dharmesh

I soft-launched YouSpot yesterday (via a tweet).

YouSpot is an AI-native Solo CRM.

Fortune favors the focused.

So, here's who YouSpot is NOT for:

1) If you have a GTM team (marketing/sales) and looking to grow, YouSpot is not for you. Buy HubSpot.

2) If are an e-commerce store, YouSpot is not for you. Product is focused more on B2B and "high consideration" purchases.

3) If you have raised venture money, you should look into HubSpot for Startups. That's the right product.

4) If you're hoping for an open source project that you can run locally, and connect your own local models and use the Karpathy wiki style knowledgebase -- you are *awesome*, but YouSpot is not for you.

5) If you're trying to manage your personal stuff and family life -- I honor you, but YouSpot is not a B2C product. It's meant for 1-person companies (businesses being operated by a single human).

6) If you're worried about connecting your Gmail and other systems to a third-party app you didn't build yourself -- I respect your worry. The world is a scary place. But YouSpot is probably not for you (you're not going to get value without connecting third-party systems that can be used to build your second brain).

Other than that, would love to have you as a beta user! :). Just go to YouSpot.com. Waitlist for the free private beta, or skip the line by coming a $1/month subscriber (first 1,000 users and we're already 547 in).

Building this in public, so if you have questions around what's in my head (and what's in my second brain), just reply to this tweet and ask.

Cheers.

20 years ago, my friend Brian and I founded HubSpot.

We were in a tiny office right at CIC (iykyk) on the MIT campus where both of us met and had gone to grad school. (shown below).

Today, 20 years later, we are refounding HubSpot.

Thrilled to share that @bhalligan is returning to HubSpot as CEO.

My deepest thanks to Yamini Rangan. She is one of the smartest and hardest working people I know and cares deeply about our customers and partners. She helped take HubSpot from 100,000 customers to over 300,000 customers and has worked tirelessly to help them grow better. She has my best wishes and eternal support.

Brian and I, along with thousands of HubSpotters across the globe are going back to the basics. Rethinking and reimagining what HubSpot can be in this new AI age.

We are partnering with Duncan Lennox who has been promoted to president of product to help write this next chapter. We will be creating the world's first Customer Relationship Harness and accelerating our vision of Headless HubSpot (stay tuned).

Our mission is to help millions grow better.

20 years ago, it was about helping organizations leverage inbound marketing. Today it is about helping them leverage AI.

I am super-excited about this refounding and the road ahead for HubSpot. We will surely make mistakes (I'd be worried if we didn't). But I can already feel the personal excitement.

Thank you to all our customers, partners and extended community.

Cheers.

#HubSpotRefounding #FoundersMode

Could not be more thrilled for the HubSpot Refounding and about working together again.

Let's do this!

#HubSpotRefounding

I went on the @a16z podcast to talk about the opportunities in software and why I'm so excited.

Some points I make in the episode:

1. The interface is a means to an end. For business software, the value is in the work that gets done. AI assistants are becoming one more great way to reach that work, the way browsers were for the web. AI harnesses are the new browser.

I didn't say this in the episode, but wish I had: MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the new HTTP. If you aren't making your software product composable and callable by AI harnesses, you're going to miss this wave.

2. Don't use inference to solve something a query can solve. Structured data still matters. If you want to know who your top customers last quarter were, that should be a structured query with a deterministic response, not inference over a bunch of unstructured data presented as context to the LLM.

3. Don't use a frontier LLM to to do something a decision model (like JEV) can do.

4. AI is software. Really smart software, but software. It opens up a whole new class of problems to solve at every layer in the stack, so the opportunity is bigger than it's ever been.

What a time to be a building software!

Full episode here: dharme.sh/dharmesha16z

For the first time in 25+ years, I had to use DIP switches to configure a hardware device.

Today, it was to configure the RAID level on a 16TB SSD from Oyen Digital.

A DIP switch is basically a simple hardware switch that can be turned on or off. They often come in sets like the example below. In this case, the manufacturer was nice enough to put the diagram of the switch configuration right on the device.

For those of you that have never before encountered a DIP switch, you're welcome.