Zuddl is a modular event management platform built for B2B event marketers, unifying conferences, field events, and webinars in one system. It handles the full event lifecycle - registration, ticketing, branded virtual stages, on-site check-in, attendee engagement, and post-event content - while pushing engagement data into CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot so teams can prove and improve event ROI. Founded in 2020 and backed by Y Combinator, Alpha Wave Incubation, and Qualcomm Ventures, Zuddl serves brands including Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and the United Nations.
Jonah Lopin is the co-founder and CEO of Crayon, a Boston-based market and competitive intelligence software company he started in 2015 with John Osborne. Before Crayon, he was HubSpot's sixth employee, running Customer Success from zero through the company's 2014 IPO. A Cornell physics grad with an MIT Sloan MBA, Lopin built Crayon on a simple frustration: companies obsess over their internal metrics while staying blind to what's happening in the market around them. His pitch is that competitive intelligence can be programmatic, continuous, and software-driven rather than a slide deck someone updates twice a year.
Keith Frankel is CEO of Totango, the customer success platform, where he is fusing AI churn prediction with customer-led growth. A designer-turned-founder, he ran creative and design at HubSpot through its 2014 IPO, built adaptive-learning product at Firecracker (acquired by Wolters Kluwer), then founded Parative, an AI customer-intelligence startup backed by Bain Capital Ventures that forecast churn with greater than 99% accuracy. Totango acquired Parative in 2024 and folded its tech into the Unison growth-intelligence engine. Before any of it, he produced reality television at MTV.
HubSpot is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software company that pioneered the inbound marketing movement and built an AI-powered CRM platform spanning marketing, sales, service, and content. Founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah after meeting at MIT, the company went public in 2014 and reached $3.13 billion in annual revenue by 2025, serving over 288,000 paying customers in 135+ countries. Its all-in-one platform - built around the idea that businesses should attract customers rather than interrupt them - has become the operating system for growth-minded companies worldwide.
Zack Bloom is a co-founder of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, the company behind America's first commercial direct air capture facility in Tracy, California. A software engineer turned climate entrepreneur, Bloom previously co-founded Eager - a cloud app marketplace acquired by Cloudflare in 2016 - and served as Director of Product at Cloudflare overseeing Workers, Storage, and Tunnel. In 2020, he pivoted from internet infrastructure to atmospheric infrastructure, co-founding Heirloom alongside Shashank Samala and Noah McQueen. The company has since raised over $354M in total funding, opened its first facility, and secured contracts with Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, and JPMorgan.
Openprise is a San Mateo-based enterprise SaaS company that builds a no-code RevOps Data Automation Cloud. Its platform handles the unglamorous plumbing behind revenue teams - cleansing, deduping, enriching, scoring, routing, and unifying B2B data across Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot and other GTM systems - so marketing, sales and ops teams can stop firefighting spreadsheets and start pulling levers.
Jay Simons is a General Partner at BOND, the growth-stage venture firm co-founded by Mary Meeker. Before joining BOND in 2020, he spent 12 years at Atlassian - nine as President - helping grow the company from $20M to over $2B in ARR and through a landmark $5.8B IPO in 2015. He is one of the most influential practitioners and advocates of product-led growth in enterprise software, and now backs the next generation of category-defining SaaS companies from his perch in San Francisco.
Rob Theis is General Partner and Chief Investment Officer at World Innovation Lab (WiL), a Palo Alto-based venture firm bridging innovation between the US and Japan with over $1.9 billion in capital commitments. With 18+ years of VC experience and a prior career as a tech operator at Sun Microsystems and co-founder of NEON (acquired by IBM), Theis has backed companies with an aggregate market cap exceeding $85 billion, including HubSpot, DocuSign, RingCentral, and Auth0. He also volunteers as a Sheriff cliff and mountain rescue specialist in his spare time.
Brian Balfour is the founder and former CEO of Reforge, the professional development platform for experienced product, growth, and marketing practitioners that grew to 100,000+ alumni before being acquired by Miro in March 2026. Now Chief Growth Officer at Miro, he is best known for the Four Fits Framework - the thesis that Product-Market Fit alone cannot drive $100M+ growth, and that market, product, channel, and model must all interlock. A former VP of Growth at HubSpot, serial entrepreneur, and Venture Partner at Long Journey Ventures, Balfour is one of the most influential thinkers in the product-led growth movement.
Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) is a Boston-based entrepreneur and social media pioneer who convinced the world that Twitter was a serious business tool - years before anyone else believed it. She founded the first Twitter-for-business consultancy (Pistachio Consulting), built the first Twitter app store (oneforty.com, acquired by HubSpot in 2011), co-authored 'Twitter for Dummies' with a foreword by Jack Dorsey, and pioneered the first 'donate by tweeting' charity campaign. After nearly a decade as HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Evangelist, she now runs The Enough Company, applying her evangelism and storytelling skills to accelerating climate solutions through market forces.
Krystal Wu is a Boston-based community and marketing program manager known for building engaged B2B communities at HubSpot, Shopify, and Common Room. She spent nearly five years at HubSpot growing their social media community before moving into senior roles at Shopify and ZoomInfo. At Common Room, she built an events engine from scratch that generated $1M+ in pipeline in a single quarter, earning her a reputation as one of the more results-oriented voices in the community-led growth space.
Kieran Flanagan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zapier and one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. A former software engineer turned marketing leader, he spent nearly a decade at HubSpot building its international marketing engine - growing the Dublin office from 12 to 1,000+ employees. Today he co-hosts the 'Marketing Against the Grain' podcast with HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar, publishes 'The AI Marketing Generalist' newsletter on Substack, and invests as a Sequoia Scout. He is widely credited with pioneering the B2B creator approach to marketing and is an outspoken champion of AI-driven marketing transformation.
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and media creator who built The Hustle from zero to 1.5 million subscribers before selling it to HubSpot for ~$27 million. He co-hosts My First Million, a top-25 business podcast with Shaan Puri that pulls over 1 million downloads a month, and co-founded Hampton, a vetted peer community for high-revenue founders now generating ~$8M ARR. Equal parts hustler and storyteller, Parr turned a Nashville hot dog stand into an eight-figure media empire and keeps reinventing what it means to build in public.