Dharmesh Shah explains HubSpot's founding bet: marketing was shifting from arts-and-crafts to data-driven work that software could solve. They looked at Omniture's $1.5 billion valuation as a comparable and believed a global marketing software company could reach $100-$500 billion. The timing felt right, even though the odds were long.
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When you were starting the company, did you have a number in your head where you're like, man, I think this, I think this can make $100 million a year, or I think this might be a billion-dollar company? Or was it as big as, man, I think this could be worth tens of billions?
We didn't have a specific number in our head, but we had, I'll say, comparables for lack of a better term, which is, okay, there are successful software companies that have done similar or related things. Either they're in the same market or in the same target customer base. And this is what we told to VCs at our pitch. We're like, okay, we think— at the time we were just in marketing software— in the history of software, no one has ever really built a $10+ billion household name, global brand marketing software company. Had never been done. Omniture was the greatest one at the time with a $1.5 billion price tag at the time. And we're like— And the reason companies have not been built in the marketing tech space is because marketing is an arts and crafts-y kind of discipline. It's about the shade of your logo and you're outsourcing a bunch of creative stuff or whatever. But it's not the kind of problem software solves. And our belief was that marketing was increasingly turning into the kind of thing software does solve. Lots of data coming in, you're trying to make decisions around all this stuff. It looks exactly like an industry that software can help with. And so our thesis was that someday someone will build a $100, $200, $500 billion software company that's doing the thing we're trying to do. And we said, it might as well be us. We're relatively nice people and we're kind of committed to this and seeing it through. So, You know, do we think the odds were relatively high that we would pull it off? No. But did we think there was an opportunity to do the kind of thing that you're talking about? Yeah. Others had done it. We were not putting someone on Mars, right? That was not— it's like, okay, well, people have done this before and this is just a different time. And maybe now the time is right for a new company to do something that, you know, has been done but better.
