Brian Halligan

Brian Halligan is best known as the co-founder of HubSpot, the inbound marketing and CRM software company he started in June 2006 with his MIT Sloan classmate Dharmesh Shah. He served as HubSpot's CEO from founding until 2021 — stepping back after a snowmobile accident — and then continued as executive chairperson until May 2025. Under his leadership HubSpot coined and popularized the term "inbound marketing," launched the annual INBOUND conference, went public (NYSE: HUBS), and grew into a multi-billion-dollar business (roughly $1.7B in revenue and ~6,000 employees by 2022).

Before HubSpot, Halligan earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Vermont (1990) and later an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management (2005). His career included a long run at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), where he rose to lead the company's Pacific Rim operation (building it to roughly $100M in revenue from Hong Kong and Tokyo), followed by a stint as VP of Sales at Groove Networks (acquired by Microsoft in 2005 and folded into SharePoint Workspace) and a brief period as a venture partner at Longworth Ventures.

Today Halligan splits his time across teaching, advising, and investing. He is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, where he has taught entrepreneurship courses (notably "Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures") for over a decade and received the school's Monosson Prize in 2023 for entrepreneurship mentorship. At Sequoia Capital he serves as a senior advisor/growth partner, coaching startup founders on how to become scale-up CEOs through coaching, community, and his podcast "Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO." In 2022 he co-founded Propeller Ventures, an early-stage climate-tech fund of about $100M focused on ocean innovation. He co-authored *Inbound Marketing* (2009) and *Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead* (2010), is a Grateful Dead devotee (he bought Jerry Garcia's "Wolf" guitar at a 2017 charity auction), and serves as a corporation member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

• Angel investing in founder-led B2B/SaaS companies — frequently early/seed-stage software in marketing, sales, and business productivity, often alongside the HubSpot/Boston founder network (Dharmesh Shah, David Cancel, Elias Torres, Ty Danco, Ric Calvillo).
• Backs people and product-led growth — his coaching emphasis at Sequoia and MIT centers on category creation, culture building, product-led growth, and competing with incumbents; he gravitates toward founders solving those problems.
• Climate and ocean innovation via Propeller Ventures — a ~$100M fund he co-founded in 2022 targeting climate tech with an ocean focus (e.g., carbon monitoring, ocean-based solutions).
• Operator-investor lens — he openly frames his value as having "made most of the mistakes" scaling HubSpot and helping founders avoid them; he says yes to founders he can meaningfully coach through the startup-to-scaleup transition.