GigaOM » Dharmesh Shah

Hubspot nets $35 million in new cash to fuel hiring and M&A

Barb Darrow — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:11:39 +0000

Hubspot, a Cambridge, Mass. specialist in in-bound marketing technology, snagged $35 million in new venture money which brings its total funding to $100 million.

The company has big plans for that cash including acquisitions and more hiring, CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan told me last week. “We just opened our office in Ireland and we have 70 openings now for software developers, sales and marketing people. Next year, we’ll look at Asia.”

Acquisitions would not be new to Hubspot, which last year bought marketing automation outfit Performable and social media firm oneforty, adding their capabilities into its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.

The company , which now has 400 employees, says its software suite gives marketers the tools they need to “pull in” customers via blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook and such platforms rather than the old model of broadcast marketing, which often falls on deaf ears. “Marketers need content management, social networking, automation tools; we do all of that,” said Halligan, who co-founded the company with Dharmesh Shah.

Hubspot, to some extent, competes with Salesforce.com, which is also a partner and — interestingly — an investor. Salesforce.com has a habit of investing in companies (e.g. Box) and then launching competitive products — (e.g. Chatterbox). Salesforce started out as a CRM and sales force automation service but has been steadily adding more capabilities and functions. It bought Radian6 and Buddy Media to bolster its own social media savvy.

Halligan characterized this new funding as a mezzanine, pre-IPO round. It includes contributions from a new, unnamed backer as well as Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital and previous investors. That roster is a long list including General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures and the aforementioned Salesforce.com.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Little Bird wants to be your new “robot librarian”

Laura Hazard Owen — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:00:14 +0000

Throughout Marshall Kirkpatrick’s career as a journalist — first as a writer at TechCrunch, then as an editor at ReadWriteWeb — his preferred method of finding stories and sources was not “shoe leather down in the Valley,” but data. With his year-old startup, which launches in private beta today and gets a new name, Little Bird (it was formerly called Plexus Engine), Kirkpatrick hopes to automate discovery and vetting of experts and influencers so that journalists, marketers and PR reps can find reputable sources more easily.

The Portland-based company, which is being demoed at PIE [Portland Incubator Experiment] Demo Day this morning, is also announcing a $1 million angel funding round today. Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments led the round, with participation from Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage Group, Hubspot cofounder Dharmesh Shah and former Twitter engineer Blaine Cook. MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey, Accel’s Jonathan Siegel, Blogads’ Henry Copeland and social media expert Jay Baer also invested.

Little Bird determines which people are most influential on any given topic based on their personal connections, rather than on the content they create. “Unlike almost every other service out there, we are not doing content analysis for discovery of influencers,” Kirkpatrick told me. “We are looking at the specialists that other specialists are paying attention to…I think of it almost as a robot librarian. Whatever topic I’m interested in, I have the ability to snap my fingers and say, ‘Bring me the world’s most trusted neuroscientist.’”

Little Bird’s algorithm works by crawling the social graph of Twitter accounts and reducing them down to the “most trusted specialists” on a topic. (So you won’t necessarily be finding the world’s most trusted neuroscientist, but you might be finding the most trusted neuroscientist who’s also active on Twitter.) “The only way to climb up the ranks is to win the respect of your peers,” Kirkpatrick said. Though Little Bird is only crawling Twitter and blogs for now, the company plans to add LinkedIn and Google+ accounts soon. “We have reason to believe there are some serious professionals out there using Google+,” Kirkpatrick said, but “nobody knows who they are now.”

While Little Bird sounds somewhat similar to Klout, Kirkpatrick stressed that it’s “almost the opposite of a black box” in that it’s designed to be transparent and rational. He also says it’s a better discovery tool. “If you’ve already got someone in mind, Klout can tell you what their general popularity across the web is. But if you need to do discovery and what you’re really looking for is influence among other specialists, that’s something we provide better than Klout or anybody else.” Even so, he said, Klout data could eventually be added to Little Bird’s algorithm: “Sorting by Klout score would be an interesting way to display the data we’ve discovered.”

Along with person discovery, Little Bird offers various content discovery options. A “hot content” tab shows the links being shared the most around a given subject. “It’s like Techmeme for any topic,” Kirkpatrick said. A “top blogs” feature ranks blogs based on the number of inbound links, and a custom search engine lets users search inside “a whitelist of trusted domain experts” rather than across the web at large. Finally, if you’re in the mood for navel-gazing — and of course you are — “scorecard” lets you compare any Twitter account to other influencers on a topic.

So how well does it work?

I tested Little Bird and had pretty good results. I tried searching for two topics, “book publishing” and “ebooks,” figuring that I’d be most familiar with the results and would be able to gauge how good they were. My search for “book publishing” mostly turned up publisher accounts (for Simon & Schuster and Sterling, for instance) rather than individuals. Kirkpatrick admits that “in some sectors, companies do dominate,” but users can filter their results to show only individuals. When I did that, my results were much better.

My search for “ebooks” turned up a mixture of people I know and would actually consider influential, but also a number of marketing, company or promotional accounts that people probably primarily follow in order to get freebies. There were also many users speaking in foreign languages (though you can confine your search to a geographic area).

My search for “hot content” around ebooks revealed basically useless results: Two separate tweets about Catalonian independence (from the same user), two duplicate tweets from an editor and one tweet about Mitt Romney’s education policy.

These results may improve when Little Bird starts pulling in sources beyond Twitter. And the service also might be better for broader topics. A search for “broadband” pulled up our own Stacey Higginbotham, while “journalism” found people like Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly.

What it costs

Today you can view a few reports for free. Then Little Bird is rolling out free previews and subscription access in waves to individuals, small businesses and large businesses, with general availability expected in the next year. Individual accounts are $50 a month, and business accounts range from $250 for companies with three or fewer employees to $1,000 a month for companies with 26 to 500 employees (larger companies can get in touch for custom pricing). “It’s a little less expensive than [social media monitoring tool] Radian6 and more expensive than Meltwater,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s a lot less expensive than hiring a consultant or agency to go out and do this research.”

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Book discovery startup Libboo raises $1.1M seed round

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:05:01 +0000

Libboo, a TechStars Boston startup that aims to “create the next digital bestseller,” has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. The round was led by Massachusetts VC firm MassVentures.

Libboo’s goal is to build buzz around books by connecting “buzzers,” or “readers who love to share and talk about books,” with books in order to “create the next digital bestseller and help talented authors get discovered.” They’re asked to do things like post a book’s cover to Facebook or write a blog post about a book and tweet the link to the post. In return, they get rewards like free ebooks.

Libboo, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by Chris Howard, a food writer and former teaching assistant at Harvard.

Last week, Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt partnered with Libboo to promote new titles Diving Belles by Lucy Wood, The Heart and the Fist by Eric Greitens and How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, as well as a number of backlist titles.

Hubspot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, Avid and Wildfire founder Bill Warner, and former Compete CEO Don McLagan also participated in the round.

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