Brian Halligan

Brian Halligan
Brian Halligan
Occupation	Executive, author, venture capitalist
Known for	Co-founder of HubSpot, coining the term "inbound marketing"
Education	University of Vermont
Website	[HubSpot Official site]

Brian Halligan is an American business executive, author, investor, and educator who co-founded HubSpot, a software company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that develops marketing, sales, and customer service products. Halligan served as the company's chief executive officer from its founding in 2006 until stepping down to become executive chairman. He is credited with coining the term "inbound marketing," a concept that shifted the focus of digital marketing from interruptive outbound tactics to content-driven strategies designed to attract customers organically through search engines, social media, and blogs. In addition to his business career, Halligan has served as a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught courses on entrepreneurship and marketing. He has co-authored two books: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs 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 with David Meerman Scott. As of late 2025, Halligan also serves as a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, where he focuses on technology investments.

Early Life

Brian Halligan grew up in the northeastern United States. A profile published by Fortune in November 2025 recounted that in the summer of 1985, when Halligan was seventeen years old, he walked out to a road on Cape Cod, wrote "Saratoga Springs" on a piece of wood, and hitchhiked to see the Grateful Dead perform in Saratoga Springs, New York. The experience of becoming a devoted fan of the Grateful Dead — a so-called "Deadhead" — would prove formative for Halligan's later thinking about marketing and business strategy. The band's approach to cultivating a loyal following through free content (such as allowing fans to tape concerts), community building, and an unconventional business model became a recurring reference point in Halligan's career, ultimately informing his co-authored book on marketing lessons derived from the band's practices.

The Fortune profile described Halligan's trajectory from a Grateful Dead–following teenager on Cape Cod to the leader of a publicly traded software company, suggesting that the ethos of the band — creating value for an audience rather than pursuing traditional advertising — became a philosophical foundation for his concept of inbound marketing.

Education

Halligan attended the University of Vermont for his undergraduate studies. He later enrolled at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he earned a Master of Business Administration degree. It was at MIT Sloan that Halligan met Dharmesh Shah, who would become his co-founder at HubSpot. The pair connected over a shared interest in how the internet was fundamentally changing the way consumers research and purchase products, and how businesses needed to adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.

Halligan's connection to MIT extended beyond his time as a student. He became involved with the university's entrepreneurship ecosystem, serving as an entrepreneur in residence at the MIT Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He also served as a senior lecturer, teaching courses on entrepreneurial product marketing and development. According to the Fortune profile, Halligan brought lessons from both his business career and his experiences as a Deadhead into his MIT classroom.

Career

Early Career

Before founding HubSpot, Halligan gained experience in the technology industry. He worked at several technology companies, including a period at Groove Networks, a collaboration software company founded by Ray Ozzie that was later acquired by Microsoft. His experience in the enterprise software sector provided him with firsthand knowledge of how technology companies marketed and sold their products, and he grew increasingly convinced that traditional outbound marketing methods — cold calling, email blasts, trade shows, and television advertising — were becoming less effective as consumers gained more control over the information they consumed online.

Founding HubSpot

In 2006, Halligan and Dharmesh Shah co-founded HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was built around Halligan's thesis that businesses needed to fundamentally rethink their approach to marketing in an age when consumers could block, ignore, or circumvent traditional advertising. Instead of "outbound" marketing — in which companies pushed messages out to potential customers through interruption-based channels — Halligan advocated for what he termed "inbound marketing," a strategy centered on creating valuable content that would draw customers to a company's website through search engines, blogs, and social media.

HubSpot's initial product was a suite of tools designed to help small and medium-sized businesses execute inbound marketing strategies. The platform included features for search engine optimization, blogging, social media management, lead generation, and marketing analytics. The company received venture capital backing, with General Catalyst Partners serving as one of its early investors.

Under Halligan's leadership as CEO, HubSpot grew rapidly. The company was recognized on the Inc. 500 list as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. HubSpot expanded its product offerings beyond marketing to include sales tools (the HubSpot CRM) and customer service software, positioning itself as a comprehensive platform for customer relationship management. The company went public with an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HUBS.

Halligan's leadership of HubSpot drew attention from the technology media and the broader business press. He was identified as an influential figure in the small business and technology communities.

The Inbound Marketing Movement

Halligan's coinage and promotion of the term "inbound marketing" represented one of his most significant contributions to the marketing industry. The concept, as articulated by Halligan and Shah, posited that the internet had shifted power from marketers to consumers. Rather than interrupting potential customers with unsolicited messages, businesses should create content that answers the questions customers are already asking and optimize that content so it can be found through search engines and shared on social media.

In 2009, Halligan and Shah published Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, which laid out the principles of the inbound marketing methodology. A revised and updated edition was subsequently published by Wiley. The book provided a practical guide for businesses seeking to adopt inbound strategies and helped popularize the approach among marketers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. The New York Times described the book as a "social media primer" that outlined how businesses could leverage online tools to attract customers.

HubSpot also established an annual conference called INBOUND, which grew into one of the largest marketing and sales conferences in the world, drawing thousands of attendees to Boston each year.

Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead

In 2010, Halligan and co-author David Meerman Scott published Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History. The book argued that the Grateful Dead had pioneered many of the marketing strategies that technology companies and startups were adopting in the internet era, including giving away content for free (the band famously allowed fans to record and share concert recordings), building a devoted community, embracing an unconventional business model, and focusing on the live experience rather than recorded product sales.

The book drew upon an argument that had also been explored in The Atlantic, which published an article examining the "management secrets" of the Grateful Dead and how the band's approach anticipated modern business practices. For Halligan, the connection between the Dead's philosophy and inbound marketing was personal, rooted in his own experiences as a Deadhead going back to the 1985 hitchhiking trip he took as a teenager.

Controversies and the Disrupted Affair

In 2016, HubSpot faced public scrutiny related to the publication of Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, a book by journalist and former HubSpot employee Dan Lyons that offered a critical portrayal of the company's workplace culture. Prior to the book's publication, HubSpot's chief marketing officer was fired and the company's co-founder and then-CTO was sanctioned after an internal investigation revealed that company employees had attempted to obtain a manuscript of the book before its release.

Halligan, as CEO at the time, was sanctioned by HubSpot's board of directors in connection with the incident. Documents released as part of a federal investigation into the matter were later reported on by The Boston Globe. Fortune published an excerpt of Lyons's book and a review recommending it as essential reading for technology workers and investors.

The episode was a notable moment in the broader cultural conversation about startup workplace culture in the mid-2010s. Halligan and Shah publicly addressed the ethical lapse and discussed the internal changes that resulted from the investigation.

Transition to Executive Chairman

Halligan stepped down as CEO of HubSpot and transitioned to the role of executive chairman of the company's board of directors. In this capacity, he continued to serve as a director of HubSpot. SEC filings from February 2026 show that Halligan sold 8,261 shares of HubSpot stock on February 17, 2026, at a price of $253.00 per share, a transaction valued at approximately $2.09 million.

In a May 2025 discussion at the SaaStr conference, Halligan revealed that during his eighteen years leading HubSpot, the company did not receive any acquisition offers, despite widespread industry speculation. He stated that there was never a serious offer from Salesforce, and that rumors of an acquisition by Google had also never materialized into an actual bid.

Venture Capital and Sequoia Capital

Following his transition from the CEO role at HubSpot, Halligan joined Sequoia Capital as a partner. In this role, he focused on technology investments, including evaluating opportunities in the artificial intelligence sector. In a November 2025 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Halligan expressed a degree of skepticism about the state of generative AI startups, stating that "there's more sizzle than steak" about some companies in the space. In the same month, he appeared on Fox Business to discuss startup valuations and AI regulation, commenting that "startup traction right now is 'unbelievable.'"

In August 2025, Halligan participated in a discussion at the SaaStr conference about CEO compensation in technology companies, arguing that prevailing compensation structures were creating misaligned incentives for growth.

Personal Life

Halligan is a lifelong fan of the Grateful Dead, a fandom that has influenced both his personal identity and his professional thinking. His first Grateful Dead concert experience came at age seventeen, when he hitchhiked from Cape Cod to Saratoga Springs, New York, to see the band perform in 1985. Halligan has spoken publicly about how the Dead's approach to community building, content sharing, and fan engagement informed his business philosophy and, in particular, the development of the inbound marketing concept.

Halligan is based in the Boston metropolitan area, consistent with HubSpot's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Legacy

Halligan's influence on the marketing industry is closely tied to his articulation and popularization of the inbound marketing methodology. The concept fundamentally reframed how many businesses — particularly small and medium-sized companies — approached customer acquisition in the digital age, shifting emphasis from paid advertising and cold outreach to content creation, search engine optimization, and social media engagement.

Under Halligan's leadership, HubSpot grew from a startup into a publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's platform became widely adopted by businesses around the world, and its annual INBOUND conference became a significant event in the marketing and technology industries. The Fortune profile of Halligan, published in November 2025, described HubSpot as a company that had reached a $38 billion valuation under Halligan's stewardship, framing his journey from a teenage Deadhead to a technology CEO as emblematic of a particular strain of countercultural thinking applied to business.

Halligan's work as a senior lecturer at MIT contributed to his influence as an educator, bringing his practical experience building HubSpot into the classroom and mentoring future entrepreneurs through the university's entrepreneurship programs. His involvement with Sequoia Capital represents a continuation of his engagement with the technology industry, now from the perspective of an investor evaluating the next generation of startups.

His books remain reference points in the marketing literature. Inbound Marketing, co-authored with Shah, helped codify a set of practices that are now standard components of digital marketing strategy. Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead offered an unconventional lens through which to examine business strategy, drawing connections between the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and the technology-driven disruption of the 2000s and 2010s.