Brian Halligan

Brian Halligan is an American executive and author.[1] He is CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is also a senior lecturer at MIT. Halligan uses the term inbound marketing to describe the type of marketing he advocates.[2]

Brian Halligan
Brian Halligan in 2010
Alma materUniversity of Vermont
MIT Sloan School of Management
OccupationExecutive, author
WebsiteHubSpot

He has co-authored two books on marketing: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs[3] with HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah and Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History[4] with David Meerman Scott.

Early life, education and career

Halligan was born in Westwood, Massachusetts, and grew up and attended public schools in Westwood, Massachusetts. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Vermont and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management in 2005.[5]

His career began at Parametric Technology Corporation in several roles leading up to senior vice president of the Pacific Rim. Wanting to work in a smaller company,[6][7] he joined Groove Networks as vice president of sales, where he worked from 2000 to 2004 before it was acquired by Microsoft and rebranded as Microsoft SharePoint Workspace.[7][8]

After a period as a venture partner at Longworth Ventures[9] he co-founded HubSpot in June 2006. In HubSpot's 2016 Year In Review, the company reported $271 million in total revenue and 1,597 employees with headquarters in Cambridge, MA and offices in Dublin, Ireland (EMEA HQ); Berlin; Singapore; Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; and Portsmouth, NH.[10][11] He credits the company's success, in part, to innovations like the "Alpha, Beta, Version One" policy, in which employees begin proving their ideas might profit the company "nights and weekends" (the alpha phase) before receiving additional resources (the beta and version one phases).[12]

From 2014 to 2016, Halligan also served on the board of directors of Fleetmatics,[13] a provider of fleet management solutions delivered as software as a service, leading up to their acquisition by Verizon for $2.4 billion.[14]

Publications, speeches, and awards

Halligan's first book, Inbound Marketing, was co-authored with HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah. The thesis of the book is that because people now block marketing that interrupts them, such as advertisements and spam, companies need to instead provide information that is useful to prospects, who will then self-identify. Reviewing the book, Meryl Evans said that it contains "elementary stuff..." but it "does a good job for those who don’t have a clue about how to use social media for business." [15] It was also reviewed in The Boston Globe.[16] As of July 2011, the book was in its seventh printing, had sold 40,000 copies, and had been translated into nine languages.[17] The book was revised and updated in 2014 in a second edition.[18]

With co-author David Meerman Scott, Brian Halligan (right) on the Marketing Lessons... book tour. The background photo montage includes Jerry Garcia, co-founder of The Grateful Dead

His second book, Marketing Lessons, was co-authored with David Meerman Scott. It uses the marketing activities of the rock band The Grateful Dead as an example of this. Scott Kirsner, reviewing this book in The Boston Globe,[19] mentions that the authors say that they were inspired, in part, by an article in The Atlantic by Joshua Green.[20] In 2017, Halligan purchased the "Wolf" guitar once owned by Garcia for $1.9M at a charity auction. An anonymous donor made an additional donation of $1.6M and so the total benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center was $3.5M.[21][22][23]

Halligan speaks on marketing and business topics, including at TEDx.[24] He was an entrepreneur in residence at MIT[7] and is a senior lecturer, teaching "Designing, Developing, and Launching Successful Products in an Entrepreneurial Environment".[25] He previously taught "Entrepreneurial Product Development and Marketing" with Elaine Chen.[26] He is also an occasional lecturer at Sloan on the science of selling and marketing.[27]

Daniel Lyons incidents

In his book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble, which is sharply critical of HubSpot's management and culture, former HubSpot employee Daniel Lyons accused Halligan of age discrimination.[28]

Materials obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed that certain Hubspot executives working under Halligan considered the book "a financial threat to HubSpot, its share price, and the company’s future potential." The FBI report discusses "tactics such as email hacking and extortion" in the attempt to prevent the book from being published.[29]

Halligan was forced to pay financial penalties by the HubSpot board of directors because he failed to promptly alert the board after he discovered that staff members at HubSpot behaved inappropriately. "There was definitely some fishiness. But I didn’t report it. That was my bad," Halligan said about the incident.[30][31][32][33]

References
  1. "HubSpot Management Team, Brian Halligan, CEO & Founder". HubSpot. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  2. "Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO & Co-Founder". Inbound Marketing. Archived from the original on November 18, 2011. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  3. Halligan, Brian; Shah, Dharmesh (2009). Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 978-0-470-49931-3.
  4. Scott, David Meerman; Halligan, Brian (2010). Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History. John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 978-0-470-90052-9. Archived from the original on 2011-12-12. Retrieved 2011-12-04.
  5. "Five MIT Sloan companies to watch #3 HubSpot, Moving the World to Inbound Marketing" (PDF). MIT Sloan Alumni Magazine. MIT Sloan: 29. Fall 2009. Retrieved January 14, 2012.
  6. "HubSpot: Key People: Management: Brian Halligan, CEO & Founder". VentureBeat Profiles. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
  7. "Entrepreneur In Residence: Brian Halligan". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on January 2, 2012. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  8. "Microsoft, Groove Networks to Combine Forces to Create Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration". Microsoft. March 10, 2005. Archived from the original on December 8, 2011. Retrieved December 19, 2011.
  9. "Brian Halligan". General Catalyst Partners. Archived from the original on November 19, 2011. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  10. "HubSpot 2016 Year In Review" (PDF). Hubspot. 2017. Retrieved June 15, 2017.
  11. HubSpot. "Contact Us | HubSpot". www.hubspot.com. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  12. Markowitz, Eric (September 2010). "My Story: Brian Halligan of HubSpot". Inc. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  13. "Fleetmatics Group Expands Board of Directors | Fleetmatics". www.fleetmatics.com. Retrieved 2017-06-15.
  14. "Verizon Completes Acquisition of Fleetmatics | Fleetmatics". www.fleetmatics.com. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  15. Evans, Meryl (March 9, 2010). "Inbound Marketing: A Social Media Primer". The New York Times/GigaOm. Retrieved December 19, 2011.
  16. Kirsner, Scott (October 19, 2009). "Brian Halligan's To-Do List: Run Company, Write Book, Raise $16 Million". The Boston Globe. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  17. "Brian Halligan, Nominated for a Small Business Influencer Award in: Leaders". Small Business Influencers. July 2011. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  18. | url = http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118896653.html | publisher = Wiley | date = August, 2014
  19. Kirsner, Scott (July 16, 2010). "New book casts the Grateful Dead as brilliant marketers". The Boston Globe. Retrieved December 19, 2011.
  20. Green, Joshua (March 2010). "Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead". The Atlantic. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  21. Blistein, Jon (2017-06-01). "Jerry Garcia's Legendary Wolf Guitar Sells for $1.9 Million at Auction". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2017-06-05.
  22. Rosen, Andy (2017-06-01). "HubSpot's Brian Halligan buys Jerry Garcia's guitar for almost $2 million - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved 2017-06-05.
  23. "Auction of legendary guitar to benefit SPLC". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  24. Halligan, Brian; Shah, Dharmesh; Caruso, Joe (June 29, 2011). "How do you catch an angel investor's eye?". TEDx Boston. Retrieved December 7, 2011.
  25. "15.392 Class Home". stellar.mit.edu. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  26. Chen, Elaine; Halligan, Brian. "15.S16 H2 Special Seminar in Management: Entrepreneurial Product Marketing and Development". MIT. Archived from the original on February 14, 2012. Retrieved December 6, 2011.
  27. "MIT Sloan's inaugural Marketing Conference to reveal the future of engaging the digital consumer". MIT Sloan. September 1, 2011. Archived from the original on January 22, 2012. Retrieved January 14, 2012.
  28. Primack, Dan (April 16, 2016) "Why Tech Workers and Investors Should Read 'Disrupted." Forbes. (Retrieved 8-16-2016).
  29. Extortion, hacking claims sparked HubSpot investigation, FBI records show, Boston Globe, 24 March 2016.
  30. beta Boston
  31. My Year in Startup Hell, Dan Lyons in Fortune, April 2016
  32. Woodward, Curt (2016-03-24). "Extortion, hacking claims sparked HubSpot investigation, FBI records show". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2016-04-12. Chief executive Brian Halligan was fined for failing to promptly alert the company’s board of directors after finding out about the incident.
  33. Kirsner, Scott (2015-07-30). "HubSpot CEO and CTO discuss firing of company's 'third founder' over attempts to obtain book manuscript". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2016-03-16. I did the math on how many days I’ve been a working professional. It’s something like 6,250, and yesterday was the worst.
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