Kat Tooley: The Start of Unbound, Experiential Marketing, and Event Management

As you know, our favorite event of the year is getting a makeover this year, and today on the Sound of Inbound, we meet the woman behind the brush. Kat Tooley is a wiz in experiential marketing and has been with HubSpot nearly 5 years, helping to coordinate their Global Events, including of course UNBOUND. 

If you are planning to attend UNBOUND this year and want to learn more about the what, the how, and the why, you are in the right place. With Kat, we go over all of the ins and outs of the show, talk about the exciting main stage speakers, and learn more about her career in global events. 

Check out this episode on YouTube and Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

• Episode Transcript

  Kat Tooley: The Start of Unbound, Experiential Marketing, and Event Management

  Sound of Inbound, Season 2 — Episode Transcript

  [00:00] We are back with another very special episode of "The Sound of Inbound" today with Kat Tooley of HubSpot. And this episode's super special because we're getting an interesting inside look into the things HubSpot's doing differently this year at their big conference. The Unbound Conference. Mm-hmm. So Inbound is now Unbound, and we had a very cool opportunity to speak to Kat about why the conference was rebranded to Unbound, and some of the really cool things that are going to happen at this year's show. And this is the first time she's appearing on a podcast after the rebrand, so I'm feeling really, really special that she is joining us today. Yeah. It's very special, for sure. So if you're watching us because you're interested in going to Unbound this year, which I'm sure you are, make sure to listen. Kat has a ton of really interesting things to say about why Unbound is what's being brought to Boston this year, how great the conference is going to be, as it always is. Will you be there? I'll be there, duh. I'll be there. Yeah. Let's do it. We'll see you there. Okay, we are very excited to hear on "The Sound of Inbound." We hope you will join us and listen in on our interview with Kat Tooley from HubSpot. Welcome back to another special episode of "The Sound of Inbound." Today we are joined by a powerhouse in the experiential world, who has spent nearly two decades turning brand visions into unforgettable live events.

  [01:25] From the days leading production and operation at Superfly and Refinery29 to her current role steering the experiential ship at HubSpot, she is a true industry visionary. In fact, she was recently recognized on the Watchlist 2025 and as one of the top 50 women in B2B marketing. But before she was winning awards and scaling global events, she was right here in our neighborhood, actually in our backyard, and she is adding to our growing wolf pack of guests here on "The Sound of Inbound." She is a graduate of this North Carolina State University, so go Pack. She is here to give us an exclusive inside scoop on a project that's been two years, I think may be more, in the making, and we're diving deep into the transformation of the marketing industry's favorite event. Actually, I say the marketing industry, but it could be much, much more than that. So please welcome here to "The Sound of Inbound," the VP of Global Events and Experiential Marketing at HubSpot, Kat Tooley. Kat- Hi ... thank you so much for joining us here. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you? We love it. I'm doing great. This is going to be my 12th time coming to a HubSpot conference, and we're going to get to that today. I've been working with HubSpot since, gosh, 2013 or so. Yeah. So very excited to have you here today and talk about some of the things that you have been working on for the last few years to make that experience so special for all of us. So again, this is going to be really fun.

  [02:49] I hope you enjoy our little podcast today. You are the type of a customer and partner that makes me so nervous because you've been to so many of them. Oh, no. Come on. No. It's all about it. I'm all about experiential marketing, so we're going to have a lot to talk about. But the first thing I wanted to get to, because it's just a strange coincidence, we were doing-- I don't know if anybody's going to believe this as they listen to this, but we have focused a lot on the talent of North Carolina, and when I reached out to the advocacy people, and actually they were reaching out to me about us to have this conversation today, they said, "You got to talk to Kat." I'm like, "Sweet. Kat Tooley. She sounds like a radio DJ. Let's go." And so they put us in touch with you, we start talking, and I find out that you went to NC State. Grew up in Charlotte, graduated from South Mecklenburg, went to NC State. I actually was a comms major and a journalism minor, so I thought I wanted to be in public relations and crisis comms, and there are some days in event marketing I do feel like that I am in crisis comms. But I thought that that's what I wanted to be, and then, yeah, ended up kind of stumbling into the events production and marketing world, actually through an internship at the end of my four years at NC State. I'm going to have to say something really quickly. How in the world is an event not going to create that craziness, that chaos? It doesn't matter how prepared you are, it just brings that energy every time, doesn't it?

  [04:11] The best thing you can do is try to mitigate and put out as many fires before you get on site because you know inevitably there is going to be things that happen on site. So if you can get everything done and really well prepared before the event starts, you are much better equipped to handle everything wild that comes your way the day of, or the multi days of, and there will be a lot of wild things. So I think it's really, really fun that you did come from our area, and we do have a lot of folks here at Inveniv that have graduated NC State. There are a ton of people even at HubSpot. Are there? Yeah, well, I think there used to be a lot more. But yes, over the years, Michael Walton, who led Sales Hub for us for many years, he actually left HubSpot last year. He is NC State. He loved to hire people from NC State. I just think in general, NC State and North Carolina does really well in the tech world. There is a lot of big companies that go and recruit really bright people coming out of NC State. Google, Apple, HubSpot, Salesforce, if you go on any of their LinkedIns, you can see the amount of people that graduated from NC State or are still involved in NC State. It's something I'm very proud of, and it is a badge of honor, certainly in the tech industry.

  [05:38] You are in a good class of folks in our season two of this podcast because some of those companies you just mentioned have been on here, and they actually have their headquarters here, which is really fun to have it. So Google is actually located in Durham now, and we got to speak to a person who's very influential on the user experience side, amongst other companies as well. So this area is definitely... continuing to thrive, which is excellent. And I'm liking how some of the tech companies are starting to see this area as an interesting opportunity for East Coast headquarters. And Apple has established their headquarters here on the East Coast in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's crazy. Yeah. Why wouldn't you want to? You're in the center of just a ton of excellence, three amazing schools, four if you count Wake Forest, if you want to extend that triangle out to be more of a box. But you're amongst three amazing institutions, a lot of really bright minds. Talking about Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State. But of course, NC State's going to take the cake on all those, guys. So I have a couple questions I wanted to get into so people get to know you. You actually spent a lot of time, was it with Superfly? Did I get that right? Yeah. Okay. You know. Yeah. With Superfly. So I figured Superfly must have been a different kind of role, as was your job at Refinery29, and these are very famous companies. So I was wondering, what's the culture shock to go from a company that's going from more of a B2C type experiential mission to something now where you're working for a SaaS organization? So it had to be very different.

  [07:02] Different and same in a lot of ways, too, right? So Superfly, I think one of the things I've really learned there was having, because we were such a small company that was rapidly growing and really producing things that were so large and also so part of the cultural zeitgeist, and we just had our hands in a lot of different things. And what Superfly really taught me was a bias for action, and I feel that at HubSpot a lot, too, right? We are much more of a culture of get up and go and try things and fail fast. I was definitely worried about when I first came to HubSpot was, oh my gosh, am I coming into a culture that has a lot of red tape around it, that moves really slow, that doesn't take risk, that doesn't want to have their experts lead with autonomy and is quite the opposite, right? And it's the type of organization that wants to move fast, wants to take big swings. We lead with a very scientific mindset. We like to set hypothesis. We celebrate our failures just as much as we celebrate our wins. And we're not scared to really move on things and action things that we believe in, and that same energy happened at Superfly. It's almost like a little bit of that startup energy.

  [08:31] Obviously, we're a lot more calculated at HubSpot, and we've got some pretty heavy KPIs and goals that we measure against, but we still have some of that startup mentality, which I really, really love. You called it bias for action. Is that what you said? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay, so break that down for just a second for me. When you say that, does that mean it's focusing on the deliverable? Is it focusing on that we're just getting started on something, or we're not talking about it for too long? What does it mean? Starting on something without talking about it for too long. Because I think we find that you can talk about things over and over again, and you will find a million reasons to not do something, and you'll find a million reasons to do something, and at some point in time, you have to make a decision and go because you're speculating about things that haven't happened, right? And so a bias for action, you got to get out there and try things before you can actually say what worked and what didn't, right? And so that's what I always push on my team is we can sit here and debate all day long. We could sit here and debate for weeks, but ultimately we have to go out there and try it before we know whether or not it worked. The conference I've attended for years, it's changed a bit. But I watched it change with some of the trends that were happening, too. There was, it could've been 2019, I want to say.

  [09:51] I want to say 2019. And the show was pretty epic in a way, in a couple of ways, and one of them was the trends of finding things that were Instagrammable. Maybe it was in the middle of the era where if you went into a restaurant, they had a corner where you could sit down and do an Instagram shot, like, "Oh, bring your meal over here and take pictures." It's everywhere you went. Post office had a little plate. No. But it was funny that everything had that, and when people attended that show that year, there were all these little activations, I guess maybe we'll call them, and one of them was even get in a bathtub with a bunch of rubber duckies and throw them up in the air, and it was this hysterical kind of stuff. It was pretty funny. Very ironically, their inspiration for that was from 29 Rooms, which was the event that I produced for Refinery29. So it was fun to see. That's essentially how Kipp, my boss, and CMO of HubSpot, how he got my name was when he was going out and looking for this position. He knew a lot of the new elements that they had brought into Inbound were inspired by Refinery29 and some of the work we were doing there, and he was like, "Who's the person who runs that for Refinery29?" And I had a conversation with Kipp, and I think what we found was that I actually had a lot more common ground than he probably thought with what they were doing on the HubSpot side.

  [11:14] Even at Superfly, we did a lot of creative and strategic work for a lot of major tech companies that came to us that wanted to really adapt their conferences to feel more, I'm going to use the term festivalized. They didn't want to just produce this cookie cutter ballroom experience anymore, and that in order for people to come and engage with their content, they needed to get them in the door first, and they knew that they needed to create something that was more about the human experience, right? And so there were major tech companies that came to us, and we did a ton of behind-the-scenes work in developing out new ways that they could take their conferences and adjust them into new formats. So we worked closely with Google for Google I/O, the very first one. We worked closely with Apple for WWDC and some of their more experiential elements that went around that. We worked with Verizon on their first sales conference. So I think there was probably a thought like, "Oh, she's only worked on these big festivals and Refinery29 and 29 Rooms and these kind of high fashion, high entertainment projects." But actually, we were also doing a ton of work behind the scenes with these major tech brands, even through Refinery29, creating B2B experiences and bringing in a lot of the B2C learnings that we had to make it a more human experience for everyone.

  [12:50] I was going to say, so with all those events, you must have some kind of traditional, I was going to call it a traditional event rule that you hope you can now break going forward. So is there one traditional event rule that you think we should all be breaking right now when it comes to like-getting to these events and running these conferences and- This is a good one, and I'm actually about to give a talk on this in a couple of weeks. It's something that I'm even kind of exploring internally at HubSpot, which is, I think event marketers and event producers have to get over vanity metrics. It can't be a volume game anymore. It needs to be a value game and highly-- And you got to be picky about the audience that is coming to your event because it really sets the tone, sets the content, and sets the pace of everything you want to do there. And that big events that hit a lot of different audiences don't always work, and they're not always the most desirable for the attendee either. And I think that people are really wanting things that are more personalized, more focused towards their goals and their careers, and the things that them and their peers are seeing and feeling on a day-to-day basis.

  [14:10] When I was at the school yesterday, I spoke to some students that are about to go into the summer programs and things like that, and I was asking them some questions about what they might do this summer, and Disney came up. I just don't want to go anymore. And they're like, "Why not?" I'm like, "Because I don't want to have to buy fast passes, and I want to buy the Genie, or whatever the heck it's called." And so what I was going to get back to was, I wish they would, even if it was a little more expensive, but there would be less people, I'd find the whole experience much more valuable. And maybe you're kind of getting to that when it comes to conferences. Does it have to be 35,000 people? And we're trying to do everything for everybody all at once, and it's just so many things. So I would spend more time at a conference, and I would spend more money on a conference if it felt more really purpose-driven for me. Even from an internal business standpoint, you really have to ask the question, what is more valuable to you? To have 30,000 people where 15,000 people aren't really engaged with the content and are there for maybe one or two things, going to spend a couple of hours, then they're going to leave, or do you want 5,000 really engaged people who are like, they're going to take it all in, they're going to follow up with their reps afterwards, they're going to listen to everything, they're going to ask questions, they're going to want to know more. And I think it's like you really got to find that balance because also part of the vibe at these big events and conferences is the sheer number of people sometimes, but at what cost? I think that you can still have a really amazing time with 10,000 really high-value customers than 30,000 people where 20,000 are just there to be there and aren't really getting a lot of value out of the experience that you're putting in.

  [15:52] So for me, I think it's like, let's throw away that rule. Let's get rid of these vanity metrics. I don't care about the number of registrations. I care about the quality of the registrations, like who is coming. And I think overall, it just makes for a much more focused and better experience all around, on the planning team, on your sales teams, on your executives, and on the attendees. What I found different for me, at least at your conference, the different kinds of persona that can attend have been shifting over the years, especially for HubSpot. One of the things that I was interested in last year is I spoke to another agency partner, and he said, "I don't even pretend like I'm going to register for classes. I'm not here for that anymore." I'm like, "What? You're not?" He's like, "All I'm here for is the main stage stuff, and sometimes I go to that, but mostly it's networking, and I meet all my clients." I'm like, "All your clients come. All the big clients come here." And he was telling me all about the different things that he has set up, even putting on his own private event. And that to me was like a maturity moment of a show that I thought initially really pivoted on all the content and the classes and the sessions and all that kind of stuff. But he was not going for that anymore, and I think that's something that has kept up with the times, I guess, is what I'm hoping, yeah. And we found that from a lot of our attendees, and I would say also, we encourage that behavior as well. I want people to go there and have educational moments, and I want people to go there and sit in an environment and leave and say, "Wow, I learned something new." That's a goal, right?

  [17:18] But I also don't want them to spend every waking moment that week in a classroom environment, passively learning. Part of the beauty of these events is meeting people and being with people. I think that people who don't put in meaningful time to connect or join communities or talk to others are missing a fundamental piece of that experience and why we- You might like this little story. Ashley Faus, do you know who she is? She was on our- Yeah ... show. She's with Atlassian. Yeah. Okay. And she's come out to event a number of years and spoken and everything like that. She told us a story that she actually wanted to network with people, so when we were all in California last year, she baked brownies and just put a little thing on social media. She's like, "I'm going to make some brownies, and I'm going to be here at this moment, and if you want to meet up and share some brownies." I'm like, "You did what?" She's like, "Oh, yeah, isn't it crazy that strangers would believe that they could just get together and enjoy some snacks?" But she said it was very funny, and people did actually meet up with her. Yeah. We introduced brain dates last year, and the thing that probably gave me the most joy, Inbound was over, I go home, I'm going through all the data, and I'm like, "I'm going to read all the brain dates that were created," because they're all attendee-generated topics.

  [18:39] And it was everything from, "What do you think's going to happen in the final season of 'Stranger Things?'" to "Dog lovers." I was just like, this gives me so much joy that people remember at a go-to-market business conference that at the end of the day, they're human beings. The world is hard. It's become more isolated since after COVID. So many of us work from home, and I really think that these events are amazing outlets to just go be around people and talk to them, and people who are kind of living the same life as you, maybe... a thousand miles away in their home, and just being able to talk to them about something that, a roadblock or something they're experiencing in business, but also talk about things that aren't business too. Let's spend a minute here reflecting, and then I want to get to what we have now received, the big reveal. So I think for over 10 years I've been attending Inbound. It's meant a lot of different things for me. The first year I went, I might have shared this with you before, I went with some colleagues, and after one or two sessions, everybody was handing out books from every ... I'd come out of a session, there was a table as you were exiting the room, and they were handing a book to you, and my backpack was getting filled with books. And I'm like, "I didn't even know I needed a library, but I'm going to start a library now." And I'm like, "We're going to write books." And my colleagues were like, "Let's write a book!" And we were so excited about all this and thought leadership we were learning. And then we were also equally excited about going to some of the after-hour events. And I actually helped Janelle Monáe off of her stage and back onto the stage, because she was literally in my face as she was dancing around the crowd in the middle of the Inbound conference. Fast-forward a couple more years, and I got to be in a panel or two. And then a couple years after, not even a year or two after that, I actually started writing music for keynote presentations by the founders, which was really, really fun.

  [20:35] And that was something that I didn't even think would even be possible. But it was because I had so many different connections through working with you guys as an agency over the years, that when I shared I wrote music, and they said, "Well, if you ever have an idea, share it with me." And then one goofy night, I decided to text a friend that worked at HubSpot. Then he texted Brian Halligan with it, and then they emailed me the next day. They were like, "Dude, you're going to be the sound of Inbound next year." I'm like, "No way!" So all of a sudden I was like, here I am queued up doing it. It was such a crazy experience. And then going fast-forward even from that, two years ago, I was contacted to be part of something called the Inbound Correspondent program, and had a lot of fun interacting with the show in a very, very different manner and getting to meet people, as you said. You could literally drop the needle on anybody you meet, and there's all sorts of like-minded folks from all around the planet that all have really interesting stories. And it is so cool and neat to meet them, and you feel like you're a kid in a candy store. All right. So here we are now, and just a couple weeks ago, it was officially announced that Inbound is becoming Unbound. And you noted that this was now a two years in the making kind of project. So why was now the right time to move away from what you might consider a 15-year-old brand name that basically defined what a marketing era might be? Because I know, and you know, and I know, we've talked about this now, it's much more than that. But why now?

  [21:53] Biggest reason why now is because we had at HubSpot something very specific to say that is all around the narrative that Yamini put out probably about eight weeks ago, that we are really embracing that we are now an agentic customer platform. And we felt like that now was the time around that kind of announcement and that narrative, that this was a meaningful enough shift that it warranted this conversation. And I think for us also, we didn't want to change the name for the sake of change. We wanted to change it when we had a very clear answer to change to what and why, and we felt that announcing our approach as an agentic customer platform was really the trigger and the time to say, "And now we're also moving to Unbound." Inbound was the methodology that really set HubSpot up for success and set up so many of our customers for success, and now we're shifting to this Unbound mindset, in an AI era and with the adoption of the agentic customer platform. So for us, we wanted to make sure that the business reasoning behind it was there, and that we told a complete story. And again, we didn't want to change just to change.

  [23:12] We wanted to change when it was the right moment for HubSpot. Yeah, I think that the mindset concept, as you mentioned, is something that is a lot more representative of a large industry. And I was actually going to search this today, but I decided to talk to you about it. If you had to categorize the conference, it's not a marketing conference, is it? What kind of conference would you say this is now? I think it has been for several years, it is definitely complete go-to-market. I think that it's marketers. I think it is sales leaders. I think it's service experts and success experts. I think it's a lot of RevOps people who are interested in really adopting and unifying all their teams across a full platform. And I think it's just business leaders at large, right? And I think the lines between marketing and sales and service and success and RevOps continue to be blurred, and I think it's really for leaders in go-to-market. And it has been for several years, and what we're really hoping is by this name change, we're signaling to the market that we've kind of finished that swing. I think go-to-market is a good start. I think it's customer experience. I think it's the entire customer experience. Yeah. I love that. I think it's bigger than the go-to-market. Because the go-to-market to me is the- I love that ... because you said this bias for action is- Yeah ... earlier. It goes much further than those that want to enter market.

  [24:31] It's the entire journey. You want to keep your brand sticky, so why wouldn't this become that loop that you guys talk about? We called it this infinity life cycle of people wanting to continue to work with you. And so for me, I feel like all the aspects of an Unbound conference should touch on the points in which keeping your brand really, really well managed is an entire customer experience discussion, not just a go-to-market discussion. I think customer experience, I love your point, and layer one more onto that, is that we also speak to the whole person as a leader. Some of these sessions are not so much about the customer, a large majority are about the customer experience, but a lot of sessions also are about personal growth as a leader within a go-to-market function, or a leader of a company at large, and the modern things and ways in that we relate and speak to our employees, that we run organizations, and how we grow through that. So I would say it's customer experience, but also career experience and career growth. And that's what I think makes Unbound really special and different than a lot of the other competitor conferences, is that we do a lot of programming for the whole person. I don't want to lose sight of that either.

  [25:51] You had some really good points. And so- Yeah ... I would love to take a quick break. Yeah. And when we come back, I want to get into the programming of this year's Unbound conference. Okay. Because we might have some really interesting announcements that we're going to share with everybody. So please stick around, and we're going to talk to Kat Tooley here on the "Sound of Inbound" about what's coming on Unbound 2026. Hello, everybody. We are back here on the "Sound of Inbound" with Kat Tooley from HubSpot, and I want to make sure we're not giving everything away, but we're talking about Unbound 2026. And she was kind enough to join us here on our podcast, maybe to give us some sneak peeks into some of the things experiential, and maybe some of the folks who are coming in tastemaker-wise, who are going to be at this year's show. So without giving everything away, Kat, what's the one physical or experiential change that attendees might notice this year as they walk into that Boston Convention Center? I'm really curious. What would be the top thing that you might say they might be excited about? People are going to see the new branding alive and well. But I think they're also going to see just that Unbound mentality strung through the content. Spotlight is still going to be our big opener, big first session of the conference. I think it's going to be bigger and bolder this year. So excited to see that come to life.

  [27:10] Academy Labs, which is the hands-on educational labs that we have at the event, are actually expanding and getting their own space this year. We're actually going to be in the Westin, so we're taking on the Westin, too, as an extension. The Academy Labs, has that been there in other forms in the past? It has. Okay. Yeah. So we actually started Academy Labs about two years ago, and it came off of the success that we were seeing from a lot of our academy professors, just normal breakout sessions. So obviously people love Kyle Jepson there, and he had a HubSpot admin 101 session that every year just had a line out the door. And so we were like, wow, there's something here. Our academy professors have really big personalities. They're really great educators and HubSpot hands-on trainers. What more can we do here? So we started beta testing these Academy Labs sessions. And then last year in San Francisco, we actually had a dedicated, I think it was about 12 sessions throughout the weekend that were Academy Labs session. They're longer. Some are 90 minutes, some are 120 minutes. They're very hands-on learning. You're getting into the HubSpot portal, and you're actually deploying agents, you're learning about loop marketing, and you're applying the loop marketing methodology within your portal in real time with a professor and proctors helping you.

  [28:38] And so we just were getting really amazing feedback on it. And so we actually not only launched a standalone event series this year, but we're going to basically double the size of it this year at Unbound. And so that'll be in the Westin space, so it's kind of getting their own space for really hands-on tactical learning. We're also bringing back Sparks Labs, which was in a little bit of a test last year, but bringing back in full this year, which I like to say that Sparks Labs is really hands-on labs, thinking about thinking, and really problem-solving and how do you approach true collaboration between your teams. So we're bringing that back. So that's going to be a really fun, kind of hands-on studio experience. Then you have all the S series, right? You told me about this. First there's the Sync, which you said is going to be role-based, right? Yeah. That's role-based areas to meet up? Yes. Okay. So Sync is role-based areas to meet up. Give me an example of something that would be a Sync. So marketers or sales leaders. So role-based. The next one would be sector? Industry, yeah. And that's industry, obviously. Okay, so that's just market-based. Industry would be manufacturing, healthcare. And then finally, the spot which we've had for many years is identity. So this would be LGBTQI at Inbound. This would be women sales leaders at Inbound. This would be Black at Inbound, which has been a community group for many years.

  [30:07] So these are kind of identity-based communities. I'm allowed to say this now because I was part of the early announcements about what programs were happening at Unbound this year. So I'm an Unbound insider. And so we'll be back this year with a whole program of people. I think there's about 60, 70 of us, I believe, this year. And there's also an emerging voices group, too, part of the same program, where we get to share our experience about the show from a lot of different angles. I think each year I bring this idea of man on the street idea of trying to feel like people on the street, kind of feeling what the show is all about and get more of the vibe of it, about what people are experiencing from their point of view throughout the year. But then also, of course, what they came to Unbound for and what their experience is all about this year, too. So kind of fun to kind of mix it all up, especially around this world where things are changing so quickly. We're all in horsedrawn buggies watching spaceships fly by. Yeah. With the AI happening around us. So I think there's some interesting conversations that people will have. Last year, we didn't even know if we could send emails on automated ways. This year, we have agents. It's like, what? Yes. I know. It's going from here to here. Yeah. Well, and I think during this period of disruption and rapid development, community and your community becomes more important than ever, just even for that support. Are you feeling what I'm feeling? Are you seeing what I'm seeing?

  [31:28] We forget about that a lot in our current roles. I had a coffee date last week with one of my peers, he's a VP at a major consultant for-- He puts on their events, and he was just like, "Do you just want to catch up for an hour about nothing?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And we got on the phone, and we traded stories, and we were like, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" And it was just nice for that hour just to have that banter back and forth and not feel so alone with the challenges we were experiencing and then also sharing the wins that we've had. So it felt really good to do that. Yeah, and I hope that we give voices to people that are-- These aren't the folks that are making major sponsorships or bringing in huge teams. They could be anybody. So I like the idea that this is a great network where you could really, as I said earlier, drop the needle and get some really interesting opportunities to get perspectives from around the entire world. So that's kind of fun. Okay, I'm hoping I'm not pushing too hard on this, but we would love to know if you could reveal anything that might be special happening at this year's show, including any of the main stage folks that are coming in. Yeah, sure. I'll definitely share some- Okay. All right. Lay it on us. Let's go. First of all, we're really excited about this one because we've tried for many years to get him, and he's always been very busy, but he is well-loved in the Boston area. We are having none other than Tom Brady.

  [32:52] He's really going to talk about longevity and reinvention. We're all very excited about that. We literally have asked him, I think, every year for 15 years, and obviously he couldn't do it. We are very excited to get him this year. The second one is someone who, when we started talking about Unbound, we were like, "Oh, she would be amazing," just because she's very famous for singing about unlimited possibilities. So we also have Cynthia Erivo, so we're really excited about her. She's actually going to talk about crossing disciplines and just kind of her success around kind of not just having one track, having this abundant mindset and trying lots of different experiences and things and different ways of doing things. And I just want to quickly add, thank you for sharing this. This is very, very exciting, and you're finding different folks to kind of bring in different perspectives from a wide range. I mean, sport and entertainment are big, huge inspirations for all of us, so that's a very cool opportunity for everybody to experience that coming to a show like this. Over the years, the Obamas have been there, and Jane Goodall's been there, and so many other folks that have written all sorts of wonderful strategy around business and books, and they've done all sorts of great things. These are very inspirational. I was going to say, it feels like almost you almost have Nostradamus. It's like you guys pick people that are about to be big that next year.

  [34:14] We have a lot of really smart and engaged people who do a lot of research on our behalf. So I have an amazing programming team, and I think one of the things that they do that no one else can do, even at HubSpot, is they've just got a very unique sense of the cultural zeitgeist and kind of finger on the pulse, and that is a big part of their job, is realizing a trend before it becomes a trend, right? And getting ahead of that before it-- Trying to land that before it becomes big. Last year in San Francisco, Dario Amodei from Anthropic and getting him to speak with Yamini, that was in the making a year before Inbound happened because we were like, "Hey, OpenAI is doing amazing things, but there's also this little AI platform that could that we're starting to hear a lot about with Anthropic." Obviously from a HubSpot strategic partnership standpoint, we were talking with them, and we planted the seed, like, "Would Dario ever come and speak at Inbound?" And would he ever like-- And the answer was yes, and then when we said it would be with Yamini, then the answer was absolutely yes, right?

  [35:33] And so I feel like we got ahead of that. We landed Dario and even Aravind from Perplexity before they had really made that big turn into the mainstream. At the time, everyone was still talking about ChatGPT, OpenAI, right? And we knew that there was other players in the space, and so- For sure. Of course, now, I mean, there are some... massive changes in all that space. Yeah. All right. Is there anybody else coming that you want to share? Yeah. So we also have Mel Robbins. People love her because I think a lot of people resonate with her let them theory. So we have her. We also have Suni Williams, who I'm actually really excited about. So Suni Williams was the astronaut that was on the mission that got caught in space for 608 days. Oh my gosh. Was this the one because of the trouble with the actual capsule that was coming up and had a leak in it? Yes. Oh my God. Oh my God. So she's going to come and speak about courage when plans break, which is like, I can't think of any better topic, honestly. She literally dealt with an emergency in space. And also, space has always been cool in my book, but space is having a moment right now, too.

  [36:51] It's been so inspiring. Fascinating. Yeah. That's really, really fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Well, these are very different varied stories coming from different places. I would just say, over the years, I wouldn't want to totally make the parallel to TED Talks, but there are moments where I would've never had a opportunity like that if it wasn't for what was now previously called Inbound, now called Unbound. Yeah, and it's because what you guys are thinking ahead and bringing these opportunities to the table for all of us. That's really, really exciting. Yeah. And the reason why we love to have this more, for lack of a better term, more entertainment-based thought leadership in addition to all of the educational sessions and more go-to-market thought leadership sessions is because people are not monoliths, right? People enjoy lots of different topics and find inspiration from lots of different people, and I think it's really important, again, to program to the whole human. And I know for me, when I go to events and conferences, yes, I want to leave with inspiration and learning, but I want that to come in a lot of different forms and from a lot of different voices and people. And I think that they have a lot of very important things to say, and it's interesting, and they have lived experiences that are totally different than most people in those rooms.

  [38:12] Even you guys do an excellent job curating the sessions through each year as well. And just today, I believe it was today, I think it was today or yesterday, we're in late April right now, all of the announcements of the speakers are starting to come out. People that have made it to the stage at Unbound have gone through a series of steps to get to here. So it's like this is heavily curated, and they're very accessible at the show. It's like when these talks are done, it's not like they just run away. They do come down to the audience, and they do want to talk to everybody, and they do want to stay connected. And I've made all sorts of interesting connections over the years by sticking around and talking to these folks, and getting all sorts of other lessons learned about what works for us, what works for them, and it does become a shared learning. It's not like this one way, I'm just going to tell you what to do, and I'm going to leave. They really do want to listen. Yeah. So many of our speakers do that, and I love it because they've really almost built their own fandoms and communities within the Unbound community as well. We call them all, I think, don't you guys call them HubSpot famous? We all say that. Yeah. HubSpot famous. Yeah. You're HubSpot famous because literally when you go into those Unbound walls, there are people that are HubSpot famous. Yeah. It's fun because, again, it's a very close-knit community, and once you start to learn more about it, you feel like, okay, this is not a hard sell. This is more of a very embracing community that they're doing all sorts of things.

  [39:32] And they're using HubSpot in different ways, too, and it doesn't even have to be about HubSpot. I think that's why it's such an interesting conference because it does get much, much bigger than any of us. Okay. I have two more questions for you real quick. So the first is the hard one, which I said earlier to you, so I gave you a quick preview on this one. So when the doors close on the very first Unbound this September, what's that one feeling that you hope, or that aha moment that you hope everybody is going to take home with them? So what's that feeling you want them to have? I thought about this, and I think the term or the feeling I want people to feel is a sense of relief. That like, oh, I have some answers, and I have some playbooks, and I have a foundation, and I have a lot of really brilliant people who told me that they're having similar problems that I'm having, and there's a way forward. So we try to ask people a reverse question, like what's your brand ownership idea? What's that one thing you want to be remembered for? And I never thought about phrasing it in this way. So after an entire week of shenanigans, what's the feeling you want them to leave with is actually the similar, if not the same, as the brand ownership idea because that's the thing that they're going to remember throughout the rest of the year. And I think relief is an interesting strategy because I think of similarly, I want people to empathize with our situation. I want to empathize with their situation.

  [40:52] I want to come out thinking, "Okay, I got it now." And that is relief. I want people to leave obviously knowing more, but I really want them to leave saying HubSpot has their back, and that they felt that their cup was full throughout the whole week. That they met some really amazing people, that they made some new connections that are going to help them solve some problems or some things that they are running up against. That HubSpot as a platform is foundationally there for them, and that everyone is experiencing kind of the same shift in customer experience and business and the way we do things, but there's still muscle memory there, and there's still foundation there from HubSpot. A literal and mental hug. Yeah, exactly. I love that. We got you. I love that. Great. Well, my last question has to do with AI, and so I just wanted to know from your point of view, do you really feel like the impact of AI, I feel like this is true, but the impact of AI has now made you rethink... what conferences are all about. I think the impact of AI is the perfect-- I think events and conferences and in-person engagement is the other side of the AI coin.

  [42:15] I actually think that they go together. As we use AI to gain productivity, as we use AI to build more content, as we use AI to get more personalized and getting that customer experience exactly right, there's also going to be a desire from your customers to also validate and meet you in person, right? And when I say you, I mean you as a sales rep, you as a marketer, you as a brand, right? And I think that events are going to become, or already have started to become, that perfect other side of all of the good and bad noise that AI is putting out there, that the events is the perfect juxtaposition to getting to actually meet your customers, hear from your customers, see your customers, and them also to build a relationship with you as a person and as a brand. So I actually think that the AI era is a really good thing for the events era as well. Yeah. I think when you say that the productivity will increase, I do agree on that as well. The tools are getting more and more sophisticated, and they're getting sharpened to a place where I feel like, okay, more will be able to use that.

  [43:37] So that should get more people to be able to use these tools, which might help us all to get out more, and- Exactly ... just be more human. Right? What we say at HubSpot is every minute from the day that AI buys back for us, we should be spending with a customer. That's the real stuff. That's the human stuff that can't be replicated ever by AI, like empathy and understanding and human reasoning and just feelings, right? And so it's like every project that AI replaces for you, go find something that only a human can do. And I think just connection is a big one, and what better place to do that than at an event? And what better event than Unbound 2026? Exactly. All right. Actually, no, Kat, what I wanted you to do is I wanted to give you a moment and just totally sell it. So why should people attend? As an Unbound insider, on your side of the table here, I think you and I need to pitch this back to the world. Why should people attend Unbound 2026? Because there's not another event out there like it. It's the perfect balance of community, connection, learning, networking, business, thought leadership.

  [44:54] It hits you kind of all at once, and I really don't think that there's any comparable event to it. And just the uniqueness of it, I think everyone just needs to come out and experience it once. And also, is there any better place than Boston in the fall? No, there's not. Well, I can say from experience, 12 years running, I've made my investment in coming to this show every year, and I call it a show. It is a show. It's a conference, it's a show, it's a lot of different things, but- It's all the things. Honestly, I have trouble even saying conference, and I have trouble saying event, and I have trouble saying show because I'm like, it is so many things at once, right? And I think everyone should come out and experience it. And everybody should send their team to it, too, right? There's nothing- If you're going to spend a moment in the year where you're going to take a beat, and for yourself and for your team, and want to kind of see what's happening out there in the market, this is really a very cool, densely packed experience. And you're right here on our podcast, we have one of the super experiential person that knows what great experiences are like, and she's the one that actually helped put this all together. So why wouldn't you want to hear it and see it and feel it? So yes, I would say if you're going to spend any time getting out of the office and getting from behind these screens, why not spend it in Boston in September?

  [46:13] So what are the dates? September 16th through 18th. 16th through the 18th. And if you are a partner agency, you can come the day before, correct? September 15th is Partner Day, yes. And September 15th is Partner Day, which again, it's a party, you should come to that, too. Okay. So if anybody wants to hear more about what's happening at Unbound this year, you're going to go to unbound.com. Yes. And you're going to check out all of the different programming that they're going to be sharing. Some of the announcements we made today were just on this podcast. So hopefully there's all sorts of new news coming out too very, very soon. But we're very excited about all the speakers that are going to be here this year. And you're going to get to see Kat, and you're going to get to see me, and all sorts of other fun folks and other HubSpot famous people that'll be roaming the halls in Boston's Convention Center. Absolutely. Say hi if you see us. Yes. We'll see you. And if people want to connect with Kat, you can find her on LinkedIn, I'm sure. Yep. Her name, as I said earlier, it's like a DJ name, Kat Tooley. It's just awesome. I didn't even ask you, I should ask before we go. Is that the family name? Is Kat a family name? No, it's a weird name. But my family name's pretty good, too. So my maiden name is Cooney. Right. I only changed two letters, kind of like Inbound, Unbound. Exactly. There's a trend going on here. There's a trend. Exactly. Well, we're all about it. And this year you've really unboxed a whole new era for HubSpot, so I think it's really exciting this year for 2026.

  [47:35] Okay, Kat, this has been so excellent for here on "Sound of Inbound." Thank you so much for joining us. Everybody, if you want to hear more from Kat and me, check out soundofinbound.com, and you can also hear all our podcasts on YouTube and on Spotify, Apple, and we're also on Instagram and LinkedIn. So again, Kat, thank you so much for joining us here on "Sound of Inbound." I look forward to seeing you in September.