Skip to content

By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.

Masters of ScaleMasters of Scale

HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah: Build your culture like a product | Masters of Scale

Your company’s culture is the bedrock of everything you do. So you can’t afford to just let your culture emerge — you need to build it with the deliberate approach of a product designer.

Dharmesh ShahguestReid Hoffmanhost
Jul 13, 202327mWatch on YouTube

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

Great conversations run long. Their best ideas don't have to.

uListen is free on iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and Claude.

See how

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah Explains Building Company Culture Like a Product

  1. Dharmesh Shah reluctantly took on culture after co-founder Brian Halligan was pressed on it by a CEO peer group, and he met harsh employee skepticism by applying his product design and coding mindset.
  2. He launched a narrowly scoped 16-slide culture code, gathered feedback through surveys, focus groups and one-on-ones, and published it publicly, and it has grown to 128 slides since 2013.
  3. Reid Hoffman and Shah walk through four components of the culture code: solving for the customer, extreme transparency, taking bold risks, and strength from diversity.
  4. Shah argues that culture is never finished, so founders should evolve it rather than preserve their startup culture, since a company builds one product for customers and another for its people.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Skepticism about culture is a feedback signal, not a dead end.

Employees' harsh reaction to Shah's first email revealed they saw culture talk as posters and coffee mugs, which gave him specific insight into what to avoid.

Start narrow and iterate publicly.

Shah's first version answered just one question about what attributes make people successful and happy at HubSpot, and feedback then pushed it to cover how decisions are made.

Customer pain should be felt directly, not just reported.

HubSpot's exec team holds a monthly meeting with a live customer, often an unhappy one, and engineers are pushed to talk to customers, so the team experiences the pain together.

Putting the customer first means the collective of customers.

Shah says this isn't 'the customer is always right'; individual requests may be declined in favor of what raises value for all customers.

Protect core cultural values even when convention says otherwise.

To keep transparency intact at the 2014 IPO, HubSpot named every employee a designated insider, since limiting the list would have meant breaking a cultural value.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

There are two products every company builds. One is for their customers, and the other product is the one they build for their people. No product is ever done. That means culture is never done.

— Dharmesh Shah

Everybody in the company has a voice but not necessarily a vote. We don't make decisions based on consensus. Some middle road that tries to appease everyone is probably the worst of the possible options.

— Dharmesh Shah

Lots of companies like to say that they hire for a culture fit. And my personal belief on this is that in order for you to be permitted to use that phrase, you have to be able to describe and define and show someone what your culture is.

— Dharmesh Shah

The mistake so many entrepreneurs make is they think their job is to preserve their startup culture, and I think that's misguided.

— Dharmesh Shah

Feedback is a gift. You do have to change the culture over time in order for it to continue to deliver the value for which it was created

— Dharmesh Shah

Read the available transcript
Culture as a productHubSpot Culture CodeEmployee feedback and iterationSolving for the customerExtreme transparency and designated insidersRisk-taking and decision ownershipDiversity and hiring for culture fit

Ask ChatGPT about this episode

Get its key ideas, plus a summary of each chapter linked to that point in the video, right in your chat.

  1. Add uListen AI to ChatGPT.

    Install uListen AI in ChatGPT (opens in a new tab)Needs a ChatGPT account.

  2. Paste this prompt into a new chat.

    Use uListen AI to give me this episode's key ideas and a chapter-by-chapter summary, with timestamps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2W7RqSWqoA

SPEAKERS

  • Dharmesh Shah

    guest

    Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, known for building and codifying company culture through HubSpot’s Culture Code.

  • Reid Hoffman

    host

    Co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock; host of Masters of Scale.

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

Read along on your phone, search it beside the video, or ask your favorite AI app what was said.

iOSAndroidClaudeChatGPTChrome