dshah

Congrats on the launch. Sign-up was super smooth and the product is compelling.

Will be testing it with some of the agent work I'm doing on agent.ai.

If you're ever looking for a super low-maintenance indie investor, please reach out. Have lots of YC folks that will vouch for me.

One of my favorite books on the actual practice of programming.

The other one is "Code Complete".

That's fair feedback. We're working on making the UX better -- especially around the Agent Builder.

Lots of work to do, and we're still a tiny team (but growing).

Thanks for noticing my post, building agents.json and open sourcing it.

This is why the Internet is awesome.

Very much clicked for me.

Loved this line:

"I’ll discuss a few boring things we do that help us keep things boring."

Looking forward to the HubSpot + MySQL integration.

Disclosure: I'm one of the HubSpot founders.

Thanks for including a search provider for HubSpot and best wishes with the launch.

Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of HubSpot so a bit biased. :)

I'm from HubSpot (I'm one of the founders).

This was our second year doing the "Week of Rest". It was an experiment we ran last year.

It ended up being a good idea and works well.

This is a really useful thread with posts from people actually using LLMs.

I wonder if Claude-100k could be used to ingest this entire thread and then answer questions based on it, or summarize or identify the pros/cons of certain aspects of Claude, large context windows, vector embeddings, etc.

This is how I've been thinking about it.

Hybrid interfaces that combine visual cues and output and natural language input.

I'm Co-founder/CTO of HubSpot.

There are many things I admire about Salesforce.

But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon.

They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs.

There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce for large enterprises (the Fortune 1000) and HubSpot for SMBs.

Thanks for the kind words. I don't consider myself a "brilliant" engineer. More of an experienced engineer. I've been building software products for 30+ years.

I think the role of the CTO varies based on the scale of the company.

This article on the types of CTOs is useful framing: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c...

Great to hear from you Zack. Thanks for chiming in and sharing your positive experience. Hope all is well.

Can confirm. :) I've been glued to this discussion thread all morning.

Resisting the temptation to respond to many of the messages, because I don't want to come off as defensive.

Thanks for chiming in. Have many good memories of your time at HubSpot.

First and foremost, it's for the ~4,000 people that work at HubSpot and who actually create the culture and live it day-to-day.

Second, it's for those that want to better understand HubSpot and how we work. It may be because they're considering joining the company. Or becoming a customer. Or becoming a partner.

Third, it's for the community of entrepreneurs that are building businesses. My hope is that it can be a useful example of how one company (that has done reasonably well) thought about culture -- and articulated it.

Candidly, this year, because of the pandemic, we've come closer together as a group. Not quite a family -- but closer. Also, I needed to make room in the deck to articulate our position on diversity and inclusion.

I agree with you on that front.

In earlier versions of the deck, we actually explicitly called out that we are NOT a family. We are a team with a common goal. You don't get to choose your family, but you do get to choose your team.

h/t to Netflix for that original "team not a family".

Thanks for the warning. I hear you.

My direct experience is that there will be some that will be cynical -- that's OK.

A big lesson for me personally is that working on culture as a "product" is very useful. Collect customer feedback. Identify bugs. Categorize some things as "works as designed". Be transparent with your customers. And, of course, iterate, iterate, iterate.

The product I'm most proud of having worked on. Hundreds of hours invested for over a decade.

Yes, it's a slide deck -- but think of it as a template.

Shared with the community with love.

Disclosure: I am one of the HubSpot founders.

Sorry for the poor experience you've had with the HubSpot CRM. We are working hard to make things better -- especially the APIs and how we present information in the Contact view.

Thanks for the candid feedback.

At scale, recruiting is often about marketing. It's about conveying a compelling story that pulls people in.

Congrats to the api.ai team.

I love when great companies do well.

I'm a happy customer (and wish I were also an investor, but I'm not).

I'm using wit.ai as well, and overall it's working well for me.

But, the new story-based functionality is something I still haven't been able to get comfortable with -- and it still feels very early. So, that part I'm still implementing myself.

And yes, I too wish they they would allow you to download your logs/model. Bugs me that they don't do that (and one of the reasons I'm also looking at api.ai).

Interestingly, my usage dates back to around the same time (Sep, 2010) and the list of features that I use/need is identical. Just a daily email reminder with a previous post from the past year/month.

If the founder(s) of OhLife are reading this thread, I'd like to make an offer: I'll pay to host the infrastructure/servers (up to $1,000/month) as a contribution to the community. My guess is, a lot of people are using this app and would like to keep it around.

Ping me @dharmesh on twitter if you're interested.

I agree that company culture's are organic (changing) and highly dependent on the people that make it.

Having said that, the people that are there are determined by the culture. If the culture of a company is well known, articulated and understood, there's a self-selection process that happens. A given culture attracts certain kinds of people -- so it becomes self-reenforcing.

I also disagree with the notion that a culture cannot permeate across groups. There is certainly a sub-culture that can (and does) exist within groups (this exists everywhere people of like mind or activity aggregate), but that doesn't mean there can't be an overarching culture that is shared organization wide.

I've given a lot of thought and calories to this topic. My company (HubSpot) has grown from 2 people to 800 people and like Brian (OP from AirBnB), we think about this culture thing a lot.

Just because you hit the "awkward teen" size doesn't mean you are predetermined to fail at trying to have a functional , shared culture.

I would humbly submit http://inbound.org. It's a Hacker News for inbound marketing (including SEO, blogging, conversion rate optimization etc.)

Great community of folks and some of the best content on SEO out there.

The community was founded by @randfish (of Moz fame) and myself (@dharmesh of HubSpot)

Wow. I had no idea. Though I'm not the author of the article, I came with the title. I didn't even know there was such a thing as an "800 pound gorilla".

Thanks for pointing this out. Learn something new every day.

This is unfortunate. Trying to figure out what it would take to keep the site alive, because I do think it serves a useful purpose and the costs of keeping it alive are likely minimal.

Disagree with this.

In today's world (particularly in consumer Internet), investors often judge the "quality" of a team based on the aesthetics of the pitch-deck -- and website. All things being equal, the deck with the better design sense wins.

Longer decks still work -- even today.

Possible reason: Often, decks are shared before a meeting is taken, so the really good ones are designed to be read (not just presented).