Why HubSpot’s Co-Founder Is Betting Against the SaaSpocalypse
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah tells a16z's Joe Schmidt why he thinks AI expands the software market rather than killing it, and how HubSpot is rebuilding around agents and launching Uspot, a CRM for solopreneurs.
The gist
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Shah says you can't judge an idea in advance, so narrow your focus and test fast; HubSpot began as an ERP pitch for law firms.
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A survey found 60% of paying HubSpot customers used no CRM, so HubSpot built the simplest one it could and made it free.
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To avoid being flattened by AI labs, Shah suggests a test: if adding 'yet' to 'ChatGPT can't do this' still holds, avoid the idea.
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Shah sees ChatGPT and Claude Cowork as the new browsers, and says anything a database query can answer shouldn't use AI inference.
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Shah says early paid sign-ups for Uspot beat any project he's launched, and over 70% of new US companies are expected to stay one-person.
Made by someone on this episode
Agents API
· Dharmesh Shah's
— OpenAI's developer service for running Codex-powered agents, with c...
Also mentioned
0:56
Yellow Brick Road Stay
· "We're picking up on a conversation that started with an exchange on X about my Yellow Brick Road essay: the..."
2:11
HubSpot
· "HubSpot's 20 years old now. And when the company started, the genesis of the company was, oh, there's this..."
16:31
Salesforce
· "We discovered that 20% were using Salesforce.com, another 20% were using some other CRM other than..."
26:48
OpenAI
· "I'll pick on Sam Altman, since I'm an investor in OpenAI and know Sam. It's like he could wake up tomorrow..."
30:14
OpenRouter
· "Right now, things like OpenRouter exist because it's easy to sort of swap out models."
30:18
Model routing
· "Even within HubSpot, and most SaaS companies, are doing some form of use case decomposition and model..."
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