This week has found me at Boston's Convention Center for another INBOUND conference, my eighth since joining HubSpot. For me, the event is a compressed few weeks of my normal job: meeting HubSpot's larger and more complex customers and helping them understand how to accomplish their goals with our software. For almost all the rest of the fifteen thousand attendees, the event is a hype train.
What is Red Lobster?
I'm back! For the first time in 394 weeks, I took two months of from this Friday email. For anyone following my professional boosterism on LinkedIn, I took two months off from that, too.
This week, I've been off. HubSpot closes its offices for the first week of July each year, so it's a chance to be away without missing too much. We've played the "staycation" game, which for me is like a succession of Saturdays. I have made coffee and fed the kids pancakes; I've played not a little golf; we've seen my Dad in Maine; we've caught a game at Fenway; I've pushed through almost all of a home project. The time off is good—the time at home is great.
In 2017, I started as a HubSpot consultant, advising go-to-market teams on their strategies and how to implement them with HubSpot software. Early on, HubSpot certifications were the critical part of my learning. After I was up-to-speed, certifications helped freshen and broaden my working knowledge. For example, before we launched Service Hub, I didn't know how to talk "customer service." The service strategy and software certifications helped me start on that learning curve. Ditto revenue operations.
The two HubSpot architecture certifications are for technical people what those classic marketing, sales, and service software certifications are for go-to-market consultants: a required 101 to working in this environment.
I would expect that precisely no one reading this email needs my opinion about last night's debate. (The 77 year-old bested the 81 year-old.) Opinions, they say, are like butts: we've all got one and no one wants to see yours. Besides, the good reading I find and send to you isn't often in punditry. The enjoyable part of my weekend paper isn't the opinion section, it's the review section.
The era whose stories I enjoy the most is America from roughly 1890 through 1950. It's the era of my grandfather's first decades and perhaps the era where your average fifty years of life saw the most change. The earliest stories include ice blocks keeping your root cellar chilled and the latest have you driving your air conditioned car to Dairy Queen for soft serve ice cream. The book from last week's essay chronicled the rural west from 1905 through the 30s. Its opening saw the closing expansionist west of the pioneers; its ending was somewhat metropolitan, although our heroes still drove cheap cars, they no longer had doubts of gas stations along the way.
My first summer read was a 500-page Wallace Stegner novel published in 1943. A friend hefted The Big Rock Candy Mountain from the counter and chuckled, "well this seems light."
A few months ago, I experienced something amazing. I saw an eclipse of the sun at Sugarloaf. That's accurate, but does nothing to convey what it was.