HubSpot's Billion-Dollar Journey: From IPO to Success

It's hard to see it sometimes, isn't it?

Did you always know that HubSpot would be— I need to tell you the thing. Honestly, I didn't think it would get— I, we did, when we started HubSpot, I'll tell you a funny story about HubSpot. I remember the day of the IPO, we're on the floor. Yes. And ringing the bell and the whole thing, really good mood. Everyone's fired up. And my co-founder Dharmesh ran over with his phone and picked the phone up and he had the stock out and he's Look, Alstron's worth a billion dollars.

And everybody said, take a screenshot and never see that again.

Hey, what else did you say when we were starting it back in 2006? We were classmates. You know, what were the odds we'd create a company worth 30-something billion dollars? I would've put the odds very low and a lot of stuff had to go right to get there.

Yeah.

And the industry really came together. I don't know what Salesforce market cap was in 2006. It was nowhere close.

I don't know what it was. What was it? Because it was in my investor deck when I raised my seed round. $2 billion. Yeah. I wrote my comps on my comp slide. My comps were eFax, which is now a different company, $800 million, and Salesforce, $2 billion. I said we could do almost as good as Salesforce and we can certainly do in these signatures. We could do better than a fax service. So I said, this is my VC pitch. $2 billion. Hard to imagine HubSpot could be worth more right back then if your comp is $2 billion, right?