Last week, we covered the first part of Brian Halligan's and Dharmesh Shah's keynote at our HubSpot INBOUND conference from two weeks ago.

After learning from Brian about how to get from startup to scaleup, today we'll look at what Dharmesh, HubSpot's CTO and co-founder, shared on how to grow better consistently by looking at the three key functions - marketing, sales and customer service - and how they should be creating a delightful customer experience at each key stage they take care of - attract, engage and delight.

Dharmesh started with a personal story of how he got to spend a whole dinner with Elon Musk. 

As the evening was progressing, Dharmesh asked Elon an important question, namely "How do you work towards solving really big problems?"

Here's how Elon explained it:

"Let's say you're trying to get your company from point A to point B. Every person on the team is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors." 

Now Dharmesh was a bit puzzled and of course, got to do some thinking around this.

Let's look at this a bit.

Did you know that only about 5% of startups become scaleups? 

Last week, INBOUND17 took place and it was by far the best INBOUND I've attended, probably the best conference of all the ones that I've been to in my life so far. 

It hosted about 21,500 marketing, sales and other professionals from around the world. 

I'm proud of the event and I'm proud of our co-founders - Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah - who are not only leading our team at HubSpot but also leading where the industry is going, paving the way for marketing, sales and service companies to grow and scale. 

During their keynote at INBOUND17, they shared their learnings from starting HubSpot 11 years ago to scaling up to a 1,800-people company and 34,000 customers in 90 countries.

This week, I want to share with you the key insights from Brian's part of the keynote. (Next week, we'll run through Dharmesh's). 

How to Get From Startup to Scaleup

There are 3 phases that new companies go through from starting up to scaling (if they get there):