Get To Know: HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe

In early 2007, Mike Volpe joined HubSpot as the company’s fifth employee. With Volpe serving as chief marketing officer, HubSpot has since grown from 10 to 10,000 customers, expanded from 5 to 650 employees, and raised $100 million in venture capital. Under Volpe’s leadership, HubSpot has won more than 30 marketing awards and has been […]

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In early 2007, Mike Volpe joined HubSpot as the company’s fifth employee. With Volpe serving as chief marketing officer, HubSpot has since grown from 10 to 10,000 customers, expanded from 5 to 650 employees, and raised $100 million in venture capital.

Under Volpe’s leadership, HubSpot has won more than 30 marketing awards and has been featured in over 20 marketing and business books. Volpe has guest lectured at Harvard Business School, Babson College, Carnegie Mellon, TCU, Boston University, and MIT Sloan School of Management, and contributed to numerous blogs, as well as the Harvard Business Review.

Volpe is an MBA graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management and received his BA in Economics and Government, summa cum laude, from Bowdoin College. He is a former director of the alumni fund at Bowdoin College and a co-founder and former director of the Boston Scholars Program, a Boston volunteer organization.

At MIT, Volpe received the Patrick McGovern award for his contributions to entrepreneurship, and the Peterson merit scholarship for his contributions to the community and academic performance. He was named one of Direct Marketing News’ 40 Under 40 in both 2012 and 2013. Volpe lives right outside Boston with his wife and 2 sons.

Get To Know:

Mike Volpe

CMO @ HubSpot

  • Age: 38
  • HQ: Cambridge, MA
  • Apple or Android? Apple
  • First Job: Financial Analyst
  • Favorite Musician: Jay Z is my hero
  • First Car: Oldsmobile Station Wagon

What mobile device can you not live without?

iPhone.

Can we take a peek at your iPhone’s home screen?

Mike Volpe phone

What app do you use most often for work?

Box.

What social media network or website do you frequent most when you’re not working?

Twitter.

What’s the first thing you check on your phone in the morning?

Email.

What work challenge keeps you up at night?

Being the most inbound of all the marketing teams in the world.

What has been the most exciting work development this year?

Our INBOUND conference in August. This year, we had over 5,500 attendees, launched three new HubSpot products (Signals, Social Inbox, and the COS), and built an incredible speaker roster (Arianna Huffington, Seth Godin, and Nate Silver, just to name a few).

The conference is a milestone for HubSpot because it’s a culmination of a year’s worth of thought leadership and product developments, not to mention a culmination of our marketing team’s hard work actually planning the four-day event. Our CEO, Brian Halligan, said INBOUND 2013 was his proudest moment in HubSpot history so far. That felt pretty great.

How many miles did you travel in 2013?

In 2013, my wife and I had our second child, so I think I only traveled 25k miles.

What other career would you like to try?

Professor. I’ve guest lectured at Harvard Business School, Babson College, Carnegie Mellon, TCU, Boston University and MIT Sload, and it’s just such a rewarding experience.

I recently started a mini-MBA program within HubSpot for employees to take eight MBA style classes with me for a business school crash course.

What does your desk look like right now?

It’s actually pretty neat (though, my inbox is another story).

I’m usually in meetings, traveling for events, or on conference calls so my desk is really just a home base where I keep the Golden Unicorn (a weekly award given to a top-performing marketer), signed books from marketing thought-leaders that feature HubSpot, the bell we used to ring every time we closed a new customer before the company got too big, and my 40 Under 40 award from Direct Marketing News. Oh, and a bottle of Lagavulin.

Mike Volpe workspace

What is the last business book you read?

ZERO by Joseph Jaffe and Maarten Albarda.

Outside of your company’s efforts, what ad campaign or video caught your eye recently?

Google’s Reunion video, and the iPad ad with Robin Williams, but most of that stuff doesn’t work anyway. #inbound.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Amy Gesenhues
Contributor
Amy Gesenhues was a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

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