Build your culture like a product, w/HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2023
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
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. Then you need to bring that culture to life by winning buy-in from your team.
This is exactly what Dharmesh Shah did at HubSpot — as laid out in the famed HubSpot Culture Code. This living document continues to inspire founders and business leaders to adopt a product design approach to building their own vibrant and adaptable company cultures.
In this episode, Dharmesh talks through the inspiration behind the Culture Code, and reveals how he built and rebuilt some of its most inspiring elements — all while keeping his team invested.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.8 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player |
| 0:28.0 | and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. |
| 0:33.0 | We didn't really use the word culture for the first five or six years of HubSpot. |
| 0:38.0 | It was not a thing we talked about, and I know this because I went through the email logs. |
| 0:42.0 | That's Darmes Shaw, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot. |
| 0:46.0 | Darmesh, only started to take culture seriously, |
| 0:49.0 | several years after launching the company |
| 0:51.0 | when his co-founder and HubSpot then CEO Brian Halligan found |
| 0:55.2 | himself at the center of an uncomfortable exchange with his peers. |
| 0:59.5 | He joined this CEO group that got together once a quarter the way I always pictured it was like |
| 1:04.8 | group therapy for CEOs. The theme for this particular meeting was culture. |
| 1:14.0 | They would go around the group and when it was Brian's turn he's like, well, you know, that's not something we're really spending time on. |
| 1:20.0 | Culture is something that we will deal with some other day. And they came down on him |
| 1:25.2 | hard. They're like, Brian, I don't think you understand. There's nothing more important than culture. That's the thing that |
| 1:31.5 | will define the company's destiny over the long term. |
| 1:33.7 | If you don't get that right, nothing else will matter. |
| 1:36.2 | And so he nodded his head and that meeting was over. |
| 1:39.8 | The meeting was over, but for Darmesh, his journey as a culture builder was about to begin. |
... |
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