Josh Payne's Unstructured Thoughts

Ok, this won’t be 27,459 items long. But . . . I’ve been at HubSpot for a little over 2 weeks now – enough time to notice a bunch of differences between my old life at IBM and my new one. So here, off the top of my head, are a list of differences between work life at a very large software company (IBM) and life at a small software company (HubSpot).  And for the record, none of these differences are meant to be judgments about which is better – they’re simply differences that a job searcher should keep in mind when determining what’s important to you and what kind of company you want to work at. Without further ado, in relatively random order:

1. At IBM, I was a young-un, probably in the bottom quartile in terms of age. At HubSpot, I am certainly in the top quartile.
2. At HubSpot I had lunch with the CEO my 2^nd week and had a quick hallway conversation with a board member yesterday.  That certainly didn’t happen at IBM (though I almost did demo to the IBM board once — a story for another time — but failed my ‘audition’).
3. At IBM, in my product marketing role, I was the key decision maker on the biggest strategic issues facing the product I worked upon (with much guidance, oversight and approval from my management chain).  At HubSpot, the same level of seniority gives me more of an input role on the biggest strategic issues facing the product at a one product company.
4. IBM, as I wrote previously, is increasingly a virtual, work from home company. It’s not a highly social environment.  I haven’t had a holiday party since 2005.  HubSpot is the absolute, polar opposite. There is a communal lunch every day, there was an evening of celebratory drinking, a barbecue and there’s a team outing in the works in a couple of weeks. If there’s one thing that is starkly different, it is the social nature of my new company.
5. Lack of lawyers. IBM gets sued all the time.. As such, we used to talk to our in house lawyers frequently about topics. At HubSpot, I don’t think a lawyer is employed.  This was really brought home in my first week at HubSpot. A call came into the support line – a writer wanted to use an image from the product documentation in a book. The marketing manager in the course of 30 seconds gave the green light, reasoning that the images are licensed under Creative Commons and the writer simply needed to abide by those terms. The same kind of request came to me at IBM and it took multiple emails back and forth with a busy lawyer over the course of weeks to reach a similar conclusion.
6. Online directories. At IBM “bluepages” was an indispensable, comprehensive, company wide directory that we could all access on the company intranet to find pertinent personal information about IBM employees (phone numbers, email addresses, online status, profile photos). HubSpot has virtually nothing of the sort. Its directory is a spreadsheet.
7. IBM was incredible about its systems and passwords and security. I really only needed three passwords: one for my Windows login, one for my email and one for the IBM intranet. And that IBM intranet password was pervasively used as a single-sign-on for virtually every internal application. I have many more passwords at HubSpot right now for many fewer internal systems.
8. Rate of change. At IBM I worked on products that were on premise software for large enterprises delivered via annual release cycles, semi-annual patches and the occasional hot fix. The rate of change was relatively slow. At HubSpot, we’re delivering new features to a hosted service every month, if not faster.
9. Email. HubSpot uses hosted email on gmail. IBM uses Lotus Notes. A world of difference.
10. Intranet. IBM’s intranet has millions and millions of pages, but the top-level landing page was a curated portal page with contributions from professional writers. HubSpot’s intranet is primarily a crowd-sourced wiki with an RSS feed at the top-level landing page.
11. Vacation policy. IBM has a progressive policy of not bothering with the overhead related to tracking salaried employees’ vacation. IBM employees are on the honor policy. HubSpot goes one step further –it has no vacation policy at all!
12. IBM, in one way, poses a greater product management challenge because there are more constraints on what can and can’t be done. Once we determined what the best option was from a business/product perspective, we then needed to reason through the intellectual exercise of grappling with the extra constraints a company like IBM faces. Product delivery at HubSpot faces fewer tactical constraints like IBM.
13. Transparency. HubSpot is pervasively transparent as a company policy. Metrics are all widely communicated. New ideas are out on the table quickly. IBM, by merits of its size, layers of management and regulatory obligations as a public company is not nearly as transparent. I knew big company news from IBM when the public did.
14. HR Benefits. It’s very hard to beat the benefits provided by IBM. If there’s a benefit, IBM likely provides it or has a policy on it. No small company like HubSpot can match the purchasing power of an IBM.

There are a bunch others . . . but I’ll cut it off there.

What do you think? What differences would you highlight? Which ones are important to you?

As I branch out from IBM, I’m interested to hear from you about what kind of topics you find most interesting on this blog. Tell me here.