Pros
*Transparency*
HubSpot shares all company performance data, financials, and executive meeting notes with all staff. Other companies don’t do that. Other companies hoard, and filter, and release bitesize chunks of “digestible” information to their frontlines. But HubSpot's commitment to transparency means that every employee deeply understands how the company works, why the strategy is what it is, and why our execs make the decisions they do. It also empowers every employee to knowledgeably identify opportunities to improve the company — our founders openly share their thought processes (and their concerns and their blindspots) because they want everyone at HubSpot to have a founder’s mindset. You’ll learn more about business, leadership and decision-making in 1 year at HubSpot than you could at any business school.
*Dynamism*
Our leadership team refuses to fall into complacency. Good is not good enough. Even if we’re beating the industry average on some measure, if they know we can do better, they will push us to do better. They’re not afraid to break what works in order to find something better. Other companies would be happy to make small tweaks to earn incremental progress. At HubSpot, you’ll learn best practices, but you’ll also learn to constantly challenge the status quo, whether that’s around sales tactics, go-to-market strategy, product innovation, or customer service.
*Professional Growth*
Many entry-level employees will start with concrete tasks and a clear plan, but as you grow, you will increasingly have to define your own roadmap. You will be expected to experiment (and fail), you will be expected to digest as much knowledge as possible (through coffee chats and devouring the internal company wiki), and you will be expected to take advantage of unlimited free books and thousands of dollars available to support classes/training. Other companies puts people in boxes and make them climb a pre-defined ladder; HubSpot takes a build-your-own-adventure (with some guardrails) approach to professional growth.
*Autonomy*
Use good judgement. Take as much vacation as you need. Work from wherever you are. And get sh*t done. The results you produce matter more than whether you’ve followed every instruction in some hundred-page employee handbook (see: other companies). Some people prefer structure, rigid expectations, clear lines of authority, etc. — there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not HubSpot. If you like freedom + delivering on high expectations, you’ll thrive at HubSpot.
Cons
Many of the things that make HubSpot great are also the things that can be frustrating.
*Autonomy*
Lots of autonomous individuals and teams acting in loose harmony can lead to duplicative efforts — e.g., two smart people both recognize an opportunity and chase after it without “someone in charge” recognizing that they’re doing the same thing.
*Transparency*
Holy torrent of information. Given how much information and data is made available, it’s sometimes hard to know what I should know and care about. At best, this can simply be a time suck; at worst, it can be overwhelming.
*Manager Growing Pains*
As the company as grown rapidly, we’ve promoted a number of first-time managers. Young staff look up and say, “Hey. I could be at least as good as that manager!” Which leads to frustration, more inexperienced managers, and misaligned expectations about what professional growth should look like at its best. I think we've recently made a number of good investments to alleviate some of this pain.
I understand that these downsides are inevitable given the choices we’ve made. I wouldn’t have chosen differently.
