Dharmesh Shah
Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot. On 6 shows, 10 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerinvestorauthor@dharmesh ↗LinkedIn ↗dharmesh.com ↗
Dharmesh Shah co-founded HubSpot in 2006, serving as its long-time CTO and authoring the company's Culture Code. He is also an active angel investor, co-author of Inbound Marketing, and the founder of Agent.ai.
6shows
10appearances
197statements
16resolved
13supported
1contradicted
81%fully supported
286said about them ↓ Everything Dharmesh Shah said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Shah: Primary angel investing goal is minimizing time, not maximizing returns
“Number one principle of my angel investing is solve for minimizing time, not maximizing return.”
Shah: Zero founder meetings or calls held for angel investments
“No founder calls or founder meetings at all. Even pre-investment, even during the decision process.”
Shah: Under-engineering is preferable because tech debt interest is quantifiable
“I would rather under-engineer something than over-engineer it if I were gonna err on the side of something. And here's the reason is that when you under-engineer it yes, you take on tech debt but the interest rate is relatively known and payoff is very, very p…”
Shah: AI codebase refactoring will make under-engineering even more optimal
“Because we're gonna, not that long from now, we're gonna have, you know, large code bases be able to exist you know, as context for a code generation or a code refactoring model. So, I think it's going to make it make the case for under engineering even strong…”
Shah: MCP or an equivalent standard will be AI's next major unlock
“So I think MCP or something like it is going to be the next major unlock because it allows systems that don't know about each other, don't need to just decoupling of Like Sentry and whatever tools someone else was building.”
Shah: Hybrid workplace teams of humans and AI agents are inevitable
“So I think it is, I will go so far as to say it's inevitable that we're going to have hybrid teams someday. And what I mean by hybrid teams. So back in the day, hybrid teams were, oh, well, you have some full-time employees and some contractors. Then it was li…”
Shah: The AI industry does not need a new language to replace Python
“He was talking about like, oh, we need a different language than Python or whatever that is like built for built for AI and built. It's like, No, Brett, I don't think we do actually. It's just fine. It deals with just fine, just expressive enough. And it's nic…”
Shah: Long-term economic value of software engineers will increase due to AI
“I think so I'm actually bullish on engineers in terms of their kind of long-term economic value.
Not despite all the movements in Cogen and all the things that we're, you know, already seeing, but because of it because what's going to happen as a result of…”
Shah: Agent.com will end up being more valuable than $15M Chat.com
“It's, yeah, it's gonna be, I think, end up being bigger than chat.com, which was 15.”
Shah has had zero direct reports across HubSpot's 7,000-employee scale
“7000 plus employees, exactly zero direct reports from time t equals zero.”
HubSpot designates all 7,000 employees as legal insiders to maintain financial transparency
“What we ended up doing literally the day we went public is we designated every single employee to be a designated insider. So that allowed us to maintain the transparency thing, because there was no rule that said you could only have five, six, 10, and it was …”
Shah: 'Reverse gravity' inevitably pulls successful software companies upmarket into enterprise
“In software, there's what I call reverse gravity. Over time, the market will always pull you up, right? Because what ends up happening is that smart founders and smart management teams will look at the numbers and say, oh, well, as it turns out, our bigger cus…”
Shah: For all-in-one suites, ranking top three in any sub-category signals over-investment
“Are we in the top three in the market in that category? If the answer is yes, that means we invested too much in that category. We should not be in the top three because our value proposition is not that we want the top three blogging tools or one of the top t…”
Shah: Founders should continuously iterate on company culture rather than preserving it
“And this is the number one mistake I think I'm biased. I think founders make is that they say, oh, we have an awesome culture and my job is to preserve the culture. That is not the job because The needs of your customers change. The needs of the employees chan…”
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot designated every employee an insider before its IPO
“The decision we made was we were going to designate every individual employee at HubSpot a designated insider when we went public.”
Shah: OpenAI is the startup most likely to reach $1T valuation
“It, it'd be up there in the top three. I honestly can't think of who else would rank higher in terms of probability of getting to that.”
Shah: LLM capabilities cannot be explained by simple next-token prediction
“It's able to do things. That are not explainable by a simple probabilistic model of auto-suggesting next character, next word, next token, next sentence, right? Like it's gone well beyond that.”
Shah: Prompt-driven text-to-video with director styles will arrive in 2023
“I would not be surprised, let's say by the end of this year, that we have a reasonable way to kind of describe in textual form what we want, who the characters are, what the scene is what kind of stylistic attributes we want. We can point it to, oh, I want thi…”
Shah: AI is an order of magnitude bigger than mobile
“I think it's the single largest opportunity and biggest kind of a tech paradigm shift we've seen since the internet originally came out. Like mobile was big but there was a discrete set of use cases. Like when you put a camera on a phone, when you put a GPS de…”
Shah: I personally bought the Chat.com domain for eight figures
“I did. As of Transfer the domain yesterday, last night.”
Shah: Losing millions on Chat.com is worth the price of AI credibility
“Chat.com for let's say I even break even, let's say I lose a few million dollars. It is worth the price of admission for me just because that pays the cover charge.”
Shah: Serving upmarket and low-end customers creates synergistic product advantages
“The investment we make on our upper market, 202,000 segment, we have these features that we add that we can kind of subside. We're making money. Yes. And then over time, our MO is we pull those down to lower tiers all the way down to the free tier. And so it b…”
Shah: Word-of-mouth growth depends on total happy users, not wallet share
“The reality is word of mouth is not a function of how much revenue you're making from a customer. Word of mouth is based on how many people love your product that are out there in the world. And it's much easier to do that and get that mind share versus, so lo…”
Shah: Standard SaaS LTV calculations underestimate long-term multi-product customer value
“The one thing we miss is that LTV as it's currently measured is based on our current churn rate and current market dynamics. Here's what a customer is worth that we sold right now. But if you've been out for a little while and you're like, oh, maybe we might a…”
The other half of the tape: Dharmesh Shah's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 268 times in 92 episodes across the shows. 18 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sam Parr 72Jason Lemkin 44Brian Halligan 26Lenny Rachitsky 19Shaan Puri 12Shishir Mehrotra 11Harry Stebbings 9Mark Roberge 8
Statements about Dharmesh Shah, by other people (18)
Virtually zero founder-CEOs Brian Halligan coaches maintain a work-life balance
“I don't know any of the founders I work with that have work-life balance. By the way, this is not something I recommend. I didn't have it. I don't think my co-founder Dharmesh had it. None of the CEO, the only CEO I know And he's unusual in this way is Kareem …”
Lemkin: HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah alone offered to fund SaaStr's inclusion program
“I asked about 20 CEOs and founders and CTOs in tech to help us with the inclusion program this year. Okay. You know how many offered to help one Dharmesh Shah. From HubSpot said he would fund the entire thing next year.”
Parr: Dharmesh Shah sold Chat.com to OpenAI for ~$15M equity
“He owned chat.com, which he sold to OpenAI for what he paid for it, which I think was around fifteen million, and he got AI ChatGPT stock.”
Lemkin: HubSpot is currently not charging customers for AI agents
“When I talked with Brian Halligan the other day, I didn't realize Dharmesh right now HubSpot isn't charging for their agents.”
Parr: Dharmesh Shah paid eight figures for Chat.com
“He's like, dude, I bought chat.com, or, yeah, chat.com today. I'm like, why? He goes, because it was available. I was like, well, what are you gonna do with it? He's like, I'm not sure, but I'm gonna figure something out, but I paid eight figures for it.”
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: Co-founders use a 'lay on the tracks' rule for disagreements
“If we both agree on a given topic, of course we do it.
If one of us feels really strongly and is willing to lay on the tracks on a topic and the other person's like, I kind of disagree with you, but you feel strongly.
We go with the lay on the track person.
If…”
Dharmesh Shah: Company culture is the product built for employees
“When we're building companies, we actually build two products. We build one for our customers and we build another one for our employees. And that's actually that how we work part of it. That's the term he uses for that is culture. That's the product we build …”
Parr: Dharmesh Shah bought a $10M domain to get OpenAI shares
“Well, I mean, Dharmesh had to buy a ten million dollar domain and then convince them to buy it in order to become a shareholder.”
Shackleton: Weighting all feedback equally slows organizations down
“Otherwise every bit of feedback is taken the same, which is just fundamentally like the impact of that is it slows everything down. Cause now you're looking at like a list of pieces, a hundred pieces of feedback and you're going like, oh man, we gotta address …”
Wilkinson: Would pay $10k monthly for hyper-targeted executive ad service
“So I would pay 10,000 dollars a month to be on Dharmesh's radar everywhere he goes. And so I don't know how it gets done. It's like a advertising sniper rifle, essentially. But I really like the idea of something like that.”
Burke: Company values must differentiate and filter out mismatched candidates
“Your value should uniquely position you in the same way that your value proposition for your customers distinguishes you from your competitors. Your culture has to do the same thing, and so if your entire culture is motherhood and apple pie, you're doing it wr…”
HubSpot's early growth relied on SMB focus, single platform, and culture
“Deep conviction in SMB. Deep conviction in building a platform and crafting the platform Deep conviction in having culture as a product. Like, those are decisions that I just loved, and I completely believed in.”
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…”
Lemkin: HubSpot took five years to build sales CRM awareness
“He was talking about how it took him five years to build awareness for their sales CRM.”
Halligan: Dharmesh Shah's blog drew 100x more traffic than VC-backed startups
“And he had a hundred times more traffic in his crap little blog than any of my wealthy venture-backed startups.”
Cohen: I have zero direct reports at WP Engine, like HubSpot's Dharmesh
“And now I have zero direct reports, just like Dharmesh at HubSpot.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
My First Million 113
20VC 59
the Official SaaStr Podcast 49
Lenny's Podcast 40
Latent Space 7
2026 24 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- How to be a CEO when AI breaks all the old playbooks | Sequoia CEO Coach Brian Halligan
- Scott Galloway: Why I'm selling my American stocks
- Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an AI, Tragedy Apps, and Too Many AI SDRs? | The Agents #004
- Jensen's Open-Weights Letter | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks
- $100M+ Advice That'll Piss Off Every Business Guru (ft. DHH)
- Why Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box
- The SaaS Massacre: Public Market Collapse |Microsoft Lost $360B & NVIDIA’s $100B Dispute with OpenAI
- The Most Important Founder You've Never Heard Of
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 44 mentions in 24 episodes 2 per episode
- Make $8K/day From These Side Hustles You’ve Never Heard Of
- How the smartest founders are winning in AI
- HubSpot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on How to Hire Great VPs and How M&A Really Works
- Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Future of AI in B2B SaaS: Insights from Synthesia and Theory Ventures. Hosted by Jason Lemkin
- ⚡ Inside Google Labs: Building The Gemini Coding Agent — Jed Borovik, Jules + AIE CODE Preview
- Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
- AI and The Future of Sales, Marketing & CS with HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan
- 16 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 91 mentions in 23 episodes 4 per episode
- Q&A: Gut punches, favorite guests, plus advice for life
- Brian Halligan: Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to $28BN | E1103 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Rituals of Great Decision-Making | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024
- Mark Roberge: The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise -Stage 2 Capital|E1176 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- HubSpot Co-Founder and Chair Brian Halligan on AI and SaaS, Board Meetings, and When Incumbents Win
- 10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo
- Pat Grady: Sequoia Partner on Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin | E1174 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | E1157 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 18 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Chris Miller
- What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)
- +$1 Billion Businesses You've Never Heard Of (#497)
- What SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Really Thinks About AI, Sales & Lead Gen In 2024
- Our 2020 Predictions For OpenAI Came True… Here’s What’s Next (#508)
- Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life
- Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Joost de Valk: How I Founded Yoast; The Ultimate Guide to SEO; The Threat of AI | E1000 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 33 mentions in 11 episodes 3 per episode
- Ranking The Best And Worst Businesses To Start w/ Billionaire Investor Andrew Wilkinson (#386)
- Saas Companies that Anyone Can Start with Rob Walling
- Secrets to SMB at Scale with HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
- Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: AMA with SaaStr's CEO
- Des Traynor: How I Founded Intercom; Product Marketing Tips; Feature Creep | 20VC #907 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, YouTube, Microsoft
- Asking A Billionaire Investor How To Prepare For The Economic Collapse (#371)
- Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar: Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | 20VC w/ Harry Stebbings #930 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 46 mentions in 9 episodes 5 per episode
- The Next Big Social Media Network Will Be On the Blockchain. Nader Al-Naji Tells Us Why.
- Near Death Accidents and Hitting $1B ARR with Brian Halligan, Founder and Exec Chairman of HubSpot
- The Milly Awards 2021
- Brian Halligan, CEO and Co-Founder at HubSpot: The Secrets to $1B ARR ... And Beyond!
- MFM #165: How Jack Butcher is Selling his Art for $76m & How to Research Wealthy People
- Why Dunder Mifflin Should Be a Real Company & A Look Inside MicroAcquire | My First Million #203
- A Discussion on Sam & Shaan's Recent Investments | My First Million #195
- Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Communities & Crypto | MFM #178
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- The Funnel is Dead. Long Live the Flywheel. With Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan
- 20VC: Sequoia's Pat Grady on What Sequoia Is Focused On Today, How Sequoia Think About Investment Decision-Making Processes & Why It Is Important To Trade A Few Points of Efficiency for Culture When It Comes To Attribution
- 20VC: Okta Founder Frederic Kerrest on Why You Want To Be A Monopolist In A Small Market, The Biggest Challenges in Scaling Okta To IPO and Being a16z's First Ever Fund Check
- From Burn-Out to $100M in ARR with Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dharmesh's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot | 3 | 65 | 100% 4/4 | full record on My First Million → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot | 1 | 33 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Latent Space → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot | 1 | 31 | 71% 5/7 | full record on 20VC → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot | 1 | 28 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot | 3 | 28 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot | 1 | 12 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Masters of Scale → |