Dharmesh Shah explains why acquisitions fail despite their appeal: aligning cultures is brutally hard, yet the payoff of scaling a proven model across new markets is huge. Amazon and Apple succeeded by staying focused until a breakthrough moment let them pivot entirely, like Amazon launching EC2.
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Acquisitions are hard. You know, very few of them succeed. But I understand now, A, why they fail, and B, why they're so popular despite the fact that they fail so often. The reason they fail is because getting like the cultures to kind of match, it's just hard. Because when you're hiring for a startup, you're hiring like one person at a time. If you're doing it right, each individual person, you should be scared to death that they're going to mess up the culture. This is the person that might end up killing the company because we just get it wrong, right? In the early days. And it happens to be true. If you do make a really, really bad hire, they can kill the company and it kills the culture. But when you acquire a company, you're getting a portfolio of people. But the reason they're so popular is that once you find like a business model that works, your opportunity backlog is immense. Like the number of things that HubSpot can do right now that's on the path of global domination, which is our goal, is just immense. Like the thing that keeps us up at night is like we should be doing these things, but we also recognize the power of focus. Most of the really successful companies that we've seen in our lifetimes, it's this weird paradox of they're focused until they're not. Like Apple doing really, really well, whatever, all of a sudden they decide to make a music player. Amazon, all of a sudden they decide to launch EC2 and do cloud. Like, who would have ever thought that? And that's the interesting thing, like they're focused, focused, focused, focused, and then it's like, ah, we changed our mind, we're gonna do something really, really different. So that's the kind of weird clichéd kind of balance, but it's trying to balance those things is hard.
