Awareness of this flipped power dynamic (and what it means for marketing) is what drove fellow MIT Sloan graduates Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah to found HubSpot Inc. (NYSE: HUBS) in 2006. HubSpot saw an opportunity to develop software tools that could help midsize companies sell themselves by giving things away. In the process, they launched the business movement known as "inbound marketing." The Cambridge, Mass., company's digital offerings now run the gamut from helping companies create personalized web experiences to monitoring social media to running critical site analytics that tell companies what works and what doesn't.