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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.