Finding Wisdom in Failure, with Sam Mallikarjunan

This is the Athletics of business podcast. Episode 24.

Welcome to the Athletics of Business. A podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect the real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now your host, Ed Molitor.

Welcome to the Athletics of Business podcast and I am your host, Ed Molitor. I'm along with our special guest today, Sam Malakarjunan. Sam is Head of marketing@birdeye.com a SaaS startup enabling small businesses to win at online marketing by leveraging their most powerful content of all their happy customers. Sam is a former Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs and has taught advanced digital marketing at Harvard University, as well as innovation management and marketing analytics at the University of South Florida. With his energetic approach as a digital marketing instructor for multiple universities, Sam strives to provide students with a curriculum focused on frameworks for building modern growth engines. As a consultant, he brings an outsider's fresh perspective to guide seasoned teams to identify areas of opportunity and develop specific plans with attainable goals.

Second, Sam is also co author of the book how to Sell Better Than Amazon, which is, thanks to the publisher, ironically available for purchase on Amazon. Sam, welcome and thank you so much for joining us today. I am humbled and fired up to have you. How are things going in your world?

Thanks, Ed. Thanks for having me. I'm super stoked to be here. Things are going good. It's good. It's crazy. I'm at a startup again, Bird Eye. So HubSpot. I was at HubSpot for seven, eight years, something like that. And now they're like a 2300 person company with like eight global offices and a six billion dollar market cap. Now to be back here where if you want to send tweets, you actually have to write them yourself is fun. It's a good time.

Yeah, that's good. So how did that all come about? How did that transition take place?

Well, that's actually an interesting story. So my bosses at HubSpot, Dharmesh and Kip Bodnar, who's the Chief Marketing officer, their one request to me was always that if I decide it's time to leave HubSpot to let them know. Because we want the HubSpot mafia to be a cool thing. We want people to leave HubSpot and do really interesting things. First of all, it's a good recruiting tool. The number of people who have left HubSpot to go be CMOs of their own elsewhere is just staggering. And second of all, it's just we want to. We want more good marketers in leadership and influential positions. Because HubSpot's biggest impediment to growth is still not somebody selling a better software. It's that most sales and marketers are still pretty bad at their jobs.

So I told them at about the beginning of the year like, listen, HubSpot's a big successful company now and I miss the craziness of a startup and I miss being able to have a huge impact. And also, to be blunt, I've been a CMO twice, but at super small organizations and I've never built like a startup org. I've always had Dharmesh and Volpe and Kip and Halligan to fall back on. And so I'm like, you know, it's time for me to step into the blue and take the risk myself and see if I can do it on my own. And so we put together a Trello board I pulled from Crunchbase. 144 US based startups that are either SaaS, Blockchain or AI that did not have a CMO that were post series B free ipo, very specific parameters.

And we put it all on Trello board and we all weighed in on what companies we think I should talk to, who knows who, where, et cetera. And now Mike Volpe, who's my former boss, is on the board here at Birdeye. And so I'm here.

Yeah, that's awesome. So they actually helped you find your next step?

Yeah, it's a good retention tool too, right? So twice before I have said, hey guys, I think it's time for me to leave and go take the CMO offer somewhere else. And they always managed to talk me out of it, both by finding an internal role for me as well as just making me believe every time somebody would pitch me like a CMO role, I'm like, I bet Brian and Dharmesh and Kip could find me something better if I really wanted it. Right. And so it created this synthetic FOMO in me that actually probably kept me at HubSpot like three years longer than if normally you just give your boss two weeks notice or maybe a month or two months if you're a senior, you know, but that would have been doing myself a disservice.

And I do the same thing here, by the way, if people want to leave. Bird Eye and I have had one VP who wanted to move on and she's like, hey, I want to be analyst at Forrester. And I'm like, we know people at Forrester, let's help you go be analyst at Forester if that's what you want to do.

Right, right. You know, it's amazing about that. And we've talked a little bit about our brand, the athletics of business. But I have a good friend of mine who actually was our very first podcast Porter Moser, head coach of Loyola. And as they made this amazing Final four run this past year, but building up to this part of their program, he had a hard time keeping his assistant coaches intact because he did such a great job of mentoring them that people, and they were doing such a good job of their recruiting and everything else that people with bigger budgets were pulling them away. But when things really started to click for him is when he figured out a way to keep them on board.

But see, I think this story about HubSpot helping you find your next step is amazing because I have a little bit of a insight into the story of how you got to HubSpot. Can you share that story with us? Because this is phenomenal.

Yeah. So for a little bit of Context, prior to HubSpot, I had run marketing at an e commerce company, but at the time I was like the talk radio host of an AM FM talk radio show about scotch and cigars. And I ended up.

Great subject.

Yeah. And so I ended up the way I found out about HubSpot was in the cigar industry. They haven't really changed much in 200 years. And they're like, hey, you know how this Internet thing works, right? Yeah, I know how the Internet works. And so I became like the go to web guy for all the cigar companies. But I, I could build websites. I've been, you know, writing HTML since, you know, I was in, you know, elementary school. But I couldn't, I didn't know how to actually help them make money off of it. And so they're like. And that's when I started googling around and I found HubSpot and I started becoming a fan of their content. I did their first ever inbound marketing university certification, which now is HubSpot Academy. I was a big fan of their content.

But, you know, I was a college dropout with not like a ton of highly relevant experience. And I knew I wasn't going to get into a company that had a higher rejection rate than Harvard. Ironically, I teach at Harvard now, but.

Right. I was going to go there.

Yeah. But, you know, so I just, I knew I wasn't going to be successful. And so what I did was I created, you know, they were big on webinars and stuff at the time. I created a landing page that said, register for the Free Webinar and why youy Should Hire Me. And then I got the free credits you get when you signed up for LinkedIn, Google and Facebook ad campaigns. I ran them targeting people who worked at HubSpot. Back then, it was about 150.

People.

Just said, like, hey, do you work at HubSpot? Click here to find out or to register for the free webinar on why you should hire me. And it worked. I captured leads for about 30% of the company, including both co founders and the CMO at the time, Mike Volpe. And three hours and 26 minutes after I pressed Go, I got a call from their recruiter. But, yeah, again, you know, you and I were talking earlier. The irony is, if I had actually been qualified, I would have done things the normal way, submitted a resume, and probably not have gotten hired.

Right?

But, you know, I think that's the liberty. If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets, right? Everyone else gets rejected by HubSpot.

Right. How did you come up with that whole idea that this could actually work?

You know, in eight years of telling me this story, nobody's actually asked where the idea came from. I don't know how I came up with it. I think it just seemed like the thing to do to me. It was more like, you know, if I'm auditioning for or if I'm applying for a job as a chef, you're gonna ask me to cook a meal, right, you know, and show off some skills. And so I knew that my resume wasn't going to show, wasn't going to tell, that I knew how to do, like, the basics of Lean generation, which is, you know, landing page, offer, promotion. And so I'm like, well, I'll just show them that I could do it.

So it was really me digging into the weakness of my resume and understanding that what was missing was anything that would at all reinforce that I knew what the hell I was doing. And the only option to overcome that being like, yeah, you know, I'll do it on my own. I will say, by the way, I dramatically overcomplicated it. My girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, got super pissed off at me hearing about it because I was. I was just talking about it all the time, right? And then one guy releases this video where he's just holding a chicken and talking about how much he wants to work at HubSpot. And everybody on the social media sphere was like, oh, it's so innovative. I'm like, it's a frickin. He's holding a chicken. There's nothing innovative about this. And she.

Whereas I had, you know, social media automation, I had a ludicrously complex campaign set up. And my girlfriend's like, you either ship this tomorrow or I don't ever want to hear you talk about this again. And so I pressed go with it maybe 50% at what I had originally specked out the campaign to be, and it was still over.

Okay. Yeah, it's not funny how that works out.

Yeah, yeah.

And here you are.

And.

Yeah, and I mean, it's just amazing story. And you have so many stories. But what's really cool about you, Sam, I mean, one of the things that's really cool about you is you share your stories. You know, there are no secrets. You know, what experiences created and shaped you and helped you get to where you are in your career. You share that, whether it's through teaching or consulting. But can you talk about some of the defining moments in your journey, if you will? That gave you the confidence maybe to do this with HubSpot or to. Gave you the confidence to say, you know what, here we, you know, we're here with HubSpot, it's time for me to do something and go somewhere else and find a bigger startup to really jump in a CMO position or. What were some of those defining moments?

Man, there's a lot. I mean, I can work backwards from the defining moment in terms of me leaving HubSpot really was. My wife and I lived on the road for a year. We had 49 US states. I gave something like 61 keynote speeches in 11 other countries and stuff as well. Absolute blast. And then I was teaching at Harvard. I was teaching at University of South Florida, and I was getting dragged more and more into teaching full time. And I was doing research with MIT and stuff. And this is gonna sound super weird. I had it way too easy. My friends. My friends don't understand my rationale at all.

No,

HubSpot is phenomenal people, they trust me. I'm well liked, I'm well loved. Frankly, not working that hard. You go to a startup here, it's 12 hours a day, six days a week, and I block off Sundays. That's about it. And I missed that. I actually like the stress and the thrill of working on weird stuff. And HubSpot was to the point where they're forecasting out plans that go into years and decades in some cases. And yeah, I just missed it. I missed the craziness. And so the defining moment really was when I, when were. I was on the road with my wife and it's beautiful and it's quiet and it's peaceful and I'm really uncomfortable with that.

It's nice for a short period of time, but that I could easily have spent the last, the rest of my life at HubSpot and been very happy, but I don't think I would have. I don't think it would have been fit for me.

Sure.

Does that make sense?

Oh, it makes total sense. And let's go back to earlier in your career and what I was trying to get to, and that's my fault, I was trying to get to was what experiences shaped your decision making process, your passion for what you wanted to. I mean, you have so many incredible experiences and stories. What were a couple that stand out in your head?

I mean, the one that comes to mind immediately. Because my defining characteristic has always been, especially at HubSpot, that they gave me all the jobs that nobody else wanted or could understand. So I ran the marketing team that led our expansion to Latin America, not because I have any particular expertise in that, but because no one else wanted it. I ran the launch of our first sales tool, ran growth for HubSpot Labs. All of that you can actually trace back to. I had some e commerce experience and so I was running the E commerce marketing for the team. But it was very small, I think to three sales reps at less than 1% of the overall sales team. And so rightfully so. The marketing team said, we're not going to give you any resources at all.

And my sales team is like, hey, we really need a case study video of one of our customers. And the marketing team's like, no, we have other videos that we have to shoot. And so I rented a minivan, I hired like some guy's cousin who did video. We drove down to Maryland and we shot a case study video with Beretta, the firearms manufacturer. You know, 500 year old company totally transforms the way they do business using HubSpot. Right? Great story. And I get back and the Brandon Buzz team is like pissed at me, like, kind of like wants me to take the video down, arguably probably thinks I should get fired because that's not good judgment. Yada, yada. And Kip, who at the time was the VP of marketing, you know, you never know what's going to hurt you until you try it.

And you never know what's not going to hurt you until you try it. And he said, no, like, my team's going to do whatever they need to do to win, even if that means doing something that is not technically within the bounds of the rules that we've set forth. And I think that was a defining moment in my career of, wow, it's actually a good thing to win even if you don't do it the way you're supposed to. It's one of the things I try and tell people on my team or all younger professionals, is if you do what you're told and you do what you're supposed to and you color inside the lines and you do everything right and you don't win, you don't get brownie points just because you did things the way you were told, you're still gonna get fired.

You're still not gonna, at best, not gonna advance your career. So that's what set my mentality in terms of figuring out what it takes to win and working my way back from there and if it fits within the parameters of the rules. That's nice.

So where do you. It's a great point. So where do you draw that line of innovative, creative, getting outside the box, thinking outside the box, getting outside your comfort zone? Right. Getting to the other side of fear. Where do you draw the line between that and maybe just blatantly having complete disregard for the process that you should be following? How do you separate those two? How do you differentiate that?

Well, processes have their purpose, right? So if something is well understood and needs to be standardized and scaled, you know, lean six Sigma Toyota production system, all this stuff was built on, hey, we should probably have a process for this. Or the moving assembly line revolutionized the global economy because it introduced process into standardization. And I don't think processes are inherently bad in any way. I don't think rules are inherently bad in any way. They give us guardrails that we can stick within. In fact, use good judgment. Being HubSpot's core decision making value has caused a lot of stress to a lot of different people because that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to everyone.

Right.

And I think it's what it comes down to is, first of all, if you had good intent, I'm not going to generally be mad at you. But second of all, if you are doing it for the right reasons, understanding that the process was built, anytime there's a process or a set of rules, it's built to execute something that's already understood. And if you're trying to do something that's not right, like expanding in Latin America or something like that, then. Then don't worry about the rules. Right. Sometimes a rule was made because somebody needed to make some decision. But I've seen way more companies get hurt and killed by what I call institutional inertia. What I think I forget what Deloitte calls it. Oh, the organizational immune system is what they call it.

I've seen way more companies get killed by that than I've ever seen get killed by rogue marketers running off and trying to do campaigns that don't make sense. Because you can always do an apology or an oops or something like that. I've done three of those since I started at this company. That worries me a lot less. So it's not about disrespecting or disregarding the rules. It's understanding that rules and processes have a place and that there is a framework within. There is a rulebook for when you should break the rules. And that's for if the rules are describing a paradigm that's not applicable to your situation. Right.

Right now, and I don't even know this is completely unscripted. I asked this question. I didn't think I was going to ask this to you. But speaking of the rules and thinking outside the box, Nike and the Colin Kaepernick ad, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, first of all, I think the market validated that it was a good idea for them. I think that they're smart people at Nike. In fact, one of the earliest examples of content marketing that we always use is Nike's little guide to running right from the 60s or whatever. Yeah, they nailed it, right? Like, they nailed it. They understood their Persona, they understood their segmentation. There's a lot of temptation in everybody's life to be universally unoffensive, right? So to try and be liked by everybody, to try and please everybody. It's a cliche for a reason. You can't please everyone. Right. It's a cliche because we all have to say it over and over.

And I think what Nike hit on, and I don't know the math of their, like, Persona cohorts, but I think that what they hit on is that for our valuable cohorts, for our valuable buyer Personas, like, they not only will not be offended, but will actually, really appreciate it, and they will look at Colin Kaepernick's eyes in a very well composed ad and they will see the struggle and the hopes and the dreams and the fears that they have. And they're going to associate that with what is still the classic, one of the most classic marketing taglines of all time. Just do it. And it's going to sell shoes. And he's an athlete too. So I think they nailed it. No problems with that. And I think what happened to their revenue and market cap proves that they did.

Yeah, and that validated everything. But I thought what was really cool about it because, hey, I made my judgment from the start when the rumors came out about what was coming and what it was going to be without seeing anything. It's just what we do, especially in the time we're living in right now is, you know, everything's so extreme. But then when those commercials ran with, you know, the kids with physical disabilities struggling or they. It was. I saw it and I had goosebumps. I was like, that is pure genius.

They.

Everybody just walked right into the bear trap on that one. You know, they sat there and blasted Nike and all of a sudden Nike just puts this on your lap and says, okay, what are you going to do with this? You know, how are you going to. I thought it was awesome, but how do you. And circling back to what you did with Beretta, how do you get to a place where you have enough self confidence to do something like that, to do something similar to what Nike did, or for you to break the rules and go down there and do that?

Case study, There's a couple bits. One, it definitely comes down to your management and leadership. It's easy to say move fast and break things, but if anytime somebody makes a mistake, they get yelled at, they're not going to try anymore. Right. So I actually, when I started at Bird Eye, I started like a little just thread on, you know, on people making mistakes, like, hey, you screwed up. Let's send out the oops email campaign, yada yada. And calling it out is I would rather people try and make mistakes than not try. In fact, the biggest issues I have on almost every team, including this one, are people who are so afraid of making mistakes that they don't ship work. Part of that is trust that they're going to be. They're not going to be punished.

The other part of it is they have to have the trust in me as a leader like I had in Kip, that they're not going to give me access or a scope of influence to mess anything up beyond my depth. Right? So I like using scuba diving as a metaphor here, which Is we all have printed on our scuba diving cards. Here's the depth to which you can go. And generally. And yeah, I can still die at that depth, but generally speaking, I'm never. No dive master is going to take me deeper than that. And I have to trust that they are going to plan this dive and execute it appropriately. There's this whole separate long story about one time in Argentina where that did not happen. And it's the closest I've ever actually come to dying.

But with my team and the way I felt with Kit was I don't have enough, right? Like, I don't have access to blast the entire database. I don't have a corporate credit card where I could buy a Super bowl ad showing off this damn thing. And this is also what I tell my team here. I'm like, you guys have exactly the amount of access to be as risk taking as you want within what I believe is your level of judgment and level of skill. So there's that trust in both directions that they're not going to get punished, and also that I'm just not going to take them on a dive beyond their depth. And that if there is something they are able to do that they can and should do it. I will also say something that helps is I grew up poor, right?

So I. My. My financial planners, like, I have financial planners now, right? And that. Cool. And they're like, hey, you know, like, we need to talk about your financial goals, right? And I told them about the time I call it the $36 burrito, that I overdrafted my checking account to get a bean burrito at Taco Bell because I just hadn't eaten in a couple of days. I'm like, listen up. That 36. That $35 overdraft fee is future Sam's problem. You know, current Sam wants food, and they sort of like, look at me. Look at my net worth. Look at me, like, okay, we're gonna need more guidance than that. But, like, that was. That was something that was always nice. You know, my wife and I, if everything goes horribly wrong, we will move back into a van. We will be just fine.

And, you know, we've kept a pretty low standard of living, if you will. Like, we're very happy, but we just don't need that much. She drinks Bud Light, right? Like, we're fine. And. And that's liberating, right? If things go wrong, we'll be fine.

That's awesome. So the thing is, you didn't even get a good burrito. You got a 711 burrito.

No, Taco Bell.

Oh, Taco Bell. I'm sorry. That's right.

Not quite as bad, but still pretty bad.

Yeah, Depends who was making it at Taco Bell.

I actually did the math on cost per calorie, by the way, before I did that. So it was the most calorie dense food that I could get for $1. Was just there. Bean burrito with some.

So you knew going in that you're getting the overdraft fee. You were full blown. So you're sincere about that. That's unbelievable. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I knew that I was paying $36 for this, but I didn't have any credit or cash or any friends that I could ask to do anything like that. And like I said, my goal is to not ever fall back to that level. But that's a pretty far level. So if that's my floor and you know, then. And the sky's the limit, anywhere within the. Within that band, I'm comfortable taking risks.

So let's go back to the depth and your team and building trust with, you know, them trusting you trusting them. How hard was that when you got the bird eye to develop that relationship and develop them to realize you were creating a safe place for them. Not soft, but a safe place for them to take risk and they can go ahead and do that. Was that difficult?

First of all, it's a good tweet. Safe, not soft. Because I do have exceptionally high performance standards. And we all work hard, right? Like if you want to, if you want an easy job, go work at Oracle or something like that. Right? Like, don't go work at a startup. I wouldn't even necessarily say I've hit it out of the park with this team so far. I've called out wins when they've happened, I've called out. And wins doesn't necessarily mean they ran a campaign and got 200 leads. Right. Wins can mean they just deployed a landing page which used to take this company six weeks. You know, now we can do six in a day. Right? Like just because we implemented some processes for that C processes can be good. And then, and then also, like first of all, sharing stories of my failures.

I have an article. Maybe we should put it in the show notes. That's. It's a horrifying list of failures that you won't find on my resume.

Perfect.

And I sent that out to my team, I think like the first week or something like that. And I'm like, my defining characteristic in my career is because keep in mind, some of these people are younger or, I'm sorry, are older than me too. That I manage. Like the only differentiator is that I fail more frequently and like aim small, miss small. Like, I keep my failures small ones. And I, and I run through a feedback loop very quickly. I mean, I've, I've killed startup ideas that I've had without before I ever launched a single line of code because nobody will sign up for the thing, so I'm not going to build the damn thing.

Mm.

You know, and so I think that helped. And then also, yeah, really calling out the failures or the mistakes that people made, making sure that we're communicating, learnings that it's a positive experience. Yeah, I'm not, I'm still not sure I'm 100% there yet. Because Dallas, where I am now, is a different startup culture than what I'm used to in Boston where, like, it's almost like, forgive the term, this is a term that other people have used. But it's almost like failure porn is how people describe it. It's like, oh, I failed so many in San Francisco, Seattle, you know, the classic startups towns. Dallas doesn't have that sort of inherent mentality. So I'm fighting a little bit inertia that way. But I think they all know, right? Like they, we're gonna have to work hard. It's definitely not soft, but it is safe.

Nobody's, nobody's been fired for making any mistakes yet, whereas people have been fired for not winning.

You know, you just said something. Excuse me. Extremely curious. So how do they get failure porn? I love that. So how do you get to the point where it's like Seattle, it's like San Francisco where they have that mentality. Do you start pulling folks like yourself in from the outside or do you try to develop that mindset with the people that you have there?

I think so. I have done a ton of work overseas and in Tampa, in the fricking Yukon territory of Canada. Everyone wants to be like the Silicon Valley, the next Silicon Valley. Right. And I actually think that's really narrow minded. I think that every city has unique characteristics that make it so that it can be its own thing far outside of like what Silicon Valley is like Istanbul. I don't want Istanbul to be the Silicon Valley of Eurasia. I want Istanbul to be Istanbul and to have or Pakistan. Right. I was in Karachi and my God, the resilience of those people. I was talking to one Startup founder. He's listening to some lecture on dealing with startup stress.

And he's talking about how for two years he would walk out his front door and be pretty sure that he was never coming home to see his wife and kids again. And he's like, I think I can handle pitching to investors. You're right, you probably can. I don't want Karachi to be the Silicon Valley of anything. I want it to be Karachi.

Right.

And I think Dallas has some unique distinguishing characteristics of its own that it should build on. I do think people have to get more comfortable with failure and they have to get more comfortable with risk, but it doesn't necessarily have to be this. This wild west nonsense that we see in some. You know, you're better off generally putting your money into like an S&P 500 index fund than investing in a VC firm that's based in Silicon Valley. Because while they take. They have a lot of home runs, but they strike out more than anyone else. Have you ever seen the movie Signs? Yeah. Okay. I describe them as the swing away guy. Yeah. They hold the home run record and the strikeout record at the same time.

You know, and I think Dallas actually can be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more methodical. They're very good at process here, so it's. Yeah, I don't want them to just like, get. Embrace the failure porn too much.

Right.

I want them to get comfortable with making mistakes, partially because we need to get comfortable with the pace and cadence. We don't run. We don't run plans in decades anymore. We barely run plans in years. You know, we have to run strategic corporate plans in quarters and months and at a startup like this, weeks. Right. Like, I don't need you to. It doesn't matter if we would have won over the long term. You know, we need. We need to win the week's game before we earn the right to fight the quarters game, the year's game, and the decades game.

Right, right. You know, use a lot of. Excuse me, use a lot of terms that I love, the pacing, cadence, the feedback loop. But you talking about getting more comfortable with risk and failure and making mistakes, some people mistake that for just becoming callous to it. But, you know, one of the things I've learned as an entrepreneur, I've become very comfortable with risk and failure. But it doesn't mean that I still don't feel those, you know, that emotion you still don't feel. You just learn how to deal with it and grow through it. Not just kind of like, gosh, I hope this passes. I hope I get over this. Can you talk into a little bit about your journey and how you had to have had to do that a few times?

Yeah, I say really personally, I still do. I still do take it personally because I have like a pretty high opinion of myself and so when I fail, it hurts, you know, in sales. My confession I'll do because this is a podcast and nobody can actually punch me through the screen. Those really annoying folks in the mall who like pitch you trying to sell your cell phones, I used to train them. And one of the emotional coping mechanisms that we always taught them was hey, listen, you're going to pitch 200 people, you know, you're only going to sell to five of them. So every no is worth like $2, right? Because you just have to pitch 200 and every time somebody says yo, no in your mind, just take that as well. Thank you for the $2.

Now I think in terms of sales that's a bad approach because if you're irritating 195 people as part of your go to market strategy, you need to rethink it. And obviously they have, but that mentality does that. The fundamentals of that mentality stretch through into our careers, which is I don't know of anybody who has been successful without a string of rather impressive failures. So if you find yourself in a position where you're not, where you're never failing, you're probably not growing fast enough, you're not taking enough risks and you have to have that mentality of like cool. That got me one step closer to actually having an interesting life and making a significant impact. So, you know, it was hard going to HubSpot, right? Like they weren't that big. Like now everybody knows HubSpot, but they weren't that big back then.

I failed once. I actually quit HubSpot previously for 87 days and I went to go work at an agency in Nashville. And that was hard, right? That was super expensive mistake. In fact, when you leave a startup, all of your unvested stock options go away. So yeah, just look up the HubSpot stock ticker and see the implications.

There's no by the way, can I get those back?

No. You know, but like if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have made a good decision this time. Right. So the big mistake that I made was I didn't value the business model. I don't, I don't fit super well in an agency business model because I like spreadsheet. Business models. I want to work with things where I can play with the unit economics and have like, really high leverage impacts. And human services just doesn't have that. Some people love that. They're very good at it. They built great businesses off it. That's just not me. And I didn't know that about myself until I went to Nashville and failed spectacularly in 87 days. And so now I told you when I was.

When were drawing up the plans for what company I was going to go to after HubSpot, we had insanely specific criteria for what type of company, business model, et cetera, is going to be a good fit for me. And I would not. I just would not have had that. I would have made a bad. I would have just made a bad decision at a more expensive time in my life, a worse decision, a more expensive time in my life, if I. If I hadn't made that earlier mistake. So, yeah, it's. You've got to frame it that way in order. You should feel bad because you want to learn something from it, but you've. Then you want to internalize what you've learned from it, but you also have to feel a little grateful that you did learn something.

Absolutely. And I'm torn here what I want to ask Ness, because I love the fact you said that you take it personal. You know, being a college coach and being around basketball at a high level my entire life, I've always found that the great ones really take it personal. That doesn't mean they're obnoxious about it. That doesn't mean, you know, they let it take them in the wrong direction, but they take it personally, challenge themselves to move forward. But the fact that you left HubSpot for 87 days and then came back, that was after you had a boss that thought you were absolutely a serial liar. Is that not true?

No. So that was the serial liar. Was. Was. Was actually the person who thought I was. She was new.

Okay.

She was my manager for the year that I was on the road. Yeah. When I stopped, I became a HubSpot fellow, so I stopped. Okay.

Okay. What was that? It's a great story, though. What was that all about?

Well, you gotta understand, like, a lot of my stories, again, start with, like, you know, I was having cigars with an exiled Yemeni prince at a bar in Istanbul, and were talking about, you know, the King of Dubai's new innovation initiative. You know, I have stories that are like, you know, I worked with the U.S. department of Commerce on helping to teach Syrian refugees, how to launch startups in Turkey so that they could integrate themselves into society. Or I had a science project on the space shuttle when I was in high school. Right. You know, I have a lot of my stories sound kind of ridiculous. And she was the editor of the publication I was writing for at the time. So functionally, like, yeah, anybody who's ever written full time knows your editor is your boss, right.

And she just like when she told me eventually that until other people validated these stories, she just thought that I was like, I was making them up.

Yeah.

But, you know, part of it is I again, like, I'm not afraid of failure. I'm not afraid of tackling something like, something super hard like the Syrian refugee crisis is. And I'm also, I'm never married to the way that people would normally solve it. Books and food and blankets, necessary and important. But I look at that problem and I'm like, well, you know, a lot of these people are like CPAs or they have, they make beautiful crafts. Let's teach them how to build an e commerce store, the basics of logistics and billing and everything else like that. And so I always say yes to some of the weird situations and the weird solutions. And so I end up in weird.

Situations, incredible situations with incredible stories. But how tell us a little bit about the Syrian refugee camp, because that's fascinating.

So originally I met, I was invited to speak at Startup Turkey in Istanbul. They read my book or something like that and they wanted me to go speak. And it was phenomenal. Great energy conference also really eye opener for me because most of my work had been in either North America or Western Europe. And to see people having to go on stage pitching to startup investors, which is hard in their third, fourth, fifth language, which is insane, really opened my eyes hearing stories from startup entrepreneurs, from especially women startup entrepreneurs who weren't allowed to pitch their ideas to investors. They had to do it through their brothers or other, you know, older male. They were Saudi male relatives.

And nothing makes you feel a lot more comfortable with failure and risk than understanding how high your floor is, you know, and so that was eye opening for me. But then I met a guy from the United States embassy there and he was giving a speech on how the United States of America, our embassy is here to help you. Like, we will literally help you do business. We'll help. You know, he was part of the US Department of Commerce. And first of all, it just made me feel good because this was during the 2016 election and not weren't the most popular country on the block in the Middle east, etc. And it made me feel good to see a US government official up there talking about the ways in which we help people.

And I was meeting with him later, and he had this idea based one of my talks, which was sort of like the minimum viable product. It was just ripping off, like, Eric Reese's lean startup framework. And he was talking about how, you know, Turkey, I'm gonna get the numbers wrong here, but they're a country of like, something like 30 million people, and they have something like 10 million refugees from Syria. So imagine if in the United States, we had a hundred million refugees pop in, right? Like, we get our. We get really upset, over 10,000 right here. And it's. It's the greatest humanitarian crisis of the time, or arguably, it's definitely an incredible scale of humanitarian crisis. And he and I were talking about it, and the idea just evolved from there.

Like, listen, let's help them make Turkish rugs, and then let's just teach them how to do that, and then teach them how to build a basic e commerce shop and sell the rugs, et cetera. And we had an impact. Also, the cost of living is low over there, right? So the normal business economics that we think in terms of can employ 4, 5, 6 times as many people over there. And it worked well. We had an impact. I think what I was really going for there was actually just a proof of concept model, and it's what he wanted to working with the embassy, that if you can build walls or build malls. I don't know. Like, I'm trying to come up with a good tweet for this, but the US Ambassador to Romania.

So I was at an event at his house because this guy moved there, and I want to keep working with him. And he asked me point blank, he's like, hey, why are we spending U.S. department of State and U.S. department of Commerce funds on supporting tech entrepreneurs who aren't even Americans? And much to the horror of the gentleman who is escorting me, my reply was not super politically correct. And I told him, because successful entrepreneurs don't blow up our embassies. And the ambassador's like, fair enough.

Yeah, okay, works.

And it's true, right? And so, you know, worked on that project for a while. It ran into some. It ran into. This is a story we just can't dive into. But it ran into some issues after Turkey had their coup. And the issues. Some of the issues with that. Sorry, amazing stuff. But, yeah, it was A lot of fun. We had an impact and I think we at the very least proved out the model, that it's the classic give a man, teach a man to fish sort of thing. Right. If you teach somebody how to have a manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, you can feed them for a lifetime.

Absolutely, absolutely. And then they'll feed others, who will feed others. As we begin to wind down, I want touch on something because you've talked about feedback loops and you talked about smaller risk, not huge, uncalculated, large risk. Can you talk about how you developed the ability throughout your journey to be transparent with yourself? So to be authentic with yourself as you run your feedback loops and while doing that, you gradually could increase the risk that you took, the size of the risk that you took?

Yeah. So the magic is how small can I keep the risk? And I use startups as the example for this. I've got. I've got an app in mind that I want to build right now. And what I'm going to do is create a landing page, hire somebody for 300 bucks to create animated explainer video pretending it exists. I'm going to run Facebook ads targeting a population I know would be the best fit for this. And if nobody signs up for the thing, I'm not going to build the thing. This is a mistake I've made before where I spend tons of money and time building something that it turns out nobody wants. You know, or you know, or.

I quit my job and moved to Nashville to work at an agency instead of maybe just doing some consulting with an agency in advance, like, see if I can figure that out. Right. Or teaching. Right. That happened sort of accidentally, but I could easily have gone on to become a full time teacher, especially at the University of South Florida, which is, ironically the school I dropped out of. And by the way, every, like, Indian or Asian American will recognize this. My dad still thinks I should quit my job and go finish my bachelor's degree at usf. I was like the highest rated instructor in our division. But yeah, you know, like what was cool there though is I was teaching one week intensive courses both at Harvard and at usf. And what I found out is I don't like teaching.

I'm good at it, arguably based on the reviews, but just because I'm good at it doesn't mean I would like it long term. I really, by definition, when you're teaching, you're the one with the answers. And I really don't like being in a room where I know all the Answers because I'm not pushing myself then. Right. And I just also didn't have the patience. Harvard did something really smart, which is that they pair and USF did too, where they paired industry experts with, like, people who were very good teachers because teaching is itself a skill and a discipline that I do not have. And I have so much more respect now after watching, you know, Nicole Ames at Harvard, watching her manage the class and watching her ability to write questions in a way where the questions also taught you something.

Honestly, it was fantastic. Yeah, I probably could get good at that, but I don't want to and it wasn't that much fun for me. So instead of quitting my job and going to be a teacher and everything else like that, I figured out really quickly, hey, this isn't something I want to do, even if it pays well and even if it's cool to say, I teach at Harvard and stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, it's stripping it down to what is the fastest, simplest, the method with the least investment to validate whatever the core concept is. If it's a startup, will people sign up for the thing? Because if they sign up, don't sign up for it. Doesn't matter if it works or not. If it's a job, will I like this job? Will I like this industry?

Well, I like this business model. How can I figure that out as quickly as possible? I'll end with one last story because I know we're running a little out of time here. HubSpot, every five years gives you a sabbatical with like a unrestricted amount of time off and a bonus to go do something fun. Most people use it to go to Europe and Bahamas or whatever. I actually used that sabbatical to start here. So I was on sabbatical from HubSpot and I used it to start my role as the head of marketing.

No way.

Yeah. And so less people think. I have no fear, by the way. I was not at all convinced that leaving HubSpot was the right thing to do. Phenomenal people who I love, some of my best friends, incredibly brilliant people, fascinating work, great customers, great business. And fortunately, I had the privilege and the option of doing an even greater in depth experiment, which was temporarily leaving HubSpot on sabbatical and coming to work here. If it had not worked out those first months, I could have just gone back to HubSpot. Right? And I would learn.

That's really cool. That is. Yeah. So where can we find out more about you? On social media website. Find out more about Bird Eye wherever it is you want to point us. Point us there now.

Yeah. So in terms of me, I decided a long time ago that if I'm not going to change my last name, I'm going to beat you all in the face with it until you remember it. So malakarjunan.com is my website. Molakarjanan is my Twitter handle. You can also find me on LinkedIn. The bright side being no one else with my last name is good at marketing. So if you Google anything even close to my name, you'll find me. So definitely I would love for more people to reach out and chat. I want to help more people. I'm still doing mentorship calls with people from HubSpot. I have one later today. Actually, you know as well as others I'm happy to help and chat.

My defining, the way I define success in my career is I could at this point get hit by a meteor today and still be pretty confident that I had an immeasurable impact on the planet. Just with the number of other people that I've helped who aren't myself, get good at their jobs and win. And then definitely do. Check out birdeye.com I'm new here. There's a lot of marketers and entrepreneurs and business people who are on this call. Take a look at it, tell me what you like, tell me what you don't like with the ads, with the positioning, with landing pages. Send me whatever thoughts you have. There's no focus group better than the free market.

So if your listeners want, definitely take a look@birdeye.com and then hit me up one of my channels and let me know what you think about how we're selling, what we're selling, etc.

Thank you for doing that. And we'll put all of this in your show notes. And the thing that you allow, we've used this for a couple times, you allow access to your experiences, which I'm going to tell you. And for anyone out there who is a young entrepreneur or they're establishing business, they're thinking about making a transition wherever you get access. If you don't get it, go find it. But you are. It's being given to you right here on a silver platter by Sam and I cannot thank you enough for that. And just one thing popped in my head here. If there is one skill that you've developed over the years that has contributed the most to your success, what do you think it would be?

Simplification. And Focus. When I talk or consult or teach, I always bust out the who chases two rabbits, catches neither? It does not matter. If your family is actually starving and needs both rabbits to survive, you can still only chase one at a time. And the temptation is to, especially for entrepreneurial people who just get excited and they want to go do stuff, do fewer things better and do it as simply as possible. Don't build the super complex solution. Don't write the blog article, for example. Smart people suck at writing because they want to write something that impresses themselves and impresses their friends and family. Tom Schwab of Interview Valet always beat this into my head that what was obvious to me was amazing and completely news to him, you know, so simplification and focus.

I love the two rabbit stories. Even if your family is starving and you need both rabbits to survive, that's. That's really powerful when you think about it.

Yeah. Because you want to chase both of them and you may even need to chase both of them, but you've got to figure out a way chase one. And that one might keep you going for another day or two and then you can go find a way to chase another. Right. Like the only wrong answer to that scenario is to try and chase both.

At once and then end up empty handed. Yeah. Hey, Sam. Thank you. And if you want to find out, want to hear this podcast again, you can always go to the podcast website theathleticsofbusiness.com our previous podcast, we are on iTunes and Stitcher themaldergroup.com to find out more about what we do. I am on social media. Facebook is edmolitor is the handle. I'm molitor on Twitter. LinkedIn is the molitor group or at Molitor again, like Sam said, please ask questions, reach out, start a conversation. You know, like we talked.

I love conversations and I've followed some of your threads on LinkedIn and they're so cool because someone from three or four or five years ago, previous in your life might make a comment on something that you're mentioned in and bam, you make a comment right back and you remember the exact conversation you had a few years ago. And I think that's really powerful and that's really cool. And Sam, I cannot thank you enough.

Thank you for having me. This has been wonderful. I enjoy talking about this and I enjoy. If even one person heard this and got inspired to live the life they want to, then we won, man.

That's what it's about, isn't it? All right, well, thanks, Sam.

Thank you for listening to the athletics of business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, visit theathleticsofbusiness.com now get out there. Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.