Max Greenwald brought cookies. At Techstars Boulder, his team was pitching a startup idea to mentors in rapid succession, and the pitch was going badly enough that baked goods seemed an appropriate apology. The business was still searching for a reason to exist. The founders had enthusiasm, software skills and a product that had already begun to change. They also had an audience willing to tell them where the problems were.
There is something appealingly practical about the cookies. A pitch deck promises that tomorrow will be different. A cookie offers a small improvement to the present. Greenwald would spend the next several years learning to distinguish between the two.
In June 2026, Warmly announced it was joining HubSpot. By then, the company built AI agents for sales and marketing, a considerable distance from its original co-founder matching app. Greenwald had published business updates, revised products and learned to let colleagues challenge his judgment. The acquisition supplies a milestone. His willingness to keep changing his mind supplies the story.
The matchmaker in the family
Greenwald’s mother, Rachel Greenwald, is a professional matchmaker. He has written about calling her for business advice. Other founders can summon a board member; he can consult someone accustomed to discovering whether two people have any business spending an evening together.
That family connection helps explain the first idea. After leaving Google, Greenwald wanted to build a Tinder-style app for co-founders. Finding a business partner was a problem he understood personally. A swipe interface seemed an inviting way to solve it. It offered the pleasure of a simple gesture for a decision with decidedly complicated consequences.
The app failed to attract the demand the team needed. Greenwald has been plain about that failure. The idea got him started, but starting and finding a workable business turned out to be separate accomplishments.
The question underneath the app proved more durable. How could people make useful professional connections? The founders explored communities, customer relationships and ways for salespeople to meet potential buyers. Sales and marketing offered a reason for someone to pay: a good connection could lead to revenue.
His mother’s profession makes a useful companion to this history. An introduction has value when the people on either side have a reason to welcome it. Software can multiply introductions very efficiently. Whether the recipients appreciate them remains a rather human question.
First, find Waldo
Before Warmly, Greenwald had plenty of practice organizing people around an idea. At Princeton, he studied Computer Science & Public Policy and graduated in 2017. He also founded IgniteSTEM, an organization built around project-based learning for schools. It brought the spirit of hackathons and maker spaces to educators, putting experiments and practical work near the center of learning.
His career at Google included product work on Maps and Photos. There were enterprise partnerships, mapping features and machine learning projects. Then there was Waldo.
For April Fools in 2018, Google Maps invited users to hunt for the striped-shirt traveler. The game worked across Android, iOS and desktop, with scenes and characters to find around the world. Greenwald led the project, drawing colleagues into work that made a navigation product briefly behave like a puzzle book.
It is a fitting early credit. Maps usually exists to reduce the time you spend finding something. This feature invited you to enjoy the search. Greenwald helped give a familiar product permission to be playful.
His later founding relationships came through a mixture of existing colleagues and new encounters. He knew Carina Boo through Google; he met Alan Zhao through On Deck. The company grew out of people agreeing to try something together, before the product had settled into its eventual shape.
Two years in the waiting room
One of Warmly’s longer detours involved virtual meetings. Its nametags product helped people display useful context about themselves on video calls. A name, a role, a small personal detail: the information that can make an introduction feel less like attendance being taken.
Warmly became an early Zoom App. A large platform offered distribution and the possibility of reaching many people. It also imposed a schedule the startup could not control.
Greenwald later described months spent dependent on Zoom’s roadmap. Meanwhile, an off-Zoom sales product reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 13 months. Waiting had a cost, and the team had found evidence of a different opportunity.
His co-founders pushed him to act. Alan and Carina believed that waiting for enterprise deals on the nametags product was dangerous. Greenwald had been reluctant to let go.
“I was holding on too tight”
Max Greenwald, reflecting on the nametags strategy
The admission matters because it leaves the other founders inside the story. They could disagree with the CEO, and the CEO could accept their argument. The team ran both businesses for several months while testing the change. A pivot arrived through discussion, hesitation and work.
The visitor already at the door
The sales business began with people who were already showing interest. Someone visits a company’s website, looks around and leaves without filling in a form. For a seller, that visit can disappear into a traffic report. Warmly worked on identifying visitors and using buying signals to help teams decide whom to approach.
Greenwald’s own analogy was an online shop that lacked the helpful assistant available in a physical store. A website could display its goods perfectly and still leave the buyer alone with unanswered questions. Warmly’s proposition was to give the business enough context to offer useful help.
The product expanded from identifying interest to acting on it. AI agents could engage visitors, qualify prospects, arrange meetings and support follow-up. That progression gave Greenwald a concrete problem to work on: connecting what a company knows about a buyer with what it does next.
A conceptual map of the problem Warmly set out to solve.
He has also argued that people retain a place in an AI sales world. Automation can handle work that would overwhelm an individual. The relationship still requires judgment. The point of gathering context is to improve a conversation, which is a more demanding ambition than simply producing more messages.
A CEO with the curtains open
Greenwald made a habit of publishing Warmly’s progress. His LinkedIn updates included revenue figures, priorities and difficult months. In a report published in June 2026, he gave May annual recurring revenue as $7,628,334. Earlier updates carried less comfortable news, including weaker pipeline and a deliberate reduction in revenue.
The specificity gives the public record texture. A company can be growing and still have problems worth discussing. A founder who publishes the figures gives readers a way to follow those problems over time, rather than offering a succession of announcements that all sound like opening night.
He applied a similar approach to his own job. For 2024, he publicly listed expectations that included motivating managers, generating demand, hiring and delegating with accountability. Everyone at Warmly wrote a job expectations document; his needed agreement from the board and leadership team.
Running the company required him to reconsider an old strength. Solving problems himself had helped him get started. Sharing problems with the team gave others room to develop solutions and take responsibility. A CEO who remains the compulsory answer to every question can turn a growing organization into a queue.
His hiring metaphor comes from mathematics: learning rate matters alongside starting experience. Someone who learns quickly can overtake someone with a stronger initial résumé. It suits a founder whose own education in sales and company-building happened largely after he had already begun.
Learning speed deserves a place beside experience.
Greenwald’s slope-versus-intercept idea: weigh how quickly someone improves, as well as where they start.Customer selection brought another uncomfortable lesson. He described discovering that around 50 customers were a poor fit, despite some appealing company names. The team had difficult conversations and recommended competitors where appropriate. Keeping every customer can make the roadmap harder to understand. Saying goodbye sometimes clarifies whom the company can actually help.
The neighbor who stayed
Warmly’s relationships reached further back than its software. Greenwald met Ryan Beyer when he was six. They were neighbors, and his recollection of childhood includes Beyer being better at tennis.
Beyer joined Warmly in 2022 to build customer success. Greenwald later credited him with personally onboarding and supporting the first 150 customers, representing $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2026, the team formally recognized him as a co-founder.
The promotion gave a long friendship a new title. It also acknowledged a kind of founding work that happens after the legal beginning: getting customers through the door, helping them use the product, and learning what happens after the sale.
Those relationships help explain why the biography resists becoming a solitary-founder fable. Carina and Alan challenged a strategy. Ryan built customer success. Mentors helped redirect the early business. Greenwald’s decisions were made among people who could tell him when something needed to change.
A new badge, an old question
The HubSpot relationship developed before the acquisition. Warmly built its first integration with the company in 2023. Greenwald reported 20 integrated customers in 2024, 100 in 2025 and 223 paying customers using the integration in 2026. The companies already had customers and workflows in common.
On June 30, 2026, Warmly announced an agreement to be acquired by HubSpot. Greenwald subsequently moved into product management there. By September, HubSpot listed him as Director of Product Management and scheduled him to speak about Sales Hub’s agents and product direction at UNBOUND.
His acquisition message returned to the buyer’s experience. AI agents could make interactions with businesses more useful or more intrusive. He wanted to help build experiences that arrive with context and earn trust. The old question about a welcome introduction had followed him into a much larger company.
There is room in this story for other pursuits. He telemark skis, runs triathlons and freestyle raps. An interview about building Warmly even included a rap performance, a small reminder that a product executive can have interests that refuse to fit neatly into the quarterly update.
The next chapter puts Greenwald back inside a large organization, carrying what he learned outside one. The cookies, the discarded app, the co-founder arguments and the public numbers belong to the same education. He kept trying to make a useful connection. Along the way, he learned to recognize when his own plan needed an introduction to reality.