The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 41 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Halligan: Morgan Stanley and Fidelity aligned to lower HubSpot's IPO price
“I don't think there was collusion going on, but definitely Morgan Stanley and Fidelity were on the same side of the table trying to get us to sell at a lower price.”
Mathrubootham: No enterprise software company has successfully transitioned down to SMB
“Oh, start high and go down never, never works. In the history of software, you can tell me which company has succeeded in starting at enterprise and actually winning in SMB. It's not happened. But if you look at many companies, including Salesforce and Freshwo…”
Lemkin: HubSpot engineers using Cursor are pushing out too many features
“Literally I talked with Yamini wrong on from HubSpot last week. Okay. This is HubSpot. She said now at HubSpot there with cursor, they are pushing out so many features. They can't put them into production anymore. She wasn't kidding. They're there. It said the…”
HubSpot will adopt hybrid seat and usage-based pricing models
“We believe that in the fullness of time, we will have hybrid pricing. We'll have some seed based pricing and some usage based pricing.”
HubSpot will integrate AI natively instead of selling standalone SKUs
“We have a deep conviction that there's one product, which is an AI product, and it's going to be inbuilt into every hub and every part of the platform. And that means Monetization is the entire platform”
Lemkin: Demand environment is worsening for Salesforce, MongoDB, and Workday
“Yamini got on the last call a couple of weeks ago and said, yeah, we saw a little bounce at the end of the year and HubSpot had a great quarter, but it's not any easier. She said, it's not one lick easier right now. So HubSpot, not any easier Mongo worse. Sale…”
Every major Sand Hill Road VC rejected HubSpot's 2009 Series C
“It was in the throes of the recession back in and we went up and down Sand Hill road, like Darmesh and I get off the plane from Boston, landed in Sand Hill road. We're like, we got this. We're going to go up and down. It's like 20 meetings. And we go all 20 me…”
Flanagan: HubSpot's AI chat agent is booking meetings and closing sales
“We have an AI chat agent that is able to sell now. It's booked in meetings. It's doing sales.”
Lemkin: HubSpot NRR dropped from 110% to 100% despite 30% growth
“And HubSpot is still growing almost 30%, right? At two and a half billion, but HubSpot's NRR is down too. It's down from a 110 to a hundred.”
Traynor: HubSpot proves SaaS startups do not need enterprise upmarket focus
“HubSpot have proved exactly that there's massive businesses to be built without ever having to go, like, all the way up market, right?”
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…”
Halligan: Zendesk never secured long-only investors due to shaky IPO timing
“Zendesk at the time went out. And it was just, it was timing, and it was just a shaky week that they went out, and they just didn't get, they didn't get the big long onlys, and they had a good story, and they didn't get them, and they never really got them. Th…”
Halligan: Shopify is the only SaaS stock outperforming Oracle and SAP
“If you go from that date and you look at you look at Oracle and you look at SAP, they're both growing, like, 230%. The only SaaS company since August 22 It's growing faster. Shopify. They're growing 300%. So they're outpacing HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe Box, At…”
HubSpot required prospective partners to buy and use the product first
“One of the things HubSpot did in the early days, and to some later stages too, is if you want to become a partner, you need to buy HubSpot. You need to learn the product. You need to learn how to generate leads using HubSpot. So it's almost like you're being t…”
Mahtani: HubSpot generates roughly half its revenue through partner ecosystem
“HubSpot has about half off its revenue coming through the partner ecosystem.”
HubSpot study found SMBs average 250 software applications
“There was some research done by HubSpot not too long ago where SMBs had a tech stack of about 250 apps.”
Roberge: HubSpot monthly churn reached 8% in February 2008
“Eight was the highest a hit in February of 2008. Throughout 2008, it was mostly between three and four, which is terrible. I mean, even at three or four, that's 40 to 50% a year churn. It's really bad.”
Salesforce drove 10% of HubSpot's revenue as a channel partner before competing
“Salesforce.com was an early investor in our Series D, believe it or not, and actually became a big channel partner for us over time, about 10% of our customers before we became competitive.”
Lemkin: HubSpot CRM generates $700M ARR and outgrows marketing automation
“CRM is at seven hundred million, I think, and it's growing faster than marketing automation.”
Stebbings: HubSpot built a $28B business through SMBs alone
“HubSpot have built a twenty eight billion dollar company through SMBs alone.”
Balfour: HubSpot has never missed earnings since its IPO
“They have not missed a earnings since they went public, which was like eight years ago. I don't know if most people that they have never missed in earnings, the perfect record as far as I know.”
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot's original marketing software product reached over $1B ARR
“HubSpot started in the marketing software business. And about, I'll say maybe seven years in we decided that, okay, well, we have marketing software, and we loved it. We loved the category. It was growing and that product now is over a billion dollars in ARR”
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot's first six hires were all men from MIT
“The first six hires, all men, all from the exact same school, same program, had the same, not necessarily the same graduating years, but just in that little cluster.”
Destin: HubSpot Refused to Use Internal Job Titles for Years
“So HubSpot in Boston was famous for not having any titles for the longest time. They're titles externally, because clients care or your executive vice president or whatever, but internally, actually, they refuse to have a structure of titles.”
Stebbings: HubSpot's market cap has fallen 45% to $12.5B
“You're looking at 12 and a half billion now market cap for them down 45% in the last six months.”
Lemkin: HubSpot is 2.8x More Revenue-Efficient Than in 2021
“HubSpot, 2.8 times more efficient than 20 21. Salesforce, two times.”
HubSpot grew from $1B at IPO to $25B in public markets
“Yeah, the smart money on HubSpot was in the public since we went from a billion dollars to 25. In a relatively short period of time.”
Halligan: Big institutional investors own roughly 90% of HubSpot stock
“It's very little of HubSpot is owned by mom and pop, owned by Harry Stebbings, buying Harry Stebbings's mom. It's like, 90% these big institutional investors.”
HubSpot diversified away from SEO by acquiring podcasts and newsletters
“We've been really looking at diversifying our content strategy for the last three to four years, even before AI came in. And that's a process of expanding to podcasts. We actually, you know, brought a podcast network and it's, you know, we get like millions of…”
HubSpot Ran Its 4,500-Person Operations Entirely on Its Own Software in 2020
“When I joined HubSpot, this is January, 2020 I looked at how we were running the company, how we were running marketing sales and service, and we were running HubSpot on HubSpot. And guess what? At that time, we were a 4500 person company.”
Mahtani: HubSpot receives approximately 30 million website visitors each month
“The blog still gets about ten million visitors even today each month. All of HubSpot gets, like, I think, thirty million approximately each month.”
HubSpot has tracked employee Net Promoter Scores quarterly for 15 years
“We do net promoter surveys for the whole company. We've been doing this for. 15 years or once a quarter, we asked every, every employee scale one to 10. How likely are you to refer HubSpot as a place to work?”
Lemkin: Box, HubSpot, and Shopify IPO'd under $1B valuations
“Box IPO did eight hundred million. HubSpot IPO did eight hundred million valuation. Shopify IPO did a seven hundred and fifty million dollar valuation.”
HubSpot's blog still drives growing organic search traffic after 15 years
“I, my first job at HubSpot is I wrote the HubSpot blog. I wrote, I think we did like three posts a day for, you know, a year or whatever. And we did that to get organic search traffic. We're still doing that. We are. 14 years, 15 years into that blog grind and…”
Shah: HubSpot's 5,000 partners drove acquisition of 140,000 customers
“We have 5000 of them, but they're the ones that were the story consumers, and they're the ones that helped kind of spread the word to the other 140,000 people that are now customers.”
Shah: HubSpot launched its CRM product expansion one year before IPO
“And the year before the IPO is when we made this brilliant decision, like, oh, we're getting into CRM, right?”
Dharmesh Shah: Intuit was the only $10B+ SMB software company when HubSpot started
“Intuit's the only real example back then of a successful software company that was 10 plus billion dollars in market cap.”
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot built its community prior to launching a product
“One of the things that I think HubSpot got right is that we were kind of builders of community well before we even had a product, right?”
Slack grew revenue from $100M to $1B during Herzberg's tenure
“Danny is a partner at Sequoia Capital, and prior to entering the world of venture, Danny spent four years at Slack, As their head of enterprise sales at Slack, Danny built and scaled the self-serve, mid-market, and enterprise sales orgs across the Americas, as…”