Brian Halligan
29 statements across 7 episodes · 5 bullish · 8 bearish · 6 people on the record · first statement Aug 16, 2023 by Brian Balfour · said 106 times in 34 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Brian Halligan's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (31), Pat Grady (15), Jason Lemkin (14), Dharmesh Shah (10), Mark Roberge (8), Jeetu Mahtani (7), John McMahon (4), Winston Weinberg (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Thrive Raises New $10B Fund | OpenAI Buys OpenClaw | Stripe at $140B: Is Adyen Wildly Undervalued? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg: How to Make Mega Deals | Lessons from Rabois, Halligan & Grady · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Canva Slashes Growth | Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50B CEO Package | Musk's $55B Terrafab
- The SaaS Massacre: Public Market Collapse |Microsoft Lost $360B & NVIDIA’s $100B Dispute with OpenAI
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 23 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- Yamini Rangan, CEO @ HubSpot: How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Sales: John McMahon on How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Sales Reps | How Sales Changes in a World of AI | Sales Lessons from Snowflake and MongoDB | How to Create and Drive a Sales Process with Urgency
- Elias Torres, Co-Founder and CEO @ Agency: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic Raises $13BN & OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1BN All Stock · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jake Saper, GP @ Emergence Capital: "We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions" · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Is a $4.5BN Exit Enough in VC? & Harvey Raises $150M & Why Google is a Buy and Amazon is a Sell · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why VC Today is Worse than 2021 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cerebras CEO, Andrew Feldman on Why Raise $1BN and Delay the IPO & Why NVIDIA’s Worried About Growth · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 49 mentions in 11 episodes 4 per episode
- Pat Grady: Sequoia Partner on Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin | E1174 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jeetu Mahtani, Sales Leader @Hubspot: How and When to Go International and Crush It | E1207 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mark Roberge: The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise -Stage 2 Capital|E1176 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Predictions for 2024 - What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups? | E1099 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | E1157 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Saam Motamedi: Why Series B Won’t Make Money & Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | E1177 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Crowdstrike, WTF Happens From Here? Wiz Rejects Google’s $23BN Acquisition Offer|E1181 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tooey Courtemanche: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO | E1090 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Roundtable #5 with Jack Altman, Auren Hoffman, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings | E1077 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 22 mentions in 3 episodes 7 per episode
- HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah: The Ultimate Guide to Company Culture | E896 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar: Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | 20VC w/ Harry Stebbings #930 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20 Sales: How To Build Sales Teams with a Product-Led-Growth GTM, What is a Sales Hiring Scorecard and How To Construct Yours & How To Structure the Onboarding Process for all New Sales Hires with Dannie Herzberg, Partner @ Sequoia Capital
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
Everything said about Brian Halligan, oldest first
Aug 16, 2023
HubSpot funded internal product bets using VC-style seed and Series A rounds
“The philosophy behind it was, okay, we are going to start with multiple bets. We are going to treat each one of these bets like a new venture investment. We are going to seed fund this. And so they like made us come and they would pitch for our seed funding fo…”
Jan 15, 2024 negative
Jan 15, 2024 negative
Jan 15, 2024 negative
Brian Halligan asserts MBA programs do not effectively breed great entrepreneurs
“I don't think MBA programs are breeding grounds for founders. It's a relatively, like, if you're doing the decision tree on your career and you decide to do an MBA, It's a pretty risk averse move. It's not a risk seeking type of a move. And so I don't think MB…”
Jan 15, 2024
Brian Halligan argues managers on performance recovery plans rarely regain team trust
“What I found, and it's a little depressing is. You put somebody on a recovery plan, more often than not, they don't recover, and we end up parting ways to that person. Once they've lost their team, they almost never can get that team back.”
Jan 15, 2024 neutral
Dharmesh Shah evaluated Brian Halligan's CEO performance using Net Promoter Score surveys
“The way Darmesh does the reviews, Darmesh is very introverted and does not want to talk to anyone. He really doesn't. So he does a Net Promoter survey on me, and so he sends a Net Promoter survey on a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to refer Brian as th…”
Jan 15, 2024
Jan 15, 2024 positive
Brian Halligan warns that employees over-index on and remember everything founders say
“Everything you say, people pretend like they don't listen, and they push back at you, but they remember what you say. You'll run into somebody and, you know, you'd be walking down Newberry Street in Boston, bump into an employee, and you'll have coffee with th…”
Jan 15, 2024 positive
Jan 15, 2024
Jan 15, 2024 positive
Brian Halligan says blending internal promotions and external hires creates winning teams
“And that mix really works, and I think that has worked for HubSpot. We've got a mix of people who kind of grew up through our system, and we hire people from the upside. That's proven to work pretty well, I think. I think that's a good formula.”
Jan 15, 2024
Jan 15, 2024 neutral
Jan 15, 2024
Brian Halligan advises leaders to hire around weaknesses and maximize 10x strengths
“I try to hire around them and I try to advise my folks to hire around them and I lean into my strengths. So if I have a strength, that's like a 10 X strength, how do I make that a hundred X strength? Or I've got a weakness that it's a -10 X strength. Just leav…”
Jan 15, 2024 neutral
Jan 15, 2024 neutral
Jan 15, 2024
Brian Halligan asserts startup culture and structure inevitably break at 100 employees
“I think it always breaks at a hundred people. At a hundred people, you go from knowing everyone in the organization, knowing a bit about their background, you interviewed everyone to, gosh, you just don't know some of the people. It goes from very flat, like t…”
Jan 15, 2024
Brian Halligan says executives fail by prioritizing their team over the enterprise
“The most frequent The reason I let someone go, and the most common failure condition is I kind of think of this equation of are people solving for themselves, for their team, or for the enterprise? In the failure condition for people scaling up in their career…”
Jan 15, 2024 negative
Brian Halligan argues AUM-driven management fees created an oversupply of venture capital
“I do, I think this tendency to grow the AOM because you get management fees on the AOM and limb off those management fees, and there's such a long timeline on, on where the returns are coming in. I think that's just incredibly tempting to general partners and …”
Jul 8, 2024 negative
Jul 12, 2024
Mar 17, 2025 positive
Aug 7, 2025 positive
Brian Halligan names Nvidia's Jensen Huang as CEO of the Year
“I think the CEO of the Year is Jensen. And I like them, but the other thing I like about Jensen is sort of rethinking the role of the CEO. He's rethinking the CEO playbook. I think he's a pretty good inspiration for CEOs out there today.”
Aug 7, 2025 negative
Halligan: Prosumer and Enterprise AI Succeeded, but SMB AI Lags
“The stuff I see, Jason, is there's a ton of prosumer stuff that's working. Lovable's working. Reflet's working. Gamma's working. Like, so many prosumer things seem to be working. And then enterprise is working. You're right. I haven't seen much in between.”
Aug 7, 2025
Halligan: Sells fixed number of HubSpot shares monthly to avoid signaling market
“I sell the same number of shares every month since we went public. And the reason I do that is I don't want people to think, I don't want to signal something. If I make a big buy or a big sell, it's going to signal something.”
Aug 7, 2025 neutral
Aug 7, 2025 neutral
Halligan regrets early HubSpot secondary stock sale to Sequoia Capital
“When we did our round, it was Sequoia. Sequoia came to us and said, we'd like to buy some of your shares in retrospect. It's a horrible financial decision for me, but it was good at the time. And I saw, I forgot a couple million dollars worth of HubSpot shares…”
Aug 7, 2025 bearish
Nov 28, 2025 negative
McMahon: Dev Ittycheria's intimidating style limits critical information sharing at MongoDB
“Dave is very intimidating to a lot of people, really intimidating... Brian can get probably more information out of you, whereas I think that some people, if they're intimidated by Dave, they don't give him the information that he should get as a CEO”