INBOUND19: Facing Fears: Growing Better by Growing Bolder | Dharmesh Shah Spotlight

Present fears, future fears, personal fears and professional fears. Now, since we're at inbound, if it's easier for you, you can think of those as B2C fears versus B2B fears. For me, there are a few things that scare the life out of me. The first one is terrifying. I can't understand why everyone doesn't have this fear. It's just. I dread it. I dread it. It's the low battery warning. I hate that thing. It makes my heart rate go up. And not in a good way. Where you get credit on your fitness tracker. Not in a good way. So why the dread? Without battery life, our devices die. And without devices, all we have is each other, people, the horror. It's because of this fear that when I got this message from a colleague of mine, Christopher o', Donnell, who's the head of product at HubSpot, I. I was shocked, not shocked at the valuation for Monday.com, great company, great product, more power to them. Shocked, because if you look in the upper right, he's got a low battery warning. What's more is there's no lightning bolt in that battery warning thing. The phone is not charging. The phone is not charging. So yet he has the presence of mind to send me a screenshot, send me a message while living on the edge. What was even more shocking, it's 6:53am who uses up their battery life by 6:53am? Personal fear number two, I hate making eye contact. Thank you. And I know some of you are thinking, well, he's making eye contact with us right now. No, I'm not. I'm looking at your foreheads. You all have lovely foreheads, by the way. Nicely done. If I'm not looking at your foreheads, I am looking at the floor. I've built a great rapport with the floor of this convention center. We're BFFs all 18 miles. Here's someone who also has a lovely forehead. This is my wife, Kirsten. She's in the audience right there. Hi, sweetie. She and I met 27 years ago. I made eye contact 25 years ago. Thank you. I was proud of myself, too. Thank you. Now, when we first met, Kirsten talked to me about the gre, the Graduate Record Examination. It's like the sat, but with less acne. So Kirsten says, I'm thinking about going to grad school. So I'm planning on taking the gre. And I'm like, well, that's serendipitous. I'm planning on taking the gre. I was not planning on taking the gre. But it wasn't a total lie. By the time I had said those words, I was now planning on taking the green. So our first date was a study date. Now, some of you might be questioning, does a study date really count as a date? Yes, it does. Study date. It's got the word date right in there. So we plan our date. I'm not outdoorsy. Kirsten digs the outdoors. I dig Kirsten. So we're outdoors for our first date. This is a photo of us outdoors with our GRE book in hand. Now, I apologize for the graininess of this photo. This was back when you had to get photos defined, developed like a caveman. So we have a son, by the way. He's eight now, Sohan. And he likes to joke that Mommy and Daddy met in the late 1900s. And I'm like, you're not wrong. But I would tread lightly. Mommy brought you into this world. She can take you out. Daddy got you on the Internet. He can take you off. Last fear. Now, I know many of you are wondering, why is Dharmesh fearful of yoga splits? He doesn't seem like the type that would do yoga or. Or splits. This is actually a fear of water. I have a very rational fear of water because I can't swim. Just never learned. So you see a photo like this and many of you are thinking, oh, that's a nice tranquil pool. And the thing that goes through my head when I see this. Danger. Death awaits. And I can't help but think, I did not plan properly to die today. Now my life has turned out okay. I've mostly avoided water my whole life. Beaches, water parks. Cruises are okay because cruise ships are practically a small continent like Australia. So, sure, I've missed out on a few things, but overall, I'm fine. I tell myself late at night I'm fine. But now I have a son. His name is Sohan. And he's afraid of the water, too. So when he was in his late sixes, he wouldn't put a foot in the shallow end of the pool. Not even a toe. Wouldn't go near it. So that night in Maine, I was listening to the sounds of the forest. Or it might have been someone. Spotify playlist sounds, the forest playing too loudly? I don't know. The point is, I was overcome with guilt. I thought, is fear of water genetic? Did I pass this down to my son? What have I done to my son? I have failed as a father. Aquaman's son would not have this Issue. I felt so guilty. So I talked to Kirsten, who is not neurotic like I am, and she says, genetics, maybe. Or maybe he just needs to learn how to swim. Brilliant thesis, I thought. So we try that. Put Sohan in swim class, and lo and behold, the boy can swim like he were the son of Aquaman. It's awesome. So this is Sohan at that exact same pool that he would not put a toe into. This is him cannonballing into the deep end of that pool. Thank you. This is awesome. Did my heart so much good to see him in the water. But then he turns to me and he says, daddy, why are you afraid of the water? No parent wants to look scared in front of their kid. How we face our fears is what defines our destiny. And often how we overcome them involves not just one thing, but multiple things coming together. And if there's one person that understands the combinations of things, it's this dude. Now, you probably don't know who this dude is, because most dudes in the 1800s look like this. Actually, 200 years later, lots of dudes still look like that. Back to this dude. I'll give you a hint as to who this is. Yeah, I know. This is John Venn. He was a mathematician from Cambridge, uk. I hear they have a Cambridge there, too. He invented the Venn diagram. It's a part of math that's called set theory. Now, you've probably learned about Venn diagrams in high school, or if you're from India, like me, first grade. So here is an example of a Venn diagram. You have Paul Simon, gifted musician, singer, songwriter. You have Art Garfunkel, who has the name Garfunkel. Slightly better example, you have animated characters that love carrots, like Bugs Bunny. You have animated characters that are loyal friends, like Donkey from Shrek. By the way, it's not the donkey. The name of the character is Donkey. I just saved you some Googling time. Then you have animated characters that love carrots and our loyal friends. This is what I like to call a Sven diagram. I know, I know. You have to take the good with the bad, folks. You've got a dad on stage wearing dad jeans. You have to expect dubious dad jokes. That's how it goes. Now, for those of you in the audience feeling left out, a little bit of FOMO because you didn't get that joke. Just let it go. Now, many of you are wondering, why is Dharmesh talking to us about Venn diagrams? It's because facing your fears involves the intersection of different but complementary things. So a couple weeks ago, I posted this to LinkedIn. It got some resonance in the community, so I thought I'd share it with you. As a startup, at first you fight death. Next you fight stagnation. Then you fight complexity. So before moving forward on the path to growing better, you should know what fears you might encounter along the way. Brian talked about five genetic adaptations of the new breed of experience Disruptors. I'm going to share with you the five fears that you're going to need to face on the path to growing better. Now, before we dig in on the fears, it's important to recognize not all fears are bad. Some are worth fearing. They're dangerous, scary. The important thing is you have to pick the right fears to pay attention to. That's what we're going to talk about. Fear number one, a fear of commitment. This is a paradox for me. I'm exceptionally committed to things I commit to. Kirsten and I have been together for 27 years. Brian, I have been working together for 13 years. I've been wearing this T shirt on stage for 10 years. When I commit, it tends to stick. Apart from diets that don't include pizza, I know that about myself, which is why I find it hard sometimes to commit to make a decision. Because I mistakenly assume when I make the decision, it's going to last forever. So the result is uninspired compromises. Instead of committing to one path or another, I avoid a decision altogether. And I think many people have the same challenge. So we made one of our first uninspired compromises. Early on at HubSpot, we were unable to decide exactly what customer base we were going to focus on. Here's a photo from the first year of HubSpot. We're having an animated debate over email. Anything else would have required eye contact. Now, you can't tell from this photo. We are mid compromise right here. Now, I want to pause and make a few observations on this photo. I know this looks like a Fortnite marathon for dads. It's not. It's a room at the Marriott across the street from the HubSpot office. And so you're wondering, well, why are you working out of a Marriott across the street? And the answer is, because HubSpot was on fire. Literally on fire. Like, there was an electrical blowout. And so, by the way, don't you hate when people use the word literally when they actually mean figuratively? It's like my heart literally broke into a thousand pieces when I heard Ed Sheeran was no longer touring I'm sad about that too. But really, did your heart break? Did you count those pieces? So when I say HubSpot was on fire and literally on fire, there were literal flames. It was on fire. What was not on fire was my fashion sense. So that sweater and those shoes. Still own, still wear. Almost wore them today. Kirsten suggested I might not want to do that now. In this photo, Brian, as always, is ahead of his time. This is him working while standing. Before standing desks were a thing. You can think of it as a hunching desk. Last observation. Both Brian and I are using PCs back then, we both have subsequently switched to Macs. Brian because he loves Apple, Me because the free U2 album. Anyway, back to our compromise. We couldn't commit to exactly who our target customer base was going to be. So we kept having these animated debates, weeks, months, years. It was so painful. What we learned along the way was that what we needed was the combination of a market that's big enough to support the growth you want and need right now, but that's small enough that you can focus and delight your customers. You need the intersection of those two things, because when you narrow your focus, instead of trying to broaden your market, it's easier to grow and it's easier to delight your customers. And delighted customers are important. A lack of delighted customers is not the quickest way to kill growth, but it's the most reliable. To get delighted customers, you need to pick a very specific market and commit to it. Now, many of us have a fear of making commitments, of making sharp, incisive decisions, not hedging. Instead, what we should really fear is uninspired compromises. Those are the quiet killers over time. Fear number two, the fear of differences. We're going to go back in time, way, way back in time. This is me, five years old. Now. Many of you are thinking, well, back then you were able to, like, have intense eye contact. You're like, making intense eye contact. No, I'm not. I'm looking at the photographer's forehead. By the way, I'm wearing a tie back then because I had not yet discovered that one could just start a company and wear logo T shirts the rest of your life, including on stage. One of the privileges. This is me, version 1.0. I'm out of beta. I'm in my early 20s, Indian accent, super geeky. I've kept that consistent over the years. I take standardized tests for fun or to meet the love of my life. Now, I'm originally from the state of Gujarat in India. Shout out to the folks from Gujarat, my family. I moved to Alabama from India and I Alabamian for 10 years. That's where I met Kirsten. Now at the time, I desperately wanted to fit in. Not so easy in Alabama, but I tried. This is me 2.0. This is the result of what Brian might call some mutations or adaptations. I went clean shaven hoping it would help me fit in. I worked on losing my accent, hoping it would help me fit in. I even changed my name from Dharmesh to David. True story. Hoping it would help me fit in and make my life easier at Starbucks. This is me 3.0. Still keeping it consistent, still geeky. Shift back to my original branding, Dharmesh. But I use just my first name. Not because I'm cool like Madonna or Adele. I'm not cool. I do it because most of the time Dharmesh is sufficiently unambiguous and because it's my name. Here's that. So me 3.0 went to graduate school at MIT in Cambridge, across the river from here in Boston. There I really fit in. It was awesome. MIT is teeming with geeks like me. Zero eye contact, even on study dates. While I was there, I met another grad student named Brian. I thought this guy seems pretty clueful. We're similar in ways, different in ways. But I'm a startup guy, he's a startup guy. He's more soul cycle. I'm more no cycle. But maybe we could work together someday. But there was one problem with Brian and it was not that. He was running around campus with a PowerPoint clicker in his hand advocating for a disruption in academics while playing John Mayer on repeat. Dressed up as Spider Man. I mean, that was a problem. It wasn't the problem. The problem was that Brian was in business school. So he's going to be an MBA now. Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with MBAs. I love MBAs. Two out of three of my friends are MBAs. And I don't mean two thirds. I mean I have three friends, two of them have MBAs. And yes, one of them is Brian. And sure, the other one might be Kirsten, a non mba. The issue was that I was in business school too. And if you have too many MBAs running around, they start using words like disruption and causation and correlation. It's very disrupting, ironically. So by the way, I often used to make the mistake of of assuming causation when it was really correlation. But like since business school I make that mistake much less frequently. Did they teach me that at mit, it's hard to know for sure. Thank you. Thank you so much. Brian and I did end up starting a company together. This is what the early team at HubSpot looked like. We had half a dozen MBAs. We should have gotten a bulk discount, a programmatic discount. No negotiating discounts. Brian, I don't believe in that. MBAs are business geeks and if you're building an experience disruptor, they're just as important as technology geeks. So six MBAs on the early team wasn't really an issue, but we did have a big problem. The issue was that they were all dudes, all from mit, all with a similar background. What little diversity there was on the team, you're looking at them right now. Focusing so little on diversity was one of the biggest mistakes we made in our early days at HubSpot. I think I had spent so much time trying to fit in in the years earlier that it didn't occur to me that maybe other people were having a hard time fitting in with us at HubSpot. So if I had a DeLorean that could travel back in time, I'd have HubSpot prioritize diversity early and maybe also that series finale of Game of Thrones. But mostly the diversity thing. Sorry, I know it's too soon. Too soon. I know, I get it. The best possible time to start being mindful about diversity is time. T equals zero. When you're just starting, starting a new company, starting a new team, starting a new project, the next best time is now. The data on the benefits diverse teams is overwhelming. But there's a very fundamental basic reason why diverse teams are better for you and better for your customers. When YouTube launched their mobile app for the first time, the team observed this strange phenomenon. Many users were uploading videos upside down. And yes, I know you're thinking, well, you know, that looks a lot like Brian. I assure you it's not Brian. As evidence, I submit this actual video of Brian on the Inbound 13 stage. I love many things about my co founder. One of the things I love the most is that he doesn't take himself too seriously. Love that guy. Sorry for the pdfa. Public display of founder affection. It's not usually how I roll. Alright, back to the curious incident of the upside down videos. It wasn't a small number of videos, it was about 10% of the videos that were upside down. So the YouTube team racked their big brains to try and figure out, why would people do this? This is crazy. As it turns out, the answer was very simple. It's because 10% of the population is left handed and so they hold their phones like this. They hold it differently, not wrong, differently. So they weren't uploading videos upside down from their perspective. So you would think this is a relatively obvious, simple thing. Why didn't the YouTube team catch this? It's because no one on that early team happened to be left handed. They just lacked that perspective. So magic happens when different but complementary people intersect. We build better relationships, build better companies. Someday I hope all companies will care more about the values we each hold, the value we can each add to the team, and will embrace our differences and our quirks. But many companies don't hire for diversity. They often hire for personality fit. They use personality assessments like the Myers Briggs test. By the way, I am a classic intj. I stands for introverted, NT stands for not talkative.