HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah turned down the CEO title because he knew management wasn't his strength. Instead of spending a decade becoming passable at something he disliked, he stayed an individual contributor. He argues people should double down on what they're actually good at rather than chase management roles that dilute their unique value.
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There are 5,000 people that work at HubSpot now, and exactly zero of them report to me. And that's always been the case. And I'm not suggesting you do that exact thing. The reason that's the case is when Brian and I, my co-founder, sat down and we talked about the business starting, he was like, oh, you wanted to be CEO. And I'm like, I don't want to be CEO because I've been that before and I suck at it. I actually suck at management. You know what? I could spend a bunch of years of my life. I'm a reasonably smart guy and I could probably become passably okay at management with some coaching and some training and some reading. I could get there. I'm like, I don't want to spend 10 years of my life becoming passably okay at something. So we made the decision when we started the company that I was going to be an individual contributor. It was like I was going to be all in on the business, but I'm just not going to have direct reports. I'm not going to do one-on-ones. Like, I just don't do that. That's not my thing. And that ended up being a really, really wise decision, both for HubSpot and for me personally. Because had I not made that decision, I don't know that I would have lasted at HubSpot because I'm a startup kind of guy. Figure out what your strengths are and kind of double down on those things. We have this misguided notion that everybody has to kind of move up into management and that's the thing that you do. If you're an author and they've had some bestsellers, like, okay, we don't tell them, it's like, okay, well, you know what? You need to start managing writers now instead of like writing books, which is what they're really good at. They need to write books. If that's your thing, do the thing.
