HubSpot is a hot startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts with ~160 employees as of this writing. Many, including HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, credit much of HubSpot’s success to its effective hiring practices. So, how does hiring work?

Hiring Mantra

Hiring at HubSpot is an extremely quantitative affair. Data is collected about candidates at every stage of the game and only the absolute best scoring candidates make the final cut. Candidates are interviewed by many people at the company including several VP level employees and often the CEO.

The Rubric for Engineers

There are 6 qualities that all Engineers must have to be offered a position

1. Add energy to the team
2. No assholes
3. Like the product (I.e. motivated by making a difference)
4. Can not be silo’d into one technology or language
5. Pass a short programming test
6. Ask questions (i.e. Why are we making this?)

The Difference Between Good and Great

I asked Yoav Shapira, the VP of Engineering at HubSpot about the hiring rubric. He said that the difference between a good engineer and a great engineer is the tendency to ask high-level questions. “Great software developers don’t just build to spec. They will ask why are we building this? Is this the best and most efficient way to do this?”

Photography by dprevite

“Fight Brewer!, Fight Back!, Fight Brewer!, Fight Back!, …” was the chant of the crowd on Mass Ave. in Boston today. A group of angry protesters assembled and marched under police cover in protest of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who was visiting Boston today. According to FOXNews, Governor Brewer is in Boston for the National Governors Association Meeting. (It was the first hit on Google. I don’t read Fox News, I swear.)

I snagged a few choice photos of the crowd shaking their fists and yelling toward a crowd of almost entirely white onlookers. I wasn’t fast enough, however, to catch a Boston local whistling and giving the protesters the double-bird. I assure you, however, that he was there, basketball shorts and all.

The group of protesters was fierce, but small in comparison to the size of their police escort. The crowd was no doubt muted by the downpour. A local police officer, who had to work the protest in the rain, remarked that he was happy for the rain because it meant that the protesters would be gone faster.

The main lesson I took away from this is that if you want to have a great protest, it is absolutely essential that you have a loud, angry woman with a mega phone and a small child shouting at the top of her lungs. It just wouldn’t have been the same without her…

In South Boston, there is a fort called Fort Independence, which is open to the public most days. Towering 20 feet over Boston Harbor, Ft Independence is surrounded by grassy fields, volleyball courts, beaches, playing children, American flags, and fried food.

Tracy and I headed out to the fort because we heard that it was friendly to dogs and served soft ice cream. We had nothing to do and it was the day after independence day, so it sounded like a perfect little trip.

The area didn’t disappoint. Finding parking was a breeze and max met a friend and played on the beach instantaneously. Max’s friend even had his own ball.

Castle Island sports a huge phallus that is visible from the water. I’ve never seen it up close before, and it was pretty impressive. Above is a photo of Tracy and Max sitting next to it for perspective.

We weren’t able to go into the fort because it was closed. Maybe it was closed for the holiday.

There haven’t been many attacks on New England by sea lately, so at this point Fort Independence seems to be mostly guarding Pleasure Bay. Pleasure bay is walled off by a causeway and has a nice boat club inside.

The best part of Castle Island, however, is the ice cream and fried foods restaurant called Sullivan’s. The chicken fingers at Sullivan’s are to die for. Tracy had the fish and chips and it was “respectable”. Tracy had a maple and walnut ice cream that was “delish”.

Photography in respective order by: Fort Independence, Tom Rose, Google

What would you rate this on the embarrassing scale from 1 to 5?

I just attended a presentation at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center led by Al Burnett, the general council for Vecna Robotics. He had some interesting things to say about intellectual property (IP) and how it could be effectively used in very young companies.

The short of it: get some patents, and do it as cheaply as possible. Don’t worry too much about the quality of the patents, the claims, or the enforceability.

Why? Well, patents are only enforceable when they come along with litigation (read: very expensive.) If you are a young company, or a small company, you lose whenever litigation occurs. The solution, therefore, is to avoid litigation entirely.

In that sense, patents are not a protection against people trying to use your technology. They are actually protection against people trying to bring suits against you. And when it comes to law suits, patents beats no-patents.

This is how they work. If a company files a suit against you for infringement on one of their patents or technologies, there is a good change that they are a competitor of yours and they are fighting you because you are stealing their market share. A patent is something you can fire back with to say, “I’m not going to lay down and take it from you.” Patents are negotiating chips that you can use to protect yourself from underhanded attacks.

Patents have some other key benefits too: (1) They make your company look more attractive to potential acquirers. They indicate that you are serious, you’re technical, and you know what you’re talking about. (2) They make you look tough when you are being evaluated by competitors. In this sense, more patents are better. A single patent will make you look casual, but several will make you look like a real player.

The end result: get patents, but get them on the cheap. They need to be written well, but not that well. A big company can tear anything apart, so don’t invest in trying to make patents bullet proof. They won’t be.

Photo by Senator Mark Warner

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick speaks at the opening of the largest global startup competition ever. Visit www.masschallenge.org for more info.

Startup companies all grapple with the same issue at first. They are trying to find that magical product offering and marketing effort that will be the turning point which causes revenue to skyrocket. Well, Clayton Christensen et al. have been researching successful startup companies to determine exactly what conditions typically exist right before that turning point.

What he has found is that companies typically experience a marketing breakthrough immediately prior to their phases of rapid growth. This marketing breakthrough is the discovery of the key “job to be done” that customers have for which they “hire” the product they are purchasing. This breakthrough represents a shift away from the ordinary marketing mind set.

Most companies complete their marketing segmentation in one of two ways:

1. Customer Segmentation - Customers are grouped by a set of observable characteristics that correlate with the value of the product to them. A commonly used customer segmentation is psychographic segmentation. For example, one psychographic segment might be wives who like expensive, luxurious handbags.

2. Product Segmentation - Products are grouped according to various categories along a spectrum of cost and functionality. For instance, consider Toyota’s assortment of sedans and trucks: corolla, camry, avalon, tacoma, etc.

Christensen’s latest research suggests that perhaps an alternate mind set might be useful. Instead of matching the product to the customer type or product category, match the product to the job the customer has when he or she goes looking for the product.

For example, consider a store selling milk shakes. Traditional marketing strategies would suggest matching the qualities of the milkshake to the preferences of the customer. This, however will result in the averaging of a wide variety of different preferences resulting in a vanilla, one-size-fits-none product. On the other hand, if the product is matched to the job the customer has for the product a different strategy emerges.

A little ethnographic research will reveal that one of the main reason people purchase milkshakes in the morning is so they have something interesting to do in their cars during their commute. (Believable, but hardly intuitive.) The “job” that the customer has is for something fun and entertaining to occupy him or her on the way to work. Once armed with this information, it is possible to make killer product decisions which greatly increase the value of the product to the customer. In this case, the thickness of the milkshake can be increased so that the milk shake takes longer to drink. Chunks of fruit can be added to the drink so that periodically … thunk … a fun and interesting piece of fruit flies up the straw. Also, a quick serve line can be added so that customers can get their milk shakes in a hurry when they are running late.

The point is this, if you are able to discover the “job” that your customer is hiring your product to do. You will be in a much stronger position to capitalize on improvements that can increase the value proposition of your product. If not, you run the risk of tailoring your product to fit the wrong market, or worse creating a one-size-fits-none vanilla milkshake.