Building HubSpot to a Unicorn: Dharmesh Shah’s Amazing Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to your third chapter. What was the genesis of HubSpot? What was going on in the industry and in your life that led to HubSpot?

Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot was not supposed to happen. When I sold my first company, I promised my wife that I’m not going to do startups anymore. My plan was to get my Ph.D. and teach. While in grad school, I met my Co-Founder Brian Halligan, and we both had a shared passion for SMBs. We both came from tech. He came from a sales and marketing background. I came from product and engineering.

Building HubSpot to a Unicorn: Dharmesh Shah’s Amazing Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Were you going to grad school with some money?

Dharmesh Shah: The acquisition price was around $15 million. One thing I stumbled about money is that the first $4 or $5 million is life-changing. During undergrad, I was working full-time the whole way through. It took me seven years for what should ideally be a four-year degree.

When I went to grad school, I made the deliberate decision that I was going to be a real student. I didn’t have to work. I always had this aspiration for MIT. It’s why I moved to the Boston area. I moved to Boston in 1999 and didn’t apply at MIT until five years later when I was able to sell my prior company. 

Building HubSpot to a Unicorn: Dharmesh Shah’s Amazing Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 1)

Dharmesh discussed his entrepreneurial journey with candor, humility, and generosity. Wonderful conversation.

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Sramana Mitra: We will start at the very beginning of your journey. Where did you grow up? What kind of upbringing and what kind of circumstances were you raised in? I know you come from a part of India that is particularly entrepreneurial.

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next product shift?

Dean Guida: We started investing more in marketing, PR, and sales. We rode a whole bunch of technology waves. We went from the C and C++ market and started competing in the Visual Basic market. We then started shifting to selling Visual Basic developers. That just opened a lot to us. It wasn’t extra R&D work for us. It was a faster language and a faster-growing and popular developer. That helped us as well. 

Sramana Mitra: What time frame is that?

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 6)

Dean Guida: A strategic event along the way was definitely PR. PR was important to get advocacy, authenticity, and having others say that we were legitimate. That was early on. I told you the story about Wendy’s. That was big for us. Second, I was speaking at software development shows. That was another big inflection point of helping us build credibility and create relationships in the industry. That was a big thing that we did that helped us.

The third was just the fact that we were authentic. I loved software development, so anytime that I talked to a development team, they could sense that. They could see that we cared about what we were doing. There was this one deal where I was talking with Dun & Bradstreet. I was showing them our software and they were like, “Wow, you guys built all that software? How many people are on your team? You have 17 people on your team? No way, you didn’t build that software with 17 people. “

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What does the internet do to your business? Let’s say we are talking about the time period from 1994 to 1996 when the Internet was happening. How does your company change?

Dean Guida: It was way back when it started. So, we had to create a website, which helped us a lot. We got into writing user interface components for Java. Charles Schwab and FedEx built their trading and shipping applications with our development tools and our UI component. I spoke at the second Java 1, which was the best software development show in the world at the time.

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 4)

Dean Guida: We got out there and we were in a room with 12 people. These were the guys who wrote the compiler, debugger, linker, and then there’s me and my girlfriend. I was like, “Oh my god. Don’t hold my hand. Don’t look at me. Don’t do anything.” Chris, a guy that was there, went on to create the C# language. I was a hardcore developer at the time.

My girlfriend was in the tech space but not as hardcore as us. It turns out that she solved more problems than I did. Everything went well. I created a better relationship with all the guys there. We did a deal with Borland. Borland put our product, a code generation visual design tool, into all their Borland C, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, and all their boxes.

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 3)

Dean Guida: When we finally finished our first version and were going to bring it to market, everybody was reading this Charles Petzold book. It was this 600-page book. You had to learn all these APIs. We were going to market with this framework to help people build business applications faster, but no one was going to want to learn more APIs.

Before we went to market, we created this tool around it where you can visually build menus and screens and connect them to data. We then generated a C code. We created this development environment and then we went to market. What is amazing is that 33 years later, we are still building UI controls.