not go to college. Alex Karp has the Palantir Fellowship for people. So all that's going on, which is interesting. And now we have AI. What the hell does education look like in five years? That's a great question. We're talking a lot about that. First of all, the college experience is so much more than some specific set of skills. So people talk to me, alums talk to me about how MIT changed their lives.

31:11It's not because of some particular class or some particular skill they acquired. It's the whole environment.

31:16Brian Halligan:My class, actually. It was my class. It was your class. They say that by name. And so that's, you know, the whole college experience is important. But I think - I agree with that. Like I say Sloan, it's like I got some pedigree from it. I learned a bunch and I got a great network. You can learn this stuff anywhere now. That's right. And the other thing is fundamentally, we're still training human beings. No matter what AI does, we want people who graduate from MIT to use AI as a tool that can augment their performance. And so they have to learn to live in this environment. So I don't know how you think about this, but for me, I still am not sure how much you need to have in your head to think creatively versus how much you have to offload.

32:02When we think about what we need to train our students to do, if you ask an AI agent a question three different ways, you get three completely different answers. And so how do we teach our students to think about that? How much do you have to know to know if AI is hallucinating or just plain wrong? So there's a discussion going on among some of our folks about, you know, do our students really need to know basic coding? And like, yes, they do, because they have to know if what they're looking at is correct. And they have to sort of have a concept in their heads to ask the right questions regarding coding.

32:34Same with writing. Writing is thinking. So to just ask, you know, AI to write something for you, it's not the same as thinking through a draft, thinking through a problem. Yes, you can have AI help you and iterate. So I think what we're going to see is, first of all at a place like MIT, really thinking about how you use these tools most effectively. Second thing, MIT has always been this, you know, hand in mind kind of place where building things is really important. And in one way, AI is forging ahead, but I think physical AI is not really quite there yet. You know, I've seen like, you know, videos of, you know, a robot trying to like, bring a can of Coke across the room and they turn the Coke upside down and are trailing the Coke.

33:23There's a lot we need to do.

33:25Brian Halligan:Will classrooms go away? It's a good question. I don't know. I think you could imagine a kind of Oxbridge-style tutorial system coming out where students work in groups with an AI tutor that then go to class and have a discussion with faculty. I don't know if we're going to see the traditional didactic lecture survive over many years when there's so many different ways to take in that factual material. But the human interaction, the discussions, the critiques from faculty, from fellow students, that really is what produces the college experience and the education that you come out of a place like MIT with.

34:02So do I think that's going away? I don't think so. Okay. If you had a 17-year-old daughter, what would you want her to study? Oh, that's interesting. Well, I have a 30-year-old daughter who is a surgeon. I think that's a pretty good thing to have done.

34:23Brian Halligan:Of course, the surgery, I've actually already gone away, but I don't think the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As somebody who's had a lot of surgery, I don't think it's going away. Yeah, that seems to be a pretty good thing, even if she's very interested in robotic surgery. But if you were 17, you're 17, you're going to school, what do you study? Yeah, that's very interesting. I think there are a lot of areas of science that are still, you know, if I were picking an area of biology, for instance, now I'm a biologist, I would pick neuroscience. I think the mysteries of the brain or immunology, which I think is just going to impact all areas of our health.

34:53Brian Halligan:Yes. So. So nascent. Yeah. There are areas that I think have many, many years of discovery ahead of us. But I would say only pick areas where you really have a passion and you really want to be a thinker. So when I was in graduate school, you could get a PhD sequencing a gene, a single gene. And it was technical work, but it wasn't actually super intellectually engaging. I think now about companies that are, you know, for instance, science discovery companies where the really great student will now have the equivalent of lots of hands at their disposal. but they still got to be the creative one and do the thinking.

35:31If you were just going to be the person who are the hands, don't do a PhD because that, that is.

35:37Brian Halligan:That could change five years from now. Like Google outsource information. These AI systems are kind of outsourcing cognition. It's, I don't know. I think it's going to change a lot. I'm thinking about my course and like, what do I do next year? I'm trying to think about how I might. No, I hear you. I mean, even if you're thinking about being a physician, think about how much AI is changing image analysis. Would you be a radiologist now? Maybe, maybe not. Would you be a pathologist now? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know because we still don't know how much human judgment. We know in terms of like, is this cancer, is this not cancer?

36:12But that's not the only judgment folks are making. So I think we don't know enough yet. And I want students to be, what we really want is students to be curious and teach them to think critically. A 17-year-old doesn't have to pick their career, nor do they have to pick a career that's going to last the rest of their lives. Because people pivot constantly now.

36:33Brian Halligan:Do you care what the vocational path of graduates do? Like computer science students, a lot of them go into quant shops. A lot of them go and do their PhD. Some do startups. I wish more would do startups. Does MIT care? You know, that's interesting. So this is not a new question to me because even when I had a biology lab, about half my students went to industry and half went to academia. And at that time, even that was controversial among a lot of faculty who really thought we should only be spending our time and effort training PhDs and we're going to go into academia. I have never particularly cared where people go, except that wherever they're going to go, they have to be prepared to a level of excellence.

37:22So if you tell me you're going to industry and you tell me you're going to academia, I don't care because you, while you're here, you have to evince the same level of excellence in your preparation. And so I think that it's not like we tailor our education to someone's specific future career goal. We want them to have the kind of knowledge base and ability to navigate the world that will enable them to do anything they want to do. But that means you can't cut corners just because someone's going to do something that you don't think requires the full suite of educational opportunities.

37:59Brian Halligan:And you talk about, related to this, the CATE initiative you have, which I love. Why are you doing it? And do you care what happens in the city around you? Does that industry matter to you? It really does. First of all, we've all seen the impact of biotech on the surrounding area. And you know as well as I do that we've seen a lot of the AI action go to the West Coast. Driving me crazy. Yeah. And so, look, I think, first of all, I want our students and our faculty to be able to bring to the world as rapidly as possible their great discoveries. So that's one. But I also do want to see the people who are here populate our local ecosystem.

38:45Brian Halligan:Okay, you do care about that. I do. I do. Because first, for a number of reasons. One is just for, you know, base economic reasons. I think it's important for the country, for the region rather. But another reason is that MIT is part of this rich ecosystem. And, you know, students are going back and forth, faculty are going back and forth. I want there to be a continuing dialogue between what's going on at a place like MIT and what's happening in the real world kind of thing. And so proximity is really important. We want to, for instance, we're thinking about whether our students should be doing more co-ops and have more opportunities in these companies.

39:22Things have to be proximal for you to be able to do that. So there's a lot of reasons to want that to happen. And the vitality of Massachusetts has always been about sort of the education economy and cutting edge tech economy. And I don't want to see that go down the drain.

39:37Brian Halligan:I don't either. Sally, my first exposure to you was that congressional hearing. Oh, great. You said, I want to talk to her. No, and as an alum, I was like, my NPS was low on you. That was my exposure. I was like, I didn't know anything about it. We're like, ah. And then how you handled that crisis, how you handled the hecklers at last year's graduation. Oh, right. I almost forgot about that. You're an outstanding leader, and I'm really proud to be associated at MIT. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks very much. Hey, everybody. I hope you liked that interview with Sally. I think she's a real gem.

40:15Brian Halligan:A couple of my takeaways, some things I learned or maybe forgot from when I was the CEO. She's handled a couple of whopper crises really well. And several of the other podcasts guests have, like Vlad from Robin Hood's been through a couple whoppers. And some of this stuff rhymes, and almost all of you will probably go through some major crises. some of my takeaways are even though you're in an absolute tornado in in size you're kind of boiling up you're losing it somehow magically you have to show a calm exterior it is not easy it's unnatural but in a crisis the ceo needs to do that if you have made a mistake like she made a mistake in front of congress there's an expression old colleague of mine used to use when you explain you lose.

41:05Brian Halligan:You're like, you're spinning it, you're explaining it, you're explaining it, and people just tune out. Made a mistake, just admit it. Clarify your remarks if you need to clarify them and do it quickly. Don't sit on it. Another hack she has that we had at HubSpot, have an excellent writer on board because you have to verbally communicate stuff, but so much is done in writing. And in her case, in HubSpot's case, many times, a very well written post internally and externally is gold. And we had a couple of a couple of moments where that really mattered. And I took a lot of writing classes. My co-founder is a good writer and we leaned on that heavily.

41:39Brian Halligan:So if you're not a great writer, it doesn't even have to be your comms person. Somebody on your team should be an excellent writer. And the last piece is just, she has a very good board and her board's on board with her. That's underrated. You want your board to be behind you. We talked about meritocracy and sustaining excellence. My co-founder and I at HubSpot graduated from MIT and we tried to keep sort of the culture of MIT into HubSpot. And the way I would like to describe this is my mother, every time I'd visit my mother, all her friends' kids seemed like they were always looking for jobs.

42:12Brian Halligan:So I'd get a stack of three or four resumes every time I'd visit her. And of course, I'd refer them back to HubSpot. HubSpot didn't care that I referred them. In fact, it might have even been a black mark that I referred them. And so much more often than not, they didn't get the job. That really irritated my mother, but I think was good for HubSpot. um another thing about this i think she didn't talk about this but i think is like a lot of founders ask me like who should i be interviewing and when at what scale should i stop interviewing i'll give you my two rules of thumb you should all obviously interview the people who are directly reporting to you in the circle in that next level out um i also think like as you're scaling fast you can interview everybody up to 100 employees not the first interview but the final interview.

42:59Brian Halligan:And a couple of my CEOs are doing that around 100 employees. It starts to really break down there like they have 10 minute interviews on their calendar. But I think you should have veto rights up until about that point on everyone because you're kind of setting the foundation. Two other hacks that we had at HubSpot that really worked on the meritocracy side. One is, you know, she talked about this, but like they didn't necessarily write down this idea of sort of excellence and meritocracy. It was cultural. We had something similar we had our five values and in the form you would fill out after you interviewed someone all five values would be on there and you'd scale you'd rank them on a scale of one to four that kind of built the values into the system and we'll go back later and compare how are we doing on those values and then for every person we interview would score them and my only advice I'm interviewing particularly execs is it's very tempting we did this a lot to hire the person with the least amount of weaknesses that everyone liked as opposed to hiring the person who maybe has some weaknesses that some people were negative on but some people really thought were great you know when we started hiring spiky people in fact Yamini the current CEO of HubSpot started doing this it really paid off for us anyway those are some of my takeaways I hope you like the pod I think she's incredible I'm a proud graduate and I'll see you on the next pod

44:25Thank you.