It’s official: now two months after the IPO, HubSpot has surpassed the $1B market cap threshold and has become that “pillar” company that the tech ecosystem long anticipated. The benefits have been touted previously: an anchor for attracting and retaining talent in Boston, as well as a breeding ground for the next set of great Boston entrepreneurs and founders.

Already, a handful of groups have spun out to start new ventures, like the teams at Driftt, Bedrock Data, Grokky, and NextView-backed InsightSquared. As HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah recently told BostInno, “We’ve wanted to not just build a great company, but also build some great entrepreneurs.”

Talk with my fellow venture capitalists, and they’ll no doubt confess how they’re “tracking” a potential founder or a given team set at the company in order to be ready with funding when it’s time for them to spin out. This entrepreneurial HubSpot spirit has — and will continue to have — a ripple effect throughout the Boston early stage startup ecosystem.

The HubSpot “Mafia” Will Have a Bigger Contribution Than Founders

In addition to these founding teams, there’s an even bigger contribution which HubSpot is already making to this same landscape: the proliferation of skilled marketing talent into a broader set of startup companies.

Historically, one of the (admittedly fair) critiques of Boston as a tech ecosystem is that the community is just that: a very tech-focused ecosystem, often at the expense of good marketing. “Build it and they will come” has been the philosophy. The focus is on creating some awesome technology, which is critical, except that the sales and marketing piece has been an afterthought in many cases. I can’t tell you how many pitch decks from local startups I’ve received over the past decade that barely even touch upon the key subject of distribution. And that thinking has carried out into the companies as they were being built.

But all of that is quickly changing. HubSpot has trained everyone in the company incredibly well (not just future founders), and many will eventually move on to other roles and be oriented towards distribution first.  The marketing training ground that is HubSpot creates a local DNA which will begin to pervade all companies in the area.

In a world which is increasingly won by startups who reach and then accelerate their product-market fit, not technology-market fit, this matters. A lot. I’m not just talking about B2B SaaS companies that feel similar to HubSpot either. This culture of being noisy about what you’re doing and implementing the right tactical techniques to get noticed will spread to consumer-facing startups as well.

I’ve begun to notice this effect first hand. With Jay Acunzo, HubSpot’s former head of content marketing, joining our team at NextView from HubSpot to support our investments in a platform role, he’s pushed the thinking about marketing across the entire portfolio. Former HubSpot marketing leader Rick Burnes also recently left for consumer-facing BookBub, where I’m on the Board, as VP of Content Products. (Here’s Rick’s take on HubSpot’s company DNA.) It’s becoming obvious that HubSpot marketing instincts span both B2B and consumer, and these are spilling into our entire community of companies following the IPO.

The above were just two immediate examples for me, but there are many more individuals adding to this emerging “Marketer Mafia” phenomenon. Jay and I took a look and created a graphic below depicting this HubSpot marketing talent which is starting to penetrate the Boston ecosystem:

Yes, HubSpot is going to spawn many successful startups, which will have a real impact onto the Boston ecosystem, which hopefully creates another set of pillar companies. But the more immediate and arguably more important contribution which the company is making is the marketing talent which is leaking out and flooding the local startup community, elevating the entire startup ecosystem.