Daniel Olshansky

/goal is underrated

BREAKING NEWS: HubSpot co-founder/CTO buys $1.8M of his own company's shares. Disclosure 1: Yes, I'm that guy. (And no, I'm not used to talking about myself in the third person -- will not make a habit of it). Disclosure 2: This is not investment advice. Please do not buy or sell $HUBS shares based on this. So, why am I sharing this and writing about it? Well, for one, at least in my little world, it's noteworthy. It's been a while since I've bought HubSpot shares (I think it was back in 2022). Also, instead of answering the common questions from friends, family and colleagues, I figured it would be easier and more efficient to just answer them just once, here. 1) Why buy more HubSpot shares? Simple. I'm a big believer in the long-term vision of HubSpot and the team driving it. 2) Why do this now? Hasn't the stock been falling? Yes, the share price has dropped considerably despite what was a pretty strong quarter (results reported publicly last week). We added 10,800 net new customers in the quarter (well above the expected range), growing to about 300,000. Revenue, as reported grew 20%+. 2) Why $1.8M? That's an odd number. I purchased 10,000 shares at whatever the market price was. 3) Isn't HubSpot going to get disrupted by AI and agents? I"m biased, but I don't think so. For AI agents in GTM (marketing/sales/service) to do their work they're going to need a platform that can provide the context they need and a work engine that can take action on their behalf. They need a customer platform they can *operate* to do what they need to do and drive outcomes. They're not going to reinvent/rewrite a CRM. They're way too smart for that (and getting smarter). They're going to use what's out there. They'll bias towards systems that have a great Agentic Experience -- not just a great User Experience. (HubSpot will have both. Headless is great, but we don't think completely humanless is a good idea). 4) I heard that others bought shares on the same day. True? Yes. Our fearless leader Yamini Rangan bought shares. Our board chair Lorrie Norrington bought shares too. 5) It's been almost 20 years since you started HubSpot, why don't you slow down a bit?! (That may or may not have been from my wife). :) Answer: I love HubSpot. I love what I do. I'm a builder at heart. I'm up 2am most nights learning, tinkering and building. There's never been a more exciting time to be a builder and to serve small and medium sized businesses. I think we are going to see *millions* of entrepreneurs start businesses leveraging the power of AI. HubSpot's mission is to help them grow better. If you have other questions, leave a reply. Can't promise to answer all of them because...laws and regulations, but I'll do what I can. Cheers.

If I were a college career counselor or in career services, I’d quickly be figuring out how to get students to understand these forward deployed engineer jobs exist and how to get them. The requirements are a mix of deep technical skills, often CS majors or minors. You must be great at understanding problem solving, how to have systems thinking, and have a strong business acumen. The kicker, of course, is to make sure you’re very deep in AI agents; you need to have fluency in coding agents, MCP, CLIs, Skills, and so on. Hundreds (thousands?) of technology companies will be hiring for these roles, same with any consulting and IT services company, and the vast major of mid-size and large enterprises will be hiring for this talent internally as well. One great example of opportunity for highly technical talent out there.

I am building out Meta's compute desk. I am looking for folks with background in any of: deep learning, supply chains, commodities, semiconductors, sovereigns, energy, Excel, prediction markets, monitoring situations, etc. Candidates should have experience in at least one of these domains, and novel ideas on how to apply LLMs to their work. If you'd like to help manage $100b+ of compute spend, please DM and include information about why you're a fit. (If you're in doubt about being a good fit please apply! Epistemic humility is in short supply these days.)

GPT-5.5 high is the strongest coding agent we've measured, but the lower reasoning tiers are surprisingly weak.

Fine-tuning frontier models was a mostly dominated solution anyway. Use an untuned frontier model for prototyping or personal use, but for the large majority of production use cases where you’re going to be doing the same task thousands to millions of times and/or your business depends on the quality of your solution, fine-tuning is basically required. And if you’re fine-tuning anyway, why not get the dramatically better cost, latency, privacy, and control benefits of building on an open source base. The gap between fine-tuning vs not is usually much larger than the gap between closed vs open.