No Priors Ep. 36 | With Hubspot's Co-Founder Brian Halligan

Customer relationships are the lifeblood of every business, and CRM, a key system of record for every business is facing a sea change. Riding those waves is Hubspot, one of my hero companies. A unlikely SMB marketing software startup founded in 2006 in Boston has over almost two decades become the primary contender to Salesforce through brilliant strategy and consistent execution and is as much a community and a movement as a business. They've recently made big bets on AI. Today, I'm sitting down with Brian Halligan, founder, long-time CEO, and now executive chairman of Hubspot to discuss learnings from the founder journey, staying innovative as an incumbent, the impact of AI on workflow software, and his new mission in climate tech with Propeller. Brian, thanks for doing this. Welcome to No Priors.

Thanks. I have two questions for you.

Shoot.

Why were we an unlikely success?

Oh, uh, I hope that is not offensive.

(laughs)

I guess-

'Cause of Boston?

Uh, I think 'cause of Boston, because in 2006 time period, the companies ... You must have heard this from VCs. The markets that people thought were go- worth going after were, like, high-end enterprise in a small number of categories.

Yeah. Things like that, yeah.

Right? And so the, um, the idea that you'd sell software for SMBs to manage an online presence and do social, like that, that felt unclear that you'd become a, you know, $25 billion plus business.

Interesting. It was clear to us. (laughs)

That's what makes you the founder.

Okay, I have another question for you. You, you referred to us as a hero company. By the way, I'm honored. Like, what's number one on your hero list?

Oh, man. Um, I feel like I'm gonna offend friends if I choose one. Uh, I don't know.

(laughs) What's your criteria?

If I think the product has changed the world, if I think, like, the, the people just made really interesting decisions.

Okay.

I'd probably say, like ... But this is just 'cause it's the one I'm closest to, Figma.

Yep.

I have a lot of admiration for Dylan and Evan, and, like, I think they changed how a lot of people worked, and it was also, like, not obvious at the beginning.

No, no. I am with you on that.

Yeah. But yeah, good questions. I'm supposed to be asking the questions.

(laughs)

It's supposed to be easy for me, Brian.

(laughs) All right, fire away.

Okay, so, uh, Brian, you, you actually started, I think, as a sales leader for PTC, like, famous enterprise sales organization in Asia. How did you go from that to the founder of Hubspot?

I actually started as PTC's first BDR in its headquarters in, uh, Boston and moved in sales and channels, and then they s- they were ... The company was going incredibly well, and they moved me over to Asia to start it, so I moved to Japan, and I lived in Hong Kong for a while, and, um, yeah, I worked there for 10 years. It was a really good run. Um, but I just think of my ... I have three chapters in my story. Chapter one was PTC, enterprise sales, eat your young, really a hard-charging culture, sales-driven culture, um, terrific company in some ways, uh, unusual culture, tough place to work. I left there, and I had a second chapter that couldn't be more different. Started the sales organization for a company no one's heard of anymore called Groove Networks, and Groove's famous for its founder, a guy named Ray Ozzie, who's the father of Lotus Notes, and it did okay. Like, we got to 20 million in revenue when Microsoft bought it, and it's, like, a little part of SharePoint now, but it really didn't tip, and it ... And what was, was interesting about that company and learnings for me was Ray was a product person, and the company was very much a product company, and he referred to himself as a social anthropologist, which I thought was really interesting. He'd sort of watched where technology was going, and he thought about how human behavior would change, and then he tried to create something kind of in the future to, to match it, and he did that with L- Notes, sort of hit the nail on the head. He did it with Groove. It was a little early. Groove was, like, a little bit of Dropbox, a little bit of Slack, a little bit of Notion. It was peer, on a peer-to-peer platform. It was just a little early. Microsoft bought it, but I learned a lot, how to envision and build compelling products. He was very early on product-led growth, freemium model, and, uh, I don't know anybody else in B2B who was really doing that at the time, and so I get to ... We didn't figure it out, by the way, but we got to learn a lot along there, and then I went back to business school. In those three sort of, you know, this sort of right-wingish PTC, this sort of left-wingish Groove, and this sort of back-to-basics MIT came into my head and really influenced me personally, and I think still influence Hubspot in a lot of ways.