dharmesh

Co-founder/CTO, HubSpot ($HUBS).

Mission: Help millions grow better.

Publish newsletter (2M+ subscribers).

Builder:

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

2023 was the year of chat UX powered by generative AI. That led to me hacking on ChatSpot and launching it last year.

2024 is the year of Agent AI, so that's what I've been hacking away late nights on.

I'm obsessed with #AgentAI. Was up past 3am last night.

I have a handful of simple (but useful) agents that I built for myself and one I built for my wife.

Will start releasing them one at a time.

I'm using a bunch of LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini) and a bunch of proprietary/paid data sources. Will be fun to see the bills rack up. :)

Releasing it all for free.

You can join the waitlist at https://t.co/xirHeCKZPl

Thanks for your support.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

@tobi Congrats!

HubSpot is (chronologically) just 7 days behind.

But along other dimensions, we've got some work to do. :)

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The jobs data coming out continues to suggest the opposite of what a lot of people had thought would happen.

Just take engineering, as the prime example of the area with greatest AI impact (and perceived risk). Most companies now have far more software projects than ever before because of AI, and effectively only engineers are going to be the ones doing that work.

You can get by for a while by being non-technical building software, but eventually someone has to understand what the thing is that got built, has to maintain it, has to fix security issues that come up, upgrade the systems beneath it, and so on. That’s all jobs.

Now apply that to a number of other job functions. AI is going to cause companies to hire more in sales because agents can let them process more leads and do more customer research. AI will cause an explosion of new marketing roles because of how much more efficient it is to launch campaigns and target. The list goes on.

AI is going to have the opposite effect that lots of people thought on jobs.

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

When the cost of doing something at scale goes to zero, the value of that thing goes to zero too.

AI SDRs will stop working the moment everyone has one. Now the human salesperson has become the premium signal again. Enterprise deals are being closed on calls and text.

The things that don't scale are going to become more valuable as everything else does. Actual presence, carefully nurtured relationships, real conversations, etc. The pendulum always swings back.

[Nicolas Dessaigne @dessaigne]

Everyone says: hire people better than you, then get out of the way.

One of my biggest mistakes at Algolia was taking that literally.

Yes, hire people better than you. But don’t confuse seniority with earned trust.

Stay close at first. Inspect the work. Pressure-test the judgment. If you’re still micromanaging after 3 months, you hired the wrong person.

And trust your gut.

As a founder, you are the most fine-tuned model in the world on your own company. If something feels off, it probably is, even when the exec says, “Trust me, I’ve done this for 20 years.”

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

@akothari @satishmreddy @NotionHQ @ivan Wish it had been me.

Would have loved to have gotten some equity in Notion. :)

[Aaron Levie @levie]

This is effectively the #1 problem for AI agents in the enterprise.

As we go from agentic coding (where a large amount of context is in the code base, and users are technical enough to get the rest to the agent easily) to a world of knowledge work agents, the context problem becomes much more acute.

We see this every day with customers at Box. For existing digital knowledge, it’s often fragmented across legacy systems or environments that don’t play nice with agents, and have access controls that don’t map to the real work that needs to be done, which become a huge hurdle for getting agents the context they need. This has to all get moved to modern, secure cloud environments.

But also, companies often haven’t captured and digitized some of the critical context that agents need to work with. Decisions, processes, and workflows often live in people’s heads and tribal knowledge that need to get turned into unstructured data for agents.

This is actually one of the biggest points of leverage for applied AI companies, because they can work to specialize in getting agents exactly the information and domain expertise they need. But it’s also one of the reasons why FDEs and new system integrator plays will also work so well right now.

The companies that figure this out will be able to get the most out of AI going forward.

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

SaaSpocalypse narrative violation.

I suspect a couple of years from now there will be far more agents using HubSpot than homo sapiens.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

Was a fun conversation last night about Building in Boston.

It had been a while since Brian and I were on a public stage together. (We see each other all the time and talk about some of these same topics -- just not in front of hundreds of people).

[Jon Lai @Tocelot]

huge thank you to Hubspot cofounders @bhalligan @dharmesh for a riveting chat on why there’s never been a better time to build a startup at Boston tech week!

A few of my favorite takeaways:
- Hubspot created a new category in marketing SaaS, there are similar opps for new category creation in AI today
- Most founders should aspire to be more ambitious - ex. Hubspot wanted to be the biggest company in Boston, let’s be the biggest in the world
- Finding distribution still remains hard - AI makes it easier to build but also increased noise. Hubspot was built around a distribution insight, and startups today need to find one too
- The nature of AI-native teams is changing - but hiring for strengths rather than lack of weakness still works

[DHH @dhh]

From Getting Real [2006], Chapter 87:
Ride Out the Storm.

Wait until knee-jerk reactions to changes die down before taking action

When you rock the boat, there will be waves. After you introduce a new feature, change a policy, or remove something, knee-jerk reactions, often negative, will pour in.

Resist the urge to panic or rapidly change things in response. Passions flare in the beginning. But if you ride out this initial 24-48 hour period, things will usually settle down. Most people respond before they’ve really dug in and used whatever you’ve added (or gotten along with what you’ve removed). So sit back, take it all in, and don’t make a move until some time has passed. Then you’ll be able to offer a more reasoned response.

Also, remember that negative reactions are almost always louder and more passionate than positive ones. In fact, you may only hear negative voices even when the majority of your base is happy about a change. Make sure you don’t foolishly backpedal on a necessary, but controversial, decision.

[Tech Week @Techweek_]

That's a wrap on Building in Boston with @HubSpot and @a16z.
Founders, a fireside with @bhalligan, @dharmesh and @Tocelot, and a panel that didn't pull punches.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

I was a surprise last-minute guest at an event at @HubSpot HQ in Cambridge this evening.

Fun fireside chat with my friend and co-founder @bhalligan, moderated by @Tocelot from @a16z.

Loved the entrepreneurial energy for building in Boston.

Thanks to all of you that joined. Was a sold-out event and the room was packed!

[Jon Lai @Tocelot]

@Techweek_ @HubSpot @a16z @dharmesh @bhalligan What a great event!

[Jean-Michel Lemieux @jmwind]

@houmanasefi @dharmesh code talks, bs walks. we're no longer in "what if" mode. it's "take a look at this". step change.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

If you work in the software industry and have time to read only one long-form post today, read this one.

If you have time to read two, read this one twice.

Highly #recommend

tl;dr: Stay off the yellow brick road that the frontier model companies are racing down. There is plenty of opportunity to solve hard problems elsewhere. Focus on areas where you can build the system of work (workflows), capture compounding, non-public data and deliver deterministic outcomes that customers need.

[Joe Schmidt IV @joeschmidtiv]

https://t.co/i7teOUTWgZ

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

"Executive IC". That's pretty much the role I've had at HubSpot since its founding 20 years ago.

Thanks for giving shape to the idea, @jmwind and best wishes with the new role.

Long-time admirer of your work.

[Jean-Michel Lemieux @jmwind]

Very stoked about my next adventure. I’ve joined Spellbook, but not as CTO.

I’m joining as an Executive IC. It probably means different things to different people. It means I'm here to build and be hands on in every part of the company.

I've invested and been advising and getting to know @scottastevenson and the team for more than a year. At some point it became obvious the most useful thing I could do was stop talking about ideas and go work with the team.

With AI making code cheap to copy, what's going to be hard to copy is the shape of a company. How a team learns, decides, and ships. That's what I want to work on. It's what I've spent the last three decades learning to do.

Why Spellbook? The world has entered into one of the largest investment cycles in decades. Trillions of dollars are being deployed into energy, AI, manufacturing, transportation and the modernization of critical global systems. Despite this, progress still moves at the speed of contracts. Spellbook’s mission is to modernize the $1 trillion transactional legal market so the contract system can keep pace with the global economy.

At the same time, every contract ever signed is becoming searchable, comparable, and weaponizable by counterparties, regulators, and plaintiffs' lawyers. You will be attacked.

We're hiring. Slight bias toward Canada, but remote-friendly for great talent.
DM me.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

@m_mcintosh2 Thanks. That may be in the top 5 geekiest things I've said.

Also, the tl;dr is technically:

1) Take the first step.
2) Take the next step.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

Was it something I said?

Sometime around the beginning of this year, the number of new followers I was gaining on X/twitter on a daily/weekly/monthly basis started moving *up* -- and has kept increasing since then.

I did not make any deliberate change to how often I post or what I write about.

I'm not complaining, just a little confused.

In any case...Woo hoo! I just crossed 400k followers!

Thanks for your support.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

I think you're totally right -- and I'm already convinced.

I think of this kind of person as an "agent builder". It's a high value, high leverage skill that's very much in demand.

As models and harnesses get better, the value of the agent builder goes *up*, because there are more business challenges they can solve.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Levie’s Law of AI Psychosis:

The farther away you are from the actual work the more confident you are that humans are no longer needed

I like it

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

@colepulse Great point. You do indeed need both.

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

The harness matters more than the model.

Models have gotten really good. Great reasoning, large context windows, better instruction following.

But, what makes *use* of those capabilities is actually the harness. It's what provides tools, memory, skills and context to the model.

ChatGPT is a harness. Claude Cowork is a harness.

Without the harness, the model is just an engine with no car. You don't get anywhere.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Everyone building AI agents is focusing on building the prefrontal cortex. Planning. Reasoning. Multi-step chains. There's value here. CEO-stuff.

But also, a reframe: there is value in building the cerebellum. It's offloading boring tasks into reflex so the complex thought can focus.

Your mortgage gets paid by a standing order, not a committee. The things that are not fun, not interesting, but have to be done? Done. Most agent frameworks will fail because they treat all cognition as high cognition.

The winners will nail the boring stuff first.