Dharmesh Shah
Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, and creator of Agent.ai, a network for AI agents, and WordPlay.com.
“AI, by the way, for the record, it is software, just so you know. It's not some new energy source. It's software. Newly smart software, but software… Yes, some software companies will die, no doubt, just like some software companies did not make the transition into SaaS and cloud-based things. That's the circle of life kind of thing.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Dharmesh Shah offers this as his counter to the 'SaaS apocalypse' narrative, arguing that AI opens up problems software couldn't solve before rather than ending software businesses.
Transcript
…about this notion of having a second brain. What would the ingestion points be? How do you pull it together? What's the actual agents that you would produce or the work that you would sort of accomplish? But I think that underlying primitive is actually a powerful one. I think it applies to that.
…so fascinating. And I think it's very valuable for that, particularly for this type of user. I mean, it's what they want, of course. How do you then take those learnings and like productize them at the mothership, if at all? And what processes do you need to put in place to make that happen?
Yeah. The way we've done it, which we've kind of stumbled over the years and tried various mechanisms, is to kind of pull on that original thread of this is a startup within a startup. So we do a couple of things. One is if the thing gets to scale, and we've had this happen multiple times before. So there was a product I launched a couple of years ago called agent.ai. And agent.ai was a marketplace for AI agents. Yes. Back in the day, this is one of my accidentally competed with Sam Altman stories. Although it was focused on go-to-market, it was too horizontal. But there were two parts to it. There was these kind of agent AI marketplace, and there was an agent builder that says, oh, can we let mere mortals actually build these kind of mix of deterministic, non-deterministic agents? And what we discovered is that half of the idea was right, but actually belonged and needed the full HubSpot team behind it. So we did effectively an acquisition, right? So he's like, we're going to take that, and now we're going to make Agent Builder a product within HubSpot or whatever. And that's what it lives at right now. So in the…
It's free.
Exactly. So yeah, that's, and we sort of try to have an open mind about it. But the nice thing about doing it the way we do it is that. So you think it's like, why can't you just do it within the core core business? Is that those degrees of freedom are super important to be able to run the…
It's so easy right now, especially with some of the national discourse to think negatively about AI and the impacts. But the reality is all the data that I've seen are so exciting. Growth is unbelievable. And I actually think USBot is a really good example of this potential growth, right? It's…
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