Brian Halligan

In the startup phase it's 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration. In the scale-up phase it's 90% inspiration, 10% perspiration.

I lay at the bottom of a cliff after a snowmobile accident, thinking I was going to freeze to death. One of the decisions I made there: I don't really like being CEO of an 8,000-person company. If I make it out alive, I'm out. And that's exactly what happened.

Starting a company has never been easier. Scaling one into a durable, high-impact organization has never been harder.

CEOs dramatically overrate their ability to interview people and underrate high-quality blind references. After 18 months of hiring a C-level exec, at least 50% of the time they're gone. The mortality rate is brutal.

Never hire from McKinsey. Almost by definition, someone who goes to work there is very conservative in their outlook. And almost by definition, great founders are skeptical of conventional wisdom. It almost always fails.

The go-to-market playbook is about to get turned on its head. People will start their buying journey in ChatGPT or Gemini, not Google. Your website matters less. Your AI avatar on your homepage matters more.

Avoid the big company hire. We hired so many people from Salesforce, Google, and Microsoft — 100% attrition rate on all of them. The impedance mismatch between their expectations and reality at a startup is massive.

When we interviewed candidates, the person with the least weaknesses almost always got hired. We changed that. We started choosing spikier people — those with real strengths and real weaknesses. Our hit rate improved dramatically.

Don't hire the person with the fewest weaknesses. At HubSpot we kept picking the 3/3/3 candidate over the 4/2/4. We started picking the spikier people, the ones with real weaknesses. Hit rate on hires improved dramatically. Strength beats lack of weakness.

The go-to-market is about to get turned on its head. People won't start on your website. They'll start in ChatGPT, get educated, then show up to your site. Your homepage becomes a high-quality avatar that can answer everything. The funnel is flipped.

If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it. Every important thing in a company happens cross-functionally. If nobody has their ass on the line for a specific outcome, nothing will happen. DRI isn't just an acronym. It's survival.

My LOCK algorithm for evaluating founders: Lovable (does this person inspire followership?), Obsessed (deep founder-market fit), Chip on their shoulder, Knowledgeable. Add an S: Student. The ones who win are LLMs — they never stop learning.

Never waste a good crisis. Every good thing at HubSpot came out of a crisis because we were forced to make changes we'd been avoiding. If you have bad news to deliver, don't nibble on the sh*t sandwich — just eat it. Adults can handle the truth.