“The more room you have to fail, the more space you have to innovate.” -Christopher O’Donnell
In this episode, Jay interviews Christopher O’Donnell, SVP of Product at Hubspot, and founder of the rock band The Providers. Christopher manages a rapidly growing creative team at Hubspot, and thus he and Jay chat deeply about fostering creativity as a small business owner, but also: adaptability as an entrepreneurial skill set, celebrating the little wins, soliciting feedback from the right people, imposter syndrome, gap awareness, running controlled experiments and viewing one’s self as a talent agent/coach.
Episode Highlights:
02:07 Shifting the Power in Shop & Buy
07:11 Implementing Peer Leadership
16:19 Be “The Agent”
24:26 Shaping Behavioral Styles Creatively
30:06 Celebrate
36:00 Simplify It Down
42:13 How to Make a Record
48:43 Your Dog Walking Time
Resources:
@JayRooke and @markitecht chat deeply about fostering creativity as a small business owner, but also: adaptability as an entrepreneurial skill set, celebrating the little wins, soliciting feedback from the right people and so much more at… Click To Tweet
Connect with Christopher:
Website: https://www.hubspot.com/christopherodonnell
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christopherodonnellguitar/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markitecht
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markitecht/
Inspirational Quotes
- “I think one of the errors that earlier stage business owners make… is they try to structure and run their entire company like a big corporation.” -Jay Rooke
- “I think the number one way to build that kind of confidence is to be celebrating little wins along the way and to have this sense of a shared experience of winning.” -Christopher O’Donnell
- “There are two types of people: people who energize you and people who exhaust you.” -Christopher O’Donnell
- “The more room you have to fail, the more space you have to innovate.” -Christopher O’Donnell
- “If you celebrate that, you start lowering the bar and lowering the bar and lowering the bar and making the goals easier and easier to hit. And you end up doing less and less and less and celebrating yourself more.” -Christopher O’Donnell
- “I think that that perspective shift of being able to view it all as an experiment frees up so much of the hand wringing around needing to get things dialed in perfect, and allows us to be much more freeform, and connected to the customer and the market feedback.” -Jay Rooke
- “Oftentimes, during those early years and when a team is understaffed, founders will let their passions go to the side in the hopes of exchanging those for success, stability, that company, etc. I think that can work for a short term push, but I think in the long term hurts the person more than it helps them.” -Jay Rooke