HubSpot was one of those startups that showed Boston entrepreneurs that success was possible.
Founded in 2006 by two friends who met at MIT's business school, the company rode the boom in blogging, Google searches, and social media to an initial public offering in 2014. Today, it has a stock market value of about $25 billion, making it one of Massachusetts' biggest software companies.
This week, the company holds its annual conference, Inbound — and for the first time ever, it's in San Francisco rather than Boston. Speakers include Amy Poehler from "Parks and Rec," Colin Jost from "Saturday Night Live," and Sean McDowell from the YouTube series "Hot Ones," along with more tech-focused names like Dario Amodei, chief executive of the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. The event attracts about 13,000 people, according to HubSpot chief marketing office Kipp Bodnar.
It's a good time to ask two key questions about HubSpot , which sells software that helps small and medium-sized companies communicate with their customers — and prospective customers — across their websites, email and social media. The company's 2024 revenue hit $2.6 billion.
1. What does it mean to be 'headquartered' in Massachusetts these days?
HubSpot's headquarters address remains First Street in East Cambridge, across from the Lechmere MBTA stop. But a lot of things started to change in 2023.
In January of that year, the company announced that it would be opening up a San Francisco office. Immediately after that, it announced that a San Francisco-based executive, Yamini Rangan, would be taking over as CEO from HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan, who lives in Boston. And later that month, the company's footprint in Cambridge got smaller as it announced it was shedding about 500 employees globally, and consolidating its Massachusetts employees from two buildings into one.
Over the past few years, HubSpot's senior leadership team has also become less Massachusetts-centric, and more spread across the country. Of the dozen people in the company's top ranks, half are based in Boston, four in San Francisco, one in Seattle, and one in Chicago, according to LinkedIn. The company's board meeting alternates between Boston and San Francisco each quarter, Bodnar said.
In the years before the COVID pandemic, Bodnar said, most HubSpot employees showed up at offices in Cambridge or Dublin, Ireland, the company's European outpost. Since then, he said, the company has "really turned into a true global business and culture. You have a huge European presence in Dublin, meaningful offices in London and Paris and Amsterdam, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. And in the U.S., we have a major presence in Boston — that's the core east coast anchor — and a really vibrant San Francisco office now."
Bodnar said that while Cambridge remains the company's largest office, only about a third of the company's employees tend to work from any office on a regular basis. (One-third are completely work-from-home, and one-third are a hybrid of work-from-home with occasional office visits.)
There's no set schedule for employees to be in the office, he said. "I live in Newton, but I'm not in the office every day — partially because getting from Newton to Cambridge is horrible. In a given month, you might be more likely to see me in the San Francisco office," since Bodnar said many of the colleagues he collaborates with are based there.
Holding the company's annual conference, "Inbound," in San Francisco this week isn't a permanent move, Bodnar said: "The plan is that will be in Boston in 2026."
In a 2013 interview , Halligan, the co-founder who still serves on HubSpot's board, told me, "We want to build an anchor company here, something our grandkids will be proud of. Boston needs it." (Halligan served as chair of the HubSpot board until this past May, when a former eBay exec based in Silicon Valley, Lorrie Norrington, took over.)
A dozen years later, it's less clear what the economic and employment impact is of having an "anchor company" headquartered in any given city, if its hiring happens around the world and people can work from home. On HubSpot's job postings page, only three current openings are posted as tied to the Cambridge headquarters office, all related to software engineering; 116 are listed as open to remote workers.
2. How well will HubSpot navigate the shift to AI?
For the past few years, HubSpot executives have been unveiling new artificial intelligence features, now called "Breeze Copilot." Like other AI copilots, it can sometimes be helpful in drafting social posts or emails, but on other occasions, it instructs you how to do things manually in the software, rather than taking care of it for you.
"My main thought on HubSpot's AI is that it's a huge challenge to integrate it seamlessly into their existing platform after all these years," says Jeanne Hopkins, a former HubSpot vice president. "It's easier for newer companies."
Doug Levin, a one-time advisor to HubSpot, says that the company's "AI retrofitting will certainly drive growth" — but some of that growth may come from acquiring AI startups and plugging them into HubSpot's existing offerings. (A handful of AI startups in the Boston area focused on sales, marketing, and customer service, including Maven AGI, Day AI, and Agency AI, have been founded by ex-HubSpot employees.)
Bodnar said that one of the announcements at this week's conference will be personalized emails crafted by AI. Early tests, he said, show that a personalized email is greater than 80% more likely to get the recipient to generate a sale than a more generic message.
But AI is not only changing what customers expect of HubSpot's software, it's also changing how things are marketed and sold online. Bodnar said that "the average marketer is a little bit in the trough of despair these days," because less traffic is arriving at their websites as a result of instant AI answers delivered by search engines like Google and Perplexity. As sites get less of that organic traffic, they're either sending out more emails — which can aggravate email recipients — or paying more to advertise.
"There needs to be a new way of doing marketing," Bodnar said, adding that the company would release a new "playbook" and product features at the Inbound conference, including ways to use AI to generate advertising and marketing content.
"We have probably the most ambitious slate of products we've ever launched," he said.
HubSpot shareholders will be watching closely: while the company's stock price has risen 72% over the last five years, in 2025 it is down 30%.
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