Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot (currently valued at $30 billion) and one of the most fascinating founders I’ve ever met. Dharmesh is the keeper of HubSpot’s Culture Code, built ChatSpot (an AI chatbot built on top of HubSpot CRM) and a game called WordPlay (which grew to 16 million users), and also founded and writes for OnStartups, a top-ranking startup blog and community with more than 1M members. He’s also invested in 100+ startups including OpenAI, AngelList, Coinbase, and Dropbox.
Career (separate track) Skills
Public speaking can be mastered by decomposing it into measurable sub-skills and using objective data, like laughs per minute, to optimize for audience attention.
"I have custom software that I've written that will say, 'Okay, here are the points at which the audience laughed.' Actually audibly laughed. That's the only way it counts. And this actually... and it..."
Strategy & Positioning Skills
Success often comes from challenging conventional wisdom and making high-conviction bets that diverge from consensus advice regarding product scope.
"Some of the best startup advice I've heard is startups should focus on one thing and be really, really exceptionally world-class at that one thing. And one of our early zigs is we are going to do exac..."