By Brian Halligan, Co-Founder & CEO at HubSpot
Today on the HubSpot earnings call, we announced that I’m coming back to HubSpot stronger than ever as our Executive Chairman, and that our Chief Customer Officer, Yamini Rangan, will be HubSpot’s new CEO. It’s a new chapter for HubSpot, and I believe it’s an exciting one for our customers, partners, employees, and investors.
When Dharmesh and I started HubSpot 15 years ago, our objective was to create a company future generations could be proud of. We wanted HubSpot to transform how our customers do business, and we wanted to create a culture people really loved. With over 120,000 customers globally, it’s now more than ever that we have an incredible opportunity ahead of us for both our customers and for our culture. And I believe Yamini is the perfect CEO to help us write HubSpot’s next chapter.
Our employees have gotten to see Yamini’s leadership first-hand over the past few months as she ran day-to-day operations at HubSpot while I was recovering from a snowmobiling accident. The results speak for themselves, but I wanted to share a few reasons why Dharmesh and I (alongside the HubSpot Board) know Yamini is going to be great as our new CEO.
Yamini is a seasoned executive with experience at scale from Workday, Dropbox, and SAP. As a trained engineer who has led sales, operations, and go to market teams, she’s able to think big on strategy while nailing the details, and she has managed to bring remarkable lessons she’s learned from previous experience while being culturally additive to every initiative she’s led at HubSpot. A few additional reasons I know Yamini is the right choice here:
- Customer-centricity: Yamini joined HubSpot as our Chief Customer Officer 18 months ago, and she’s been a tireless advocate for our customers and partners ever since. One of Yamini’s greatest strengths is combining customer empathy with operational excellence, and it shows in her decisions like rapidly deploying support to help our customers and partners navigate COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic.
- CRM expertise: HubSpot’s winning aspiration is to be the #1 CRM for scaling companies. Yamini has been living and breathing customer relationship management for decades and has the depth of knowledge, experience, and customer feedback to lead HubSpot through our next chapter of growth.
- Curiosity and Culture: Yamini has a learning mindset, and it shows in how she runs her team, organizing field trips for the Flywheel organization to get inspiration on strategy, doing customer “follow me home” visits virtually during the pandemic, and leading with empathy every step of the way.
- Continuity: Yamini has been overseeing day to day operations at HubSpot since March, managing Board meetings, the HubSpot earnings call, and key hiring and growth initiatives, working closely with Dharmesh and the rest of the leadership team. She’s made HubSpot better by being here, and I know that trend will continue with her as CEO.
One of my favorite Warren Buffett quotes is “someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” HubSpot has been built on big bets that our customers and partners depend on to grow their business. I want to spend my time as I return partnering deeply with Dharmesh and Yamini and our Board on those bets, and on empowering Yamini to focus on scaling our company, our culture, and our customer experience.
HubSpot has an incredible opportunity ahead of us: we have a great product, we have an award-winning culture, and we have content, community, and customer experience that helps organizations globally grow. I’ve always believed that we need to ensure we have the right leadership for each chapter of HubSpot, and our leadership team is stronger than ever under Yamini.
I can’t wait to get back to HubSpot in my new role, and to support Yamini in her new role — the story of HubSpot is only just beginning.
