Founding CRO @HubSpot / Prof @HBS / CoFounder @Stage 2 Capital Mark Roberge: The Science and Psychology of Scaling

Mark Roberge’s first anxiety attack hit him six months after 9/11, and his second hit him in the middle of a big speech while he was an executive at HubSpot. And Roberge, who now lectures at Harvard Business School and co-founded the venture firm Stage 2 Capital, says it’s important to include that anxiety in his entrepreneurial story. “I talk about it because there is a stigma associated with it,” he says. “Society values some of the things I’ve accomplished, but when I admit to everyone that I have severe anxiety, it gives other people comfort.”

In this episode, Mark and Joubin discuss the connections between HBS and KPCB, taking the long way around to get to MIT, Mark’s first company PawSpot, the meteoric rise of HubSpot, why it decided to zag when all the competition was moving upstream, being pigeonholed inside of big companies, what to say to reps who are trying to leave, extreme anxiety attacks, escaping to the gym, whether Mark would encourage his sons to work in tech, why customer retention matters more than revenue growth, becoming a VC, and why the best plan can be not having a plan.

In this episode, we cover:

• Mark’s first sales job — selling $2000 vacuum cleaners — and what he learned from his sales coach father (06:45)
• How he met and started working with HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah (10:24)
• Should you hire more sales reps, or incentivize existing reps to work harder? (19:40)
• Why established players can’t embrace product-led growth as quickly as smaller competitors (27:19)
• The stress of chasing a number and why “it’s always a grind” (36:03)
• Struggling with — and talking about — anxiety (41:01)
• Making time exercise and family dinners during the HubSpot journey (46:29)
• The reasons why someone might not want to join a startup (50:25)
• Ex-Shopify exec Loren Padelford’s big question for Mark (55:28)
• Do MBA programs “get” what’s happening in the tech sector? (59:54)
• Why Mark decided to get into venture capital with Stage 2 Capital (01:02:40)

Links:

• Connect with Mark
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm