The Surprising Reason HubSpot Paid Every Employee the Same Salary

4 Jan 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:37

HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah paid himself, Brian Halligan, and early employees the same $5,000 monthly salary to signal that mission mattered more than money. That baseline stuck, anchoring all future hiring conversations and shaping the company's culture around compensation as a secondary concern.

Chapters

I have a fun HubSpot story. So when we started on this compensation thing, you know, Brian and I had to pick salaries for ourselves, something more than zero. And so we picked $5,000 a month, right? It's like, okay, well, that's— it's a number. So when we hired employee number 3, we had to decide what we were going to pay them. $5,000. Hired employee number 4, $5,000. And so we just built this like, okay, if you're here for the salary, you're here for the wrong reason, right? That's not why you're going to join this motley crew of folks. And that lasted a while. And then it kind of has this inertia built in where it's like, okay, well, All of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join the company are all paying ourselves $5,000 a month. Now, what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making $5,000 a month?