Mark Roberge

From HubSpot sales leader to venture investor

Mark Roberge is co-founder and managing director of Stage 2 Capital, a go-to-market venture capital firm that describes itself as led and backed by GTM experts. He is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, a post a third-party profile dates from 2015 and that SaaStr also lists.^[1][2][3]

Stage 2's own site says it invests between $200,000 and $5 million in early-stage B2B software and AI companies from pre-seed through Series A, can lead, co-lead or follow, and has no geographic restriction, with a portfolio across the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Australia and South America. It says its network of limited partners includes more than 1,000 go-to-market operators. Attention dates the firm's co-founding to 2018.^[4][2]

The HubSpot years

Roberge was HubSpot's founding chief revenue officer. Attention dates his time at the company to 2007 through 2016, progressing from senior vice president of worldwide sales and services to chief revenue officer, and says revenue grew from zero to $100 million, the team from one to 450 and the customer base from zero to more than 10,000. SaaStr gives the same revenue and team figures. SiliconANGLE notes that in 2008 he was HubSpot's senior vice president of worldwide sales and that his small-business sales approach held up in that downturn.^[2][3][5]

Before HubSpot, Attention says he did consulting work at Accenture. He earned an MBA from MIT Sloan, which Attention dates to 2006, and an engineering degree from Lehigh University. He was named 2010 Salesperson of the Year at the MIT Sales Conference, and is ranked 19th in Forbes' list of Top 30 Social Sellers in the world.^[2][3]

The Sales Acceleration Formula and Harvard

Roberge is the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula, which draws on the HubSpot experience of growing from zero to $100 million using data, technology and inbound selling. SaaStr says his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., the Boston Globe, TechCrunch and Harvard Business Review. Stage 2's site credits him with creating the Science of Scaling, a data-driven framework with three stages: product-market fit, go-to-market fit, and growth and moat.^[3][4]

How Stage 2 invests

Stage 2 pairs a career investor with a seasoned operator on each deal, which it calls the Pod Model, and runs Catalyst, a go-to-market accelerator for early-stage B2B founders with annual cohorts. SaaStr reports that its third fund, Fund III, is $150 million, with first checks of $4 million to $6 million into companies near $1 million in annual recurring revenue, usually between seed and Series A, and that the firm often begins by advising startups on go-to-market questions before any investment is discussed. Note that this check size is larger than the $200,000-to-$5 million range on the firm's current site, so the SaaStr description likely reflects its larger rounds.^[3][4]

In a July 2020 interview with SiliconANGLE, Roberge said Stage 2 prioritizes early customer retention over rapid revenue growth and measures product-market fit with a formula, citing the HubSpot benchmark of 75 percent of customers using five or more of 25 features within 60 days. He said the firm generally preferred board observer roles to board seats and advised founders to confirm that investors share their views on long-term growth before taking money.^[5]

Stage 2's site lists OneCrew, where it leads a $7.5 million Series A for a company building an operating system for the paving and asphalt industry, and Momentum, whose 2024 Series A Stage 2 co-led and which the site says has agreed to be acquired by Salesforce. SaaStr cites a co-led $5.2 million seed for Prequel, a data-syncing tool.^[4][3]

Views on founders and AI

Roberge advises founders to imagine restarting their company today with current knowledge of customers, macro conditions and technology, and to rethink their path accordingly. On AI, SaaStr reports that he expects the hype cycle to turn, with down rounds and possibly failures among early entrants, including a major large language model provider, and that he believes the biggest winners have not yet been founded, comparing the moment to how Web 1.0 leaders gave way to then-unknown companies.^[3]

Network and community

The firm's site highlights go-to-market executives from companies such as Notion, Writer, OpenAI, Anthropic, Lovable and HubSpot, though it does not say whether each is staff or a limited partner. SaaStr describes the limited-partner base as chief revenue, marketing and customer officers at large technology companies used for deal sourcing, hiring, founder coaching and sales methodology. SaaStr also says Roberge sits on startup boards and advisory boards.^[4][3]

Why he matters

Roberge is one of the best-known examples of a sales leader who turned an operating record into a repeatable method, then a book, a teaching post and an investing firm. His data-first approach to sales, which treats hiring, retention and product usage as measurable, shaped how many software startups run their go-to-market organizations.^[2][3][5]

On The Executive List

Mark Roberge is ranked No. 60 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Revenue Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.