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Dharmesh Shah

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hubspot

Search every verified Dharmesh Shah interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, spoke at the UNBOUND 2026 event on September 16, 2026, where he discussed the role of AI in business growth. He described a trend of increasing new company formations, citing record numbers in the United States, and noted that a significant portion of these are one-person businesses. Shah attributed the success of some AI users to their use of "harnesses" and context, rather than superior models, and introduced YouSpot, which he described as an AI-native solo CRM designed as a domain-specific AI harness with CRM capabilities. In a September 18, 2025 appearance on the "Marketing Against the Grain" podcast, Shah discussed the evolution of AI since late 2022 and the rise of one-person businesses enabled by AI. He explained his approach to using a "second brain" for managing information and automating actions, such as monitoring domain offers or social media mentions. Shah also promoted YouSpot as a tool for solo entrepreneurs, offering a discount code for the service during the episode.

Recent appearances

  • Growing Better In The Age Of The Builder | Dharmesh Shah | UNBOUND 2026

    September 16, 2026 · 📺 HubSpot and HubSpot Live

    Live: Wednesday, September 16 | 1:30 PM ET Here's the strangest fact about AI in 2026: one-person companies are hitting a million in revenue. People who've never written code are building products. Millions are staring at a blank chat box, re-explaining to the same AI for the 47th time, wondering when the magic kicks in. The breakout people aren't using better AI. Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot co-founder and CTO has spent years obsessed with that gap: same AI, wildly different results. Join him live from UNBOUND’s Main Stage where he breaks down the operating system behind the breakout. You'll leave…

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  • Dharmesh Shah: “The New AI Era Will Create Millions of One-Person Businesses”

    September 15, 2026 · 📺 Marketing Against the Grain

    [Free guide] build your second brain with AI: https://clickhubspot.com/trom To get started with YouSpot, go to https://youspot.com/pricing/pro?promo... . You'll see the coupon code automatically applied on checkout. Did you know that 86% of all new companies started aren’t expected to hire any employees? Kipp, Kieran, and guest Dharmesh Shah (Founder of HubSpot) dive into the rapidly growing world of one-person businesses and how AI is fueling a new wave of solopreneurs. Learn more on the evolution of the "second brain" for entrepreneurs, how agentic AI harnesses are changing the game, and w…

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  • HubSpot Burned the Roadmap for AI | Dharmesh Shah Explains Why

    May 07, 2026 · 📺 Get Paid

    In this episode 48 of the Get Paid podcast, host Manny Medina sits down with Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder and CTO of HubSpot, for a wide-ranging conversation about the AI transformation reshaping SaaS from the inside out, from the early days of GPT-2 access to HubSpot’s bold decision to burn the product roadmap and go all-in on AI. What You’ll Learn: • HubSpot's internal “startup within a startup” model • Why vibe coding won't replace software companies • How HubSpot landed on a hybrid seats-plus-credits pricing model • What it really takes to break through passive resistance when an entire orga…

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  • Is SaaS really dead? Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot on AI, Vibe-Coding & the Future of Work

    February 03, 2026 · 📺 Zapier

    Explore SaaS with AI and Zapier. 🔥 https://bit.ly/3WsVPzp Is SaaS about to be replaced by people “vibe-coding” their own apps — or is something deeper at stake? Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, joins Wade to cut through the hype and give a refreshingly practical view of how companies should show up for AI. Dharmesh argues the right question isn’t “How do I compete against AI?” but “How do I compete with AI?” — and explains how culture, curiosity, and a little bit of tinkering unlock real value. From practical starting points for SMBs, to why large SaaS vendors still have a massi…

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  • Agents, Metaprompting and Tech-powered Parenting with HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah

    October 14, 2025 · 📺 Canva

    HubSpot Cofounder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, joins Cameron Adams to explore how AI agents are reshaping work, leadership, and creativity. From culture-as-a-product to tech-powered parenting, Dharmesh shares insights into why he’s still betting on humans, even in the age of powerful AI tools. From building culture as a product to tech-powered parenting, Dharmesh shares insights into why he’s still betting on humans, even in the age of powerful AI tools. Cam’s notes on Substack: promptedwithcam.substack.com

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  • $30B Founder: SEO is Dead.. Do This Instead

    September 15, 2025 · 📺 My First Million

    Want to rank #1 in ChatGPT? Get the Prompt Library: https://clickhubspot.com/dbm Get HubSpot's new Loop playbook here: https://clickhubspot.com/cd63b7 Episode 745: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Dharmesh Shah about the early days of SEO and how to jack the algorithm today to show up in ChatGPT responses. — Show Notes: (0:00) The origin of inbound (15:55) Algorithm jacking (22:43) Old Way: SEO (32:45) New Way: AEO (36:21) Step 1: Enable chatbot crawlers (37:55) Step 2: Restructure your content as Q&A (39:05) Step 3: White hat linking (…

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  • You To The Power of AI with Dharmesh Shah | INBOUND 2025

    September 04, 2025 · 📺 HubSpot Live

    HubSpot Spotlight - Explore new AI, marketing, sales and customer service software 🔗 https://www.hubspot.com/spotlight In a special solo keynote, HubSpot Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah explores how to build and lead in an era of unprecedented change. From AI transformation to evolving customer expectations, Dharmesh will decode the patterns that define tomorrow's successful companies. Walk away with a clearer vision of what's coming and the practical steps to position your business ahead of the curve. 📙 FREE Certification Courses Digital Marketing Certification: 👉 https://clickhubspot.com…

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  • How to Compete with AI -- and Win | Dharmesh Shah | TEDxBoston

    July 02, 2025 · 📺 TEDx Talks

    Most people get this question wrong. When you hear ""How do you compete with AI?"" - do you think compete AGAINST it, or compete USING it? HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah reveals why your answer determines your future. From his first conversation with AI (2 years before ChatGPT) to watching his 14-year-old son ""program in English,"" Dharmesh breaks down: ✅ How AI actually works (without the technical jargon) ✅ Why banning AI is like refusing spellcheck ✅ The simple shift that turns AI from threat to superpower ✅ What ""Generation AI"" knows that we're still learning The bottom line: AI won'…

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  • The Agent Network — Dharmesh Shah, Agent.ai + CTO of HubSpot

    March 28, 2025 · 📺 Latent Space

    full writeup: https://latent.space/p/dharmesh Hosted at Chroma: https://trychroma.com/ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome 02:29 Dharmesh Shah's Journey into AI 05:22 Defining AI Agents 06:45 The Evolution and Future of AI Agents 13:53 Graph Theory and Knowledge Representation 20:02 Engineering Practices and Overengineering 25:57 The Role of Junior Engineers in the AI Era 28:20 Multi-Agent Systems and MCP Standards 35:55 LinkedIn's Legal Battles and Data Scraping 37:32 The Future of AI and Hybrid Teams 39:19 Building Agent AI: A Professional Network for Agents 40:43 Challenges a…

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  • Billionaire Compresses 20 Years of Wisdom Into 75 Minutes - Dharmesh Shah

    December 03, 2024 · 📺 My First Million

    Spot market opportunity before it explodes [Free Resource] 👉 https://clickhubspot.com/dmh Episode 655: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Dharmesh Shah ( https://x.com/dharmesh ) about how to increase the odds of hitting your first million and your next million. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:33) Lesson 1: Get leverage (9:26) Lesson 2: Be an asset, not a liability (13:40) Lesson 3: Get even closer to the value creation (19:42) Mini Masterclass on Power Negotiating (24:35) Dharmesh's little-known $2M failure (29:35) Lesson: Insight compressi…

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  • The Future Of AI Agents With Dharmesh Shah | INBOUND 2024

    September 19, 2024 · 📺 HubSpot Live

    Get free access to Agent.AI: https://clickhubspot.com/dlxp HubSpot co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, gives his predictions on the future of AI agents. He believes agents are the new apps, and soon everyone will not only be using agents, but many people will be building agents. Dharmesh demos agent.ai, the first professional network for AI agents, and lays out his vision for bringing the agent network to HubSpot’s customer platform. HubSpot Spotlight - Explore what's new: https://clickhubspot.com/8fa2 00:00 Intro 01:05 The Evolution of HubSpot's Products 01:55 The Rise of AI Agents 02:50…

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  • HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah: The secret to driving long-term growth | Masters of Scale Summit 2022

    August 12, 2024 · 📺 Masters of Scale

    On the Masters of Scale Summit stage in 2022, Dharmesh Shah, co-founder & CTO of HubSpot, unveils the key catalyst for scaling companies: building a strong community. Drawing from his experience as an introvert, Dharmesh explains how fostering connections through the IDEAL framework — Identity, Diversity, Engagement, Action, and Learning — can drive sustainable, long-term growth. He highlights the difference between an audience and a community, emphasizing that true value is created through many-to-many interactions. 📫 THE MASTERS OF SCALE NEWSLETTER 35,000+ read our free weekly newsletter pa…

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Notable quotes

“YouSpot is the AI-native solo CRM. So let's break that down. What does it mean really to be AI native? Because this term gets tossed around a lot. YouSpot is built as a domain-specific, custom-purpose AI harness. So this is not a CRM with AI inside. This is an AI app, an AI harness with CRM inside. So you can use it just like ChatGPT, just like Claude. In fact, it supports both the latest models, you can swap between”

“So new business creation in the United States hit an all-time record in 2025. All-time record. 5.6 million new companies were started in 2025. And this is not slowing down. So far this year, we've already had 4.3 million businesses started. So we're going to break the record again this year. Now, what's more interesting than the number of new companies starting is the shape of those new companies. Because the percent”

“The world has seen an increase in number of new company formations that's been happening now and the US Census Bureau puts data out. Uh Stripe puts data out. Uh in 2025, we had the record highest number of new company formations in the United States than we've ever had in in history. Roughly just a little under five million uh new businesses were formed. Um through July of this year, we've already exceeded 4 million.”

“My sense is that the trend line will move up. So I don't know and I'm not allowed to provide dates and timelines and slopes of curves and such. But I expect that over the fullness of time credits will become the predominant model and the reason for this is that more and more of the value that HubSpot creates will be better articulated and better captured with that model versus the seat-based model. So and the way we ”

“The way we're tackling this, and this is not necessarily new, so we have the entire core team and we did like others have done and have talked about publicly, you know, in Q1 of 23, we threw out the road map we had at the time and said okay well this is not a drill this is not small. And so we had believers through the exact team so it was not a lack of conviction on AI at all. And we moved I thought pretty quickly b”

“I don't think so. And here's why. It's like, okay, so HubSpot is 9,000 people. We have hundreds of engineers that have been doing this a long time. They are professional developers. They have moved products into production. We have all the resources in the world. The number of SaaS apps that we have replaced as a result of all this kind of army of resources and talent that we have, we're a software company through an”

Other executives at Hubspot

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