dharmesh
@dharmesh
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Co-founder/CTO, HubSpot. Mission: Help millions grow better. Write articles about startups, scaleups and growth at https://t.co/OOZjd773nV (free subscription).
Joined March 2008
2023 was the year of chat UX powered by generative AI. That led to me hacking on ChatSpot and launching it last year. 2024 is the year of Agent AI, so that's what I've been hacking away late nights on. I'm obsessed with #AgentAI. Was up past 3am last night. I have a handful
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Some of the biggest breakthroughs I've had are when seemingly random "dots" in my life ended up connecting in delightful and unexpected ways. It's why I love this quote from Steve Jobs:. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So.
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I've been furiously coding away every night on a new project. Thrilled I can finally share it with you. ChatSpot is something I built for myself. Check out the launch video:.. It's the all-in-one ChatGPT-powered tool to help you grow better. It's in.
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It's never too early to plant the seeds of simplicity in your company. Start with the simplest possible thing that could work, and then see what happens. You will have to fight for simplicity, because complexity is in insidious force that seeps in. From my podcast episode with.
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When working on a slide and you find yourself lowering the font size to get things to fit, STOP. Don't lower the font size. Elevate the message.
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How do you pick the right idea for YOU?. Four things to consider:.1) Potential for the idea. If successful, what's the outcome?.2) Probability of success. What are the odds?.3) Passion for the idea. Is it something you care about?.4) Prowess. Do you have particular skill,.
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MY MIND HAS JUST BEEN BOGGLED. I just tried the early release of OpenAI's new DeepResearch feature (rolling out later today to the $200/month Pro users). I've been working in the CRM software industry for 30+ years. It's not just that I've had court-side seats to the game,.
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tl;dr: Woo hoo! HubSpot has some MAJOR product updates we're spotlighting today. Trust me, THIS IS BIG. HubSpot was built with the spirit of reinvention. We started as a simple set of applications for marketing. Over our ~18 years, we've evolved into a full CRM and customer.
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BREAKING NEWS: Secret acquirer of $15+ million domain chat .com revealed and it's exactly who you'd think. For those of you that have been following me for a while, you may recall that I announced earlier this year that I had acquired the domain chat .com for an "8 figure sum".
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The future will be full of more small businesses. After seeing this week’s updates from OpenAI, the pace they’re moving with GPT-4o, Google’s AI Overviews for search and DeepMind’s Project Astra, it’s made me even stronger in my conviction about the future. 2006 - @bhalligan
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Not bad for an introverted kid from a tiny Indian town. I have a simple plan. Invest most of this (90%) in what I'm passionate about:.1) Elevation (human rights, environment).2) Innovation (startups, open source, community).3) Education (increase opportunity for all).
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Got to see @lexfridman live at the MIT A.I. conference. Not sure if he realizes how much people respect and admire him. Including me.
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In a couple of years, building an AI agent will be as prevalent and common as building a web app is today. AI agents will be the dominant way that developers solve customer problems and implement use cases. The last big wave was the web. The next big thing is the age of the AI
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Just the initiative I was looking for. I will match @balajis donation of $50/RT up to $100k to help India fight the COVID tragedy. Thank you. 🙏.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to do well this year, consider joining me and @VitalikButerin by donating at the addresses below. But if all you have is Twitter, help spread the word. For every RT, I’ll donate another $50 to fight COVID in India, up to $100k. #cryptovscovid.
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As you scale, you add people with low tolerance for risk, but high tolerance for process. Left unchecked, the "process people" will overwhelm the "risk people". Adding process is natural, taking risk is not. You need to push and support the taking of calculated risks.
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I love APIs, but as we move towards a more agent-based world, I think we'll see forward-thinking products and platforms offer an interface that's built for agents. Today, we have robots.txt and sitemap.xml support. They provide instructions to webcrawlers. Tomorrow, I can.
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Thanks, @balajis for the inspiration. As promised, just sent $101k in BTC to @sandeepnailwal for donation to India COVID relief efforts. I loved how simple this was to do. It both raises funds *and* raises awareness. Cheers.
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Be an imperfectionist. Imperfectionists hit publish. Imperfectionists ship product. Imperfectionists iterate publicly. It's not that they don't believe in excellence. They dream big, but iterate small.
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Wanting work-life balance is OK. Wanting to build a breakthrough startup is OK. But you shouldn't expect both. In 30+ years and knowing hundreds of founders, I've never met a single founder that built a breakthrough startup while maintaining work-life balance. Any
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Woo hoo! HubSpot's INBOUND 2023 event is officially SOLD OUT. If you don't want to miss out, we'll be live-streaming the event for FREE. Signup here and you're in (and we can send you the recording afterwards if you can't make it live):.
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Have been playing with OpenAI's "Operator" agent all weekend. Some early thoughts:. 1) The fact that it's already hosted and you can just start using it means it'll be more widely used than Claude's "Computer Use" feature. 2) Operator will be able to make websites that haven't.
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Stressed-out right now. Delivering a presentation in 9 hours. 70+ slides. 7,000+ people. Super-high stakes. It's the HubSpot All-Hands.
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BREAKING NEWS: Anthropic announces the ability for Claude to *use a computer*. Yes, you read that right. A.I. will now have the ability to *use* computer software, just like humans can. This dramatically increases the potential use cases for AI Agents because no longer is it.
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Was leaving to go the HubSpot office for meetings and my son told me I was "drippin". I don't generally leave the house and he's not used to seeing me in anything other than pajamas. Better yet, my wife joked that I had rizz (word of the year!) and grabbed a photo of me
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Lesson from the early years of HubSpot:. Don't try to convince people you have a better solution than your competitors. Convince them that you picked a better problem to solve.
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The startup graveyard is full of companies that obsessed over their competitors instead of obsessing over their customers.
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When Olympians are obsessed with training, we think how amazing. So dedicated! Inspiring!. But when people are obsessed with their work/job, people think how sad. You need a life! You need balance!.
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The MCP Network: The Next Billion Dollar AI Idea?. I'm going to share an idea that I don't have the bandwidth to pursue (I'm busy building @AgentDotAi ). You may have heard of MCP (Model Context Protocol) which is on 🔥, in terms of adoption. MCP is an open standard for AI
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This is why 215,000+ companies use HubSpot. Disclosure: I'm biased, but I think the ad is funny and engaging.
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When a new business inside Amazon grows to $10 million, the overall company is growing from $10 billion to $10.01 billion. It would be easy for senior execs to scoff. But they don’t. They watch the growth rates and send congrats. That’s pretty cool. "Invent and Wander".
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LEAKED NEWS: I acquired the domain name os .ai for $150,000 (just saw the transaction reported on some online sources). It's the only two character domain name I own and one of the handful of .ai domains I've bought over the years. I have some ideas on what kind of
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The best way to win is not to start by developing a strong product but to discover a strong market need. If there's strong market need, but you have a weak product, you can iterate and make the product better over time. You can control your product iteration. You can't
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The whole "10,000 hours" thing is bogus. It doesn't work. I watched 10,000 hours of stand-up comedy and I'm still not hilariously funny.
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The secret that underlies most successful entrepreneurs:. The ability to switch back and forth between the creative mind and the constant grind. Again, and again, and again.
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Success Is Making Those Who Believed In You Look Brilliant — Medium
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Good things come to those who wait. Great things come to those who wing it and iterate.
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Product Led Growth is great. What I'm excited about now is Community Led Growth. Companies that create a massive community for their category and facilitate connections will win hearts, minds and market share. Community is a catalyst for growth.
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I was born in founder mode and plan to die in founder mode. This is the way.
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Still the best advice on copywriting, ever:. "Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When they read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter. One human being to another, second person singular.". ~Ogilvy.
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Hot take: There's a very simple reason @OpenAI is winning the A.I. platform race against Google and others. They actually understand and care deeply about developers. When building a platform in a fast-moving space, success is measured not by an abundance of words in your.
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Geniuses are busy. Sages are hard to find. Children are easily distracted. Books will be there for you. Night and day without complaint,.and without judgment.
Spend your time in the company of geniuses, sages, children, and books. @naval.
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I also agree. Every product I've ever launched was awful in the beginning. One lesson learned: It's easy to take an awful product in which there is strong interest and make it better. It's really hard to take a great product in which there is little/no interest and increase.
Agree.
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2 months ago, I bought the domain for $10M+. Here's what happened next:. tl;dr: Sold it for a profit and am donating $250k+ to @khanacademy .
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Woo hoo! HubSpot has now reached the 200,000 customer milestone. It took us ~15 years to get to the first 100,000. Then ~3 years for the next 100,000. Our mission is still to help millions of organizations grow better. So still a lot of work to do and fun to be had. Thanks
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@brian_armstrong Hi Brian, I'm building exactly this with Happy to answer any questions your'e curious about. You know where to find me. :).
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Fun Fact Friday: HubSpot was never a unicorn. But, on average, we have added more than a unicorn ($1B+) worth of valuation every year for all 15 years since we were founded. Most of that was after $HUBS IPO, so thousands benefited. That makes me happy.
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.@sama says a lot of simple, smart things. This is one of them. Don't make sophisticated plans. Make steady progress.
the best way to get good at something is usually to just practice actually doing the thing in question. a lot of very capable people outsmart themselves with complex plans that involve working a lot on fake prerequisites.
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There is a profound joy in surprising those who underestimated you.
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Still processing the news that Sam Altman was let go by the OpenAI board. I'm biased, but I thought he was uniquely suited to growing OpenAI.
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Susan Cain (author of "Quiet") totally gets me:. Introverts, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They.
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Descript is one of those startups I wish I could have angel invested in. Such a brilliant product.
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Someone should write an academic paper on succeeding in SaaS:. "Retention Is All You Need".
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Whatever you do, don't play it safe. Don't do things the way they've always been done. Don't try to fit into the system. If you do what's expected of you, you'll never accomplish more than others expect. ~Howard Schultz (Starbucks). Growing up, I was routinely underestimated.
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Most companies need a "Chief Simplification Officer" more than they need a "Chief Innovation Officer". #simplewins.
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Microsoft (3 months ago): Google's the 800 pound gorilla and I want people to know that we made them dance. Google (last week at I/O): Let's dance. * Grabs 🍿.
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I turned 30 today!. Not as a human (I wish!), but as a software entrepreneur. 30 years ago today I started my first company and have been doing software startups ever since. And yes, I started my first company on April Fool's Day. I was 24 years old and completely clueless. Fun.
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I know Discord is all the rage these days, but its user interface makes my head hurt. Anyone else feel that, or is it just me?.
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Amazing that Jensen had this clarity of thought and conviction 15 years ago. What's also impressive is the raw humility. Worth spending the 4 min to watch.
Jensen’s clarity of thought and soothing, patient speech can only be described as the Alan Watts of engineering 😁.
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I'm with @snowmaker on this one. Vertical AI agents are going to be a massive market. But, horizontal agent platforms will be huge too (similar to the horizontal SaaS platforms we have today). We'll see them for CRM, HR, ERP -- all the major business software categories.
If you still don’t realize what AI agents are and why we will use tens and hundreds of them → this is the 1-min example by @dharmesh for you
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The best product managers aren't product managers. They don't "manage" product -- they BUILD product.
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“Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.". ~ Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Same.
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I was invited once again to be on the MFM podcast with @thesamparr and @ShaanVP. We talked all things A.I. and why this may be the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity in 30+ years. Hope you find it useful/entertaining.
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In a SaaS business, approximately 100% of your energy should be spent on things that increase retention:.1) make the product better.2) sell better fit customers.3) invest in education.4) proactively reach-out to those not getting value.5) increase adoption of "sticky" features.
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Absolutely Nobody: Why do you need a MacBook with 8TB of SSD?. Me: So I can one day run a large language model with 65B parameters locally on a computer I carry around. What a time to be alive.
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Entrepreneurs will live 347 lives. One for every Internet domain they have purchased. Every domain is the dream of a project not yet started and a life not yet lived. ---.What's the best domain you've purchased when dreaming of the future?.
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I'm moving to an async model of working. Yes, an email discussion takes more total time than a 30-60 min meeting. But all time is not created equal. A meeting cuts up my day. Emails can fill cracks in my schedule. Bonus: You don't need to take notes for an email discussion.
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As a startup:. At first you fight death. Next you fight stagnation. Then you fight complexity. It's a noble fight.
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Want to support Black leaders in tech? @devcolororg is the career & community accelerator for Black engineers, technologists, and execs. For every like and retweet of this post, I’ll donate $10 (up to $50K). Easy way to support a great cause. #techforgood #philanthropy
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HubSpot turns 17 years old next month. It really has been quite the journey. Still having fun after all these years. My heart-felt thanks to our customers, partners and team.
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"The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." ~ @PeterThiel.
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"A Founder's job is injecting risk into the business. It's flooding it with new ideas, stuff that seems hard to do, ideas that no one else would dare try, placing the kinds of bets that only someone who started the damn thing would be willing to wager.". ~ @jasonfried . I do my.
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I'm a fan of systems thinking. I'm an even bigger fan of systems doing.
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The Venn Diagram of Success.
I met many aspiring artists in my early 20s. Observing their trajectories since then, I've learned that long-shot careers in the arts (famous singer, actor, songwriter, filmmaker, etc.) are long shots not because success relies on wild luck or rare genius or insane connections.
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Fun Fact: Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett accumulated nearly 90% of his wealth after the age of 65. Hopefully, that means the rest of us still have time.
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HubSpot's a pretty big company (~8,000 people) but we've managed to avoid this death spiral. Things that have helped:.1) Small teams with high autonomy. 2) Hold regular "science fairs" where teams show off what they *shipped* . 3) Closely connect our product team to customers,.
Startup vs Big Company Dynamics. Startup.• Observation: Users want a new feature. • Designer (60 min later): Here are some figma prototypes. • Engineer: We can ship this by the end of the week. Big Company:.• Observation: Let’s discuss our observations when Suzy’s back;.
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This is the thing I've been most excited about and tinkering with. Nice that I can finally talk about it.
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Woo hoo! HubSpot reached a couple of major milestones. $1 Billion (with a "B") in ARR. But, I get much more joy from this: 100,000+ customers are growing better with HubSpot. Thanks to all of you for your support and love.
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The OpenAI Assistants API with retrieval built-in is going to be game-changing. So much time has been spent by so many developers (including me) trying to implement RAG. OpenAI is going to make that easy.
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And the remaining 1% is forgetting past pain and just going at it again and again and again.
99% of winning is pain tolerance.
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I totally agree with this. Corollary: If you're looking for a new opportunity and choosing between companies, pick the company that indexes the most on this growth mindset and wanting to be a learn-it-all (vs. a know-it-all).
Best hiring advice I’ve received:. Hire people who love what they do so much, they listen to podcasts about it. Getting to build with these people will make your day. Their obsession, their love for the craft, it’s infectious and awesome 🤩.
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What's often more important than Product Market Fit (PMF) is PGTMF. Product Go-To-Market Fit. Your GTM needs to match the product you have. Don't take a complex product that requires customer behavior change and try to sell it in a touchless way. Tools are bought.
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Final update on my socially-powered fund raise for @KhanAcademy: We ended up with 17,664 likes + 714 comments = 18,378. I rounded up to 20,000 and made a donation of $200,000. Normally, I like to do these things anonymously, but this was fun! . Thanks, and Happy New Year!
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Happy Birthday, America!. Coming to the U.S. changed the trajectory of my life. It truly is the land of opportunity where a shy immigrant kid like me can start from nothing and create. something. I have now been a proud U.S. citizen for over 25 years.
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When I was growing up in India, if someone had told me I would be one day pictured with this illustrious group, I would not have believed them. (Partly because I didn't know who they were). 😀. Honored to be mentioned in such company. Now back to writing (and generating) code.
A few days ago, the AI world quietly reached a significant milestone. @dharmesh , founder and CTO of @HubSpot , announced that his four-month-old startup, had amassed 258,000 users already. What began as an experiment at INBOUND 2024 swiftly evolved into
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It's past 2am on a Saturday night during a long weekend. I'm furiously coding away on a new product. One I find myself using every day. Scratching your own itch generally leads to better software . Stay tuned. #goodtimes.
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