"On one hot June day in 1985, a 17-year-old Brian Halligan walked out to a Cape Cod road, scrawled "Saratoga Springs" on a piece of wood, and stuck out his thumb. He and Eric Olson, a fellow high-school student and his partner in a painting company, had decided to follow a certain band on tour. Their car, a battered Subaru Brat with a broken starter, wasn't exactly road-trip-proof."
"Halligan didn't know it yet, but that first show would take him from a curious listener into a full-blown superfan of the Grateful Dead. And throughout his professional life- he became a cofounder and former CEO of HubSpot, which at its peak valuation in late 2024 had a market capitalization of about $38 billion, a partner at Sequoia Capital working with hot AI startups, and a senior lecturer at MIT - he has carried the Dead's ethos with him."
Brian Halligan became a Grateful Dead superfan after hitchhiking to a 1985 concert. He later co-founded HubSpot and, with cofounder Dharmesh Shah, grew revenue from $250,000 to $15 million in three years during the 2008 financial crisis. HubSpot reached a peak market capitalization of about $38 billion in late 2024. Halligan worked as a partner at Sequoia Capital and served as a senior lecturer at MIT. He credits the Dead's experimentation, user feedback, taping culture, and unconventional strategies with shaping his approach to building and scaling companies and questions traditional business-school frameworks.
Read at Fortune
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