Aligning Vectors: How To Scale A Business (#INBOUND17 Keynote With Dharmesh Shah)

So Brian talked about how to position yourself for growth, how to get culture right, how to get decision making right. What I'd like to talk about is how you produce growth. How do we grow better? Better now, every now and then in your life, you get this email that causes a range of emotions. This is one of those emails. This came from Sequoia Capital, one of HubSpot's venture capital investors, and they were inviting Brian and I to a founders event. Now, I'm going to walk you through the thoughts that went through my head as I read this email. Number one, buried deep in the hills. Now, this was my first hint that there might not be optimal WI fi where they were having this. And that was a problem for me because I'm what you would call indoorsy. It's not that I'm anti nature. I'm just pro Netflix and pro pajamas, right? That's just problem number two. We're hosting a small N100 gathering. Now, I like the N equals 100 part. The fact that he said it that way because that appeals to the geeky side of me. In addition to being geeky, I'm also introverted. And n equals 100 is about n equals 98 more than the number of humans I'm used to being around. That's just not my thing. Final problem, we're bringing together our most legendary founders. Now, I can understand why they would want to bring together legendary founders. If I were them, I would do the same thing. My issue was then why do they also feel compelled to invite me? Because legendary is not on the list of descriptors I would use for myself. The one that I would use is insecure. And so if you add it all up, I'm indoorsy, I'm introverted, I'm insecure. Net result, I'm intimidated. And so I send a message back. I'm polite about it, honored to be invited. Thank you so much for inviting me. Sorry I can't make it. And that was that. Or so I thought. Two weeks later. Two weeks later, I get a follow up. Oh, and by the way, Elon Musk is going to be there. Now, I can characterize my feelings about Elon in one hyphenated word. Geek crush. Geek rush. But the thought that went through my head as I was reading this email was one word. Crap. Now I'm going to have to come up with better excuses not to go on this outdoorsy thing. I'm still not going to go, but now I need better reasons. Now, as big a fan of Elon As I am. I know someone that's an even bigger fan. My son Sohan, who's in the audience today, by the way, for the first time. So Sohan is six and three quarter years old. I know this because every week he gives me an update and tells me exactly how old he is. Sohan's two favorite things in the world are space and cars. So you can imagine why he would be a huge Elon Musk fan. He's seen every launch video, he's used a lot of percentage of his screen time on El. And I have a suspicion if there was such a thing as reverse adoption, he'd trade me in for Elon. So I chat with my wife about my dilemma. She's outdoorsy and she's an extrovert. We've been together for 20 plus years. Thank you. Yeah, she's been to every inbound and she gets me and I explain all the reasons why I'm not going. And she says, someone would really love that selfie with Elon. And I'm like, good talk, good talk. So here I am at the Founders event and this photo was taken with a drone because why wouldn't you take a photo with a drone if you can? And Elon did make it. That's Elon in the aviator glasses. It's hard to tell from this photo. He looks astonishingly like the Terminator. He's not, don't get me wrong, but he looks astonishing like the Terminator. He's more like an Iron man thing. Anyway, so that's me. I'm easy to spot in this photo because I'm the one person that's looking at the ground. And the reason I'm looking at the ground is because I'm an introvert and I don't like making eye contact, not even with a drone. That's just not what I do. And so I'm a man with a Grandmaster plan here at this event. So we're going to shift to this big tent and we're going to have dinner. And here is my plan. It's like, okay, I'm going to sit myself at dinner, I'm going to pick a strategic spot. Then sometime during the course of dinner, I'm going to turn around, I'm going to take a selfie of myself. All selfies are of yourself. I'm going to take a selfie and Elon's going to be somewhere in the background and I'm going to let the magic of Photoshop do the rest. That's my Grandmaster. It's like he's six and three quarters. When he figures it out, he'll understand. Like, daddy, I would do the same thing. It's like, yeah, he'd be understanding about it. That's my suspicion. So this is the plan. So I'm sitting there waiting for dinner. I'm kind of channeling my inner Jason Bourne, checking out all the angles. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Someone sits down kind of right next to me. I'm like, oh, that cuts out some of the angles. But turns out the person that sat down right next to me is Elon Musk. What are the odds, right? Well, actually, I guess 1 in 100 is any cool anyway, but doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Not important to the story. Okay, so first it's like, awesome. Elon Musk is right there. And then I'm like, not awesome. Because it is impossible to take a selfie with somebody that's sitting right next to you without them noticing. Like, it's just science, right? You can't. You can't do it. Right? So I'm stressed out now. The good news is Elon was everything I had hoped he would be. Crazy smart and brilliant. Super geeky, and as it turns out, very gracious, very charming. So I got to spend two and a half hours at a small dinner with Elon Musk. Had a great time, didn't go to bathroom for two and a half hours. Different story. So we're chatting. We're chatting, having a good time. And during the course of the evening, this question is posed. Like, Elon, you're doing like, Tesla and SpaceX. Like, how do you do such big things? Like, what's your advice now? You have to realize Elon is a physics guy. Here's what's the answer. Let's say you're trying to get your company from point A to point B. Every person on the team is a vector, and your progress as a company is determined by the sum of all vectors. That's all he said. So I did what anyone would do. I nodded politely and started talking about artificial intelligence. So It's. So it's 2:30 in the morning, there's no WI fi, just so you know. And I was pondering vectors, and I did the unimaginable, something I hadn't done in years, which is actually like exercise thought without the aid of Google. I didn't even know that was still possible these days, to actually think without having Google right there for you. And here's what I pieced together around what Elon was talking about. First off, a Vector is a quantity having both magnitude and direction. So let's say you have a hypothetical company and you have a person in this company, and let's say they have an impact score of 9 out of 10. They're super clueful, they're committed, they're competent, they're good. 9 out of 10 on this arbitrary scale. Now this in of itself is not a vector because we don't know what direction this person is moving in. This is what's known as a scalar, just the magnitude, okay? Now if we know this person is moving in the right direction, now all of a sudden it's a vector represented by an arrow. Let's say you had four people in the company and they were all 9 out of 10s because you've been hiring well, you've got a good culture. Let's say you have these four people, and let's say this is how we represent how they're working. Two people are pulling in one direction, two people are pulling in the opposite direction. The algebraic sum of these four vectors, what Elon is talking about is what's known as the null vector. It has zero magnitude and unknown direction. Nothing is being accomplished. Now, this is not common. This would not happen in any company ever, right? This is more common, right? Mostly people are pulling in the correct ish direction, except for that one guy. There's always that one guy. We know that one guy, right? There's always one of them. But overall, things are moving in the right direction. But it's still not optimal, right? Because we're not maximizing the value of those impacts. If you did this kind of algebraically, you'd calculate how much actual impact was being had. I'm going to spare you that. Now, this is what Elon suggests we should be trying to do. This is the theoretical maximum for those 9 out of 10 people. Add them all up and the magnitude of impact is actually 36. Nothing is being wasted. There's no inefficiency. There's no one pulling in the wrong direction. This is what we should be all striving for, which is aligned vectors. So congratulations, you've just passed a micro class on linear algebra. I'm not saying it was the best class on linear algebra, but it's the biggest live class on linear algebra I think, ever. Now, some of you are wondering, Dharmesh, that's all well and good. Why would you give us a micro class on linear algebra? Two reasons. Reason number one, HubSpot's about 11 years old. I've been to 40 company meetings. I've written a thousand blog posts and some things stick when I tell them. It's like, oh, I went, I learned this thing, I read this book, I met this person. This idea of aligned vectors is the thing that has stuck the Most with the HubSpot team. It's part of the vocabulary now. It's just simple enough to understand, but then applicable in a wide enough cases to be useful. That's reason number one. Reason number two, in my experience, in the hundreds of companies I've talked to, including HubSpot, the number one issue most companies have is misalignment. And it's not just the misalignment. Oh, the people are not aligned around the company's goals. That happens. There's an even larger issue where the company's goal is not aligned around what the customer wants and needs. That's a much more insidious problem. And so the idea here is, okay, so what does the customer want? What does the customer need? And Brian talks about this, right? He's like, people want a delightful end to end customer experience the whole way through. That's what customers want. That's what the company's goal should be. Okay, so Brian said this, we believe this. If you have a great culture, it makes recruiting easier. Similarly, if you have a great customer experience, it makes scaling easier. So that's the goal. If you want to grow and you want to scale, you have to solve for a delightful end to end customer customer experience. Now, usually by this point in the keynote, Brian has dropped an F bomb. He hasn't yet today, so it's incumbent on me to do so. You've just been funnel bombed. This is a typical funnel showing three stages in the customer life cycle. We want to attract people into the business. We want to engage them, hopefully turn them into customers, and. And we want to delight them and hopefully turn them into advocates. Now, speaking of funnels, approximately 50% of the whiteboards at HubSpot have a funnel drawn on them at any given point in time. Exactly 100% of those funnels were drawn by Brian. That might explain the fascination with Bugles, because like Dharmesh, they look like tiny funnels. Yes, Brian, yes, they do. Okay, so we can think about the three stages as being a funnel. It's useful or linearly, if that's useful. But I think there's a better way to think about these three stages. It's not really linear. It's not this and this and then this. I think the right way to think about it is as a cycle that says we attract people, we engage them, we delight them. That makes it easier to attract more people and we can keep going and going and going. And that's the idea. So I call this the virtuous cycle of growth. And in the center of the virtuous cycle of growth is the platform, the technology platform. Now it's called the hub, by the way. I didn't make that up. Google it. It's like if you have a bicycle and there's a wheel spinning the thing in there. It's not just networks that have hubs anyway, besides the point. All right, so we're going to talk about those four things. We're going to talk about marketing, we're going to talk about sales, we're going to talk about customers, we're going to talk about platform. Let's start with marketing. Now, in undergrad I was able to squeeze into a four year degree, about seven years worth of classes. That's how long it took me to get my degree. And in those seven years, I did not have a single marketing course, not one. And the reason is I majored in computer science, didn't have to take a marketing course. And just to round myself out, make myself a little bit more human, I minored in math. And so it's a little bit odd that years later Brian and I would go on to write a book about marketing called, cleverly enough, Inbound Marketing. And it wasn't an amazingly well written book because we wrote it. We should have hired a ghostwriter like normal people do. But although it wasn't amazingly well written, it was amazingly well timed because this notion of inbound marketing and moving from this kind of outbound non empathetic approach to an inbound human friendly approach was catching on everywhere. We were not the only ones talking about it. And the key message of the book was you want to add value before you extract it and you can add value by creating content. It's the summary of the book. The good news is people listened. The not so good news is sometimes they became obsessed with the create content part instead of focusing on the ad value part. So they were creating content and creating content and creating content. And HubSpot and I were not blameless in this process. We've produced our fair share of content. So now one of the things I love about the marketing team at HubSpot is they love data and they're geeked out on experimentation. So this year we decided to take a pause, reflect and think, this is Vilfredo Pareto. In addition to having an impressive name and an even more impressive beard. Way ahead of the hipsters, by the way. Way ahead. He had an impressive observation. And his observation is that in many cases, a small percentage of the inputs can lead to a disproportionate percentage of the output called the 8020 rule. An example would be 20% of the clothing you own accounts for 80% of the time that you're out in the world. Essentially, this T shirt is a good example. So it's like, okay, well, small percentage equals to big. So we decided to look into this. It's like, okay, well, we're going to analyze all the posts that HubSpot has posted over a time period. And it's like, oh, do our top posts, our top 20%, do they produce 80% of the leads? That's what the content is supposed to do. And we were a little bit disappointed with the results because our top 20% did not in fact produce 80% of the leads. They produced 93% of the leads. Now, the reason this was a little bit disappointing was that it meant in theory, we could have done 80% less work and still gotten only 7% fewer leads. That's the theory, right? It's like, okay, well we did all this, like, why did we do this? And so like any good theory, we decided to test it. Here's what we did. We said we will take one of our blogs and we will cut the blog posting volume down by 50%. We will pick the above average blog posts and we'll publish those. Now this is not above average like in Lake Wobegon, right, where every post is above average. It's not one of those. And what happened was actually not that shocking as the quality went up. Even though we took the post volume down, the number of views that we got, the number of leads that we got per post went up. Better content does better. Who would have thought that, right? And so the lesson here, hard won lesson for us is that we should all be doubling down on content. We should all be doubling down on content. But we should be focused on the quality of the content, not the quantity of the content. Spend twice as much time. Pick only your best articles. Because what you're trying to do is think of each little piece of content as this tiny little vector. You're trying to align it with marketing's goals and the company's goals overall. And your goal is not to produce a lot of content. Your goal is to produce a content brand where you have a reputation for publishing remarkably useful, brilliant content. That's what you want. All right? So obviously, content creation is not the only activity that marketing does. There are other things that marketing invests time and money in. Which brings me to everyone's favorite topic. Budgeting. You can withhold your applause. I know it's a little bit. Okay, now some of you are thinking, well, Dharmesh, you realize that budgets don't come in stacks of bills and brown paper bags. Yes, I realize this. This is marketing. They would be organic, artisanal, farm to market designer bags. Right. Like, I get that. I'm going to walk you through how the budgeting process works at many companies. Not yours, but many companies do. This starts off with a spreadsheet. The first tell is the fact that it's got the word budget in it. Easy, easy sign. Here's how it works. So we're going to start 2018. We're going to take the prior cell, which is 2017 budget. We're going to multiply by 1.1, basically add 10%. And then the magic of Excel, we're going to drag that cell all the way down. Boom. Cupcakes and coffee for everyone. Right? We're done with the 2018 budget. Now, if we were talking about other departments that don't change very much, let's say HR or finance, this is a reasonable way to go about making a budget. It's not perfect, but it's okay. Marketing is not one of those disciplines. Marketing is changing all the time. So what we should be doing is we should be saying, hey, we want to align our budget with what we understand about human behavior now. So if there's a shift happening from textual content to visual content, which there is, our budget should reflect that. If there's a movement from email to messaging, our budget should reflect that. So that's marketing. Let's say your marketing team is cranking. Vectors are aligned, content is being produced, leads are coming in. Now it's time to talk about sales. As it turns out, in grad school, I did have a sales course, and sales class in college is a lot like sex ed in high school. It's a little bit awkward, it's a little bit weird. Half the people are like, this is all old hat. I'm not going to learn anything. I don't know here, right? This is a waste of my time. The other half are like, I'm paying attention, I'm learning stuff, but I'm not sure I'm going to need this stuff anytime soon. Right. That's the other half. Now, I went to high school in India, and so we didn't have that there. I mean, we had that. I mean, we have a billion people. We just didn't have a class about it. I guess I'm saying clearly we had that. So the lesson here is that there's this shift that's happening in sales now. It's been happening for a while and we're seeing at HubSpot is that some people are not great at selling, but they're actually really good at getting sales. Now this sounds like a paradox. It's like, what do you mean? Like they're not good at selling, but they're getting sales. It's because we confuse the activity of selling with the outcome of sales. Selling is one of the possible activities one could do to result in a sale. As it turns out, there are more. And as it turns out, one of the best ones, instead of hustling, is actually helping. So we've been testing this theory at HubSpot. Some of our best performing salespeople at HubSpot came from our customer support team that are used to helping customers all the time. So this works. I'm not suggesting that we stop hiring kind of classically trained salespeople. I'm suggesting we have a new pool of talent that are much more effective than we would likely expect them to be. Now, we did a study at HubSpot. It's something I'm a little bit bothered by. I was surprised too. We surveyed a bunch of sellers, salespeople and asked them, do you believe that you are adding value to the prospect? You're adding value to the conversation? 82% of the people surveyed, the sellers said, yes, I believe I'm adding value to the prospect. We asked the buyers, do you believe in the sales conversations you've had? Do you believe that value was added to you, that the salesperson added value? Only 34% said yes. I believe the salesperson added value to this conversation. This is a big problem, but also a big opportunity for us. And the lesson we have learned at HubSpot is we should be doubling down on sales conversations, but in the same way as we thought of about marketing, which is not doubling down on quantity but doubling down on the quality of sales conversations we're having. When you think about the sales process, it's part of a larger end to end customer experience. So you don't want a brilliantly written blog article that pulls someone in and then have a crappy sales experience. It has to be delightful the whole way through. Now HubSpot has been working in the sales business. Obviously we have a sales team. We Build sales technology, which I'd like to talk about about before I talk about it, a disclaimer and a warning. Portions of the remaining content that I'm going to have are rated sp. Self promotional, may not be appropriate for all viewers. And just to kind of give you a cue in case I'm being overly subtle, I will put the small SP on slides that I believe you need a cue on, possibly in terms of being self promotional. So in 2014, on the inbound stage, we announced and released HubSpot CRM. And the idea behind HubSpot CRM is we want it to be the CRM of choice for small businesses. And we wanted to get all these companies that weren't using a CRM at all. They were sitting on the sidelines. We wanted to be the CRM for them. So we did a couple of things. We made it easy to use, important and we made it free. Turns out that works too. And so it was very popular. Thousands of businesses started using HubSpot CRM. But the thing that sort of kept coming back to us, there were thousands more businesses that wanted to use HubSpot CRM. Maybe they were dissatisfied with their existing CRM or they had never quite made the leap because they thought it was too intimidating. But the issue was that HubSpot's offering just didn't clear the bar. We needed to be like this high in terms of features and we just weren't there. So we weren't appropriate for their more sophisticated needs. And so we've been working for years on what has been the largest R and D project in the history of HubSpot. I know I've been here for a while and I think we clear the bar now. So we're launching today is a new grown up HubSpot sales professional. Here's what it does. This is gonna be interesting. So you asked for, oh, we want better team management, we want better security and control so we can manage our teams better. We want better automation so we can send. We want better like machine learning stuff for predictive lead scoring. We took all the requests that we had for a grown up CRM and we put it into HubSpot sales professional who's excited. All right. And like Apple iPhone, the price is going up. Unlike the Apple iPhone, if you are an owner of HubSpot Professional, anytime between now and October 31st at midnight, you get grandparented into the old pricing. So all right. Yep. All right. So we've talked about marketing, we've talked about sales, let's talk about customers. You Know the whole reason our organizations exist. Now, one of the things, and Brian hinted at this is that not only are the customers like the purpose for our existence, they are the biggest driver of growth. So we have more data. We ask people that make purchasing decisions. What information do you look at? What influences you when you make a purchasing decision? Top two things. Word of mouth, customer referrals. Now, this is of CEOs and other executives. We asked the same question of VPs and directors. I had the slides, took them out. Same thing for individual contributors. The top two in all cases, referrals and word of mouth, essentially. So the customer drives a lot of the purchasing decision, and that's not super surprising. So then the question is, okay, we get that. So how do we create delighted customers? Like, what do we do? So simple, but not easy, which is you deliver help to customers, engage them however they want, whenever they want, with whatever they want. So let's duke through that. Here's how not to help a customer however they want. So I get this message like, Mr. Shah, we are calling regarding the message you sent us. It's like, well, first of all, I got this as a voicemail because I don't answer my phone ever, ever. And I don't answer my phone because I hate phone calls. I hate phone calls with a fiery, burning rage. Fiery, burning. By the way, ever since I was like, yay big, I've wanted to use that keynote animation. Can we do it one more time? One more time. Let's. I'm going to watch it with you. Let's see here. Fiery, burning rage. Yes. By the way, that's the closest I'm ever going to get to going to Burning Man. Too many extroverts. Too many extroverts. So here's the way it's supposed to work. So here's like, okay, if I tweet you and ask you a question, you tweet me back. If I Facebook message you, you message me back. If I call, you call emergency services. There is something medically wrong with me. I would never do that. Right. That. Just don't. Okay, so it's not just me. The shift from kind of the classic email and phone calls as modes of engagement is moving. And so there are lots of ways that I'm strange and atypical. The fact that I like messaging is not one of them. Actually, I fit into the norm here. One of the few ways I'm actually normal. So Facebook released this data earlier this year in April, that 1.2 billion with a B people are using Facebook messenger. Not WhatsApp, not just Facebook Messenger. That's interesting. Those people are sending upwards of a billion messages a month to businesses. Not to other people, not to friends, to businesses. Right now. That's what's happening, by the way. That's businesses with a B as well. Like businesses. And I would posit that anytime a billion people do anything. Well, not anything. There are things people do that we don't. But anyway, it doesn't matter. Anytime a billion people do anything, it's time to pay attention. And this is not one of those things where like, oh, build it and they will come. They are already here and they want to chat. So we dug into more data. Now this is internal HubSpot data about HubSpot's own customers and websites from our CRM. So it's internal data. Please don't tweet this or share it widely. I'm kidding. It's like on a 50 foot screen. It's fine. A little legal joke for the legal counsel. So here's what we discovered is that if we put a form on a webpage that has content, if the person fills that form out, 0.7% of those people that fill the form out will eventually become customers. Okay, if instead we put the HubSpot meetings app, which allows people to schedule a meeting with a salesperson and if they indeed schedule that meeting, that number jumps to 13%. 13% of the people that asked for a meeting will eventually turn into customers. If instead we put chat on the website and say, oh, if you just want to chat with a salesperson right now, if they decide to engage and have that conversation, 20% of those people turn into customers. This is HubSpot's data. Now some of you are thinking, okay, well Dharmesh, this is a bit of a sample bias, a selection bias, because depending on where in the journey they are, different things are going to appeal to them. And you are absolutely friggin right. There is a selection bias. And that's why we need these different modes of engagement. We want people to self select into whatever it is that gets them further down the journey they're trying to do on. If they want to talk to somebody, let's let them talk to somebody. If they want to schedule a meeting, let them schedule a meeting. If they just want to fill out a form, let them fill out a form so we can get the broad spectrum of engagement. That's the idea. So here's where we are. 40 years ago you had to have a phone number. 20 years ago you had to Have a website. You couldn't be a business and not have a website. What's happening today? Because billion plus people are messaging, they are going to expect to be able to reach businesses over messaging apps, whether It's messenger or WhatsApp. Apple just announced iMessage is going to support business accounts. So you can have a business presence on iMessage as well. So all of the major messaging providers are all adding business accounts so you can have a business identity on these messaging apps. Okay? Helping customers whenever they want. Now, your business may not be open 24 hours a day, but as it turns out, the Internet is. And what you would consider normal business hours don't really apply anymore. There are people like me that are up till 2 o' clock in the morning every night. We're just strange, right? But it's. But we buy things as it turns out. And so the pushback I get on this is like, okay, well Dharmesh, I get it. If I could respond to customer issues 24. 7 a day, of course I would do that. But we're a small team, we can't afford to do that. And this is where software comes in. And of course I'm talking about chatbots. And I like chatbots. And I cannot lie, I've been obsessed with chatbots for like approaching, well, years now. And so last year at Inbound, I launched Growthbot, which is a chatbot for marketing and salespeople like yourselves. It's doing really well. It's one of the top three chatbots in marketing and sales right now. Thousands of people use it. I'm not gonna go into a deep demo of this right now. We don't have that kind of time. But I have a neat little Easter eggy thing for you. So if you send Growthbot a message that says, hey, help me align vectors or something resembling that, it will send you a couple of goodies later this week after I've caught up on some sleep. Okay. Including like the blooper slides from this deck, all the ones that I had to cut out because they didn't make it anyway. So do that. All right. So speaking of bots and platforms, when we had websites, you needed to know HTML originally to kind of put a website up. We got content management systems allowed mere mortals to do it. Then we wanted to send smart personalized emails out. Originally you needed engineering, marketing automation comes along. Now mere mortals can do it. Bots. Before you need an engineer to go off and build a bot. Now we have bot platforms that are like the content management systems of Yesteryear. Except instead of building a website, you build a bot. Now HubSpot has been excited about this. Excited. The marketing team has been really excited about testing this out. So we looked at all the bot platforms, we tried them out, we actually ran tests and our marketing team fell in love with this bot platform called Motion AI. And it's a visual bot builder that lets you kind of drag and drop and build a bot. And last week we announced that HubSpot acquired Motion AI. Thank you. It's like, we welcome the team. They're awesome. You're going to love them. They're awesome. And the idea here is to take that visual bot builder to kind of blend that technology into HubSpot over time. I'll talk about that in just a little bit. Last piece. Help people with whatever they want. I'm going to keep this one quick. We've all seen this little customer support on site chat, widgety thing, you click it and here's an example conversation I've had. Click the thing conversation. Hello, how are you? Having a good day? What is your customer account number? And I'm like, well, I'm not a customer yet. I just have a question on pricing and your terms. And they're like, well, you have reached the customer support chat line. I need your customer account number. I'm like, I am not a customer. I would like to be a customer. It's misguided of me, I know, but they're like, no, but you don't understand. This is the customer support chat line. So we should not expect customers to know our org chart. It's like, oh yeah, well, the customer support people spent money on this software that supports live chat. Those marketing schmucks, they didn't do that. And so therefore you can't ask marketing. No, that is not the customer's problem. We have to help them with whatever it is they need help with. Okay, so here's what we need to do as organizations. We need to help customers with this kind of overall end to end experience, however they want, whenever they want, with whatever they want. So HubSpot is now in the middle of what is already one of the biggest projects in the company's history to capitalize on this particular movement. And what the team is building is a unified inbox that the entire team, marketing, sales, customer support, customer success. Everyone in the company has access to this one unified inbox. Messages come into that inbox across multiple channels. Email, phone, Slack, Facebook messenger, it all comes into one place. And you can collaborate so you can deliver this thing, it's like whenever it's going to support bots so you can have auto responses, it's like, oh, this will look this up in the knowledge base. You're asking about our hours, that kind of thing. Biggest project we've ever undertaken. I am personally super excited about it. I'd like to introduce you to HubSpot conversations. So I think that's pretty good news for you, pretty good news for your customers. What's great news is that we think this technology is so foundational to the customer experience, so foundational in core, that every company should be doing it. We are going to include that baseline version of HubSpot Conversations in HubSpot CRM free. So if you are not a HubSpot CRM user yet, you should be sign up. This is as good a time as any. All right, so we're talking about tech. We've got one segment left. We have to talk about platform. And the reason we have to talk about platform is I'm the chief technology officer at HubSpot. I am bound by my employment agreement to HubSpot to talk about platform. This is my job. Now granted, I wrote that agreement as a founder, but still request going to talk platform. All right. One of the big decisions lots of organizations face is to try and choose between do I go with a platform that gives me most of what I need, or do I assemble, kind of self assemble, a group of discrete products and get what's known as the best of breed. So it's like the most of what I need versus best of breed. That's the decision. All right. When companies choose not to pick a platform, here is the reason that is the most common. None of the platforms gives me everything I need. This is a fantastically good answer. It happens to be true. There is no platform anywhere that gives every customer everything they need. It doesn't exist. Not at HubSpot, not anywhere. But there's good news. Open platforms have won out over closed platforms. All the platforms that are out there are open so you can add third party products and integrate them in. And this is like there's no software company on the planet that says, oh, our platform is so closed, you're gonna love it. It's awesome. It's like, it's. By the way, this is like the impossible to open packaging thing. And just a little pro tip on customer experience, if you, if you're going to make something that you use to open impossible packaging, don't put it in impossible to open packaging. Just a pro tip. That's What I would consider non delightful experience. Okay, so the good news is open platforms have won. The better news is you have 5,000 plus options in terms of things you can add to that platform. Now, you've seen, I know you've seen this diagram because you've seen it twice today, right? What you might not know is this is the guy that does the noble work of maintaining that beast, keeping to the community's advantage. He's been doing it for years. This is Scott Brinker. Scott Brinker's an awesome guy. Fun fact, he and I were classmates in grad school. Funner fact, as of last week, by the way, Scott knows more about technology in our industry than you can shake a stick at, by the way. I don't know why people use shaking a stick as the benchmark for things that are formidable. I never got that, but it's fine. Scott knows a lot about technology in our industry. So as of last week, I'm thrilled to announce that Scott is now the VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. Yeah, this is huge. Great guy. Great guy. And his charter is going to be to help 5,000 flowers bloom flowers. He's been studying for a long time. What we want to do is get all these companies to kind of align their vectors with what the marketing, what the industry needs, essentially. And HubSpot's looking to help them kind of do that. So our advice, I'll say my advice is start with a core. I know I'm biased. Start with a core backbone platform and then plug in the gaps. Scott would say the same thing. I shouldn't be putting words in his mouth since he's only been here a week, but whatever. He would say the same thing. I've asked him. And the result here is not best of breed, the result is the best of both worlds. That's what you get as a result of this approach. So I think it's the smart way to go about it. So this is the HubSpot platform. We have the marketing hub, which you know about, the sales hub, which you know about, the Connect hub, which is our integration partners, by the way. We went from about 48 partners in our Connect program to over 100 this week. So we've doubled over the course of last year in terms of people integrating in with HubSpot. But there's always been something missing. There's been one thing, one product. We've talked about what marketing teams get, what sales teams get. The thing that's been missing is a customer hub. Right. It seems a little bit obvious and so we've been working internally on tools for ourselves to help us with customer support and creating customer success and getting feedback from customers and building out a knowledge base. We've been building this for years for our own use. And I'm thrilled to announce we're going to take all of that work and we're going to deliver to you Customer Hub, the next big product in the HubSpot platform. Thank you. So I think. Thank you. I think this is good news for you and your customers. The great news is that we think this is so foundational to delivering a good customer experience that we're going to take the core functionality of Customer Hub and put it in HubSpot CRM free. Yep, that's the plan. All right. So that completes the cycle. If you want to learn more about HubSpot products, the HubSpot platform, juicy details, other announcements I didn't have a chance to cover. I encourage you to go to the Product Spotlight, which will be after this session in this very room. So you can keep your seats after I wrap up. Not right now, just in a little bit. And Christopher o', Donnell, who's our VP of product, runs that session and he's funny and he knows a bunch of stuff. So I encourage you to go. Okay, wrapping up. So this note is more for me than you, although I've heard it's a good idea to do generally in terms of breathing. Not bad. And I'd like to wrap up with a lesson from. I've talked about Elon, one of my favorite philosophers. Brian talks about his favorite philosophers. I want to share a lesson from my favorite philosopher of all time. And this is Niranjana Shah. It's my mom, and she passed away earlier this year. Hence the breathing part. I had to kind of collect myself. I've practiced this like 23 times. I've broken into tears only 21. So I've got a pretty good chance of making it through here. Okay, so the thing about my mom, the thing I remember most is that she was fiercely principled. If she knew she was on the side of truth and justice, she would not take crap for anybody. She would not back down. That was a thing that defined her. And it's funny. So she was married when she was 16. This is in rural India on the west coast, actually. Yeah, she was married when she was 16. She had me when she was 18. Now, it's been a long time since that time. I am now 49 and 3/4 years old. Sohan tracks that as well. November will be the first birthday I have without my mom. And one thing my mom kind of told me is like, oh, what was I like? It's like, well, you were kind of a quirky, contemplative, a little bit socially awkward little boy. And now I'm about to be 50 and I'm a quirky, contemplative, socially awkward, slightly older boy. But I'm also a father. And you might recall the story I told you in terms of dinner and the selfie for Sohan and the fact that it didn't quite happen. My mother was proud as she could be that actually did come back with a selfie with Elan. She got to see that, which is awesome. No Photoshop involved. It was only minimally awkward. My son Sohan was obviously delighted with the selfie with Elon Musk that he could show all his friends. Of course, the delation lasted about two weeks. That's how things go with kids. So I'm going to answer the question that we opened with. How do you grow better? Here's what I think. Here's what we've learned. And this is the heart of the inbound movement. This is the heart of why we get up in the morning, I think, why you all are here. The key to growing better is first to believe in people and understand that everybody wants love and respect. That is a universal truth. Key number one. Number two is you need to kind of say what you believe, not what you think will drive the numbers in a certain direction. Have the belief that people matter and say what you believe. And finally, and most importantly, do the thing you say, like walk the walk as best as you can walk the walk. So I think if you can align those three vectors, that's how as an individual, as an organization, that's how I think you grow. It's always an honor and a privilege to share time with you folks. Thank you. And, and a closing note. Mom, if you're watching the live stream from somewhere, thanks for everything. And don't worry, I've been eating completely fine. I am not withering away by any stretch. Thank you.