Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple that you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. You know as a leader, I bet you've got a lot of things vying for your attention . How do you know what deserves your time and focus and what doesn't? Well today's conversation is going to help you answer that big question. I'm joined by the CEO of HubSpot, Yomini Rangan. Now if you don't know, HubSpot is a $2 billion online customer relationship management platform and it's growing by leaps and bounds. And a big reason for their success is this very clear sense of focus that Yom ini has instilled to help everyone make better decisions and prioritize the right opportunities. In fact, Yomini even has a phrase for it, "Fortune favors the focused." The way you apply your attention and focus has a huge bearing on the results you can achieve. So if you're feeling spread a little thin, or you're just not sure what you need to be focused on right now to really move the needle for your organization, then you 're going to love my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours. Yomini Rangan. You know I've had so much fun researching you because you are one heck of a CEO and I just love your approach to culture and people and customers. So I can't really wait to get into this, but if you could give us a snapshot of HubSpot and the business you're leading today, I'd really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me again. HubSpot, we are really focused on helping millions of organizations grow better . That's the purpose, that's our mission, that's what we care about, that's our bread butter and jam. The way we do it is by providing a customer platform. So think about this, David. If you want to connect to your end customers, you need to be able to look at their entire journey, whether they're coming to your website, they're buying something online or they're interacting with your support, you got to be able to connect. That's what we enable small and medium businesses to do. We're about a 17 year old company, we are all over the world and we're passionate people that are mission driven about helping customers grow. Fantastic. You became CEO in a bit of an unexpected way. Tell us that story and what it was like for you to just be thrust into that role. Yeah, you know, this will resonate deeply with you, I'm an accidental CEO in many ways. Now I've been in the tech industry for about a few decades and I joined HubSpot as their first chief customer officer. And the reason I was the first chief customer officer is that HubSpot really believes in building and bringing together marketing sales and service in service of the end customer. So my job was to come in and bring together marketing sales and service and really help focus on the customers. And I joined at a very cool time, January 2020. And I don't know what the world was going to be, but I still remember Brian who is the CEO co-founder, phenomenal leader, mentor coach. He said, well, take your time, Yomini, take a lot of time and spend the time knowing our team, knowing our culture and then march hit. And he's like, move fast. Give me answers today. I can't wait one more day. What are the changes we need to do to really go into this mode of dealing with COVID? And so I just thrust into this position of reinventing what we needed to do during the pandemic and help our small, medium businesses who at that time were honestly churning. They were closing down and shuttering. There was a question of how they were going to survive. And we said, we need to do our part to help them get digital and help them get digital really quickly. And so we changed a lot of what we did for customers in a matter of days. We went to the board and we said that we are slashing our price, we're helping our customers, we're giving them a relief fund and we're going to help them survive during the pandemic. And turns out that was a good call because three months later, all small, medium businesses needed a way to digitally connect, digitally grow. And they came to us and we earned their trust in that period. Then what happened the next March? So I'd kind of gone through one March to the next March. I got another call from Brian. And this time he was calling me, unfortunately, from his hospital bed. He had met with a snowmobile accident and had broken a lot of big bones and thankfully all the organs survived. And he said, you're going to have to step up and you're going to have to run the company until I recover and get back. And my first thought was wow, pretty big shoes and wow, no playbook. He basically called from the hospital and said, don't mess this up. And I said, okay, I'll try my best. The good part is that we had clear guiding principles as a company. We had great leadership team. And six months later, he came back again, a call. And he said, well, do it. You're doing a reasonable job. Keep doing it and become the CEO. My first reaction was, no, no, no, no. This is not what I had planned for. I plan to take a month off after kind of helping shepherd the company over this period. And I'm not really the person I never ever thought of becoming a CEO. And he said, well, it's you or I'll hire someone else and you might not like that person. What do you want to do? You know, Yominy, that's so interesting because so many women that I've talked to become CEOs, they don't think they're ready. They should be doing something else or whatever. And I love how he just said, hey, I can hire somebody else. It's up to you. And when you're faced with that author, the answer was something else. Exactly. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me think about this. And in 24 hours, I got back to him and I said, well, I will do it. But I think I have big shoes to fill and I'll need your coaching, mentoring and support. And he has been a phenomenal coach mentor guide for me throughout this process. And it's now been about two and a half years since I got that first call in March. It's interesting. I want to ask you about this and I want to get back into this particular situation. But you mentioned you were the chief customer officer. You know, that's a unique title in a lot of companies. Do you think companies need to think more about what they call their leaders? 100% 100% and for me, words matter. You stand in commitment to every word you say and what you drive. And so the chief customer officer conveys that customer is at the center. Now you could call that chief business officer, chief commercial officer, chief operating officer. You could call any of those things. But it signals that the job of that sea level leader is to put the customer at the center and then make sure everything else works in order to serve that customer. And 10 years ago, that title was not existent. And I think the industry is embracing it for the right reasons, which is the focus on the customer. It's probably the most important thing in terms of a business. Now I want to get back to when Brian says, okay, you're the CEO. You got this transition to make. You know, you're basically interim says, don't mess it up. We got a great company here. But now you got to move from caretaker, you know, to, hey, you got to be the driver. You got to figure out the future where you're going. How does the leader manage that kind of transition? It's funny because again, this time he had like a one liner, which is be the driver of the bus was the, who is the conversation that we had. And so I thought about that a lot. What is being a driver actually mean? And how does like one go from being a go to market leader to a company leader? And it really starts with who are your constituents and who are your key stakeholders? Of course, all employees within the company. Of course, all of the customers, partners, investors, board members and overall stakeholders. So it really broadens who you're communicating, but it starts with the mindset of how do I learn what is important for every one of these stakeholders. I think from my perspective, I started as an engineer, then became a sales leader and then became a customer focused executive. And I've always put the customer at the center. Now I had more stakeholders and understanding the motivations, the key priorities for each of these stakeholders is where I started in terms of my journey as a CEO. That's always a great place to start. But you know, one of the things that as I think about that is you're taking over for a founder. He's been driving that bus yet he wants you to drive the bus and you got to create a new agenda. How do you really do that? I mean, how do you really make big changes to something that's really big while that founders around without maybe hurting his or her feelings or causing a ripple? I mean, first of all, you start with imposter syndrome. Not a lot of CEOs actually talk about this, not a lot of like C-suite leaders talk about this, but you know, when he said, hey, take this on, the first thing was, am I the right person for this? And how do I actually set it? Then the next question is, well, he's done a phenomenal job. You know, do I step into his shoes or do I create different shoes for myself? And I think from my perspective, I started with saying, what is the future that I want to help create as a leader? One of the lessons that I have learned as a leader is not to focus on the past and where you're coming from, but really focus on the future and work backwards. I had to make that choice, David, because I could be sitting there and I could be thinking about what shoes am I filling? How am I going to get this role, you know, to be where it needs to be? And do I have the capability, the credibility to be able to lead this company? But that's not where I started. I made a choice. I made a choice. And I thought about 2030 and where HubSpot can be as a company and what would be my role in getting the organization to where it needed to be in the next decade and what would a great leader do and how could I be the part of that journey? So I started in the future and then the answer became clear. I wanted to be the best CEO that the company and the employees and the customers deserved. Not where I was coming from, but where it needed to be in the future. And so working backwards from the future really helped create a vision for where I can go with this company. Did you ever have to dismantle something that everybody thought was really good before that, you know, could have been perceived to be roughly in a feather? And if so, how'd you do it? That's a fantastic question. I think we've made a lot of changes over the last couple of years, but nothing dramatic. And I always say that a CEO's role is much easier when it's a turnaround role because you can come in and you know you're at the bottom and then you start slashing, burning, making changes. HubSpot is not that. We are going from good to great, which means you really need to be curious. You need to be open. You need to deeply, keenly listen to know what changes are necessary in order to scale the company versus making changes quickly for the sake of you being a leader there. So part of my process was going on a 90-day listening tour. I listened to our employees all across the board. I listened to investors. I listened to our board members. And then I created a plan and part of that evolved naturally. The changes that we needed to do was investments in certain areas within the organization to bring a leadership team together much more closely and be very clear that we're building a company for the future. So more of those changes versus a drastic, dramatic change that we needed to make day one. Have you ever wondered what David is thinking as he interviews our guests each week? Or have you been interested in hearing David's take on some of the questions that he asks his guests? Well, I do and I know a lot of you do too. My name is Koolah Callahan and together with David, I host the three more questions podcasts that airs every Monday. These episodes are just about 15 minutes and in them, I asked David three questions that dive deeper into the themes of his episode with his guests. David shares incredible insights and stories from his career leading young brands and all of his answers are super practical and inspiring. Like this great insight, David shared in one of our most recent three more questions episodes. There are going to be many times when you don't necessarily agree with your boss. And I think the first thing you need to do is let your boss know that you understand where they're coming from, that you've heard them and you know what they want to do. Then what I think you need to do is to provide your perspectives and your point of view as respectful ways you can. And I think that's a way how you can really have a good discussion on what the actual best next step ought to be. Get the three more questions podcasts and your feed each Monday and dive even deeper into the episodes you know and love. Just subscribe to How Leaders Lead wherever you get your podcasts. I want to get back into how you're leading HubSpot. But first, I want to take you back. Tell us a story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today. I love this. So I grew up in India. When I grew up in a super small town, my mom was a homemaker and my dad was a mechanical engineer who had a small business. The town did not have a high school that went up to 12th grade in the English medium. It had it in the local language but not in English medium. So part of the conversations at dinner tables was what am I going to do? Where am I going to finish high school? And it was interesting one of those days my mom gave me an article about a woman who was attempting to climb Mount Everest. And I said, "Well, I want to do that." And we were literally having this conversation of how could I complete my high school degree. And at the same time I was like, "I want to climb the Mount Everest." My mom was like, "Yeah, you can do it." And then the next week I'd come and say, "I want to become a lawyer." And she'd be like, "Yeah, you can do it." And literally I had so many different ideas of what I wanted to do living in this super small town that didn't even have a high school and my parents encouraged me. Every step of the way they believed in me as a human being, not as a woman growing up in the 80s in rural India but as a person with potential. And to me that just a power of someone believing in my ability when I didn't have any at that time certainly didn't have rock climbing or mountain climbing abilities but someone believed in me. And I think that has propelled me over so many ups, downs, failures, successes. I just believe in myself. I just have a level of perseverance and the ability to dust it off and start back again. And probably those dinner table conversations had a lot to do with the grit that I now have. As I understand it, your parents might have liked you to go on be a doctor but you went on to be an engineer and you've been, I described, I don't know if you really like hearing this so much but you've been described as someone who can be a bit defiant. Tell me a story of how that trait has shown up in the way how you lead. Oh absolutely. You have to be defiant and you're absolutely right. My parents, you know, said that I could do anything but really secretly wished I became a doctor just like my elder sister. And I chose not even go to the, take the exam. That was how defiant I was. I was like, well, I'm not going to take the exam which means I'll never have any probability of becoming a doctor. That's how defiant I was and you got to be, you know, somewhat defiant that way . When later on I'll tell you a couple of different places that had happened. I graduated from business school at Berkeley and the first job that I got was accidental in the sales organization. When I joined the sales organization, I'd been an engineer for a few years then went into business school and got into sales and people looked at me and they looked at how I was approaching sales and said, wow, she's just not going to make it. Maybe a first year at the end of the year, we're going to give her a performance plan. She's probably going to leave because I approached, you know, sales like an engineer. And then I looked at people around me, they approached sales like the art of sales. And I was like, no, I'm going to do the science of sales. And part of the defiance came from knowing that I was strong analytically and I was strong in getting customers to talk to me about their business. I was curious and I was a learner. And all of that came from my engineering background. And so I said, I'm going to lean in on that. I don't play golf. I certainly don't know how to banter about, you know, Sunday night football. But I know how to analyze a 10k and I was really defiant. And at the end of the first year, I crushed, you know, my goals for the year and gained a level of confidence in how I can present myself in front of customers. And yeah, almost every time someone says, you can't do it, I say, well, I will. And you grew rapidly and then you've moved into leadership roles. And you started out first by being this rock star salesperson, you know, that was crushing your numbers. And then all of a sudden now you get thrust in, I think it's about eight years later, you know, into this role of being a leader. How did you evolve and handle that transition? Because people have to move from individual contributor to leader. It was really rough. And by the way, I don't think my role in value sales was like that easy. I had to prove every step of the way. But when I first got into management, I did what every individual contributor that moves into a manager role does, which is like my way or the highway. It is, I know exactly how I know how to do this. I've done it for so many years. So here is a playbook and giving answers. One of the first lessons that I learned in those early days is that people don 't want answers. They want questions. People want to get to answers themselves. And one of the first skills that I had to learn as a manager was asking better questions, more thoughtful questions that would lead someone to get to their answers themselves. And that really meant that I had to go from being someone with a sprinter mindset, go fast to being a cross-country coach, coaching them to last, to pace, to get to where they needed to, and to feel a sense of success themselves. I still recall one of the first performance reviews that I got as a manager was brutal. I was thinking, I've done this role. I know how to do this role. Here's this amazing playbook. So all I have to do is give this playbook to others and they're all going to be successful. And it absolutely did not work. And I had to completely reinvent and have a playbook for asking more questions and rolling people, helping them see their potential and ultimately slowing down in order for the team to go far. Those huge, huge lessons there. You say that something that you've learned throughout your career is to be a T zone executive. I've never heard that one before. Explain what you mean by that. Oh, yeah. This is one of my favorite lessons. So T zone, and the way I think about it is that you have functional leadership. So you can be an engineering leader, a sales leader, and you know your function really well. That is the I, you know, or the vertical. The T zone is your ability to connect across multiple functions. That is what gets you to break through from being a director level, VP level position into the C suite and beyond. And I learned this the really hard way. One of the first things that I did as I was working with sales and marketing was try to bring sales and marketing together. And if you worked in high tech, you know, organizations, sales and marketing are notorious for pointing fingers at each other. You're not good enough. You're just not good enough. You didn't give me the right leads. No, you didn't follow this through how many sales and marketing organizations sit in the same place. So one of my jobs was to bring sales and marketing together as a strategy leader. And the way I did it is connected the dots across both of these teams. And I said, what is your focus? What do you care really? You all care about winning customers, acquiring customers and making them successful. So let's start with what is common and let's connect the dots across all of this. And turns out it was exceptionally important that dot connecting across functions and the relationships across marketing and sales at the time that I was working in the organization improved quite a bit. And to the point where people started trusting me, then I took it to product and engineering and I said, this is what we're trying to do in the go-to-market side. And here's what you can do to help us. And here's what we can do to help you. And so as I grew in my career, I stopped being a functional leader and started being much more of a T zone leader connecting the dots. That's when I started seeing breakthroughs in terms of my career and progress. Have you really thought about what makes you tick as a leader? What would you describe as your guiding principles of leadership and how did you come up with them? Be authentic, operate with high integrity and be customer obsessed. I would say those are probably foundational for me. And I'll say on authenticity, I joined tech when there were not that many women and there were certainly not that many Asian women in the go-to-market parts of the organization. And for a number of years as I was growing up in tech, I tried to be someone else. I tried to be the person who played amazing golf, but I really was terrible at golf. I tried to be the person that had this amazing banter in the first five minutes of a conversation. I was an introvert. I didn't quite do that well and I started embracing who I was. I'm a first principles thinker. I'm problem solver. I really focus on customers and I want the company to win. And when I started being just authentic and embracing what I was good at, just calling it as it is, I started seeing more people resonate with my style and resonate with my leadership. So authenticity has been just so important in terms of my journey of finding my own voice. When you grow up in India, most of the time, Indian women are asked to kind of keep their opinions to themselves. And part of being authentic and figuring out who I am is to be able to voice out my opinions in the most authentic manner, in the most high integrity manner. And I've had to find that voice as I've grown as a leader. And then the customer obsession, that just comes from being in the sales organization, talking to customers and solving for customers and seeing how if you truly wanted to be successful, it had to come to making your customers champions and making them win in their career. So I'd say those three are probably my North stars as a leader. You know, a lot of leaders are told, don't let your people ever see you sweat. You know, what's your take on that? You know, I've heard that advice many times in terms of my early career. I said, how do I be a leader? Well, do not show any vulnerability. Be strong. Never show your weakness and keep working hard. And I think it's complete BS. I don't think that advice is good at all. And in fact, we have to not just embrace our authenticity, but also be vulnerable. We got to tell our people, here's where I'm learning. Here's what I don't know. Here's where I need your help. Here's where I failed in the past. And the more you do that, the more you open up for others going through that big journey themselves. And for me, one of the biggest things that I've enjoyed is learning and growing as a human being. I'm a professional learning, growing and being curious. And curiosity can only come from a place of comfort with saying, I don't know this. I don't know. And I don't have the answer and being deeply vulnerable about what you don't know. And so I've learned and I've grown as a person, as a professional, as a leader because of the vulnerable moments that I've had in front of my team. And I think you would agree with that, David, right? Absolutely. I think people want you to share what you're wrestling with. My leadership programs, the things that people always enjoyed here in the most were the times I failed and the times where I really messed up. People know why you're successful. They don't know all the struggles that you've had getting there along the way. And I was a pretty much an open book like you, I would say. You spent time at SAP, then at Workday, and then Dropbox for you, were the chief customer officer, and then three really good companies before you joined HubSpot. And you know, really found this phenomenal opportunity that you're enjoying driving the bus on. How did you know it was time to move on and join another team? Oh, that's a great question, David. I don't think I had a plan. And I don't think that there is one clear way to look at when do you need to transition. And in fact, if you'd asked me early in my career, I just wanted to join a company, stay there forever and get through the ranks. And I think I have focused a lot more on learning and growing and not on the company that I work for or the role or the title that I have. And that has governed how I have transitioned. So let me give you an example. I did start my career in enterprise companies, SAP Workday being enterprise companies. And after about a decade in those companies, I felt like I knew the playbook for large customers' sales really well. And really wanted to figure out, you know, can I do this in a small, medium business? Is the playbook the same? Turns out the playbook is completely different. And when Dropbox actually approached me, it was all about product-led growth, which was a new thing that was happening in industry. And it was all about small, medium businesses. And I knew nothing about either of those. And that's when I'm like, oh, this is phenomenal. If I know nothing, that's the place for me to be. Because that's where I will get growth and I will learn and I will be able to, you know, just get better as a professional with my competency. And so what I have actually held as my North Star is do things that help you get breakthrough growth in your career. Don't follow anything else, but just follow the biggest opportunity for learning and growing. And that's probably the advice I would say. You know when the time is right when you're not growing as much. And you know some other places right when you feel like you don't know anything and you're going to have to reinvent yourself to be successful there. You've mentioned how obsessed you are with customers and you definitely are. And you've carried this love for your customer and into your role as CEO. Tell us about SFTC. I love it. SFTC is our North Star at HubSpot and it stands for solve for the customer. And it's not just a poster. It's not just what we talk about on day one of onboarding. This is how we run our company, guide decisions, empower every single employee within the company to make decisions for the customer. And I'll give you an example. I mentioned this early that when COVID hit in March 2020, we were looking at a really, really bad scenario of small, medium businesses going out of business and churn ing. And the best way we wanted to respond is by solving for the customer. I mean you think about solving for the customer at the beginning stages of the pandemic. The thing that stood really true for us is they're running out of cash. They will not be able to pay their employees. And so we got to give them breaks. And so that was the first principle. So we then designed every other pricing and policies associated with that. And we said, well, we're going to give our solutions at a deep, deep discount. We're going to give them relief so that they can survive for six months, nine months, a year till it takes for them to find their feet again. That was a policy that was purely from the first principle of solve for the customer. And when, you know, I still remember the board meeting where we went and presented this whole series of decisions that we had made and the board asked this question of, how are you going to recover all of this? And we said, we don't know. We're doing the right thing for the customer. We don't know. But it'll be, it'll be okay. There was just moment of silence and then complete support for that. And that is what solving for the customer looks like in terms of making decisions. And it's really, I am just proud to be in an organization that takes solving for the customer so seriously. I'm so grateful to be at HubSpot for that very specific reason. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Yomini in just a moment. You know, as we're talking about the power of Focus today, I'm reminded of the great conversation I had with Jim Weber, CEO of Brooks Running. They built a billion dollar business. That's a billion dollars with a B based on one brave decision to focus on a single type of customer, the focused runner. You walk into any given category today and there's usually a market leader. I think if you're not the lead brand, the platform in the category, you're a niche brand, which is I think the biggest choice every brand makes is who their customer focus is. You know, I'd rather win at something and dominate it, be known for it, get credit for it, try to create a successful profitable business behind it, than be eight things to lots of different people and be an also random category. One of our biggest strengths we think is our focus. It's a perfect case study in the power of Focus and you can hear the whole story in episode one oh six here on how leaders lead. I heard that you have customers that many of the meetings that you hold, even your board meetings. What's one of your more memorable experience with a customer at one of those meetings where you really uncovered something? So many. I would say that our board meetings start with customer panels, our company monthly meetings start with customer panels. The first email of the week is customer sentiment scoring. So it is in built into our customers. The most memorable stories are when people, our champions are successful. We just had our annual customer conference about two weeks ago in early in September. And I got to meet a few customers and their stories were not about how many dollars they were able to save or how many leads they were able to generate. They told me stories of how they made a bet on HubSpot and because of that they got promoted. Because of that they bought their first home because of that they have been able to really protect and drive through this macro environment. Those are the stories that make a difference and that really brings us to what 's our mission. We all love having purpose in our jobs and our purpose as an organization is to help these companies grow, help small, medium businesses grow. So every single customer conversation where we are helping someone grow both in their career or the company itself is deeply fulfilling. You're a big believer in culture. I know this and I learned that you treat your culture as another product. You know, I've never heard of anybody really talk about it that way. You know, what you're thinking? Absolutely. I love that you are asking this question because we take it seriously. Our first product is of course, you know, the product that we create and that is for our customers and the product's mission is helping millions grow. The second product that we have is our culture and that is for our employees and that mission there is to help HubSpotters grow. So we think about, you know, two products. Let me tell you how we take it even further. The question that we have to ask ourselves is as much as we are evolving our primary product, can we evolve our culture and how do we make sure that we are evolving the culture? We have something called the culture code, which is online. You can go and look for HubSpot's culture code. It has been downloaded something like 6 million times and it has evolved. It's now, I think, version 100 plus because we are constantly updating how we think about the culture and the concepts make a ton of sense. What do you do in terms of your product? You say, what are the best features of your product? And you figure out like what are the features that customers love the most. Same thing with the culture. What are the features of your culture that your employees love the most? And keep doing that. Then you ask yourself, what are the most requested features of your product? And go build those things in. And it's the same thing with employees and culture. You just ask, what are the most requested features of the culture? And if you pay attention to it, it becomes really obvious how you need to evolve the culture. In the last couple of years, the most requested feature, David, has been flexibility. That's why we leaned into hybrid. Our employees can go into work, they can stay at home, or they can go into the office like a couple of days a week. We found that flexibility is one of the most requested features in the world that we live in, and that's now evolved into part of the culture. And we want to be not just a great company that people want to work at, we want to be a great hybrid company that people want to work at. That's how we think about evolving culture like a product. That's great stuff. And you know, as I understand it, you actually have a program where you allow employees to work remotely in different countries for up to 90 days. That's right. Internal mobility problem. What was the genesis of that? What was your thinking behind that? Exactly this, which is flexibility. The ability to be in a place, a country, maybe visiting family, visiting friends, being with a loved one that deserves care, needs care, that is where we started. And again, as you evolve your culture, and if you're paying close attention to what your employees are requesting on a quarterly basis or a half yearly basis, you know what is needed in order for us to support them in their jobs, but also as a person, as an individual that is working as part of HubSpot. And a lot of our programs, whether it is flexibility in terms of where you work , flexibility in terms of how you get your work done, that all comes from keenly listening to our employees as much as we listen to our customers. Something else I know that you're driving in your culture is focus. How are you doing that? It's a great question. So we talked about SFTC, which is solved for the customer. We have another leadership guiding principle, which is fortune favors the focus . You know, if you look at the history and you look at a lot of companies that have been maybe at our scale and have grown, they don't do it by diversifying and peanut butter spreading all of their resources. They get from good to great by being focused on a handful that you can truly win. So one of the things that we have done is to get the leadership team together and say, what are the guiding principles that we can really focus on to help this company scale? And they came up with fortune favors the focus. And so in the last couple of years, we've said, what are the omissions? As much as we pay attention to the things that we will execute, we're paying attention to the things that we say no to. You have to be able to say no to good ideas in order for you to be able to execute great ideas. And that comes with this principle of fortune favors the focus. As a CEO, how you spend your time is so critical. Do you have anything that you do to really get you focused on the right things? Absolutely, David. Here's a thought. I've always thought of my calendar as the most strategic tool. And a lot of people have different ideas about this. I think my time and my calendar is the most strategic tool. And I really prioritize what gets on that calendar. And I measure it. I'm pretty specific about it. If you look at my calendar, it is color coded. It has got every possible heuristic built in so I can measure where I spend time. And it's very clear I need to spend time with our leadership team so that they work as a team and they're making all the decisions in the right way. I need to spend time with our employees. So I do round tables with frontline employees twice a month and connect with across levels within the organization. I need to spend time with partners, with customers. And that is prioritizing the calendar. And I need to spend time on things that others cannot do, which is if someone else in my team can do it, they should do it. If some others in the team cannot do it and it requires my time and energy, then I want to spend time only on those. And I spend a lot of time on deep work and learning. So a good 30% of my time on the calendar is actually for deep thinking and reading. And I preserve that as much as I preserve the time for meetings. And so I think of like my time is really important and it needs to be part of a strategic way in which I prioritize on the right set of conversations every single week. You know, this has been so much fun and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Let's go. What's one word others would use to best describe you? Authentic. What would you say is the one word that best describes you? High integrity. Who would play you in a movie? Salma Hayek. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? President Barack Obama. What's your biggest pet peeve? Not being on time. I know you're a big reader. What's a book every leader should read? Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. What's the biggest lesson you've gleaned from your regular yoga practice? Play grounded and stay humble. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? NPR. What's something about you few people would know? I love to grow vegetables and I like to cook a lot. All right, we're out of the lightning round. Well done. That was great. Just a few more questions for you. I've read articles where you've called yourself an AI geek. Yes. Why is that? I started my career as a computer engineer and back then, neural networks were a thing in computer engineering. I spent a lot of time as a computer engineer thinking about neural networks. In fact, I did research back then on neural networks and it felt like it was too early for it to be meaningful. Now fast forward 20 years, neural networks and transformer networks is what has cost the whole generative AI wave to come into existence right now. I'm fascinated by this concept of thinking about brain and thinking about how computers can become that in the future. I spent a lot of time besides listening to NPR, listening to YouTube videos on deep learning, on neural networks, on transformer models. It's just absolutely fascinating how quickly things have moved in the last couple of years but how long it took for it to get here. So I am totally into AI and the whole transformation that's happening right now . Speaking of AI, tell me about chat spot and the biggest challenge you face is the leader getting that off the ground. Chat spot is absolutely fascinating. We basically took the power of HubSpot and connected it with large language model which is chat GPT and we have provided a new interface. Now think about this. I've been now in application software for more than a couple of decades and the biggest difficulty in application software is the ability for someone to get just easy answers to questions. If you're so good, you should be able to get the answers from the software but you cannot. So chat spot for the first time provides a natural language interface into Hub Spot. You can ask questions. What happened last week in terms of our pipeline? How does that compare to the previous month in terms of the pipeline? Can you just schedule this report and send it to me every Monday? That's the conversation that you can have with chat spot and it's a game chang er in terms of application software, the level of engagement it can drive and just the ease of using natural language to get more out of technology. So I'm huge on this. I would give full credit to Dharmesh who is our other co-founder. He came up with chat spot over nights and weekends. He saw how generative AI was taking off the ground. He saw the power and potential of having an interface that can just make it easy for our customers and he created it and then we had to get everybody behind it as a company and it's really taken off. It's been about six months and we're pretty excited about where it's going in the future. Speaking of engagement, tell us about inbound and how that's grown. Absolutely. So for those who don't know inbound is HubSpot's customer conference and we got started with this many, many years ago and the premise for starting something like this was very simple. We want to educate and we want to help other customers, prospects, industry people grow before they even become our customers. So the philosophy was much more about education and inspiration and thought leadership within this conference and we have done that across the company. We have a whole university inside HubSpot. It's a little known but we call it the HubSpot Academy where we teach market-he arer sales people, service people, how to become great at their jobs. Inbound is the conference where they all come. They exchange ideas, they are part of this community and they learn from each other and we get so much fulfillment by looking at the community grow and it's grown. We had this time over 12,000 attendees in Boston attending this conference and we had more than 100,000 participate online virtually through all of the breakout sessions as well as the spotlight sessions. It's just become a thriving community to exchange great ideas about a front office. So love that. You know, you're obviously in love with what you do and you're thinking about this business 24/7 all the time. How do you handle all the pressure of being a CEO and bring the balance that you obviously have? I can tell you have balance. I mean, there's no question about it. I know your mother and you have a family and you know, how does it all come together with you? You just have to set an intention to stay exceptionally grounded and balanced. And I actually like the word presence more than balance, David. Here's why. Like, you know, I have two boys. They are teens. They're 16 and 14. And in many years, it just felt like a constant struggle to balance my role as a mom, balance my role at HubSpot, balance my role as a friend, as a daughter. And it feels like a tightrope walking where I'm like going to fall every single moment. And so I really adopted this whole idea of life presence, being exceptionally present in where you are. And I'll tell you a quick story. I took my son on a field trip at his school when he was about fourth grade and it was also end of quarter. So I spent most of the time in the field trip holding my ears and being on the phone the entire time. And I was proud of myself. I said, I've balanced everything. You know, it's the end of the quarter, but I'm still there for my son. And I came back that evening and I asked him, that was great, right? You know, I was there with you. And he said, Mom, you were not there. You were there physically, but you were on the phone the entire time. And it was this moment, that moment where I said, it's not about balance. It's about presence. I was absolutely not present. And the fourth grader that he was pointed out very clearly that I was not present. So now I think about being present in every conversation, whether it is this conversation or the time I spend every night with my two sons. It's only 30 minutes maybe with them individually, but I'm there. I have no other electronics. I'm not a CEO. I'm just a mom listening to a teen complain about what teens complain about. And that has helped me in a stay in the moment. It's interesting because one of the concepts we really tried to drive deep in the young brands was be here now. Yes. You know, and I think that's exactly what you're talking about. One last question here for you and I'll let you let you go be present with whatever the next thing is on your agenda. What's the single best advice you can give to aspiring leaders? I would say be authentic and stand out. That would be the single best advice that I would give, especially maybe other women who are looking to break through other underrepresented minorities, embrace your strength and just stand out. Don't be afraid of standing out. And when you do that consistently, people will really appreciate you for who you are. Well, Yamini, I really enjoyed this conversation and really congratulate you on how you're thinking through your business, centering it around the customer and your people and, you know, generating all kinds of innovation. So congratulations. Well done. It's such a pleasure. I listened to your podcast. I've learned so much from you and I look forward to meeting you in person one day, but thank you so much for having me join you and thank you for what you do for leaders in the world. Well, Yamini has to be one of the most dynamic leaders around. I'm so energized just by talking to her. I love her enthusiasm, her bravery and how she's just as comfortable leaning into her strengths as she is opening up about her vulnerabilities. But you know what I really want to focus on is her sense of focus. As Yamini points out, getting focused on what really matters means letting go of what doesn't. So this week, here's what I want you to do. Take a look at what's on your plate and ask yourself, what really, really matters? What can we put more process and discipline around that will really drive the needle and then drop the things that really don't matter that much? I guarantee you, if you go through that discipline, you'll be working on the things that will have the biggest impact on your business. And that's really what you want. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders know that fortune favors the focus. Coming up next on How leaders lead is Jim Levine, a world-renowned literary agent that's had something to do with many, many of the books you've read, including a couple of mine. We have a set of guiding principles and we say our mission, our goal is to ignite talent. That's what it's all about for us. You know, that's not just for our clients. It's really for everybody who shows up at work. It's like every day, everybody shows up with a sense that working together, each person's going to become better at it, you know, just by being together. I am so much better in doing what I do when I have a team of people that I'm working with. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]