The rise of the Chief Customer Officer

HubSpot’s CCO Yamini Rangan to become the company’s new CEO

Boston-based CRM company HubSpot announced today that co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan would be stepping into the executive chairman role and Chief Customer Officer Yamini Rangan would be taking over as CEO next month (on September 7).

Rangan joined the company in January 2020 after stints at Dropbox, Workday and SAP. Her strong background in engineering, sales and marketing should prove helpful as she takes over the chief executive role. It’s worth noting that Halligan suffered a snowmobile accident earlier this year, and while he has recovered now, Rangan ran the company in his absence, perhaps helping lay the groundwork for this decision. Halligan wrote in a blog post announcing his decision that she is completely prepared to take on this role.

“Yamini has been overseeing day to day operations at HubSpot since March, managing Board meetings, the HubSpot earnings call, and key hiring and growth initiatives, working closely with Dharmesh and the rest of the leadership team. She’s made HubSpot better by being here, and I know that trend will continue with her as CEO,” Halligan wrote.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, who has been following the company since its early days, says he isn’t surprised to see a change like this. “With the company recently hitting its 15-year anniversary it really isn’t a huge surprise that something like this is happening. And given all the success they’ve had in growing the company to this point, you have to believe they’ve been preparing for this move for quite some time,” Leary told TechCrunch.

The announcement came as the company released its Q2 2021 revenue, which looked to be pretty solid, coming in at $310.8 million up 53% over the same period last year. The vast majority, over $300 million, was subscription revenue, with the remainder coming from professional services, a ratio that you would expect for a company like this. The revenue puts them on a nice run rate of more than $1.4 billion.

The company was founded in Boston in 2006 by Halligan and Dharmesh Shah and raised over $100 million, according to Crunchbase data. It was an early promoter of content marketing, using quality content, often in the form of company blogs, to drive website traffic and increase sales. It’s something that’s widely accepted now, but when they started the company it was not well known and they helped bring the concept to the mainstream.

HubSpot later moved into a broader CRM platform after going public in 2014. Along with Wayfair, HubSpot is one of the big success stories to come out of the Boston startup scene and go public, helping to fuel the city’s startup ecosystem with the money the founders made on their successful IPOs. HubSpot stock was up over 2% in after-market trading on the news, perhaps signaling that investors are pleased with the company’s transition plan. – Ron Miller / TechCrunch