1. Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot CTO: Building a Platform that is a Joy for Partners

Having started out as a marketing applications company, HubSpot’s goal today is to be the number one platform for scaling companies.  In this episode, co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shares some of the most important lessons he has learned on the journey since HubSpot’s founding in 2006.

• HubSpot’s journey to becoming a CRM platform (1:17)
• How to measure success as a platform (3:14)
• How to attract partners to the platform (5:52) and striking the balance between established partners and new native apps (8:01)
• Importance of being a joy to partner with (8:55) and culture of solving for the customer (11:51)
• It’s ok to have conflict and competition (14:32)
• Investing in the core vs opening up the platform (16:53)
• A couple platforms Dharmesh admires (25:45)
• Parting thoughts on monetization (28:36)

Guest: Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah is co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. Prior to founding HubSpot in 2006, Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005.  In addition to co-authoring “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”, Dharmesh founded and writes for OnStartups.com -- a top-ranking startup blog and community with more than 700,000 members.  In 2013, Dharmesh published HubSpot’s Culture Code, which has garnered over five million views. Named an Inc. Founders 40 in 2016, he is an active member of the Boston-area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 60 startups, and a frequent speaker on startups, inbound marketing, and company culture.

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

Links

• Follow our guest, Dharmesh Shah
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark

You can find the full transcript here.