We all know that familiar feeling of dread: setting our alarm clocks for Monday morning on Sunday evening, or even earlier in the day knowing your weekend of fun has come to an end.
“I’m not scared of Sundays. I enjoy it because it’s my time,” said Rangan, who helms the $34 billion software company. “I get to decide what I’m learning, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m writing. It is completely my schedule.”
Instead, Rangan—who said she struggles to sit still and take time away from work—carves out Friday night and all of Saturday to take a break. She spends this time going on walks with her husband Kash (a managing director with Goldman Sachs), doing yoga, meditating, and reading.
“Saturdays are precious to me,” Rangan said. “When I didn’t take breaks, I got burned out pretty quickly.”
HubSpot employees know Rangan won’t look at or respond to emails on Saturdays, but she’ll spend time on Sundays scheduling emails that hit inboxes in the wee morning hours on Mondays.
Rangan, who’s been with HubSpot for about five years now, typically starts her weekdays around 6 a.m. and is on work calls by 7 a.m. She says she will work as late as 11 p.m.
Rangan was born and raised in South India, where she grew up in a 350-foot apartment with her parents and older sister. She says her mother inspired her to become a woman pioneer—whether it was becoming the first woman in India to win a major case, the first woman engineer to “do something really cool,” or becoming a doctor who would do something amazing, Rangan said.
She ended up studying computer engineering at Bharathiar University in India, and moved to the U.S. at age 21 to earn her MBA from the University of California—Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She used her combined experience of engineering and business to become a successful salesperson, eventually climbing the ranks in the tech industry.
She takes her sons to India every couple of years to show where she and her husband grew up and takes her sons to see a local orphanage they sponsor to “give them a sense of what your responsibility is in society,” Rangan said.
“[It’s] not just for you to make money and live in the Bay Area,” she said. “It is to figure out how you can actually have a broader impact.”
