Company Success

I just listened to this great podcast episode with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of Hubspot. In it, he talks about how he defines success for Hubspot which I thought was really profound.

My definition of success I came up with years ago that I kind of still stand by and that HubSpot actually stands by, is success is making the people who believed in you look brilliant. That’s it. What I like about that is it’s not like an inward-facing thing. This is the kind of, like customer folks, like all the employees that join your company when you’re a founder that were kind of silly enough to, “Could I join you on this thing?” whatever, like customers that believed in the early product that completely sucked, investors that believed, like all of that, do what you can to like when they reflect back on it, it’s like, “Oh, boy was I smart to having believed in Lenny and what he’s doing.”