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The GTM bets that shouldn't have worked, and did
One grew revenue 50x after half his team quit over the strategy. One brought in 50K signups in a single day with no paid budget. One generated 100M+ views from a stunt that took 50 hours to conceive. One asked every prospect to demo the product themselves instead of demoing it for them.
None of them followed the safe playbook. They treated GTM like an experiment, moved before they had proof, and made bets most founders would never get approved.
HubSpot for Startups documented all 6 stories in the free Bold Bets Playbook. The risks they took, why it was risky, and what it returned.
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—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 27, 1937
San Francisco, California, USA
88 years ago
The Golden Gate Bridge — one of the most photographed structures on Earth, spanning the entrance to San Francisco Bay, 4,200 feet of suspension bridge built in four years.
On May 27, 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrians — the first day of its existence as a public structure, before automobile traffic was permitted the following day. Two hundred thousand people walked across it. The bridge connected San Francisco to Marin County across the strait where San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean, a crossing that had been considered too difficult, too windy, too deep, and too earthquake-prone to bridge since the Gold Rush days.
Chief engineer Joseph Strauss had been advocating for the bridge since 1919. It had been dismissed by the War Department, by ferryboat operators who stood to lose business, and by engineers who thought the currents and fogs of the Golden Gate made construction impossible. Construction began in January 1933 and took four years and two months. The bridge cost $35 million and eleven lives. The death toll would have been higher without the safety net Strauss insisted on — a precaution that was almost unheard of in construction at the time. Nineteen workers were saved by the net; they formed the Half Way to Hell Club.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Golden Gate Bridge from Battery Spencer, Marin County — the view that has made it one of the most recognizable man-made structures on the planet.
At the time of its completion, the Golden Gate was the longest suspension bridge in the world, with a main span of 4,200 feet. It held that record until the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York surpassed it in 1964. The towers are 746 feet tall — at the time, the tallest structures west of the Mississippi. The International Orange color, now one of the most recognized design choices in American architecture, was chosen partly because it made the bridge visible through San Francisco's famous fog and partly because the structural engineer felt it complemented the natural setting.
The engineering achievement was considerable. The Golden Gate Strait experiences wind speeds that regularly exceed fifty miles per hour, powerful tidal currents, and the ever-present threat of major earthquake. Strauss and his team designed the structure to sway as much as 27 feet in high winds and to survive an 8.3 magnitude earthquake. It has been tested by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (magnitude 6.9) and survived intact, though subsequent inspections revealed vulnerabilities that required seismic retrofitting.
The Golden Gate has become one of the world's most visited tourist destinations, one of the most photographed man-made structures on Earth, and — more darkly — the most frequent site of suicide by jumping of any location in the world. The bridge's tragic second life as a suicide destination has been the subject of documentaries, policy debates, and an eventually constructed suicide net (completed in 2023) that was advocated for decades and delayed by cost concerns. The decision to eventually build it was made when research definitively showed that people who were stopped from jumping at the bridge did not simply go elsewhere.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The Golden Gate Bridge is the defining engineering achievement of the American New Deal era. Funded partly by federal resources and built during the Depression, it demonstrated that ambitious public works could employ thousands of workers, solve problems engineers had considered impossible, and create structures of genuine beauty. The argument for public investment in infrastructure is inseparable from the bridge.
Its seismic engineering has been continually updated as earthquake science has evolved. The Golden Gate is a living demonstration of infrastructure resilience and of the need for ongoing maintenance and improvement of structures that were designed generations ago. The lessons of its retrofitting program have been applied to bridges, buildings, and critical infrastructure worldwide.
The suicide net debate that surrounded the bridge for decades raises fundamental questions about architecture, public responsibility, and the psychology of means. The research showing that restricting access to a single method of suicide reduces total suicide rates — rather than simply displacing the deaths — was established partly through studies of the Golden Gate. The eventual construction of the net was a landmark in suicide prevention policy.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 27, 1937, 200,000 people walked across a bridge that had been called impossible. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world, built in four years in water too deep and winds too strong for the project to succeed. It is still standing, still beautiful, and still the most complex argument any city has ever had with a bridge.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"The span that couldn't be built in its time, in its place, at a cost the traffic would bear, is built."
— Joseph Strauss, Chief Engineer, Golden Gate Bridge, opening ceremony, May 27, 1937
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the engineering of the Golden Gate Bridge, the political battles that preceded it, the seismic retrofitting it has required, and the decades-long debate about the suicide net that was finally built in 2023?
