There were two leaders I emulated along HubSpot’s path from $0 to $25 billion: Steve Jobs and Jerry Garcia. A lot of ink has been spilled about Jobs, but for this CEO, Garcia was just as influential. He had a fundamentally novel approach to pretty much everything. Here are some highlights of what I learned from him in hopes you can too.
Not just passion, OBSESSION
These days, I spend a lot of my time coaching Sequoia Capital’s startup founders on their journey to becoming scaleup CEOs. As part of that journey, I’ve gone deep on the “trillion dollar club CEOs,” founder/CEOs of companies that reached a trillion dollar valuation at some point. All of these folks — Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk — have one common trait: pure, all-consuming obsession. They aren’t just motivated; they aren’t just passionate; they’re obsessed with their craft. So was Jerry Garcia.
Garcia played 2,314 concerts with the Grateful Dead over 30 years. It was a grueling set of annual marathons in and of itself. In between these marathons he turned around and played another 1,500 concerts with his side project, the Jerry Garcia Band. He also wrote over 100 of those songs he played with his collaborator, Robert Hunter.
