HubSpot

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• bearish assessment Unattributed

  But still, yet and still, like, that's a real thing where you can chase you by using GPUs that you don't even own, that Anthropoc owns, can chase down HubSpot for your use case like that.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I was like, cancel HubSpot. I'm building my own CRM. Like, I was like, like, this thing sucks. Like, I want it to work for me. Yeah. I could just build my own.

• bullish endorsement Yamini Rangan

  If I'm meeting an existing customer, then I go into, you know, our co-pilot, like summarize the company, summarize the context, summarize all the last conversations. What were the next steps? What are the objections that these customer is, has been talking about? And where should I hit all of that?

• bullish prediction Yamini Rangan

  I think when we think about the next five years and in CRM, at least in applications, it is, you know, composable UI.

• bullish prediction Yamini Rangan

  there's a future where it's hands-free. There's a future where CRM is actually listening to the conversations that are happening.

• bullish prediction Yamini Rangan

  And I think we also believe that the future is a hybrid, you know, workforce where it's agents and humans working together and augmenting each other to get better results. And in that, you know, world, a network of agents is really important.

• bullish prediction Yamini Rangan

  Otherwise, you're going to lead to having point agents very much like point solutions and point apps. They didn't work. So point agents are not going to work either.

• bullish assessment Yamini Rangan

  there's a context layer on top of that data layer, which is, you know, something that we believe we can uniquely provide because we look across the whole customer journey and we can connect the dots and we can give the age in all of the context.

• bullish assessment Yamini Rangan

  There are new things that you can now ask of unstructured data in real time to get better insights. And we're so excited about that because we are uniquely positioned.

• bullish fact_claim Yamini Rangan

  We have, you know, 1.8 million CRM weekly active users. And every day they're generating all of these conversations and they're using this.

• bullish assessment Yamini Rangan

  you look at this technology and the reason all of us got excited was that we could solve age old problems that we've never been able to solve within the CRM industry with this technology.

• neutral prediction Yamini Rangan

  I do think that the industry is going to go through all three phases, we are probably right in the differentiation stage right now.

• neutral fact_claim Yamini Rangan

  Our first product, uh, features were released in March, 2023. It was the first version of chat spot because the thing that we saw is, uh, you now have a natural language interface into everything that you do within the application.

• bullish assessment Yamini Rangan

  you have to have some core tenets around culture, but you're constantly evolving it like a product.

• bullish endorsement Yamini Rangan

  if you built it organically, one, you can actually speed up your organic pace of innovation because any primitive in the platform layer would benefit every one of your hubs. And two, it actually benefited the customers better.

• bullish assessment Yamini Rangan

  And the first belief that we had is that the two to 2000 space is mid market. It's a huge market and, uh, point solutions or enterprise solutions don't serve them well. And we have a unique value proposition.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I feel that HubSpot was at least, I worked in Boston for three years in venture. Yeah. And, and it was pre HubSpot IPO, but I knew the team and the ecosystem. And I feel like it was maybe certainly never expected to be the success that it has been today. I think it was always a strong business. Ryan and Dharmesh would disagree. I think they would disagree, but I think they would say that they were underestimated along the way. I think they would agree with, uh, agree with that. I don't think, um

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  The accuracy is so poor. I mean, the first year we did it, we didn't know that you're going to go through huge digital acceleration. And 2021, we were talking about that. That was, uh, 81% net new era growth. One of our fastest growing years, we were billion and we added like 500, you know, million to it, like almost immediately. Right. So no, we didn't plan for that. And then the following two years was a lot of digital optimization. People pre-bought a lot in one year. They bought a lot of stu

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  HubSpot is a $40 billion business in the CRM space.

• mixed criticism Unattributed

  the pitch lacked the particulars perhaps for you know um you know competitive reasons he didn't want to get into it too much uh the pitch actually was probably a 75 I would give it Dow it because I'm going to downgrade it because didn't have like an example of malware you know like it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I know it won the founders Institute so um he didn't it was a good pitch I gave the pitch like an eight and I give the idea like a 10 um it's literally like a groundbreaking idea

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I love this idea I'm an investor in disconnect disconnect is uh trying to keep people secure from privacy issues and this is a very very similar concept idea genre and I think it's going to get more and more important which is people in your company should not have browsers they should be going through a virtual browser that's contained in a window that is another instance so that it doesn't take over your desktop and take your documents right this is a great great idea virtualization of your br

• neutral criticism Tyler

  I could use a little bit of work I think it's got a little bit of the Web 2.0 as opposed to web 3.0 feel I would like to see big bold photos as opposed to little tiny photos but I think that's a transition that's easily made

• bullish assessment Tyler

  idea is great direct it's a fine platform it's a it's a novel platform and what would you give that on a scale once though um yeah this is the stuff that people like Dave like to invest in and it's I would call it it's an it's an eight of an idea I gave it eight and a half so it's a great idea

• neutral assessment Tyler

  it's a seven it's a seven no why is it only only a seven some people might say hey that was a very clear pitch it was a very clear pitch because it's hard to get excited about Vanilla Ice

• neutral assessment Tyler

  I felt this pitch was um vanilla it was a vanilla pitch I I give it a seven 75

• neutral assessment Dharmesh Shah

  the thing that keeps me up is that um if we end up you know crashing and burning it won't be uh it won't be murder it'll be essentially a form of suicide

• bearish prediction Dharmesh Shah

  if we end up you know crashing and burning it won't be uh it won't be murder it'll be essentially a form of suicide it'll be self- imploding it's like the culture didn't work something broke

• bullish fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  we're about 8500 customers now

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  marketing industry is huge we have 8,500 customers there are millions of businesses that should be doing whether they by hopspot or something else should be doing is it really Millions yeah it's Millions it's Millions so you predict you haven't hit 1% not even not even close we haven't scratched the surface

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  then we rais another $12 million within a year after that

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  when we raised our series a we raised $5 million

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  we've raised a little over 100 million now

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  it's one of the things that's made HubSpot you be the modest success it is so far

• bullish endorsement Dharmesh Shah

  we have this uh relatively rare thing at HubSpot ... on that Wiki WE Post just about everything cash balance board decks wow notes from the board deck W anything

• neutral assessment Dharmesh Shah

  the data shows that these kinds of people tend to be happier than these kinds of people

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  whether we designed it or not we have a culture here

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  the thing we Lear Learned was people were exceptionally happy at HubSpot right and the most common reason given was the other people at HubSpot

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  about 450 a little over 450

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  we have customers on annual contracts we have customers that are monthly yeah oh and they choose what they want

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  the data that we get from the someone didn't cancel is worth much more to us than the cash value of someone who paying us up front because if they paid us for a year and they signed the contract if they really thought the product sucked we wouldn't know that for another 12 months

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  starts at $200 a month and goes up to about 3,000 or so um up from there but yeah and the majority of the clients towards the $200 or towards the $300 how does it uh break down the average is probably around 5600 so somewhere in that range wow so that's a that's not an insignificant spend for a small business but it's an insignificant span for a mediumsized business yeah so our sweet spot customer someone a company with between 20 and let's say 200 employees somewhere in that range so it's in it

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  we don't uh support PPC within HubSpot which is uh oh really we don't support uh paid marketing actually because we're we're maniacally uh passionate about and this might change over time but around inbound marketing which is you know for all the money that's being spent on you know things like PPC and billboards and trade Journal ads and those kinds of things uh we think businesses are much better off just invest investing in content and pulling their customers in versus kind of blasting their

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  we have a essentially a lightweight CRM like a contact system um which a lot of our small business customers just use as their CRM because they're just moving up from spreadsheets essentially and it's good enough and we have a mobile client and it's uh yeah it's been reasonably popular

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I got this thing HubSpot it sucks in all of contacts your all of your lists and then it lets you shows you your SEO of your blog post suggests keyword suggest what you should blog about and then you blog about it and then it shows you who's what lead you're getting

• bullish prediction Dharmesh Shah

  our thesis at the time was you know A10 billion company does not exist in marketing software because it didn't need to exist before it was very artsy craftsy kind of discipline and now it's a data driven discipline so someone will create a massive sap SEO style software company that marketing

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  I think one of the things that makes uh makes Market exciting both HubSpot and all the SAS businesses is that now we can get to a body of customers that was just impossible to really reach

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  the idea and HubSpot was to kind of this integrated platform that allowed mere mortals small businesses to kind of do in what we call inbound marketing to be able to pull customers in instead of doing outbound marketing advertising

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  hubspot's about uh 6 and 1/2 years old and the idea behind HubSpot was to create a marketing platform and the the idea was we were looking at um so we were both grad school students my co-founder and I met at MIT and the observation was that this kind of this thing called the internet was happening and the old school marketing methods were just weren't working like advertising

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  one of them that's been a rocket ship is of course HubSpot everybody's been talking about that buzzing about it software as a service and um I was actually I didn't understand the business and and I think that's probably a pretty good sign to our mesh that it's a good business when people don't understand it isn't it

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  this sense of entitlement out of why combinator or other places and competition between the angels to getting the deal has led to this dysfunction

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the company went out of business

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  there's a thing called A S letter when you invest and I have a side letter that is I need a monthly update and in terms of information rights at any point I can ask you to give me the bank account log in the iTunes login and all this data and I specifically put Google analytics like I put the names of the products or similar products

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  when the market is hot you fix it Jason you fix it

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  if you have board guidance that gets in the way of your sort of founder myth of the the 19-year-old rising up and and being smarter than everybody yeah I me something yeah none of those people are the outliers

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  governance for these private companies is critical and um this idea that the founder has to be empowered is like you know maybe a lot of Founders need a little bit of adult supervision and some guidance

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  it has been the height of arrogance of entrepreneurs in the last couple years to say I don't want to have a board I want to have control of my company I don't want governance and doing a party round which is you know 50 people invest 50k nobody's on the board I didn't give up control

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  when you write a story based on a press release and you don't call Google to confirm that the company was caught you remember they did that one they like they literally wrote that somebody you know had been bought by Google and the company didn't exist or whatever and there was just somebody sending a press release they don't even call and do factchecking at Tech crunch

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Tech crunch like to call it journalism is kind of like a little bit of a stretch like I mean some of what they do is like service in its own way to the Tech Community

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  if we write about these things I think we also write about them like oh it's a startup they've got funding has and kinger is on the board rather than going deeper and actually like getting third party scientists questioning harder

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  with hubot where people bought both direct from a vendor or direct from a reseller then I would say stick to direct just because you you just need to learn so much much early on and channel introduces a whole set of variables that are hard

• bullish fact_claim Ryan

  and like you said it's like 40% of their revenue is from this guy

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Channel tended to overperform a bit so on attainment I would say they were more like 30 to 50% better than direct but what ended up happening was not only were they better at attainment but our cost of acquisition was lower because we tended not to pay marketing for each of those right someone else was basically so they were 30 to 50% more efficient but they didn't spend as much money they were even more efficient and you said ear in the presentation the LTV was greater right so that made them e

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  at HubSpot we also added a little bit of our flavor to the story um and this is something that Pete uh did really well he figured out that resellers uh marketing agency uh owners weren't really good at sales they were really marketing people

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  so certainly seek out some of the blog post perhaps on HubSpot sales about that because it is quite a in-depth topic

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  one thing that's different at HubSpot that we did which most people don't do is we never change the commission uh between these levels so we PID 20% commission at every level no matter what

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  for every dollar of commission that we paid a reseller they usually got at least $10 to $15 of services that they were able to build and that too in a recurring fashion

• bullish fact_claim Arjun Morthy

  we had something like 2500 marketing agencies that sold for us and almost exclusively sold for us without even having to ever promise to be exclusive

• bullish fact_claim Arjun Morthy

  at HubSpot when we filed for our to go public in our S1 we wrote that our reseller program was a competitive Advantage

• bullish assessment Arjun Morthy

  it had the best ratio of lifetime value to cost of acquisition of all the segments that we had in our sales

• bullish assessment Arjun Morthy

  in HubSpot we drove about 40% of our Revenue through the channel sales program it was the single largest segment

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  dares from HubSpot gave me some really good advice right dares said look push your product out there uh even before it's ready people are going to pay you money they're going to ask for their money back because of things they don't like about the product but that it's going to be super super painful but that is the best signal you can get about what to fix

• neutral fact_claim David Skok

  I have to thank Gail Goodman who's a CEO of Constant Contact who brought this up in the HubSpot board meetings the first time I heard it's a credit to her

• bullish assessment David Skok

  it's a free tool it drove a lot of viral spread it was simple for the customer low work required high value delivered and then it delivered another Valley which was it built trust with the customer because it was such a well done report that it was obvious these guys were experts so that once you had that trigger you want to ask them the question well how could you help me fix this problem and then the last lesson that I think is really important here is this is a great example of how the produc

• bullish endorsement Cheryl Dimitri

  we've been using HubSpot here at launch for a couple years and we love it it's incredible for marketing you know that but also my sales team my sells team loves loves it for CRM it's fast it's intuitive its robust and they have a great program called hub spot for startups this is a program that helps startups grow and scale faster and better it's super cool includes a ridiculously steep discount on the hub spot growth platform up to 90 percent off for startups in this education and programming a

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  so we have a real company here and what I love about companies in this space is where this is where we have done I think as a firm launch and the incubator and the syndicate have really done a great job is when we find somebody who's got 10 20 30 km month helping them 10x that

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  open source can have a powerful impact on spaces where innovation is moving slowly and so it can be a big advantage I'm not sure in the enterprise space here if it will be or not but it would be very interesting to talk to your customers

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  let me take a moment to tell you about hub spot which we use and love here at launch... HubSpot is when we stand behind cuz I had the founder on the podcast in year one and HubSpot has had an amazing run as a startup and they have a new project actually it's been around for a couple years down I think about a hub spot for startups and this program will help startups grow faster in scale it's super cool and includes a ridiculously steep discount on the hub spot growth platform... thousands of sta

• bullish endorsement Mike Ghaffary

  we love and use HubSpot at launch it is awesome for marketing and for your sales team they swear by it they love the CRM which is fast intuitive and robust we've been using it for years and we love it

• neutral fact_claim Mike Ghaffary

  it's a marketplace for long term housing instead of Airbnb as kind of short-term housing it's more of a managed marketplace where they actually go lease these homes for a year and then turn around and rent them

• bullish assessment Mike Ghaffary

  hub house saw that metric go from like low single-digit percentage when they started then they added a bunch of supply and they started seeing that number hit 10% like holy crap 10% of our users I actually just came from our own network we didn't have to reacquire them and that number keeps climbing up that's your strategic advantage

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the supply and demand is so far our whack I mean if you want a higher doesn't matter if they're Malena Z or X or boomer the supply and demand is way out of whack for for talent in Boston in San Francisco

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  we have a billion dollars in the bank

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we're a little bit like Apple versus you know Microsoft back yeah day and so we've been nervous about messing up that core competitive advantage

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  if you compare us with a lot of our competitors they're grown through acquisition so they're multiple different UIs are trying to weave together multiple database in the backend they're trying to synchronize

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  one of our core competitive advantages is our product we have a huge UX invest when the products really easy and slick apples slick but pretty darn slick so a mere mortal can get in there and do really powerful stuff

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we're gonna we integrate with slack in a really slick way so you can control HubSpot through slack you can get notified through slack

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  in our world as the hub is either HubSpot or salesforce and some people makes it in the universe were customers in there yeah in the integration works great

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the ability to pull those into one system and have everything work together is super powerful

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we've gone from the great unbundling to bundling a little bit yeah it's more picking a hub in a platform and then plug all your other stuff in so you can create a good experience for your customers

• bullish assessment Brian Halligan

  what I'm noticing about the way people buy they definitely will mix and match between the systems but more often than not it's a little bit like if you're an Apple person yeah and you're gonna buy a new phone you're not gonna buy a Sam an Android phone you're just not gonna do it it just makes your head hurt kind of happening it you know the people are becoming a sales force shop or hubs botch I see a

• neutral fact_claim Brian Halligan

  the reason we do this is like that arbitrage opportunity move from just kind of content marketing inbound marketing to this experience or like we need to build a platform to help people take advantage of that arbitrage opportunity yeah so we move from marketing into sales into service

• neutral fact_claim Brian Halligan

  the first act was an arbitrage opportunity we saw the internet it's like instead of renting space in someone's radio show or renting space as someone's TV show or renting space in a magazine or newspaper just create your own damn radio show your own damn TV a content creator exactly yes a space to yourself right now is the basis behind inbound marketing

• bullish assessment Brian Halligan

  it seems to me that the companies are really successful today are the ones that are really obsessed not about that product market experience product market fit but it's more like that experience market fit how do you transform that customer experiences so many of the winners today are doing just that

• bullish prediction Brian Halligan

  2009 your product needs to be ten times better than your competition 2019 your customer experience needs to be ten times better than the competition

• neutral fact_claim Brian Halligan

  support we fell behind in hiring support and now it's a problem because people have to wait too long in support and they hung up and they called their sales rep so we missed our MPs numbers and we missed our sales numbers

• neutral fact_claim Brian Halligan

  we were a freemium model that wasn't my idea that was his idea

• bullish assessment Brian Halligan

  we basically are obsessed with how humans decide stuff how do you buy summarize you should go through the decision process and we obsess over it and then we try to build software to help companies deal with that and leverage it so there's a lot of ray inside of HubSpot huge influence on us

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  we started going inbound matching the way he marketed with the way humans actually shop and live and buy and make decisions mostly through getting good at SEO and good at very early social media marketing and getting good at connecting with other bloggers

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think one of the most important things you can do in this world is be a good writer

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  if you think about the funnel top of the funnel sales where salesforce is strong the middle of the funnel is hubspot end of the funnel is say zendesk and they each like so zendesk were like support and they're running back up the funnel much like salesforce are running down the funnel yeah what are trying to branch out and uh and we're sitting here kind of like part of us is going haha we were right all along but then the other part of us is like oh all these people are now trying to move into o

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  calling all seed and series a startups be sure to check out hubspot for startups and hubspot ventures for their million dollar pitch competition wait what a million dollars yes that's right applications are officially open for a limited time apply to be one of six founders flown out to hubspot's flagship inbound conference taking place in boston this september when you get there you're going to get a chance to pitch on stage in front of one thousand folks and a panel of vcs and execs not only wi

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  That's why I love HubSpot for startups. It's the all-in-one customer platform. So you don't need a Frank inside of pools. No. Right now, early stage companies are going to get 75% off. And with this one system, you're going to automate marketing and actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos. And you're going to manage your customers like the Amman hotel, six stars all the way. You're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly. And man, when y

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Our competition is mostly point-to-point solutions that require manual setup and enterprise platforms that are really for scaling out in enterprise sales teams. You would never see a scale-up using Salesforce or HubSpot, and if they do, they definitely don't like it.

• neutral fact_claim Sarika Garg

  hubspot actually handles customers from two employees to 2 000 employees so we're well we're like the perfect fit in fact 50 of our customers are hubspot customers and they're the ones who probably loved us the most so it made very a lot of sense here

• bullish assessment Sarika Garg

  i should i'll be amiss to say culture i mean i fell in love with the culture of hubspot and was very aligned to how we had been trying to build the company in a very thoughtful way and uh the ceo of hubspot um rose from inside the ranks that i think she took over the reins back in 2021 if memory serves correct uh i believe the co-founder and ceo had a snowball mobile accident where he brought her up he brought he actually um asked her to step up and she's been fantastic so uh yamini rangan

• bullish assessment Sarika Garg

  but the more we talked to them the more we realized their uh their vision was very aligned to us the ambition of what they want to do in this space is very aligned to us and of course the distribution

• neutral fact_claim Sarika Garg

  that's exactly the point at which uh hubspot inbounded to us

• neutral fact_claim Alex

  last week hubspot announced that it's going to purchase hash flow a startup that had raised 10 figures while private

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  that's why i love hubspot for startups it's the all-in-one customer platform so you don't need a frankincite of fools no right now early stage companies are going to get 75 off and with this one system you're going to automate marketing that actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos and you're going to manage your customers like the amman hotel six stars all the way you're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly and man when you pull up hu

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  That's why I love HubSpot for startups. It's the all in one customer platform. So you don't need a Franken side of tools. No, right now, early stage companies are going to get 75% off. And with this one system, you're going to automate marketing and actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos. And you're going to manage your customers like the Amman hotel, six stars all the way. You're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly. And man, when y

• bullish assessment Jason Lemkin

  We are seeing folks like HubSpot, which is one of the great performers in these challenging times, move from marketing automation to CRM. HubSpot is becoming the CRM for SMBs, not just marketing everything.

• bullish assessment Brian Halligan

  remember when we first started hubspot we were pitching it to investors we i can't tell you how many no's we got across series a through e like we had a heck of a time raising every round everyone thought we were crazy going up small meeting business it'll never work you're going to be the salesworth.com good luck like we just got no after no after no but 10 years later people like you know that was a really obvious idea that hubspot thing why didn't i think of that idea

• bullish fact_claim Brian Halligan

  we're a lot of people say we're the best place to work in the united states and we have a hundred thousand customers and millions of users and they tend to be quite happy

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  Um, so we get all the, and it's just a lot of fun because I'm a big believer in, in, in terms of product development and fast iterations, short feedback loops, being able to act on things. And we have thousands of customers, you know, you know, joining every, um, every month, you're able to then kind of, um, kind of get that feedback very consistently, get ideas in kind of iterate on the product.

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  And so HubSpot has, you know, 170,000 plus customers now, right? And if, had we been in the enterprise market, that would have been more like 1700, right? Like, uh, multiple orders of magnitude difference.

• bullish assessment Dharmesh Shah

  One thing that makes HubSpot, um, kind of noteworthy and remarkable is for all of our 17 years, we've been focused on the SMB market. Um, you know, despite every quarter since our existence, everyone always asks us, including our investors and would be investors like, okay, it's fine that you started an SMB, but what's the plan to go into the enterprise? Because that's kind of a natural, uh, I think of this, uh, reverse gravity that happens in software where, um, outside of any kind of intervent

• neutral fact_claim Dharmesh Shah

  HubSpot is now 17 years old, so it's been a while time flies, uh, and they grew up so quickly. Um, and we're about 7,000 employees, um, and as you noted, it's a publicly traded, a $25 billion market cap based on which week you look. Um, so, and that's, and it's been, uh, like interesting during, you can talk about kind of the pre IPO times and going through the IPO process, um, and our, our kind of primary offering is we offer a CRM platform. So it consists of, uh, marketing, sales, service, sof

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  the product-led growth teams, like the ones at HubSpot, the ones at Atlassian, they're doing this like street level,

• bullish assessment Scott Farquhar

  And I think HubSpot, one of our employees is a board member over there, and they've learned a lot from our product-led growth model. And they're very similar, which is, yes, we can have a great product that sells itself. If you need to talk to us eventually at scale, we're here, but we win because a great product that sells itself. And I think that's really hard to disrupt, whereas there are many enterprise companies that are there because they've got a great sales team. But you can sell, I pres

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  I just had Dharmesh from HubSpot on, and they committed to the midsize, the small enterprise, and they had to have the same discipline, which is the product had to be exceptional, and the product had to sell itself. And sure, yeah, if you're big enough, we could have a consultative sale later. But there's something about having to please a two-person or a 20-person organization that just makes you really efficient and sharp on products,

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. ... And can you imagine how much money this make and how sticky it would make your app

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  And you could tell, I think for now, it's a lot more fun to make these clips than it is to watch them. So I've seen amazing, really funny stuff that has two or three likes that's just dying on the vine, because there aren't enough people watching. Everybody wants to make things. Nobody wants to watch other people's.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  They rushed it out for a good reason.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  You can use your address, but they haven't added that stuff, but they rushed it out.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  So speaking of remixes, the one downside at this point, and I know it's very early on, but it is built for social. It's like a TikTok style app where you're supposed to scroll and you like and you share. But it's as of yet, because it's invite only, it is not very social. There's no good way to find people you know in there.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Once one user figures out a character is in there, you can see it take off. Like a person figured out Spongebob, you can make Spongebob characters appear. And now Spongebob is everywhere. And then a person figured out you can make Pikachu appear. And now there's hundreds of Pikachu. So every time... Or Peter Griffin from Family Guy. Like every time there's a new one of those, you see thousands of them as everybody gets excited that they can remix them.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  They're going to get a lot of lawsuits for that. You can also see... It's going to be staggering.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  And they're going to get a lot of lawsuits. Yeah.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  That's what the Wall Street Journal reported last week, that they said, yeah, Sam Altman says it's an opt out, that they informed everybody this is coming. Let us know if you want to opt out or not.

• bullish assessment Lon Harris

  It's not only just in terms of the fidelity, like you can make a guy in Sora that looks a lot like yourself. You can realistically recreate IP and famous characters. ... But it's not just that. It can fill in the gaps for you. So if you give it a funny premise, Sora's very good at figuring out what the joke is or what the bit is and actually filling in the details in a way that adds value to the premise you came up with. ... It's getting better at storytelling. It's figuring out narrative. ... T

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  It has reached the absolute top of the iOS app store here in the United States, besting even ChatGPT, besting even Google Gemini, which means that OpenAI has yet another hit on its hand.

• bearish assessment David Friedberg

  I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. ... We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. ... If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  which people are taking to indicate that they're big believers in the company.

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer,

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there was a total of $10.3 billion in authorized sales, but only $6.6 billion traded hands.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  it is now the most valuable private company in the world. OK, just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago, and the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that money to work.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  Midjourney was built by a bunch of rich people. And it was early, and they have a ton of revenue, and it looks like their annual revenue is 500 million, so they're making 12 million per employee. Obviously, that's not sustainable or real. It might be for them for some period of time.

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and then underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities. And then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff. And they really should just assume that the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slow

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  People were saying that the stock is down because of this, like 5% or 10% because Reddit typically appears in the lower rankings. So this is, could be a big part of this future story, which is the impact of SEO and scraping and content creators and how do they get traffic to their website? How do they get traffic to their website?

• bearish fact_claim David Friedberg

  that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time. ... So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  And in that setup, if they lose a lot of money on inference costs in the interim, do they really care? Because they're going to sell the company anyways.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I thought it was relatively bold of perplexity with a company that, you know, presumably loses money to take on more costs. So I was trying to sort out the why here. I'm curious if they're trying to angle for an acquisition, because as you said, if every major LLM company wants to own a browser, why not go buy one from a company that has already proven its ability to attract millions of people to its browser and maybe grow your overall market share?

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  I think they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned. ... Anyway, that was probably their concern is can they handle the amount of traffic coming in and can they handle it profitably? ... That's probably why they took a little bit of time to launch this.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the latest news is that Perplexity, Jason, a company that's best known for its AI Surge products and also launched the Comet AI-infused browser that we talked about on the show a number of times, not only made the browser available for free instead of just for some of its paid users, but also just took the waitlist off of it. Said it had millions of people waiting to use it. And this is a pretty aggressive move. Previously a gated feature, now available for all.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  things like, uh, Hub, HubSpot, which is, you know, an amazing platform that integrates and actually they have a single page design, um, uh, for their homepage where they integrate all the different components that you need to run all of your marketing across the web, you know, uh, social media, email marketing, page search, et cetera.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think that shows the risks of not having a good GEO strategy. But my guess is that AI search query volume today couldn't make up that 80% that HubSpot lost or that Chegg lost or a similar company.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  Oh, that HubSpot was famous for being good at that. That's pretty embarrassing. So that's, and that tells us that there's a shift going on. The winners of the last war, the Cheggs, the Yelps, the Nerdwallets, will not necessarily be the winners of this next era.

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  What? I missed that HubSpot lost 80% of its search traffic? Ooh, yeah, they made a post about it.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  The kind of beacon on the hill, so to speak, here is HubSpot, right, which lost 80% of all of search traffic year on year, organic search traffic year on year.

• bearish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  for different reasons but so i think that they're both actually roughly aligned and not allowing a lot of this big m a to happen but for different reasons for

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  successful have been broad horizontal platform plays like android this is as vertical as it gets this is

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  i just looked up how many customers hubspot has hubspot has 205 000 customers as of the end of 2023

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  if you think about your top of funnel if you're one of the customers of hubspot using this google adwords is just one of a number of channels yes that's right so you could be getting your leads

• bearish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  imagine what happens when a 50 billion dollar marketing automation company gets bought by google

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  impact they'll get from selling crm services not that impactful to the business

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  i think it gives advertisers more tools that can integrate with adwords which is how advertisers spend ad dollars is through adwords platform and so as a result it locks the advertisers onto google's ad platform keeps them more engaged

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  it's a really good kind of enterprise software plugin

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  so this is a very natural fit into google's advertising business and taking all of the leads from advertising and better converting them and giving your sales team the tools they need to convert those leads into customers so it makes great strategic sense

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  hubspot has this integrated marketing automation and crm platform for taking leads and then converting those leads and selling products to them so the sales team and the marketing team uses hubspot software to operate and do their work and do it better

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  organic lead developed this business and they provide marketing automation software so basically things like crm tools email marketing tools

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  first of all it's super impressive hubspot's been public they went public at about a billion dollar market cap 10 years ago and today they're trading at 34 billion so

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  i would not characterize hubspot as strategically valuable for google i think it's an important ecosystem player and it's probably better off as an independent company

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  slow and steady revenue power of sas i guess and a great product i'm not a shareholder

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  when you look at a company like hubspot in the public markets that's three plus billion of arr and i think valued at less than 10 billion dollars versus some of the companies in the private markets that are valued at 10 plus billion dollars uh with not much revenue

1. 2028-04-09 Otherwise, you're going to lead to having point agents very much like point solutions and point apps. They didn't work. So point agents are not going to work either. · Prediction · pending
2. 2028-04-09 And I think we also believe that the future is a hybrid, you know, workforce where it's agents and humans working together and augmenting each other to get better results. And in that, you know, world, a network of agents is really important. · Prediction · pending
3. 2028-04-09 there's a future where it's hands-free. There's a future where CRM is actually listening to the conversations that are happening. · Prediction · pending
4. 2028-04-09 I think when we think about the next five years and in CRM, at least in applications, it is, you know, composable UI. · Prediction · pending
5. 2028-03-20 our thesis at the time was you know A10 billion company does not exist in marketing software because it didn't need to exist before it was very artsy craftsy kind of discipline and now it's a data driven discipline so someone will create a massive sap SEO style software company that marketing · Prediction · pending
6. 2028-03-20 if we end up you know crashing and burning it won't be uh it won't be murder it'll be essentially a form of suicide it'll be self- imploding it's like the culture didn't work something broke · Prediction · confirmed
7. 2028-03-19 2009 your product needs to be ten times better than your competition 2019 your customer experience needs to be ten times better than the competition · Prediction · pending

VentureSignalScore 6.3/100 for hubspot, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage