Visit to Hubspot

We met Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot and MIT Sloan alumni (he says that he majored in beer drinking), during the Mass Tech Trek.

Hubspot provides an inbound marketing system/web marketing software (SW as a service model) for small and midsize businesses. They also provide the free SEO tool Websitegrader.com that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website and provides a marketing report of your URL. Many of my friends have started using it.

Brian started the company in 2006 and they received $5M in July 2007 from General Catalyst Partners. Currently they employ ~30 people and they have nice offices next to my apartment in Kendall Square (MIT).

Some comments he made about entrepreneurship:

• He recommended us not to syndicate VCs since it brings down the valuation. It is better to let them compete
• Number of founders: 1 is a negative signal to investors; 4-5 too much split and decisions take a long time with disruptive ideas
• Business Plan: you loose a lot of time updating it when you start talking to people. So make it simple and easy to update