Home / Founders / Christopher O'Donnell
O'Donnell built HubSpot's CRM and rose to chief product officer there, and he is now trying to replace that kind of software with Day AI, a CRM that AI agents run.
Christopher O'Donnell is co-founder and CEO of Day AI, a Boston, Massachusetts, company founded in May 2023 that builds a CRM around a context graph of a company's calls, emails, and deals, so AI agents can answer questions and do sales work.
Building the CRM at HubSpot
O'Donnell spent more than 10 years at HubSpot, first building up its marketing automation software. Founder and then-CEO Brian Halligan later asked him to build HubSpot's CRM, which became what the company is best known for and helped earn him the title of chief product officer, TechCrunch reported.
Leaving HubSpot for Thrive Global
Missing hands-on building, he left HubSpot in 2021 to work at Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global. He was also involved with ProfitWell, a bootstrapped company he co-founded that Paddle bought for $200 million in 2022. He told TechCrunch that at one point he asked himself whether he should retire. Then OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
Starting Day AI with Michael Pici
He teamed up with Michael Pici, a former HubSpot vice president of sales and product, and in mid-2023 they began building Day AI. Early on the company had four people, and O'Donnell said he paid himself minimum wage. He has described Day AI to Upstarts Media as "the Cursor for CRM," and said he hopes it wins the category but worries it could end up like Betamax or Friendster.
