What if I told you there was a person who: -Launched a Wordle competitor with 6M+ users -Has a blog with 1M subscribers -Built a CRM chatbot on GPT-4 Now what if I told you his full-time gig was as CTO of his $20B company? Meet @dharmesh, the most underrated person in tech

Most people know Dharmesh as the CTO of @HubSpot. For those who aren't familiar, HubSpot creates software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. Hubspot currently has a market cap of ~$20 billion and did close to $2B in revenue in 2022.

Dharmesh co-founded HubSpot in 2006, after selling his first company Pyramid Digital Solutions. He was just 24 years old when he launched Pyramid, and it was doing $15M in annual revenue when he sold It took him less than a year to start Hubspot with Brian Halligan

99% of founders would have probably packed it in after a win like HubSpot. But not Dharmesh. His insatiable curiosity for tech, has allowed him to continue to launch one successful product after the next. Let's dive into some of them...

During the Wordle craze, Dharmesh built a python project to help teach his son about coding He realized that there was an opportunity to position the app as a better alternative to Wordle A few months later http://wordplay.com, had over 6M+ users & did $90K/month in revenue

Dharmesh has also taken an interest in the latest breakthroughs in AI. He's been pulling late-nights to help personally build Hubspot's newest AI tool 'ChatSpot'. The tool combines your CRM data with ChatGPT to ask questions/provide instructions in natural language

On top of building these projects, Dharmesh also has a great eye for tech startups His personal investment portfolio includes companies like: @Coinbase, @Okta, @AngelList, and more. He also owns a portfolio of web domains in the millions of $ (check out http://venndiagram.com)

Now that you know what Dharmesh has accomplished, I think it's worth taking a look into why he's been so successful. Out of all the entrepreneurs I've studied, Dharmesh seems to have the best handle on the first principles behind building a successful product/company...

Here's one crisply articulated insight by Dharmesh: A large part of his entrepreneurial success has been a function of his willingness to make meaningful iterations to his product based on tight feedback loops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK4Huabo2MY&t=52s&ab_channel=DharmeshShah…

And here's Dharmesh explaining how startups can mitigate market risk by: 1. Charging customers early + never free (he even charges his wife for his product ) 2. Charging often (ensures customers continue to remain satisfied each month) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpOzk6_Zh0U&ab_channel=DharmeshShah…

Dharmesh's blog and YouTube channels are a wealth of knowledge. (He's only at 11K subs on YouTube, which feels criminal) If you want to learn how to build a successful startup, this should be one of the first places your start https://www.youtube.com/@OnStartups

In a society that seems to be inundated with charlatans (& outright frauds), it's important that people are know of people like Dharmesh who is the real deal. I highly recommend that everyone gives him a follow. In the mean time I'll be continuing to follow his journey in awe.