Brian Halligan

I started HubSpot with my classmate Dharmesh in 2006. We grew it from 2 people and an idea called “inbound marketing” to 8,000 people, a public company and a CRM platform used by millions today.

Along the way, I learned a ton about creating a category, creating a culture, pivoting at scale, going multiproduct, competing with giants, building a channel, product led growth, going public, managing public investors, managing boards, managing myself, knowing when to step away, etc, etc.

On that long and winding path, we met Jim Goetz and Pat Grady from Sequoia who led our Series D. That worked out pretty well for both Sequoia and HubSpot. Sequoia gave us credibility, plugged us into an amazing network and helped us think through our business model to scale. They were a terrific partner when we were private and then again after we went public, buying HubSpot shares again through their unique capital structure. I hope to pay it back by helping folks who were just like myself along the journey.

I’m on the lookout for startup founders who want to turn into scaleup CEOs.

I’ve made most of the mistakes in the book in building HubSpot from the ground up. I’d love to help Sequoia founders avoid those mistakes, learn how to be a CEO, scale their company and achieve their mission.

I think we’ll look back decades from now and talk about what an amazing time it was to be building a company. I look at 2006 when we started noodling on the idea that became HubSpot. That turned out to be excellent timing as it was the start of the “Software as a Service” wave. I think we’ll look back at 2024 as being an even better time to be building as it is the start of the “Service as a Software” wave.

Get in touch with Brian