Dharmesh Shah explains how HubSpot built culture through hyper-transparency: sharing board decks, financials, and VC discussions with all employees. The company replaces policies with one rule, "use good judgment," for decisions like sick leave and remote work. Shah argues that early cultural choices have outsized impact on a company's future.
Chapters
Culture, what it really is, the way I think about it, it's like the operating system that everything else is kind of running on. It's like the heart, it's the machinery that makes us run. So we did a survey and asked the employees, are you happy or not? Would you recommend HubSpot as a place to work on a scale of 0 to 10? And the reality was good, which is, oh, they were super happy, ecstatically happy, maniacally happy. And so the approach we took in terms of culture is we made the decision early on in the company to share Just about everything with everyone, period. Only exceptions were if we were legally bound not to share it, like if we were working on some M&A transaction where we had a contractual obligation not to share it, or individual compensation data because it was data that we felt like we didn't exclusively own as the company. It was kind of a shared data thing between the individual and us. Everything else, the board deck, the financials, how much money we burned, when we were going to run out of cash, what the overall valuations were, what discussions we were having with VCs, everything was shared with everyone. The other one that's interesting, so So we have this kind of hyper-transparent culture of share everything and this is something we had to add later in the deck because there was much confusion around it. It's like, well, Dharmesh, I thought we were transparent, but then this decision gets made and I don't remember being asked for like a vote. It's like, well, no, transparency means we will tell you how the process works, what's going into it, but someone owns that decision. We do not make decisions by consensus. Someone owns it and we trust them to make the right decision. So transparency is not the same thing as democracy. As we were growing, it's like, okay, well, we have to like do things and have some guidelines around— Sick time and vacations. And we didn't have that as we were growing. It's like our chief counsel and our CFO said, okay, well, now is the time to start writing down, like, get an employee manual together and put all this stuff together. We need guidelines. And we said, we don't want to do that. So we made exactly 3 words as our policy for everything unless otherwise stated, which is use good judgment. It's really snowing hard outside. Should I come into the office or can I stay home and work from home? Use good judgment. We don't care. We care, but we don't care in terms of what decision you make. Every company, however many people, is going to have a culture. Cultures exist, period. Anytime more than one person is together, and with a few calories— I'm not suggesting you go off and spend hundreds of hours, but every hour, 5 hours, 10 hours you spend in those early days have dramatic leverage. So might as well build a culture you're going to love and build a company you want to work for and work in.
