HubSpot’s head of product David Cancel and vice president of engineering Elias Torres will be stepping down from their roles at the inbound marketing firm in September to start a new company.
Cancel and Torres first came to HubSpot when the firm bought Boston automatic marketing solution startup Performable for $20 million in 2011. Cancel was CEO of the 20-person company, and Torres was on the engineering team. The duo won’t be the first to leave the Cambridge company to break ground on their own venture.
One of the founders of InsightSquared, Samuel Clements, hails from HubSpot, as do Quantopian CTO Jean Bredeche and VP of product and community Dan Dunn. Localytics’ chief financial officer Dave Stack also did a stint at the company.
“David and Elias are part of the leadership team that has empowered those accomplishments and we thank them for their contributions over the past 3 years,” wrote HubSpot chief executive Brian Halligan in a blog post Tuesday afternoon. “As part of their dedication to HubSpot, they will remain with the company through our INBOUND conference where we will launch the latest product updates their teams have built.”
“At HubSpot, we’ve always wanted to be more like PayPal than IBM,” wrote Halligan. Continued the CEO:
We don’t view the goal as having employees for life. In fact, we only want people to stay as long as it’s a good fit for their personal and professional goals, which is partially why we have been fortunate to recruit a lot of people who want to be (or currently are) founders of their own companies someday.
Following Cancel and Torres’s goodbyes, Eric Richard will come aboard the company’s management team as vice president of engineering. Richard joined HubSpot from Boston-area digital marketing firm Compete in 2013.
The next big question that needs answering is if, and how, the departure of HubSpot’s two senior product leaders will impact the company’s upcoming initial public offering. Of course, there’s a second juicier question: What project are the very capable Cancel and Torres working on now?
