“A 6-year-old masked marauder racing about on his bicycle” The New York Times Oct. 11, 1987

About

I am Christopher O’Donnell, a dad and guitar player in the Boston area. I led product at HubSpot for a decade, and have worked with some other amazing organizations in service to their growth through the development of world-class leaders, teams and (therefore) products. I studied Computers & Music in undergrad at Brown University, after attending Phillips Exeter Academy, a school that my mother served as leader for a decade, breaking barriers and opening doors for scores of future female heads of school.

Ideas

Christopher O’Donnell on Medium

Songs

I am the singer, songwriter and guitarist in the band The Providers. You can hear our music on Spotify and YouTube. We are fortunate to have reached over 10,000,000 listeners around the world with whom our message of love and hope resonates. We have a wide variety of influences and our music often appeals to people who like 70’s pop rock.

I have contributed engineering, production, songwriting and session playing for other artists as well.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with my musical heroes, recording John Medeski, Dave Zinno, Bob Gullotti, Leo Genovese, Tim Ray, Joe Hunt, Greg Hopkins and many others.

As a student of my instrument I have had (and continue in some cases to have) the pleasure of studying with Dave Zinno, Bob Sullivan (New England Conservatory, Eric Johnson), Ariel Posen, Josh Smith and Charlie Hunter.

I got a shoutout in Electronic Musician magazine twenty years ago. I’m still unduly psyched about that one.

Founding, Board Roles, Investing & Advising

I’m lucky to have been part of number of terrific companies led by amazing and talented friends.

Profitwell (Price Intelligently) is a SaaS company in Boston that I co-founded in 2009 with Patrick Campbell (CEO), Facundo Chamut and Aaron White. Firetower was a javascript error tracking solution that I founded with Aaron White and sold to Crashlytics. I served as product advisor for the startup Smarterer which was acquired by Pluralsight.

I have held a board seat at Profitwell for the 13 years since founding. I served a term on the board of Berklee Online which I enjoyed very much.

I am an active angel investor, particularly focused on startups with Black founders.

You

I am passionate about people’s careers as creative professionals. If I can be helpful to you in your career, please drop me a connection and a note on LinkedIn where I am generally responsive if you are not selling something.

Acting

That’s that other guy. He seems, by all accounts, quite lovely.

Appendix - Presentations & Talks