Nobody's tracking your hours. They're tracking your months and years.
That one line reframed how I think about working at a company growing as fast as
Harvey.
Yesterday we had
Molly Graham speak to the whole company. She was early at Facebook and Google, so she's had a front row seat to hyperscaling.
Three things stuck with me:
- It's a lifestyle, not a sprint: not a sprint, because you can't go all out and expect to last. Not a marathon either, because there's not necessarily a finish line to grind toward. The pace that matters is measured in quarters and years, so the real skill is managing your energy for the long term.
- Learn as fast as the company grows: your actual job at a place like this is to grow and evolve as fast as the company around you.
Brian Halligan used to say, both at HubSpot and in his MIT Sloan class, that the best thing you can join is a scale-up, not a startup. Going from 100M to 1B often teaches you far more as an operator than going from 1M to 10M.
- Prioritize the company, not the role: this is how I've made most of my career decisions over the past few years, and Molly put words to why. Ten years from now, no one is going to ask what my title was at Harvey. They'll ask what I did, what I saw, and what I learned.
The AI-native GTM mafias everyone will be name-dropping in a decade are getting built right now and relationships are the one other thing you take with you together with the learnings.
Molly had one more line I loved: Scaling is a privilege. A sharper version of "pressure is a privilege."
It's easy to take for granted that customers love your product and want more of your time. I got to feel that at HubSpot, and I'm feeling it again at Harvey. Many companies never do.
6 months into
Harvey. Excited to not waste the privilege!