This is Kristen O'Brien, Managing Editor at NFX, and this is the founder list. Audible versions of essays from technology's most important leaders selected by the founder community. This is aligning vectors how to optimize to maximize impact, written by Dimesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot. I learned this from a late night dinner while glamping with Elon Musk many years ago. He said, every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.
I didn't fully understand this at first, so I had to go digging in my brain for what I could recall of linear algebra. Once I pieced together what he meant, the impact was profound. I later shared this session with my team at HubSpot. HubSpot is about fourteen years old now, and I've spoken at countless all minds gatherings, our version of an all hands, written hundreds of articles, and otherwise tried to share things I've learned with everyone.
Of all the things I've shared, this aligning vectors idea is one of the lessons that has resonated the most. It stuck. It has become part of our vocabulary and not a week goes by that I don't hear some reference to it in the halls of HubSpot. What's a vector? In order to understand why aligning vectors is so important, we first need to understand or remember what a vector is. A vector is a quantity having both magnitude and direction. Every person 10 on the competency impact meter.
They're clueful and committed. They're one of your best. Now that impact score in and of itself does not make them a vector because the impact score is just a magnitude. It measures the strength power impact, but there's no direction specified. We don't know which way this particular person is moving themselves or the company. It's what would be known as a Beller, not a vector. Now let's say we did know which direction this person was moving.
Then we'd have both magnitude and direction and they become a vector. This is commonly represented as an arrow. Now imagine if there are four people in your company and for simplicity, let's assume they all have an impact score, magnitude of 9. These are what you might call your a players or star performers. And let's assume we know which direction each of them was moving in. What goals they're solving for, which point they're trying to move to.
Since we know their magnitude and direction, they're all vectors. This is what Elon meant when he said everyone in your company is a vector. Some of all vectors, In linear algebra, it is possible to add 2 or more vectors together and get a resulting vector. The resulting vector is based on the magnitude of each vector being added and their direction.
So if we considered each person in the company as a vector, we could add the mump, get a sum of all vectors, and represent that sum with a single new vector. That new vector is basically the direction and momentum your company is moving. Every person is a vector, add them all up and you know how much progress your company is going to make. Let's illustrate with a few simple examples using our 4 hypothetical team members. Scenario 1, the null vector.
Let's say that 2 of your people are pulling in one direction and the other 2 are pulling in the opposite direction. In this case, the sum of those 4 vectors is what's called a null vector. A null vector has 0 magnitude and no direction. So in our example, the company would be making zero progress. It's important to note that this is despite all four of the people being high impact competent Pete, In fact, they could all have been 10 out of 10s. They're perfect, and the result would still be 0.
If you have perfect people and they're perfectly misaligned, The result is 0 progress. Scenario 2, suboptimal. Of course, that doesn't really happen in real life where 2 or more people are moving in the opposite direction. That's just a hypothetical, right? This would never happen in our Morgan. Would it? Let's assume not. Let's look at a more realistic example. What's more common is that most people are pulling in the correct ish direction.
Except for that one person, there always seems to be that one person. But the sum of all vectors here is not 0. However, it's also not the optimal possible vector. The resulting vector is not 36 units of impact pointed in the correct direction. This is better, but it's still not optimal. Scenario 3, align vectors, the holy grail of alignment, The optimal answer is to have all the vectors aligned, that is everyone is moving in the correct direction towards a unified goal.
That's how you have maximum impact and how you make maximum progress. Add up all the vectors and the magnitude of impact is actually 36. Nothing's being weighed did, there's no inefficiency, there's no one pulling in the wrong direction, this is what we should be all striving for. This is what align vectors looks like. Now that we have an understanding of what aligning vectors means, let's dig in.
Applying aligning vectors to your Morgan, Although in the examples used, we're talking about aligning individual people with the organization's goals so that everyone is pulling together in the right direction, that is just one of 3 broad ideas. Here are the vectors that need to be aligned. Align individual teams, product, marketing, sales, service, etcetera, with the organization's goals and align the organization's goals with the needs of the customer.
That third one is one that a surprising number of organizations lose sight of. The people and teams are working together, but they're solving for the wrong thing. They should be solving for the customer, but instead, they're solving for internal tactical goals that lose sight of what the customer actually wants and needs. How aligning vectors can help protect project planning. If you're like most organizations, you have a list of projects or initiatives somewhere.
If you're good, you try to measure how well those projects are doing. What we started doing at HubSpot is looking at projects that are not going well and asking ourselves these two questions. Is the magnitude of investment in this project sufficient for what we want to accomplish? If not, we have a magnitude problem. We need more investment, more resources. Are the people and other related projects aligned with this one and vice versa. If not, we have a directional alignment problem.
We need clearer direction, better communication, and readjustment realignment of vectors. Going through this exercise is often very revealing. Sometimes it's shockingly obvious that we have a magnitude problem and other times it's obvious that we have an alignment problem. It's vectors all the way down. I've now become obsessed with vectors. It's vectors all the way down. Every piece of content your marketing team produces is a vector. They should all be aligned.
The partnerships you forge should be aligned vectors. It's not just about magnitude, I. E, how big is the company you're partnering with, but how aligned is the partnership with both of your respective goals. If you're raising funding, don't just solve for deal terms, maximum valuation, minimum dilution, etcetera, but figure out which investor is the best aligned with the kind of business you're trying to build.
That'll likely have a much larger impact on your outcome and your happiness than whoever offers the most money or highest valuation. How to increase progress without better people or more funding? Here's the thing that I found the most startling about this whole thing. It's profoundly simple. Assume you had a hold on everything else constant, no new people, no upgrades, to the skills of existing people and no additional funding.
Even then, you can still improve your rate of progress and level of success by better aligning your vectors. You can make more progress with the amazing people you already have simply by better aligning their vectors. We should pause and reflect on that for a moment. Because it means that all of us have hope. We can be better. We can accomplish more. We can have more impact. We are not dependent on more money or smarter people. We can go further and have more impacts by aligning vectors.
The team that gets 80% of the decisions right, but is a 100% aligned, will beat the team that gets a 100% of the decisions right, but is only 80% aligned. So what do you think? For more audio essays from the people who've built companies like Instacart, Facebook, TrelloHubSpot and Dropbox, visit the founder list at nfx.com Omri subscribe to the nfx podcast at pod cast.nfx.com Omri wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kristin O'Brien, and this is the founder list.