From App to Suite to Platform, with HubSpot's Co-Founder Brian Halligan

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
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 it's as much a community and a movement as business. They've recently made big bets on AI. Today I'm sitting down with Brian Halligan, founder, longtime 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.

**Brian Halligan** (0:48)
Thanks. I have two questions for you.

**Sarah Guo** (0:50)
Shoot?

**Brian Halligan** (0:50)
Why were we an unlikely success?

**Sarah Guo** (0:53)
Oh, I hope that is not offensive. I guess-

**Brian Halligan** (0:56)
Because of Boston?

**Sarah Guo** (0:57)
I think because of Boston, because in 2006 time period, the companies, you must have heard this from VCs, the markets that people thought were worth going after were like high-end enterprise in a small number of categories. And so 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 $25 billion plus business.

**Brian Halligan** (1:28)
It was clear to us.

**Sarah Guo** (1:31)
That's what makes you the founder.

**Brian Halligan** (1:32)
I have another question for you. You referred to us to Hero Company, by the way, I'm honored.
What's number one on your hero list?

**Sarah Guo** (1:39)
Oh, man. I feel like I'm going to offend friends if I choose one.

**Brian Halligan** (1:44)
What's your criteria?

**Sarah Guo** (1:46)
If I think the product has changed the world, if I think like the people just made really interesting decisions. I'd probably say like, but this is just because it's the one I'm closest to, Figma. I have a lot of admiration for Dylan and Evan. I think they changed how a lot of people worked and it was also not obvious at the beginning.
But yeah, good questions. I'm supposed to be asking the questions. It's supposed to be easy for me, Brian.
Okay. So Brian, 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?

**Brian Halligan** (2:27)
I actually started as PTC's first BDR and its headquarters in Boston and moved into sales channels. And then 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, yeah, I worked there for 10 years, a really good run.
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, terrific company in some ways, 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 is famous for its founder, a guy named Ray Ozzie, who is the father of Lotus Notes. And it did okay. Like we got the 20 million in revenue and Microsoft bought it and it's like a little part of SharePoint now.
But it really didn't tip. And what 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 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 match it. And he did that with Lit 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 on a peer-to-peer platform, 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 like Groove, freemium, model. And I don't know anybody else in B2B was really doing that at the time. And so I got 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 and those three sort of, you know, the sort of right wingish PTC, the sort of left wingish Groove and the sort of get back to basics MIT came into my head and really influenced me personally. And I think still influence HubSpot in a lot of ways.