Brian Halligan

Brian Halligan
Brian Halligan in 2010
Born	(1967-09-01) September 1, 1967
Alma mater	University of Vermont MIT Sloan School of Management
Occupation	Executive, author
Website	HubSpot

Brian Halligan is an American executive and author.^[1] He is a CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, an Internet marketing 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]

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 Electronic 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 2001 to 2005 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 2012, Inc. magazine reported that the company has $28.5 million in revenue and has 304 employees.^[10] 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).^[11]

Halligan also serves on the board of directors of House of Possibilities, a community service organization^[12] and the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX).^[13]

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 people now block marketing that interrupts them, such as advertisements and spam, that instead companies need to 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." ^[14] It was also reviewed in The Boston Globe.^[15] As of July 2011, the book was in its seventh printing, had sold 40,000 copies, and had been translated into nine languages.^[16] The book was revised and updated in 2014 in a second edition.^[17]

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,^[18] mentions that the authors say that they were inspired, in part, by an article in The Atlantic by Joshua Green.^[19]

Halligan speaks on marketing and business topics, including at the TEDx.^[20] He was an entrepreneur in residence at MIT^[7] and is a senior lecturer, teaching "Entrepreneurial Product Development and Marketing" with Elaine Chen.^[21] He is also an occasional lecturer at Sloan on the science of selling and marketing.^[22]

Ethics scandal

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 attempted to obtain a draft copy of Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble, by Daniel Lyons. The book is a satirical look at HubSpot, its company culture, and its business practices. "There was definitely some fishiness. But I didn’t report it. That was my bad," Halligan said about the incident.^{[23][24][25][26]}

Materials obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed that certain Hubspot executives 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.^[27]

Age discrimination

In 2013, Halligan said, "In the tech wold, gray hair and experience are really overrated." In his book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble, HubSpot employee Daniel Lyons said about Halligan's statement, "Imagine that instead of saying older people (gray hair and experience) are overrated, Halligan had said that gay people are overrated, or women, or African-Americans, or Jews. Imagine Halligan saying, 'We’re trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain white people, because when it comes to technology, white people do a much better job than black people!'"^[28]

References

External links

• About the authors page at Wiley for Inbound Marketing...
• About the authors page at Google Books from Marketing Lessons...