Yamini Rangan, CEO @ HubSpot: How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce

When you are in a wartime or a hard time, you are optimizing for speed of execution. When you are in peacetime, you are optimizing for getting a consensus around what you're trying to do. You gotta be good at both and many other modes of operating. B2B apps are not winner-take-all markets. Whether you look at HR, finance, CRM, they all have multiple players. The best competitors make you better, and I think Salesforce does a really good job of-

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Yamini, listen, I spoke to Brian, I spoke to Pat, I spoke to Jay Simons, Claire Hughes Johnson. I mean, I, I think I stalked the shit out of you, bluntly-

Oh, my God. (laughs)

... before this show. I know, terrifying, but thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me, Harry. It's been a long time. I've been long-time listener, first-time talker to you there.

That, that is fantastic. I wanna start with the movement into the role of CEO. It's a $31 billion public company. I mean, the, the size of HubSpot is incredible. The question that I wanna start with is, the founders are still fairly involved.

Yep.

What's it like being CEO where the founders are still fairly involved?

It is a privilege and honor, uh, to take over from a founder, and it's hard and tough work to make it work. I think for me, um, I'd been at the company for about a year, and I always looked at, like, the decisions that Brian and Dharmesh made in starting and scaling the company, deep conviction in SMB. Deep conviction in building a platform and crafting the platform, deep conviction in having culture as a product. Like, those are decisions that I just loved and I completely believed in. So I think that is the easier part and that's the pro of working with founders who have, uh, who know the company, who have taken it from very small, you know, startup to scaling it to a public company and beyond. Um, I think on the flip side, it's a lot of work. You know, when the transition happens, you have to think about, uh, a lot of things during the transition and throughout, you know, after. What's the cadence? Do you wanna send 20 emails a day or two emails? Uh, and what's the altitude? Do you want to, want to talk about the strategy and the product or do you want to talk about the whole business? And if it's one or the other, you really need to make sure that you're covering the bases across all of those conversations. And then what do you do when something bad happens? Which, something will happen, right? If you hit a pothole or if you make a bet that does not work, what happens? How are you gonna, like, make it work, right? So there's a lot of, uh, work that you need to put in, and just like any relationship that you have, right, first of all, you have to commit to it, and then you gotta put the work in order to make it function. And so, yeah, there's a lot of work.