Introduction
Anton Osika: Point five percent of the world can even code, and much fewer can build a great product like Mati and his co-founder, right? So I decided let’s build something for the 99 percent and not this productivity boost for developers. And that’s going to be a completely new type of interface.
Mati Staniszewski: So here we don’t give any timelines. We do the research initiatives we want to plan. You need to stay nimble that, like, the moment it comes out, you have 24 hours to start integrating that into your product. That’s like the most important time to really be ahead.
Brian Halligan: Okay. This is a real treat. I interviewed two friends of mine, Mati from Elevenlabs and Anton from Lovable. Two terrific CEOs and companies that are absolutely ripping. And they’re both doing it from ye olde Europe. So we’re gonna get into it on the Europe thing. But there’s some topics that are just terrific. These two are kind of blossoming before our eyes. They’re right in the heart of hypergrowth. And we get to see, like, how they think about co-founders, how they’re thinking about delegation and letting go, how they’re thinking about building their exec teams, managing all the chaos coming in at them. When you’re in hypergrowth there’s just a lot of chaos. And really just pushing to keep the speed up. It’s a really good episode. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll be back at the end with my takes.
Main Conversation
Brian Halligan: Okay. You two are in your early 30s, similar ages. You’ve got some very good experience under your belt. A lot of founders I’m meeting and a lot of founders are getting funded, are right in school, right out of school, 21, 22. What would your companies be like if you had started them when you were 21 or 22? I’ll let you go.
Mati Staniszewski: Well, I think it would have been hard. I think I still would have the pleasure of working with my co-founder—I’ve known him since high school, so we always were best friends. We did everything together.
Brian Halligan: By the way, this is Mati from Elevenlabs.
Mati Staniszewski: Exactly. So I’m working across voice AI research and product deployment. We are on a mission to create a voice of technology. So I think I still would have started that with my co-founder, which would have been the advantage. The disadvantage is I don’t know how I would approach the first customers. How the world—like, at the time, I didn’t even know the world of entrepreneurship existed.
So I studied mathematics. When you study mathematics, the clear career paths you take is either finance or consulting. I chose finance. I Joined BlackRock, and then only after BlackRock I learned about Palantir and decided to join them where it turned out you can actually be deployed with the customer, learn about the problems, try to understand those problems and bring them back and build the product. Which was like the first glimpse into how to build something from scratch. But before that, that was still something further out of I didn’t know how to approach. So I don’t think I would be able to understand the first early dynamics of starting something in the same way.
Brian Halligan: Okay, you’re several hundred million in revenue. If you had started right out of school with your buddy, where would you be? Nowhere?
Mati Staniszewski: You know the other thing I think we would have probably worked on a very different idea. I think it took—of course the pleasure of having the co-founder I know inside out, then over the years got experience of working at other companies, which helped us understand some of the dynamics, so Google, Palantir, so we understand how to build things at scale.
But then the third thing, which I think was the most important, was the idea. And of course, through the years we looked into different projects from trying to build a crypto risk analyzer during the crypto days, which was really hard, to a recommendation system. But then when we stumbled on voice we knew that A) this is a good timing where the technology is going for the shift. We can be part of that shift of that technology. And then two, this is a huge problem that the users of the world have, and we can solve it. And if I started something at 21, 22, I just don’t think we would work on the same idea, and probably wouldn’t understand the pain the same way we do now that we approached voice.
Brian Halligan: Got it. Anton, Lovable also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like?
Anton Osika: I also think it might have not been as ambitious because I had never done something entrepreneurial. And the biggest disadvantage being that young would have been that I wouldn’t know, like, why to hire very senior engineers and what type of great senior engineers are out there, because, like, they will be very scared of working for me. But I think I would have a lot of other advantages maybe being more naïve, and already then I think I surrounded myself by super, super smart people. So I think I could have built something very different with a faster iteration pace. It could have been successful.
Brian Halligan: And I got a little bit of what you took from Palantir. You had some very interesting experiences before Lovable. Can you talk a little bit about them, and what kind of you took from those that you’re leveraging at Lovable?
Anton Osika: Yeah, sure. So if you go way back, I also studied, like, sciences and physics, specifically. I did this long internship at CERN where I …
Brian Halligan: CERN.
Anton Osika: At CERN, particle physics, and where they discovered a lot of the recent physics. But there’s a lot of smart people there. And I was like, “Wait, they’re all working on these impossible problems without any elasticity. So I’m not going to be here. I’m going to go applying great innovation to the real world.” And then I was kind of inspired to start a company when I was in university, which I’m very happy about. But I ended up doing some finance, actually. Unfortunately, which was a bit too boring for me.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: But fortunately, I started this community, Stockholm AI. And this was around when deep learning was, like, taking off in 2015-16. And I did the foundation models, almost training small language models before it was cool. And met great people there. And one was the founder at Sonat. So Joel, who recently sold Sonat to Workstate for a billion dollars.
Brian Halligan: Yes. Congratulations.
Anton Osika: Yes. Great job by the team there. I mean, my contribution was bringing in some of those smart people that went on to grow it to what it became. And I was there for three years, and it was like, “Oh, AI, let’s build—” we all were super young, but we learned super fast and it became successful. Then I joined as a co-founder at a company that just got into YC, and that was in recommendation systems specifically for e-commerce.
That could have been absolutely wildly successful, that company. It had a lot of things going for it. But after a bit of momentum loss, and my co-founder and me being—I wanted the people to do something more successful, that I can say, than e-commerce.
But I decided to do the most possible ambitious thing. And all my life I’ve been approached by people who wanted to find a great engineer to help them realize their dreams or their ideas, and that the world is full of them. Like point five percent of the world can even code, and much fewer can build a great product like Mati and his co-founder, right? So I decided let’s build something for the 99 percent and not this productivity boost for developers. And that’s going to be a completely new type of interface where you dream your idea of some technical AI product into existence.
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Anton Osika: And that’s what we set out to build.
Brian Halligan: Okay. So your first company, you were the founding engineer. Your next company, Depict, you were co-founder, CTO. Now you’re a CEO. Is it everything you ever hoped?
Anton Osika: That’s a good question. I think it’s quite different. What I love about it is that I get to know myself and how to surround myself with the right complementary skill sets, and be challenged in all the possible ways much more than being a co-founder and CTO. And I run the company on founder mode, I would mostly empathize with. But at this stage, I mean, there’s a big shift in me in focusing on empowering and unblocking the leaders in the company. And I mean, I like that. And it’s more analytical.
Brian Halligan: Is it what you thought? Is being a CEO what you thought? Like, what surprised you about it?
Anton Osika: You have to do so many things, or I mean, unless you’re very disciplined about what you delegate and how you delegate it. It’s like there’s so many, many different things thrown at you, especially as you start hyperscaling.
Brian Halligan: Yes. How about for you, you’re CEO, your first time CEO, what’s harder than you thought? What’s easier than you thought? What’s different than you thought?
Mati Staniszewski: Yeah, I think the first one is definitely you want to hire people better than yourself in all those areas that you know for the first time. In our case, things like legal or finance or building the go-to market motion and sales, like, all of these things which I’ve seen kind of results of that work, but never have actually done the work. So it was a very quick learning of like how do you do that so you actually understand it. And you need to understand at least a little bit to then be able to assess the person that you want to bring in. So that was kind of the two things that I now repetitively try to do. When we have a new area, I’m trying to first put myself in those shoes, understand the basics and then hire persons I know that they are doing that work.
Brian Halligan: And this is something you didn’t expect, or this is something that’s harder than you thought or easier than you thought?
Mati Staniszewski: A lot more areas that I didn’t expect will have existed all at the same time, which was kind of that additional piece. And the delegation, too, was something that I think I hold on for for too long. I like to do myself rather than delegate. And then actually how to delegate was an interesting piece in itself, where I think you do want to give a lot of the work to other leaders that you hired, other people that you grow, but you still want to understand the details that’s happening. And then, like, how do you let them own it, be the leaders they want to be, but still remain in the details in the funder mode to be able to jump in when needed. That balance of, like, how do you interact with that is a tricky thing that is still, I think, a continuous learning for me.
Brian Halligan: And I find that there’s kind of three types of CEOs. There’s people who are really in all the details, in everyone’s shorts all the time. There are CEOs that are pretty high level and, like, I have an expression, keep your feet in the ground, your head in the clouds, or you’re in the details and you’re up high. Some people who stay very high. And then there’s what I call spelunkers, people who kind of go down deep in one thing for a while, they come back out and go down into another thing. Have you got one of those models? Like, what are you? It sounds like you’re the first.
Mati Staniszewski: I do like the details. I think similar to how Anton mentioned that you operate is, like, you do on the founder model. You want to understand the product, you want to actually work with the product all the time so you know how to actually use the product better than most. I’m trying to stay extremely detailed in what is that we are shipping, how we are shipping it, how it works behind the scenes. So that’s probably the key thing. I like your analogy of head in the clouds, the feet on the ground. I think the thing that I’m trying, and I think where the magic happens if you do it well, is being able to zoom out and zoom in extremely quickly before those contexts so you’re able to understand the problem, zoom into the detail, you understand the detail and then the next second you need to go to another problem which requires the same activity.
Brian Halligan: There’s a lot of context switching being a CEO.
Mati Staniszewski: Exactly. And you kind of need to be immediate in that. My co-founder, who is the smartest person I know and is kind of leading the research work, in his case, he needs to go extremely deep for a very long time. So we frequently speak about this very different way of approaching the work where one is, like, all about context switching, the other one is all about going as deep as possible.
Brian Halligan: And how about what are you thinking on—how are you feeling about delegation? Is it natural, just delegate all this stuff, or is it like I want to be in the details? I had a very hard time delegating.
Anton Osika: I think it’s often the “Ah!” I’m very impatient generally, and there is some friction when there’s many things that feel very urgent, and I know one thing, but maybe not all the other ones.
Brian Halligan: Are you driving people crazy?
Anton Osika: No. Mostly no. Most of they like me. They feel where I’m coming from and, like, actually this is coming from a good place.
Brian Halligan: Okay, let’s talk about team. You just hired a friend of mine to run sales.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Brian Halligan: You’re building out your team. How are you thinking about building out your team, your senior team in particular. And then are you looking for people with high slope or high experience?
Anton Osika: Oh, that’s a good question. I think at this stage there’s many things we just need to be done very predictably, because of all the opportunities that are out there, and hiring people who have done it before and maybe wouldn’t be as effective early stage because they’re set in their ways. But that is very effective. It’s very effective.
Brian Halligan: Oh wait, so you lean towards experience not necessarily just …?
Anton Osika: For the things that have to get done. We know, like, what those things are. It is effective.
Brian Halligan: Like what?
Anton Osika: So for sales, everything that goes down to sales. Some functions of marketing that has, like, all of this …
Brian Halligan: Looking for experience there.
Anton Osika: I’m looking for experience at least to run them. And then if you have capacity to also hire people with high slopes and who are, like, generalists and you also find a good way to able to move them around in the company, that’s something that has worked really well for us. I cannot predict how it’s going to work when there is more structure in the company, but I’m committed to finding a good …
[CROSSTALK]
Brian Halligan: Are there any of these high slope generalists who you’re moving around on your senior team, direct reports, senior team?
Anton Osika: Two senior team.
Brian Halligan: Are any of your direct reports any of these …
Anton Osika: Not currently.
Brian Halligan: … you know, high slope people moving around?
Anton Osika: Not on my actual leadership team, but many of the ones I work with day to day who feel like they’re reporting directly to me on many things are more of the highest.
Brian Halligan: How about you on the team you’re building? You’ve got a few hundred employees, you’re less than 100. What are you thinking about the senior team? What are you looking for? Have you had any misfires?
Mati Staniszewski: In our case, we have over 300 people. But inside of the company it’s effectively a lot of small teams, there’s 30 teams of 5 to 10 people. And it usually is a combination of—depending on the space, either few with the experience, with the past work in that space, and then usually infused with some of the high slope.
And we like that because A) you get the generalists that can adopt a lot of the new tooling and kind of do new work. And second, we try to bring all the engineers across in some of those teams. So even in a traditional growth team, we have growth engineers and the ops team will have operations engineering to help automate a lot of the process. Sometimes use Lovable in the process to help with that work. And that has helped tremendously to kind of get the experience, the domain expertise, while creating the new process across the leadership. So then all those teams roll up to each effective lead. So we have a go to market leads, then the engineering leads.
Brian Halligan: How many direct reports do you have?
Mati Staniszewski: I have 15 direct reports.
Brian Halligan: That’s a lot. Okay. And that crew of 15, are they kind of young, hungry, grew up at the company, high slope, or are they kind of been there, done that?
Mati Staniszewski: Almost exactly half-half.
Brian Halligan: I see.
Mati Staniszewski: So half have done it before. Usually are growing with the role. Of course, we are growing extremely quickly. So we grew from—we started in 2022 from zero to now over $200 million in revenue. So that growth has been quick for everybody. So everybody’s learning at the same time. But half of them have seen that before and the other half are …
Brian Halligan: Do you think that’s right, the 50/50? Like, at HubSpot, we were kind of the same. I’d look around the table and about half grew up with the company, very high slope, and half had a lot of experience. That felt right to me. Does that feel right to you?
Mati Staniszewski: It does. So in many ways, the people that are there have grown with the company incredibly. Victoria, who leads our ops team, has never done anything like this before.
Brian Halligan: Right.
Mati Staniszewski: And also from a Palantir background, so also physics background, so trying to, like, create a process as we go across, and has grown incredibly with the company. And then others kind of are still super important for the company, but will stay in more of the product teams or on the IC roles in other parts.
Brian Halligan: How about you on the—you know, what’s your mix of kind of homegrown and been there, done that? You’re probably just starting to hire execs, I guess, from the outside.
Anton Osika: Yeah. So I built out this leadership team, which is, like, seven people with my co-founder.
Brian Halligan: Okay, so you have seven direct reports.
Anton Osika: Yeah. So without me and my co-founder it’s five [inaudible].
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Anton Osika: And officially, everyone else, like, reports something into them.
Brian Halligan: Yeah. Do you feel like you got that right or over time it’s going to get much bigger, or where are you at? Like, I think Jensen Huang has 45 direct reports.
Mati Staniszewski: You had a lot, too, no?
Brian Halligan: No, I didn’t. I had, like, 10. No—yeah. And it’s amazing to me that they get people with 45 or 50 and people with three. There’s such a range. Anyway, was the five intentional, or it just kind of happened?
Anton Osika: It was intentional, very intentional. Yeah. To add a lot more structure. And then I think generally if you say, okay, let’s try to have a lot of structure and then it’s easier to add more chaotic things on top of that and see how that works.
Brian Halligan: Okay, so you’re hiring. We kind of worked together on that, had a sales search. How are you thinking about these senior searches? How are you deciding? You know, you’ve never run the sales org. It’s a hard thing. Like, lots of people are in your shoes. Like, how are you making those calls?
Anton Osika: Yeah, so with the head of sales, I worked closely with Dannie at Excel who had done this before many times.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Dannie Herzberg from Sequoia.
Anton Osika: Yeah. [inaudible].
Brian Halligan: They coached you.
Anton Osika: They gave me a lot of input on it. And I mean, in the end it was me spending a lot of time with these candidates and them spending time with the team and presenting how they would do things. And that felt like that gave a lot of—instilled a lot of confidence for me.
Brian Halligan: Okay. So you had a bunch of help.
Anton Osika: Yeah. And spoke to many people.
Brian Halligan: And how about on your side? Same thing. You hadn’t run a sale—you haven’t—none of us had done what we did. But you hadn’t run a sales org. You had to make a decision on a sales leader. You had a lot of qualified candidates. How did you go about it?
Mati Staniszewski: Yeah, it’s a tricky one, and especially, I think, for sales, the salespeople know how to sell themselves. They need to be able.
Brian Halligan: Very well.
Mati Staniszewski: So they are. So you kind of need to filter through, like, do they actually know how to sell? But they are all, like, good at it. So we are in a good setup where one of the salespeople was our investor, so we’ve seen him actually help us advise before he became a salesperson. So when we started the company, we started getting enterprise inbound. We realized, okay, we can start something very quickly. And he already has spent so much time with us that it became natural. Okay, we want to bring that person in.
And then as we’ve hired other roles—we have, of course, amazing investors across, like, Sequoia who are on [inaudible] team, who are helping us on that hunt. So we would partner very closely with the domain experts to help us through the network, through the back references to make sure that they are the right ones. I think the back references really helps across that beyond the spending time with the team, which I think is crucial.
And then the other part, which I haven’t realized until later, is that for sales specifically, is that you are hiring, of course, a great individual for creating the sales playbook, helping you sell to the enterprises. But then ultimately, the person you hire, they will set the culture for the sales team, too. Like, a lot of the people they will hire will be so similar in their approach to that work, which I didn’t appreciate until after the fact. So I was happy that the culture was very aligned. But then you can see much similar. And we have Europe and US sales teams. They’re slightly different.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Mati Staniszewski: The Europe is a lot more confident, like a little bit like the European versus US upbringing. So we’re a lot more confident than our European counterparts that take more of, like, a partner sales approach. But they have core similar values, which helps.
Brian Halligan: Okay. One of the things that confuses me about life today as a CEO is like, from HubSpot, from let’s call it—we went public in 2012, until I stepped down in 2020, we had an annual planning cycle, and the world just didn’t change a whole lot every year. How the hell do you guys plan with the changes going on underneath? Like, what’s your cycle? How do you do it?
Anton Osika: We’ve done very little planning.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: And I think that’s pretty smart because you can—like, everything is changing very rapidly, at least for our—I mean, our B2B offerings, enterprises are huge ones, are using our product to a huge extent. We are just, like, trying to give them the time they can get, as much time as you can get and not being like, “Okay, this is our ICP. This is exactly the sales process.” At least so far. But there’s, like, tens of thousands of people in a hackathon. That’s how many of the world’s, like, largest health care companies are using us. And we will, I think, start taking a step back and being, “Okay, where are we seeing, like, from much better data analytics as well, where are we going to focus?”
Brian Halligan: Okay. And let me push back a little bit. You just had a big release that looks amazing. You must have planned for that. You just didn’t pull that out of a hackathon last week.
Anton Osika: I mean, we do have a launch roadmap and, like, it goes out, like, six months. And it’s just that I’m sure it’s going to change.
Brian Halligan: Okay, so there’s a lightweight six-month product roadmap.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Brian Halligan: Okay, got it. And it’s pretty flexible, like, within that six months deep pivot?
Anton Osika: Yeah, I do—now at this size of the company, we are of course going into longer time horizons.
Brian Halligan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it’s just hard to plan more than six months right now with all the underlying platform changes. Yeah, it’s an interesting time to be a CEO. How about over at Elevenlabs? What’s the cycle?
Mati Staniszewski: The cycle. So the teams have a pretty high flexibility in how they operate week to week. So they can kind of take different directions. But on a quarterly basis we’ll get the teams together, they’ll spend up to a day effectively outlining what are the initiatives they want to run for the next quarter. And then it’s even less for the team itself. Sometimes it helps formalize a lot of the ideas, but it’s more valuable for the teams around so they know what to expect so they can learn from, from that process.
And we just came back from an offsite with the entire team where we are looking, like, where we would like to be as a company in 2026 and in the next three years. The thing that’s probably the hardest is research. So we do also the foundational part for voice, and have a lot of research teams that crank out some of the best models out there. And that’s, of course, so hard to predict. So here we don’t give any timelines. We do the research initiatives we want to plan. So that’s the one that goes out of the cycle.
Brian Halligan: And you don’t know what’s going to come out. It’s very different than …
Mati Staniszewski: You need to stay nimble that, like, the moment it comes out. That’s why the small teams, I think, help so much as well, because the moment something comes out either internally from our research team or from other teams, you know that this is like, you have 24 hours to start integrating that into your product. That’s like the most important time to really be ahead.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Speaking of planning, I remember in the early days of HubSpot, before CRM, we were a marketing app. And every year I would go to the Salesforce.com conference called Dreamforce, and I’d sit in the audience. And our pitch, by the way, at that time was Salesforce.com is to sales as HubSpot is to marketing. And we would always think in the back of our head, “Until Salesforce.com wants to become the Salesforce.com marketing.”
And so I’d sit in the audience every year hoping they didn’t announce a marketing product. And sure enough, 2012 was their—that was the marketing year. They bought four marketing companies and they really went for it. We ended up pivoting and going to CRM. I would imagine you have a similar feeling when Anthropic’s doing a big announcement or OpenAI’s having a big announcement. Even HubSpot is like, “We don’t know. Is OpenAI going to be a platform company like Google was? Are they going to go build vertical apps?” Are you as paranoid as I was, or are you not that worried? [laughs]
Anton Osika: Yeah, I mean they do have a lot of distribution out of the box, so it would hurt.
Brian Halligan: Are you or do you sit there, like, worried when they’re doing their announcements? Are they going to …?
Anton Osika: Not really, no. Like, I have so many things to think about. I catch up on, like, on the recent announcements, and I’m sure they will announce something.
Brian Halligan: I would imagine that they’d build something in your space.
Anton Osika: It will be inferior.
Brian Halligan: [laughs] You’ve got a head start. But you kind of like—I kind of think it would be an obvious thing for them to build.
Anton Osika: Yeah. Yeah, something like what we’re building is this full platform where you’re serving most of the product needs for the [inaudible] organization. And that takes a lot of iteration steps to get to the full thing. And unless they’re, like, building that out completely in the dark and then launching it, I don’t think it’s going to be a threat from the first launch.
Brian Halligan: Okay. I’m very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you para—I would anyway. Are you like I was, paranoid, nervous about what’s going to happen?
Mati Staniszewski: Definitely a little. Always nervous and watching closely. I mean they have great, great research teams, so we know that they will be pushing into the voice space.
Brian Halligan: Yes.
Mati Staniszewski: At the same time given, like, the spread of work that you just mentioned, the corollary is they lack focus, and we are fully focused on voice, whether that’s creating the research or products for creating voice agents or creating creative AI workflows, which does take a lot of iterations to actually bring that to the user to make the best experience that they require to solve their problems, solve their integrations. So I do think it’s going to become increasingly competitive, especially on the research side. But that’s where the product, platform, brand, the design, the taste will matter a lot more—something we speak a little bit with Anton every so often—and that will be the big piece where companies going deep into that space will win.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Speaking of taste, one thing I really like about both of you is I think you have taste, particularly in your marketing. Like, you guys do some interesting stuff. You are fantastic on Twitter. Fantastic on Twitter. You’re one of my favorite follows. How much time are you spending doing it? Do you do it all yourself? You’re out there on stuff. Just talk about your Twitter strategy.
Mati Staniszewski: Yeah, sure.
Brian Halligan: Did you tweet just before we got in here? What’s the deal?
Anton Osika: No, but I do spend quite some time on it, and it feels like, oh my God, I’m doing so many today. I’m a CEO, I’m doing so many things, and then I have to sit down every week and get some of the posts, right? But I do have a team that comes to me with ideas. Like every Monday we go through. It’s 15 minutes in the calendar.
Brian Halligan: Okay. They bring you, “Here’s the tweet that would be good.”
Anton Osika: No, they bring me ideas like, “Okay, should we do something on this?” And I drop a lot of ideas as well in a Slack channel. But this is not their full time job either. So it’s a bit—it’s not the proper function in the company.
Brian Halligan: It’s very, very effective, in my opinion. Like, your brand is very strong. It’s working really well. Are you actually pressing the button when the tweet goes out, or is somebody doing it for you?
Anton Osika: It’s usually me.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: So there’s actually a very good company called Typefully that you can draft them in and then you can, like, collaborate on them. And I usually am the one who scheduled them in that. So I do the final push.
Brian Halligan: I would keep going and getting even wackier if were you.
Anton Osika: [laughs] Thank you.
Brian Halligan: I think you’re killing it. You guys are busy. I remember when I was your size, I got asked to do so much shit—speak at my conference. Can you interview my daughter? Can you talk to this venture capitalist, this candidate? It’s just an endless, like—whoosh—of asks. And it’s chaotic, and the firm is asking you to do all that kind of stuff. How do you guys manage, just like kind of tactically manage the chaos, manage your schedule, get shit done in the hurricane of requests, inputs, chaos. Any tricks?
Mati Staniszewski: A few tricks, for sure. I think we run a lot of the company on Slack, so the Slack is one part. And of course the email is especially the external piece. For email, now it’s a combination of two. My brilliant assistant Hannah is helping, and the script is helping to auto classify a lot of emails to effectively be P0, P1, P2. P0 is we need to …
Brian Halligan: Wait, somebody else is reading your emails and P0 is …
Mati Staniszewski: Someone else is reading, and now we have a script as well to auto classify them.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Mati Staniszewski: And then P0 is …
Brian Halligan: That is interesting.
Mati Staniszewski: It is super helpful.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Mati Staniszewski: Same-day reply on the P0. P1 can wait for the week. P2 not important. I can take out, and then I have, like, unblock Ps.
Brian Halligan: So somebody’s reading your emails and it’s like, “Hey, you need to respond to this. It’s P0.”
Mati Staniszewski: Labels. So every email gets a label.
Brian Halligan: By a homo sapiens?
Mati Staniszewski: By a homo sapiens and a script. So now it’s a combination of both. So script does the first pass and then the homo sapiens does the second pass.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Fascinating.
Mati Staniszewski: Hannah, who is great at it, too.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Mati Staniszewski: And then you know exactly, “Okay, this is I need to reply this day. This is an important customer, partner.”
Brian Halligan: How does she know what’s important? Like, I send you an email, she must be like, “That’s so important. You gotta respond.” How does she know what’s important? [laughs]
Mati Staniszewski: Well, the first thing is sometimes there’s of course new where you don’t, but usually she knows me inside out. And the second thing is for a lot of the people, a lot of the clients, you, Brian, you will be in my contact list. You will have a P0 inbound. So the first moment you hit me with the email, it will auto-lassify that as a P0. So I know that it’s at the top and that I should reply on the same day. So that has worked tremendously across email. I think I’m very good on getting up on those emails.
Brian Halligan: How about Slack? The Slack must be a firestorm.
Mati Staniszewski: Slack is a firestorm. Slack is a firestorm. So it’s usually a combination. If I think it’s taking more than five minutes, then I will remind myself later. So I’m big on the remind function. And then if it’s less than five minutes, I usually try to reply straight away.
Brian Halligan: Yep, kind of inbox zero on your Slack.
Mati Staniszewski: Inbox zero on the Slack.
Brian Halligan: Okay. And what about your calendar?
Mati Staniszewski: Calendar is at least a week in advance clean in terms of what I want to do. And then if there’s an urgent thing that comes up, then things get reshuffled.
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Mati Staniszewski: And then I think the biggest piece that I’ve done over the last six months—and you mentioned the conferences, the events—is planning at least a quarter ahead which continents I will be in. And I’m trying to never be switching the continent in the same month. So within a month I’m trying to stay in one place.
Brian Halligan: Oh, so you go to the US for a month.
Mati Staniszewski: I usually try to be in the US for close to a month.
Brian Halligan: I see.
Mati Staniszewski: And that helps a lot with getting on the ground, working with the team, but also working with the customers. I think it’s going to decrease to two weeks now, given how distributed we are.
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Mati Staniszewski: But before that I used to go for, like, a few days sometimes to US, and that has been not ideal, yeah.
Brian Halligan: Okay, your calendar must be nuts. What does it look like, and where do you build in time to, like, actually think?
Anton Osika: That’s a good question. I think I think best by talking together with someone else.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: So it naturally, like, happens maybe late in the office or something. One on one time.
Anton Osika: Yeah, I think I’m still in this, like, firestorm and I’m set on innovating on what works best. Like, there’s a certain type of creativity that you also only get, like, when you’re bored or, like, you get some downtime. And I don’t—I think there’s some way to program myself with the environment to get more of that.
Brian Halligan: I did a Wednesday, every Wednesday I work from home and no meeting. It was no-meeting Wednesday. That helped. I’m also a little introverted, so I needed a little time to read a chart. Are you guys introverted or extroverted? Are you introverted?
Anton Osika: I say that, but people around me are like, “No, no, you’re faking.” I mean, if I’m alone for a full day, I’m like, “Oh, God. People, human company.”
Brian Halligan: I’m not like that. I’m like, “Oh, I need another alone day.” Okay, interesting.
Mati Staniszewski: The no-meetings day helps. I also have no-meetings day. It usually gets meetings, but they are meetings I actually want to do rather than, like—are kind of proactive for the future rather than, like, in the moment in this given week.
Brian Halligan: One of the things that really helped me was, like, once a month I made a to-do list of, like, here’s the eight things I want to get done. And I would publish that on our—we had a wiki at the time. And so everyone in the company would see what I was working on. And I would look at it every couple days and be like, “Does my calendar match my to-do list?” Because all the slacks and emails are everybody else’s priorities imposed on you. And by putting it on there, it sort of allowed me to say no.
It’s just so much stuff, and it’s hard to say no. And so it gave me license to say, “You know, it’s not on my to-do list, I’m not gonna do it.” And then I got a hat with a big N-O on it, a no hat. And I walked around the office and people called me Doctor No, because I just wanted to keep it focused on a couple things that I was trying to get done and the company was trying to get done, and I would lose focus and then there’d be a firestorm and then back. So I didn’t nail it. But that was a small hack that helped a little.
Okay, you two do an amazing job building amazing companies in Europe. My two favorite entrepreneurs. What’s it like building an amazing AI company in Europe, and what are the pluses and minuses of building in Europe?
Anton Osika: I think the network around you is not as mature compared to especially Silicon Valley. And that makes it more difficult with the distribution. I mean, like, sophisticated investors that are, like, just one coffee away can be valuable. And then once you’re staffing, especially on—I mean, the high slope generalists are distributed across the world, right? But as you’re staffing with people who have done it and seen it before, it’s a bit trickier to find it in Europe, I would say.
Brian Halligan: I heard you refer to building in Europe as “hard mode.”
Anton Osika: I mean, those parts are hard mode. But at the same time I think—I don’t know, maybe we would have been more successful building from the Valley or something. I could see that. But I think it has been very helpful for us to be the go-to number one talent destination in Stockholm.
Brian Halligan: Totally.
Anton Osika: And that’s the reason I decided no, we’re going to stay here. We’re going to stay here and bet on that there is much more available talent that doesn’t jump around and, like, they aren’t entitled and spoiled, and they’re …
Brian Halligan: They’re cheaper.
Anton Osika: They’re cheaper. They’re yearning for a possibility to literally change the world.
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Anton Osika: And there’s not many companies that have done it from Europe. There has not been a trillion dollar company from Europe. And being at Elevenlabs or being at Lovable is one of those very, very rare opportunities here.
Brian Halligan: I agree with that. I’m going to ask you this. You’ve got employees in the US and Europe. Any difference?
Mati Staniszewski: Definitely differences. And similar, I will quickly add that I think the talent in Europe can be incredible.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Mati Staniszewski: You just need to find the talent.
Brian Halligan: And you’re building in London, mostly or all over?
Mati Staniszewski: All over. But London and Poland are our biggest hubs.
Brian Halligan: Yeah. Poland must be terrific.
Mati Staniszewski: Poland is incredible. Like, some of the best—central Eastern Europe, some of the best.
Brian Halligan: Everybody must want to work for you in Poland. It’s like Anton’s Stockholm.
Mati Staniszewski: We are heavily building the brand across Eastern Europe. And we think those engineers are just so incredible. They are yearning for something. I think they’re yearning for a company that actually wants to build something generational, something big.
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Mati Staniszewski: And there’s just so few of those opportunities. At the same time, the companies of Silicon Valley, frequently don’t give that opportunity.
Brian Halligan: No.
Mati Staniszewski: So it’s, like, perfect.
Brian Halligan: To build new stuff. They give, like …
Mati Staniszewski: Exactly. So I think one of the differences, which is a lot of Europeans, especially Eastern Europe, are very straightforward, straight to the point, very direct. Sometimes too direct, which we actually really enjoy as a company. It helped share a lot of ideas, criticism, feedback in a much better way.
On the other hand, what I think the US has going for them is that confidence of things are going to be amazing, are great, are very ambitious, across the entirety of the people. And that’s something that we are continuously trying to instill in some of the people across Europe, too.
And maybe the other thing that helps across Europe is that if you’re building in Europe, you of course need to build for the global market. You cannot build just for the European market. But then when you do that, then you—the time zone is actually perfect for catering to US, to South America, to Europe and to Asia as well, which helped in our case as well.
Brian Halligan: And the difference between American employees and European?
Mati Staniszewski: It will be that. I think the main one is also beyond being direct and confident, I think the entrepreneurship kind of aspiration is very different. In the US, everybody knows value of equity. Everybody is treating that as part of, like, a good career. In Europe, you kind of need to convince the employees, sometimes you need to convince the families that this is the right thing. In Poland, we need to frequently explain that equity is worth something, almost force the employees to take the equity, which always had an interesting surprise of, like, “How does it work?”
Mati Staniszewski: But now we’ve went through this cycle a few times and the equity is worth something with the tender offers. So people started educating other people that this is actually the right choice, which we hope will, in places like Poland and wider Europe, will become more normalized and then something that people will want to do across entrepreneurship.
Brian Halligan: When I was in my late 20s, I spent—or early 30s—seven years in Asia. And I worked for this company, PTC, a very good company in the US. And I had to convince Japanese people and Chinese people and Korean people that this thing called equity is going to be worth a lot. And man, it was a dog fight convincing them. They were like, “What? You’re just trying to pay me less money.” I remember those days. And people made a lot of money on that stock. [laughs]
Okay, on this topic, like, 9-9-6. Are you guys in office 9-9-6 hardcore? Like, one interesting thing, like, my generation of CEOs we kind of followed—Steve Jobs was sort of on our Mount Rushmore. And the current generations, it feels like it’s a lot more Elon. And companies are working much more like Elon’s companies. Who’s your Mount Rushmore? Are you 9-9-6 like Elon, plus? Like, where are you guys at?
Mati Staniszewski: Steve Jobs is great.
Brian Halligan: Yeah, I think it was a good one.
Anton Osika: I mean, what I like about him is he really understands that, like, a team working better and better and better over time and, like, really obsessing and caring about what you’re doing is …
Brian Halligan: Who are you talking about?
Anton Osika: Steve Jobs.
Brian Halligan: Yes. Who—if I’m Steve Jobs, are you Elon? Who’s your …
Anton Osika: I mean, my style can be a bit Elon. I’m like, “This has to get done now. What does it take to do this faster?”
Brian Halligan: Is it Daniel Ek?
Anton Osika: No, I don’t know him that well, fortunately.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: But based on reading about Elon, I have a bit of that. But I think you lose a lot of, like, the autonomy and teams feeling ownership of doing it too much the Elon way. So I might get back to you.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Are you 9-9-6-plus?
Anton Osika: Me? Many people around the company are 9-9-6 plus.
Brian Halligan: Your company.
Anton Osika: Many people in the company. But people have family as well. So it’s just we have very, very, very high expectations of everyone to have—to drive impact. And then if you’re not working many hours, you need to have clearly have impact in other ways.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Do you think that scales? Like, one of the problems with scale is that drive sort of wanes and that—you know, do you think that fades, and is there ideas in your head how you keep that motivation going?
Anton Osika: I think it’s about setting very, very ambitious goals every week.
Brian Halligan: That’s one of your things. Every week you put out goals.
Anton Osika: Yeah. And then it’s being very clear before someone joins what the expectations are. And it’s about evaluating impact.
Brian Halligan: And have you lost candidates, like VP candidates, because, like, “You know what? Yeah, I love the mission. I love you, but I can only do 50 hours a week. And I got a—I’ve got a life. I’ve got four kids.`
Anton Osika: I think we lost some kind of like that. But that’s maybe good.
Brian Halligan: Life in the big city.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Brian Halligan: Okay, who’s your Mount Rushmore?
Mati Staniszewski: It’s definitely closer to Steve Jobs between those two. But he was always so caring about the design, about making it, kind of hiding any complexity from the user, making it easy to use. He does have this obsessive piece, which is maybe slightly different to how I would try to run it or work in a company. But I love what he created as his legacy.
But there are amazing other CEOs there. You know, there’s like more pockets from different people that are incredible.
Brian Halligan: Who?
Mati Staniszewski: I like Jamie Dimon and his clarity, and his—like, across so many things that he runs, and I think he has, like, half a million people under him. He feels very calm and under control. I think this is admirable. Satya. I think the way he kind of turned it around and he is, like, a very caring person around how he runs the company. I think this is another great leader. But from the 9-9-6, I think in our case …
Brian Halligan: Are you guys 9-9-6?
Mati Staniszewski: Not in the office. I think everybody is online chronically and all the time. We definitely make it very explicit before you join, it’s we think it’s, like, a once in a lifetime change with AI across the world. We can be the voice of the change, the voice of the technology. And everybody understands the opportunity ahead is rare. And we do lose candidates across.
Brian Halligan: You do lose them.
Mati Staniszewski: We do. Frequently. I mean, they frequently, I think, won’t even apply. We are, like, very vocal in the process that, yeah, that it’s a lot of time commitment. We never impose it or ask anyone for doing that, but they do. It’s usually seven days a week, but you are not maybe working all the seven days a week, but you are online and ready to jump in, especially on the weekends, on any questions. And I think people enjoy working next to passionate people. So you kind of get that bar higher, you run together and then when you see results, it’s also motivating.
Brian Halligan: In, like, the last 50 employees, like, from employee 250 to 500 versus 50 to 100, is there a difference in your mind in commitment, in zeal, in whatever?
Mati Staniszewski: You know, it’s definitely some, but the current employees are also on it. And I think the small teams helped where you have, like, you know, you effectively joined a unit of 10 people or less. So you are seeing that everybody’s running in that unit and everybody else is running, too. So you are going after that, too. Of course, we also have people with families, people that will have other things. And that can work and it does. But usually those people are thinking about work and how to improve at all times.
Brian Halligan: What do you guys think European—like, what needs to happen in Europe to have a lot more of you guys?
Anton Osika: I think they’re coming.
Brian Halligan: You do?
Anton Osika: Yeah, truly. Yes.
Mati Staniszewski: A hundred percent.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: There’s, like, engineering schools now. You ask them would you consider starting a startup where you’re being part of the founding team. Eighty percent yes.
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Anton Osika: It went up to 10x.
Brian Halligan: Okay. Interesting.
Mati Staniszewski: And that first generation will help. I think, like, few of the companies, if we do a good job, get some people to start another set of companies. I think the second thing of what’s, I think, missing in the European ecosystem is people that have done it before, have seen that scale, and then of course have got a good outcome, to then make clear of, like, this is actually a really cool thing to do. Hopefully those people can infuse additional set of startups across Europe.
Brian Halligan: We started HubSpot in Boston, and it’s got a lot of the same benefits as Europe. Like so much talent. MIT is there. Just we were a magnet for it. The area it fell down is as we scaled and we needed to hire, you know, a head of marketing who had seen the movie before, someone who had really operated at scale. So we started hiring more people in the Valley. That started to happen around a thousand employees. But it feels similar. Boston feels similar to Europe in that way. Boston’s conservative. It’s kind of similar. Any advice for all—there’s lots of young, smart entrepreneurs listen to this pod that want to build the next Lovable, the next Elevenlabs. Any advice?
Mati Staniszewski: First of all, I think go for it. It’s amazing to build a company. And of course, maybe I was in a lucky position where I had savings and I didn’t have the dependencies. But if you are in that similar situation, I think it’s go for it. The learning experience you get across building a company, even if it doesn’t go the way you expect, I think is so much more valuable than frequently joining other companies and being a smaller coggle in a big machine.
And then I think obsess about the problem. Try to deeply understand what you are actually solving for. Talk with customers. And the simplest advice I think is the most valuable here, which is actually working with the user and iterating very deeply.
And then I think it’s all about the team and hiring. So the people you bring across and who you build with will be defining for the company. So pick your co-founders carefully and well, and know them ideally for a longer time before you decide to start something. And as you assemble the team, you really want the trust of individuals that you want to go for the next decades together.
Brian Halligan: Anton?
Anton Osika: I think you want to learn things very, very fast if you’re getting started. And you want to learn a lot of things. You want to learn how to hire. I mean you don’t have to be so good at managing but having high expectations of people and giving them clear feedback. And you want to learn how to sell. You want to sell to your customers or sell them [inaudible] market to the people you want to hire.
[CROSSTALK]
You’re always selling. And so you should do that all the time, and fail and ask someone who you respect to give it to you hard on, like, how bad you are.
Brian Halligan: I see.
Anton Osika: Because if you’re just getting started …
Brian Halligan: Were you bad at it at first?
Anton Osika: Yeah, of course. [laughs]
Brian Halligan: Okay.
Mati Staniszewski: [inaudible]
Anton Osika: And so I just go out there and, like, try to find joy probably by having a co-founder as you’re talking about in the failings and the learnings.
Brian Halligan: Yes.
Mati Staniszewski: Yeah. That’s the other thing which I was thinking about your earlier question. What you don’t expect as a CEO’s role. And you don’t expect that you don’t have anyone to complain to, effectively.
Brian Halligan: Right.
Mati Staniszewski: So your co-founder is your soulmate that you can speak to. And then there are some sometimes amazing people in the team you can iterate through. But not to the same—not to the same …
Brian Halligan: Yes, I totally agree with that. I want to congratulate you guys on all your success. I admire what you guys are doing. I sure hope you guys build trillion dollar companies in Europe. That’d be amazing. Good luck to you. Thanks for doing the pod.
Mati Staniszewski: Thank you so much.
Anton Osika: Thank you very much.
Brian Halligan: Appreciate you.
Mati Staniszewski: Thank you.
Brian Halligan: Yeah.
Closing Thoughts
Brian Halligan: Okay. Those two were terrific. And it’s nice to see them kind of blossoming before our eyes. What they have in common is they both had, like, seven or eight years of experience with, like, one good company in there. And I know it’s fashionable to drop out of Harvard and start a company like Zuck did, but at least for me, I did two startups before HubSpot. One was very successful, went public and got very large. Man, did I learn a lot from that. And man, are there a lot of lessons inside of HubSpot about scaling. But you do you. But I don’t think it hurts a founder to be in a really good startup to learn before they start a company.
They talked a lot about their co-founders, and one of the things about being a CEO is you’re a shit umbrella. Like, all the shit rains on you, and you’ve got an umbrella for your whole organization. It’s hard. The other thing about being a CEO is, like, no one is coming to save you. In my startups, my boss would come and save me, another team would come and save me. There was a lot of resources around. You’re pretty alone and it’s on you as a founder. The one person you can complain to is your co-founder. And so my advice for you would be to really get to know your co-founder, because it’s an incredibly important relationship for you going forward.
We got into the mechanics of the job, and we talked about delegation. And they’re kind of starting to—it’s interesting, they’re starting to delegate. They’re like, we’re kind of founder mode, we’re not sure how to do this, but they’re starting to do it and it’s impressive to see what they’re doing. My experience, the way that worked, as HubSpot scaled, I was very founder mode in sales and in product and man, the rest of the organization, I was very manager mode. And I drove both constituencies crazy. The sales and product folks, I was in their shorts and they always complained I was too much in the details. All the rest of them complained that I didn’t respond to their emails. So that was sort of the blend for me. I wasn’t all manager mode, it wasn’t all founder mode, and that kind of worked for me. And maybe that would work for you running your company.
I like the way they were thinking about their teams. I ask all the CEOs on these episodes, you know, what’s their span of control? And it’s all over the map. By the way, I thought everyone was copying Jensen Huang and having 60 direct reports. That is definitely not true. He is an n of one on that. And, like, Anton only has five direct reports, I had ten, Mati has fifteen. So it’s a little bit all over the map. If I were you, I would think about that. What do you want your span of control to be? And I would have it as wide as you can tolerate. As you scale from 100 to 1,000 employees, all those layers in there really will slow you down. So you want to keep it as flat as you can.
The other thing I liked about how they were thinking about teams is they were definitely starting to bring in some been-there-done-that people. The whole team wasn’t been-there-done-that. The way HubSpot ended up is we had about half been-there-done-that and a half homegrown. And VCs try to jam you full of been-there-done-that. I like that balance, having a little bit of both. The homegrown talent is underrated on your teams, most likely.
We also talked about just managing the chaos. Like, they’re growing crazy, they have so much opportunity. It’s just a hurricane of input coming into them.
And a couple things, couple hacks I liked. Anton is really good on Twitter, by the way. If you don’t follow him, he’s really good. I like that every Monday morning he has a 15-minute meeting with a couple of his staff members and they brainstorm on tweets. So he’s not just coming up with that extemporaneously. He’s thought about it a little bit, and he’s very good at it.
Most of them, or at least I had a no-meeting day where I could actually think and get some room and work on projects. I think that’s a good hack. I had it on Fridays for a while. Everyone thought I was taking a long weekend. I moved it to Wednesdays. And they’re going to have to get good at saying no. Like, I was working on saying no, so I made myself this hat, my no hat. And I had a no shirt, too. And I think startups are much, much more likely to die of overeating than starvation. That’s probably true of yours. You might need your own no hat.
You know, speaking of chaos, I asked them are they 9-9-6, and they’re both 9-9-6-plus. And I think that’s interesting. I’ve asked all the CEOs I’ve been interviewing, there’s been 10 so far, and the early stage startups are all doing 9-9-6 and the bigger ones aren’t. And I think that’s probably life in the fast lane. As your employees start having families and you’re hiring people with families, it’s just hard to get people in the office six days a week working nine to nine. But I think keep it going as long as you can if you’re doing 996. I think it’s good. I was 9-9-6 but I didn’t ask my team to be 9-9-6.
We talked a lot about Europe. Those are two amazing companies in Europe. And Europe’s a little—we started in Boston, and Boston’s a little bit like Europe. You’re, like, outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley. And there’s some real pluses and minuses to being outside of the Valley. The pluses are you end up being a very large fish in a very small pond, which can help. And you have really good access to talent and not a lot of competition for that talent. So real pluses.
The minuses we found out at HubSpot, and they’re going to find out, is inside of Boston there’s just not a lot of scale tech companies, so we had a hard time finding executives who had seen that movie on that next level of scale. Like, we took a couple people from Akamai and that worked out, but it was pretty lean. And so we started hiring execs out in San Francisco. So real pluses and minuses to being in a big city. If I had to do HubSpot over again, by the way—you didn’t ask, but I would have—we were in Boston. I’d have a big office in Boston, big office in San Francisco, then another big office in, I don’t know, Nashville or Denver or Toronto would be pretty good, where you can hire lots and lots of people for less money and have them be a little bit more loyal than, let’s say, in your San Francisco office. I wouldn’t let everybody work from home. I’d have three big hubs.
Okay, we wound up obviously talking about Europe. They’re both in Europe. Really encouraging for Europe. The world could use more Silicon Valleys and the world could use a vibrant European entrepreneurial scene. I love to hear from them that the engineering schools are chock full of kids that want to start companies. I think that’s going to be good for the world and good for Europe. So I’m excited about that.
I hope you enjoyed the episode. I really liked it. These two are great. I will see you on the next episode of Long Strange Trip.