The HubHeroes Podcast

So, Chad, it's a little bit of a different day. I don't know if you're sad or if you're happy or if we should even say anything, but Max is not here with us today. It is. It's an event. However, we do have a special guest.

We'll talk about the special guests in a minute. But you know what is with us here today, Chad? Oh, it's always It's always here.

I I know.

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you playing by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, lord lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero two belt. Knowledge.

Never fear HubHeroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the HubHero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. HubHeroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers.

Yeah. Activate those powers. And I'm super excited to add to the Justice League, just the awesomeness. Our guest today, which we're just gonna quickly get into this conversation because we care about you, the listener, and time that you are providing here. But listen to this.

And by the way, I'm not gonna say your name yet, but listen as I say this. If I get anything wrong, put me on the mat. Tell me, hey, George. Come on now. But listen, ladies and gentlemen, HubHeroes listeners, the guest today has spent nearly two decades turning big ideas into unforgettable live experiences.

She cut her teeth at Superfly and Refinery29, where she produced or was part of the team that produced iconic 29 rooms Mhmm. Before she came to HubSpot to run the whole inbound, unbound. Yeah. That's what we're gonna talk about today's show. Oh.

Today, she's the VP of global events and experiential marketing, and she's the architect behind the biggest move HubSpot has made in years, turning INBOUND into UNBOUND. She's been named to Event Marketers 2025 Visionaries Watchlist, landed on the top 50 women in b2b marketing and her work on INBOUND twenty twenty four was named one of the most innovative meetings of the year. And oh, by the way, I have to say this. She's an NC State grad. Woo hoo.

Because by the way, I live in North Carolina, so I can say that she is the person who builds the room that 10,000 plus of us walk into actually one year, think it was 60,000 every single fall. How did I do?

Really good. I, you took me, took me back down memory lane. That was really good.

There you go. Love it.

It is. And ladies and gentlemen, I want everybody to help welcome Pat Tooley. Tat, okay. I'm super excited. We've got questions.

I'm going to ask you questions in the understanding that I probably will then have other questions and Chad will have questions but I can't wait to have this conversation. I want to start with because by the way, when the announcement came out, and I was reading everything that was forward facing to us as humans who use HubSpot and go to inbound. Yeah. I was like, to be a fly on the wall. Like I would love to know.

And so, can you let's talk about the origin story and maybe a little bit of however much you can the untold story. Like how did this whole thing actually start? Where were you when the idea arose in your brain from somebody else's brain of like the whole changing of the name first came up?

Yeah. Yeah. I've been wanting to know this.

Was actually, it was several years in the making. Like we love to go fast at HubSpot and make really big bold decisions and bets. And this was one, I think we started making the decision very early but then timing just had to be exactly right. And I think it was around, I'm gonna get the dates wrong. I wanna say it was around three years ago, 2024.

Wow. We did an internal flywheel kickoff and we were talking about what would be a really great theme that we could get our HubSpotters behind around the changing dynamics of go to market with AI right on the horizon. It was really being talked about in a really big way across the B2B and SaaS space. And especially with us talking about inbound marketing so much, like how do we break our go to market team out of their old playbooks and inspire them to go beyond and start thinking about how they're going to start integrating AI tools that we were about to open up to them? How we were going to start integrating Breeze which we were about to launch like into our day to day workflows ourselves because obviously we build HubSpot on HubSpot too.

And so we kind of joked around at first but then it stuck. We were like, let's just go unbound. Like let's not be bailed by anything, right? And so we were like, wow, there's actually something there. So myself and Sunil who's our SVP of brand and comms over at HubSpot kind of walked away and wrote up a kind of a memo about how we felt around the unveiled name.

Shared it with Jermes and Yamini and Kip and John and they all loved it. And like, that was our theme for FKO, which was like, unbound. And I think we had such great reception from our internal HubSpotters across it that we were like, well, there's something there and like, this could be it. And we knew that we were going to want to change the name of the event to fit where modern go to market is. And not only that, where HubSpot has grown like in the past five, six years.

And so we had a feeling like that was it but we wanted to make sure that the timing was right. It didn't make sense to really change anything too drastically before we went to San Francisco. Like that was the story going to San Francisco, right? And we also wanted to make sure that we were pushing out the unbound story at a time where the company had something big to say around the future of HubSpot and so that really was where Yamini's narrative around our point of view of HubSpot being an agentic platform kind of came out simultaneously with the UNBOUND narrative. So all of the planets aligned and it was just the right time to do it this year.

It's so interesting because my brain goes in a couple directions. One, you're like, we're trying to get people to break out and I immediately my brain went to unbreak my heart.

Yeah.

And started singing the song. And so I'm like, that's gotta be at the event. If that's not there, I don't know what's happening. But then so then I started, like, really kinda honing in, and I want the listeners to understand that you said this was a multi year thing. And I don't know about anybody else out there, but like, I'm going to be like, Hey, I'm going to do this thing.

And then all of sudden, it's like six months later, we're like, that was a good idea on paper, but let, you know what, let's do this other thing. Yeah. How in the world did this end up having like the staying power? Like, how did it not get, especially how much HubSpot moves or changes? How did it not get killed somewhere along the way?

Like, what was the thing that the team kept coming back to of like, nope, it's by the end, by the way, actually, how you got everybody to keep tight lipped. Oh yeah. Anyway, so how did it stick along the way?

Honestly, the most passionate individual who was like, we're going to do this was absolutely Yamini. Right? Like she was like, we're going to do this. Like, let's keep on the path because I think that there was absolutely reasons to retreat. I even had some before where it's like, oh, we're going to lose brand equity.

And she was like, no, we are going to stay the path because we have conviction and we know this name feels right. We've done the testing and it's going to be hard to do. It's always hard to make a brand shift but it's the right thing for the future of this event and in the position of where we want HubSpot to be. And that was also based off of thousands of conversations that our leadership has had with our customers and solutions partners and app partners, and then anecdotally saying, Hey, your biggest event of the year is called INBOUND, but we're asking customers and you're asking us to go beyond the INBOUND marketing methodology. How does that work?

So like we heard that enough to know like we need to put out a change and we really need exhibit that change through our branding. And so yeah, UNBOUND STUCK and like it was just great having leadership that felt so strongly behind it too because you're right it is absolutely a decision especially across you know a two year planning cycle that could have easily fallen in the calculations and got forgotten about or got pushed aside another year. And I think everyone kind of held hands and I think what was helpful for me is everyone agreed on how hard it was gonna be.

And that's exactly what I was gonna say. That's a big hard change. Mean that's a deep deep root of HubSpot.

Yeah. That look how hard it was gonna be and that there was risk to it. And everyone acknowledged those risks and we acknowledged what the downside could be but we still felt the upside was more beneficial to everyone involved. So like, that's what really kind of kept our heads on straight and focused on the goal of launching this year.

Yeah. So Chad, we've done two questions. Yeah. Where's your head at right now?

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, a couple of things that just come to mind, right? Like I think about, I mean, I've been using HubSpot real deep for seven, eight years now, and like the last four or five years are just have been crazy amounts of stuff that have been added. And, like, people are wanting to do more and more in the platform. So, you know, at first, like, I don't know.

Sometimes it's like who moved my cheese or whatever that book is, you know, that, like right. You know, I'm not happy about whatever because it's changing. But then all of a sudden, you know, you feel like it does actually really test because HubSpot being a platform Yes. Right? The term platform, I mean, agentic platform, customer platform, being the thing that can do what you need it to and be molded into what you need it to be.

I love that. Yeah. One question that comes to mind for you, though, and I think this is kind of like, you know, you were talking about having a lot of support at the leadership level, but what about the opposite? Right? Like, was the hardest person, you know, to, like, convince or was there no opposition like that?

Or, like, what was their pushback if there was? I'd be really curious to know, like, what was the adversary or the devil in the details on that one?

You know, we all try to embrace a challenger mindset at HubSpot as I'm gonna be like, I don't think there was one single person that was like, this is a horrible idea. Like, I think we all definitely would get in spaces and throw out alternative point of views, whether we believe them or not. Right? So like, that's one of the things that's really great about working at HubSpot is we actually are also not scared to like challenge each other's decisions even if we agree with it, right? So I think that I would say sometimes I was the challenger to it, right?

Just because so much of the outcomes and the success around this event does fall on me and my team. So I come from a major events background and I've seen how you know a rebrand can fall apart or how just making simple shifts in how you market yourself can isolate fan bases, communities. And so naturally I was worried about everything from, well, our customers and partners hate the name, which is very macro to like, how are we going to show up in SEO? Like, how are we going fix that? Was the person that was like Mission Impossible on the board.

And I really, I would say I was probably the biggest challenger and I was the one that had to kind of be like, No, we're gonna do this and you're gonna do it well. We know it and we have confidence in you.

That's what

brought me through it. But yeah, thank goodness it ended up going well.

It's interesting because I think it was on an episode that we did where we were, the announcement came out. Chad, Max, I were all sitting around, we're having an episode. We're talking about it. We're saying like with excitement, then I quickly bumped into Kat. What's Chad, what's the

name BlueBeam. Of BlueBeam is the it's a construction product. I used to actually be in the construction software space once upon a time. And I actually knew who BlueBeam was, which is a construction blueprint SaaS product. Okay.

And they came up for UNBOUND event.

Oh, yes. So there's actually several events called UNBOUND. Because fun fact, no one actually You can't own a word. You can't own the word unbound. You can't even own the word inbound, but you can own trademarks that are within a category, right?

So because of that, because you can't own a word, there's a lot of events called unbound. And that was definitely a consideration set. We tested a lot of different words, a lot of different terms put a lot of pressure on does anyone own the IP? Does anyone own the domain? What do our competitor sets or even our peer sets have this in their name?

And like I would say there's no perfect event name. So, you know, you just have to go in there and look at the landscape weigh the risk and then make a decision. But like, yeah, there's a lot there. In all fairness to everyone, there are lots of amazing events that have UNBOUND in their title.

See, so me, I was like CEO of it all, the AEO of it all. And so it's interesting to see like what will happen over the next couple of years for it to all get straightened out, figured out where, because I'm so used to going to inbound, it's like everything us. And it's not. So, so here's the thing, because I want to, I want to dive into the inbound word for a second because a lot of people are asking, thinking if you take the word inbound off the event, are you saying in essence that inbound is dead? And Chad Max's voice is ringing in my head.

Oh yeah.

And he would say something like, no matter how much AI you add, you're still making stuff people find and come to you. And that's still inbound. Talk me through, we're not, aren't I almost said we're not saying, are we saying, are we not saying that the strategy methodology is still useful even though the event name has changed?

Yes. I mean, don't think we are going out there with the narrative of inbound methodology is dead. It's a tool and tools have to evolve, right? And like INBOUND methodology itself has evolved. I do think that we have come up with a really strong V2 which is essentially loop marketing, right?

Especially for marketing. We didn't want to name our event after a methodology. We want the flexibility moving forward for it to be able to appeal to anyone in go to market and LOOP as of right now is very much a marketing based playbook. You know, we wanted that flexibility. Inmailed still works for a lot of our customers.

And so we talked about that and we didn't want to feel that we were correcting them and saying that they were wrong and we didn't want to feel like that we were going out there and saying that they couldn't use INBOUND because it is still very relevant. I mean the idea behind it is you don't get value until you give value. Right. And that fundamentally is still a belief of our company. But yeah, I think our biggest thing is tools evolve and like HubSpot's philosophy of grow better, win with your customers, not at their expense.

Like that hasn't changed in the fifteen years and it's not going to.

Yeah, I want everybody to hear that by the way, fifteen years. It's like, you know, it'd be me at like fifteen years old going, and now my name is Jeffrey Orson Moby. Like, it's just crazy to think about like

People change their names.

Yeah, true. True. True that. So Chad, I wanna kind of pivot into more of, like, the actual event that's coming up. But I wanna take a pause, and I wanna see, like, where your brain is at if there's, an off the wall question that has come to mind before we move into, like, actually talking about what is before us.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I I assume and kind of imagine this is, like, the same core kind of a thing. Right? And it from everything you're saying, it sounds like this is just we're expanding beyond just one playbook and moving into, you know, you can do whatever you need because the platform has turned into a tool that is so much bigger than just marketing. I mean, it did start as a marketing product in in the past.

I'm just really aligning with that, and I love hearing it kinda straight from people at HubSpot who are part of that vision. It's reassuring, I guess, is kinda where my head's at. Right? It's it's very reassuring. And I will be talking about, I guess, you know, the event in and of itself here in a moment.

So I won't that's, like, where my head's at. Are those the questions that I'm thinking and I wanna ask? Know? But I'll I'll let George kind of move us in that direction. Like, I mean, I'm feeling like, is it the same event?

Is it different?

I do want to add it's like, I think also it should, I love what you said, like a lever level of comfort. It should, I actually think switching to Unbound should provide our customers a greater level of comfort because what we're saying is that there's not a single approach to marketing anymore. That you have at your disposal not only this amazing platform called HubSpot but all of these other AI tools that are available to you. And like there are lots of different iterations and ways that you can market your company that you can have sales to your company that you can service your company and that there isn't a single approach and that's okay and that you can explore and really have a scientific mindset with that instead of kind of a map reader mindset. And we felt that inbound as a term was limiting.

We're not saying email methodology doesn't work.

Yeah.

So many of our customers need to do lots of different approaches to make it make sense.

I mean I don't know if you know this but there are a number of people out there obviously you probably do because you have internal But there's a lot of people out there who don't use Marketing Hub. They want Sales Hub. Smart CRM SKU was added because workflows and a CRM database with custom objects is dope. Like, I mean, you know, it's really awesome. Like, it's a great platform.

People like you were more than trading blows with the big boys out there in service, you know, help desk and in customer success platforms. As you need to expand each one of these things in your business,

I mean,

you know, you have a tool at your disposal. I can't even tell you, one of our, one of our team members was like building a completely custom bolt on to our support ticketing platform. And Oh, like, have you heard a customer agent? I know we're not on help desk yet, but that that's customer agent. Customer agent does that.

There's literally no reason for us to be injecting custom efforts because it's such a good product. And if we spend that effort into transitioning into this tool, then we unify the you know, so for us, like, I mean, there's, you know, people who don't even use it for marketing because the other stuff is so good now.

Yeah. And I'd be remiss. I'd be remiss if on that it launched on the day that we're recording this, if we didn't even talk about revenue hub, which is not why we're here, but the fact that HubSpot now has a revenue hub. Speaking of revenue, actually, let me tie this into a question that I want to ask after this question. That is Kat, my goodness.

Y'all are bringing in some big names and kind of what feels like expanding the whole experience.

Right.

In a year where there's a lot of humans watching their budget.

Yeah. How

in God's name did you make the case to go bigger instead of smaller in twenty twenty twenty six?

I will say we are really good at managing our budget first and foremost. And we are really good at showing ROI internally. And listen we are big believers in the Unbound product and I'll tell you this the reason why we are big believers in our own events and our own experience is twofold. Number one, we think we have the best thought leadership in the world from our employees, know, and in our leadership. And we know that what they're saying out there in terms of thought leadership, what they're saying out there in terms of narrative, what they're saying out there in terms of the evolution of this industry is some of the strongest and brightest commentary available.

And like, we know that people want to hear from them and people should want to hear from them, They're good. Second piece is we believe in events and we believe in the power of human connection because the way that we look at it with AI is it's the other side of the coin. As AI starts democratizing more content, democratizing more digital marketing, putting more out there, that human connection and that trust and that taste is the other side of it. And that is directly correlated with experiential marketing and live events.

No joke, No joke. The next question that I was going to ask you is you've said, because by the way, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't checked out The Sound of Inbound by Aaron Mays, I believe this is where I pulled this quote from. You said events are the other side of the AI coin with everyone racing towards AI. Are you so here's my question for you for that statement then. Are you trying to keep UNBOUND from being or turning into an AI conference?

And is there a line that the team has thought about like, we're not crossing that line?

I don't think we've ever even said we're not, we are or we're not gonna make UNBOUND an AI conference. I think for us, we will always program against content and topics that are extremely relevant to our industry. And like right now AI and I would say agents like your hybrid workforce and kind of this approach of using agents to make your not to replace your workforce to make them better is like a big topic that we want to address. So like if that naturally comes out that you know 60% of the sessions are focused on agents and AI it's because we're meeting our attendees and customers like where they're at and what they want to hear about. I would say just it's the same way, coming out of COVID, that first inbound back, like a lot of our topics were around like modern workforce development and like culture and community and like, how do you really build or rebuild coming out of a pretty monumental moment that happened.

And we weren't becoming a workforce development conference. Just where that was what was relevant for our customers and what they really wanted guidance on at the time. So I don't think we've ever had a discussion of like we are or we're not going to be an conference. I think we just program based off of relevance. The second, is there a line that we've ever said that we are not going to cross or not going to do?

I will say this, we want to be an industry event and so with that as much as we will continue to program really relevant HubSpot related content and really great even practitioner content like Academy. Also want to make sure that we've got breadth of content for people who were not HubSpot users. And that I think we feel very strongly about. Like we do not want to be like a wholly user conference even though we could be and get fifteen, twenty thousand people in the door. Sure.

But we really wanna be something different. And we want to give answers for the industry at large.

So I just want you to know how the answers that you're just giving bring me great joy, like great joy, because here's my, my simple brain translates this to UNBOUND. I almost said the I word by the way. Yeah. UNBOUND is always going to focus on being a transition specialist, meaning it's going to transition into the place. And this is the part that brings me great as well in being of servanthood to the community in which it is actually serving.

And so this idea of pivoting and serving and showing up where needed, like it's near and dear to my heart. So I love this. Now I want to tie this into a question that we started to poke at on our episode where we did when the thing was launched and released to us. And listeners, I want you to maybe close your eyes and think about the word UNBOUND. And then I'm going to say a few things to you, and then I'm going to ask Kat a question.

So you close your eyes, unless you're driving. If you're driving, don't close your eyes. Don't do it. Don't do that. But think UNBOUND.

And then I want to say to you, Tom Brady, Cynthia Erivo, Mel Robbins, Williams. I could go ahead and say Darmesh and everybody, but I'm going to stop there. We started to get curious about what's like, how do each of these humans in the UNBOUND team to mind to UNBOUND? Are we just being stupid or is there some thread as Tamsen would say?

Yes, absolutely. I wish we actually had, now I'm being put on the spot. I wish I could go back and find the memo. We actually had a whole memo of how all of these choices kind of relates to the unbound mentality. So like Tom Brady is for me a really obvious one.

It's like he wants to be known now for he'll always be known as being a powerhouse quarterback.

Yeah. Damn.

But he is now venturing outside of that. Like what, he is trying different routes, whether it's investing in business, trying to dance at comedy you know broadcasting getting into the tech space. So really what do you do? How do you keep getting better? How do you keep going beyond being unbound beyond what a lot of people think is the greatest in history, right?

Para Rivo, I mean, obviously there's a very cute tie in with the song Unlimited and Wicked. Again she's just one of those people that like really just embraces that mentality through her creativity. She takes a lot of risk and puts herself out there in a lot of different ways. She's scared to celebrate the wins but also celebrate mistakes or things that maybe she didn't think were as successful and is very open and honest about that and I think just, just the potential that she's put out there. Everyone loves Mel Robbins

and

her, the let them mentality and, you know, again, just like breaking away from, you know, I think a lot of humans are just naturally people pleasers and like being okay and finding the confidence to break away from that playbook and just say, I can't control. I can only control my reaction to things. I can't control everyone else and their reactions. I mean, SUNY Williams went to space. I can't think of it.

Yeah. But it's more UNBOUND than going. On Earth. That was weird. So it's just like we were very thoughtful about it and like we asked ourselves that.

I will say we we start the booking of UNBOUND probably at around the same time that we knew definitively that we were going to make this switch even though we had a lot of the campaign and the playbook already constructed. We weren't sure about timing and when we wanted to do it. So we kind of made both decisions simultaneously. We knew we wanted to go after Tom Brady this year. Didn't make sense last year in San Francisco.

We wanted to do it in Boston. So we knew kind of from day one, but everything else definitely fell into place after we decided that we were for sure going to rebrand it to UNBOUND and it just made sense.

Mean, if Kevin Hart can have him, UNBOUND should have him. Right? I mean, I'm just throwing that out there. Got him. The Gatties.

I love it. Headliners come in and all the different, you know, guest stars are are really cool, and I like how that thread does tie them together. You know, like, Sonny Williams is unbound by gravity. Right? There you go.

Yeah. Because of the ISS and unbound by the Boeing Starliner now too, I guess. No? And then, I actually, funny enough, wanted to hop back to something you said earlier because you were talking about you know, we were talking about those guests and, like, bringing in big names and, like, you know, people you guys are really good at your budget. I have a question.

I'm curious. Do you do y'all use a HubSpot marketing campaign and marketing events to calculate the ROI that you mentioned, because there is budget and spend in the HubSpot campaign tool. And I was trying to think about how would I do that if I was y'all putting this event on.

So to dig into that one more level, you mean because you piggyback to on the speaker question.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you're talking about ROI. Right? Would you have like influenced revenue?

Do we have

ROI on speakers? Yeah. We don't go into that by seasonal like ROI on speakers, but like general gut feel on like whether that makes sense and like whether or not our customers. So we use a lot of different ways that we measure ROI for our event. We absolutely run UNBOUND out of our own portal.

We use Marketing Hub. We use Sales for our sales. We use Service Hub, customer service. So again, we build a lot on HubSpot. We are in the agents and getting to know the agents the same way that you guys are getting to know the agents and using agents.

We love Groove. We use it.

Oh, it's so good. I'm, like, constantly pushing my team to ask Breeze questions instead of me.

Love Groove.

Because it's so good. Yeah. Right?

We I will say this. We have a very, I would say, complex ROI model we run top. Use HubSpot as our context layer because it's a combination of a lot of different things. We have to not only look at the registrations that came in that don't have any contact records in HubSpot because we do get registrations from non HubSpot users and customers combined with registrations through our own customers and certainly people who are in our pipeline And then we have to kind of look at the overall value of the events, not only in terms of customer MRR and GRR that came thirty, sixty, ninety days out of the event, but then also all of those new leads and contacts that came whether they came through as MQLs or SQLs. And then we also look at aided awareness and like a lot of stats around people that we don't have contact records for within our own portal.

Because we've we almost run Unbound as it's like I always

It's say own little HubSpot in a way.

Own little HubSpot. Right? Yeah.

Hubception, if you will.

Yeah. Exactly.

So So you guys are killing me. I've tried to not do this, like, three other times in this episode. Yeah. But listen, if you wanna know why Kat loves Breeze, why chat loves Breeze, why I love Breeze, should actually go and register for the live free webinar that we're having Friday, July 17. That is wait, HubSpot Breeze assistant can do that.

And you'll get to hear me, Adam Stevenson and Aaron Schmoltz talk about all things that are making Breeze amazing. Okay. Now let's get back to the actual show here. Here's where I went ahead because I want to be cognizant of time. We're running out of time.

If you think about a year from now and you're while you're probably planning it way before this, but you think this event over, what did success or what did a sentence of, like, uh-oh look like to you guys?

Like, around the rebrand specifically? Or

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. An uh-oh or rebrand versus oopsie oopsie rebrand. Yeah. Like, we oops. We blew something.

Oops.

I did it again.

I don't wanna put any specific brand on the spot because Yeah. I think everyone makes decisions based off of good intent and information that they have in front of them. So I don't want to put any specific brands on the spot but I will say I think the things I wanted to avoid or we wanted to avoid that we didn't want that we saw kind of play out in other very public facing rebrands was there was a lot of companies that just constantly rebrand. It's like, you know, they're just like, that's not working. So then they go to another name, that's not working.

We'll change this. And we did not want to do that. Right. I'd say the second thing is like forgetting about who your core customer is. I have definitely seen some brands that so badly want to rebrand so that they can reach an audience that they think that they should be reaching instead of nurturing and expanding upon the audience that they are reaching.

I think sometimes rebrands can feel very isolating to current customers and audiences in that way. So I definitely wanted to make sure that like we were not doing those two things. So it was really important that we listen to our customers and also our solutions partners who are out there kind of on the ground every day also hearing from customers. So I wanted to make sure that we were hearing from them. And then I wanted to make sure that we it felt like an evolution and not a revolution, right?

And that we were definitely giving a nod and a wink to like the past. And like, I didn't want to erase the history that Darmesh and Brian and Yamini had built over the past fifteen years. So that was a big part for me.

So without spilling the beans, maybe like two more questions here without spilling the beans, is there something that you are just especially excited or looking forward to in September 2026 at the event?

It's hard to pinpoint one thing. I am excited about the exchanges, which is like our new approach to community networking. You know, it's feedback that we've gotten a lot over the past couple of years is like, how can we create more places for networking that is guided? And I thought this was a really smart approach. You know, have three different networking exchanges that are based off of role, identity, and like persona, right?

Or industry. So if you're in manufacturing, can find your people at the industry one. If you are a woman in sales, you could go to the identity one. If you are a social media manager, you could go to the role based one. So I think, I really like that approach and I'm excited to see that come alive.

The spotlight's always incredible. It's like one of my favorites. They do such an exceptional job. I'm really excited to see Duncan who is our new chief product officer. Actually at that point, he will have been here a year, but I'm excited to see him speak on stage.

He's gonna just kill it. I know. In front of all. Mhmm. Mhmm.

And always excited for the out night at night stuff. And

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey. What are y'all what are y'all calling that evening event now?

What's the name for that?

I actually don't know. We're definitely renaming it because

It's not gonna be UNBOUND at NIGHT. No. Or after hours or something? Whatever it was before.

Oh, okay. Okay.

I was wondering about that.

Why you're laughing.

Alright, Kat. So let's close this bad boy down. I've got one last question for you. You have the ears of the HubHeroes listeners. They've been listening to this episode around UNBOUND and all the thought two years, teams being tight lipped, you know, things being created at warp speed to create this like dope experience moving forward and and unlocking the future of what could be for the events.

See what I did there, ladies and gentlemen? What is the one thing that you want to tell them or share with them that we haven't talked about on this episode so far?

I'd love for people to realize like how much this is gonna sound like a sappy answer, but give me a moment. I would love for people to understand like how much like energy and excitement and passion from internal HubSpotters, like how much of that goes into UNBOUND. It is such an integral part of our company and it is like a full year campaign every year. Like the minute UNBOUND ends, like we start planning the next one and just like how much work and how much energy and like just excitement go into it, you know? And that comes from the top down, you know?

It is really, I would say probably 10% of most people's week, right? It's thinking and producing and like helping support on UNBOUND beyond the marketing team and just how much orchestration and excitement goes into that beyond the marketing team, right? The sales team and the success team our finance team and our legal team and leadership like how much everyone just in our product team wow so it's like how much they all spend time building the best experience possible for our attendees and that is like such a labor of love that we all just are so excited to be a part of because we just get so energized meeting all 13,000 of you. So yeah that's what I would like to come out and say is just it doesn't happen in a vacuum, the planning of it. It is so well orchestrated and integrated into everything we do across HubSpot.

So yeah.

Yeah. Let me let me translate that into Georgianese for a second, ladies and gentlemen. What what Kat was saying is that the humans of HubSpot, the UNBOUND team, Kat herself, they love you. Yes, the L word, love you enough to spend the energy and time to create a dope experience. And if you've never been there, make sure you head over to unbound.hubspot.com.

Make sure you hit that register now button in the TopHero section, September 16 through the eighteenth, Boston, Massachusetts. I could list off a plethora of reasons why you wanna go there because that is the city of cities when it comes to this event. If you're looking more for Cat, head over to YouTube and go listen to the sound of INBOUND. Aaron Mays did another interview. Completely different questions, by the way, completely different direction, but magical as all magical can be.

Kat, my final thing is thank you for taking time to do this interview. I can't wait to deliver it to the community. Chad, thanks for hanging out with us as And I'll end us this way. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope to see you at UNBOUND. I hope to see you at the talk that I'll be giving.

Oh, that's not why we're here. But really what I want you to do is remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy HubSpotting along the way.