The Saas Revolution Show

Maddy Cross, Talent Director at Notion Capital, is this week’s guest on The SaaS Revolution Show. She talks about Notion's recent research report: The Unicorn Hiring Trajectory. This looks into the hiring trends of SaaS unicorns compared with other high-performing (but not unicorn) businesses. When Notion invests in a startup, 80% of that capital goes on headcount - growing the team. But how do the choices you make - when to hire, who to hire - affect the growth trajectory of your company?

Dan Martell, five-time SaaS founder and founder of SaaS Academy, talks retaining top talent on this week's episode of The SaaS Revolution Show. This episode was his keynote session from SaaStock West Coast 2019. He looks at the main reasons employees leave companies, and gives SaaS founders a strategy for keeping a pulse on your team so there's no surprise departures.

This week David Roldan, Head of Venture Capital & Startup Business Development - Europe, Google Cloud, is chatting to Alex Theuma on the SaaS Revolution Show, live from Slush 2019. Their conversation focused on David’s passion: Customer Success. David offered practical tips to help early-stage startups set themselves up as a customer-success-focused organisation - even before making a single CS hire. They also discussed the areas of a business that are impacted by customer success, and how the discipline differs in Europe compared with the USA.

This week Tina Sharkey, co-founder of Brandless, is chatting to Alex Theuma on the SaaS Revolution Show, live from Slush 2019. They discussed Brandless’ journey to date, including their expansion from a direct-to-consumer model to incorporating a physical retail presence. They also discussed the importance of identifying and communicating your core metrics – and how these have changed as Brandless has grown. This is especially important for an early, growing team – it’s essential that everyone knows the key metric by which you’re measuring growth – and how their contribution aligns with that. Tina offered some great practical advice for founders on telling your company’s story, and measuring success.

This week Phil Chambers, CEO and co-founder of Peakon, is chatting to Alex Theuma on the SaaS Revolution Show, live from Slush 2019. They discuss Peakon's latest report looking at why people leave their jobs. They discuss trends and common themes in employee attrition, the importance of your onboarding process, and the times and reasons when employees are most at-risk of leaving your company. Phil shares some of his lessons in managing people, running distributed teams across multiple regions, and how he keeps healthy and balanced as founder and CEO.

This week Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder of Travelperk, is chatting to Alex Theuma on the SaaS Revolution Show, live from Slush 2019. They discuss Travelperk’s journey to becoming the fastest-growing SaaS company in Europe. Avi shares his insights on building and scaling company culture, and how to maintain that as you scale into new regions. He offers practical advice about how to prepare your company to scale – both in terms of headcount and into new countries and regions.

This week Peter Reinhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Segment, is chatting to Alex Theuma on the SaaS Revolution Show, live at Slush 2019. They discuss the pivots and challenges Segment faced finding product-market fit - from Segment's origins as a classroom learning tool to where it is today. As well as focusing on Segment's journey to product-market fit, Peter and Alex also cover how Segment approached expanding into new regions.

This week Jason Reichl, CEO of Go Nimbly, is chatting to Alex Theuma on the SaaS Revolution Show. Their conversation focused on revenue operations: how Go Nimbly is working to champion the operators in businesses - the people who influence so much revenue, but never get recognised for the role they play. Go Nimbly is defining the revenue operations category, and demonstrating how revenue ops offers real, tangible business benefits.

This week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show is a live recording from SaaStock 2019. In this episode Philipe Botteri, partner with Accel, interviews G2 cofounder and chairman, Godard Abel. It was a really interesting conversation that followed Godard’s entrepreneurial journey from his first startup BigMachines, to founding and scaling G2. As an experienced entrepreneur he offered lots of fascinating insights on everything from SaaS pricing, sales, and financing. This is a must-listen for early-stage SaaS founders, with tons of practical takeaways.

This week's episode of the SaaS Revolution Show is a live recording from SaaStock 2019. We're talking to Eric Boduch, co-founder and chief evangelist at Pendo. It was a great conversation in the middle of the show floor, on the Podcast Stage, where we really talked about product-led growth, scaling a massive company like Pendo, and how Eric personally deals with that growth.

Elias Torres is focused on building the best engineering organization based in Boston. His team at Drift is building software to help people live, work and create better together. Anywhere, anytime, on any device. He is obsessed with finding the best talent, while sculpting company culture, and getting things done. They discuss how drift are making b2b buying simple, frictionless and conversational and they also delve into people, hiring culture & the challenges of hypergrowth - including how to train managers and get the best from ambitious young talent. Enjoy 

Coming to you live from Dublin where we just wrapped the fourth SaaStock flagship conference, this week's episode is a live interview we recorded with Michael Litt, Co-founder and CEO of Vidyard. This interview was part of the  Podcast stage, where we hosted a plethora of podcasters who interviewed our speakers. Less than a month ago, Michael did something out of the ordinary. While many entrepreneurs start with a Free software offering, then scale into launching Pro and Enterprise solutions, he did the opposite. What happens when you flip the traditional freemium model on its head? What challenges did his company face in scaling this way? How did the team react? How did the market respond? Alex digs into all of these and more.When Michael is not bringing leading video-based technologies to market, he serves as a general partner of Garage Capital, a seed-stage fund focused on Super-Cluster companies looking to expand their networks into Silicon Valley. Hope you enjoy this live show with him. We have three mor

Remember Enron? A company that went to the highest highs only to have a dizzying fall in 2007. One of the values that Enron had put on the wall was Integrity. In hindsight no one would associate Enron with anything remotely close to integrity. As you heard in the intro, how you reach your objective matters, the end doesn’t justify the means and you have to be intentional about doing it the right way when it comes to people. As it turns out, putting values on the wall means nothing.This week on the SaaS Revolution Show we bring you a session from our recent SaaStock West Coast conference where a stellar panel discusses how to nail Company Culture & Mission and How to Build an Environment Fit for Scale. What this means is creating a sustainable company with healthy culture, good demeanor and authentic behaviours exuded by everyone. Moderated by Solu Nwanze, Director, Business Operations, Zendesk it features Sonja Gittens Ottley, Head, Diversity & Inclusion, Asana, Emma Eschweiler, VP, Silicon Valley ban

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Steli Efti, CEO and Co-Founder of Close about his new book on early stage selling techniques for startups.If you have been in the SaaS space for a few years you have surely come across Steli at a conference somewhere. His signature talks - loud, filled with equal measure cursing and valuable lessons for anyone who does selling, are always unmissable. Steli moved to the US 14 years ago with a one way ticket and a dream to change the world. He didn’t quite achieve that with the first company he started in Palo Alto but he certainly is making waves with his second, Close. Started back in January 2013 to make salespeople more productive, it only recently got the keys for its comfortable .com home; that itself a fascinating story of grit and hustle on Steli’s part, which he shares on his second appearance on the SaaS Revolution Show.Listen on to learn:Why books have become such a pivotal part of Close’s success A fundamental thing about early stage sellin

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Rod Ardant, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendesk, about how to build a global company.An engineer by education, Rod always enjoyed building stuff and co-founded his first company, Wozaik, pretty much straight after college. In 2013 it was acquired and Rod started plotting his next venture. He increasingly saw the discrepancy between how people could pay for things in their personal life and professional. Spending time manually uploading receipts or always needing to borrow a credit card from a manager was outdated he believed. Spendesk was born in September 2015 to improve this. By the following June when the product launched, Rod and company had made a bold statement to the media - they would be operating in multiple markets from the start. To make that happen and scale it, Spendesk has had to be global from day one, doing massive amounts of customer research to understand the local mindset and hiring with inclusivity in mind. Listen on to learn:How Spend

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with one of the SaaStock19 Keynote speakers, Leela Srinivasan, CMO at SurveyMonkey about how B2B companies can survive and thrive in the feedback economy.Originally from Scotland, Leela has spent her entire professional life in the US, passing through exciting companies such as Lever, OpenTable, Linkedin amongst others. Leela had been a long time SurveyMonkey user before she joined the company as their CMO about a year and a half ago. And she did so for many reasons, one of which being the proper attention the company gives to Diversity and Inclusion. Both the senior executive team as well as the board at SurveyMonkey are gender balanced and diverse.As SurveyMonkey has moved more and more into the B2B realm, they have been confronted with the fact that we live in the era of the feedback economy. In that sense Leela and her team have had to eat more and more in their own restaurant, meaning using SurveyMonkey to gather feedback in a variety of ways an

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we speak with Jason VandeBoom, Founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign about all the unusual things he has done to reach $70M in ARR and counting.A builder and maker of things from an early age, young Jason thought that the best way to cater for that was to attend Fine Arts school. That pursuit brought him to Chicago. However, to pay for Arts school he started doing consulting on the side. He ended up packaging it into an on-premise solution, which he sold for the good part of the following decade, abandoning the pursuit of the fine arts and establishing himself as a tech entrepreneur. In 2013 he began a transition into building a cloud based customer experience automation platform. By 2016, Jason was employing around 20 people and started growing the company.Three years later the numbers speak for themselves - headcount is nearing 550, the company has 80,000 customers and is on a healthy growth trajectory, currently earning 70M in ARR. What is not so obvious is h

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Dan Adika, CEO and Co-Founder of WalkMe about how he has raised the whopping $217 million in the past 7 years. Dan follows a somewhat familiar path that has bread many excellent Israeli entrepreneurs. He spent 6 years working for tech unit of the Israeli Defence Forces. He then had a year in HP, before realizing that to truly follow his passion for making things, improving them, all the while solving some thorny problems, he had to build his own company. In 2011 Dan did just that. Together with his co-founders Eyal Cohen and Rephael Sweary they started WalkMe. In February 2012, the three raised their first round of funding that wasn’t coming from friends and family. There were no customers at the time but there was a dream, a bold one - allow people to “walk” the digital world, the way they did the physical one. That bold dream would not always be enough to convince funders but for those times, Dan and his co-founders learned the art of metrics, benc

This week on the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Sarika Garg, Chief Strategy Officer at Tradeshift about walking the tightrope between tactics and strategy. Sarika was raised in Africa and India and moved to Silicon Valley about 20 years ago. Fifteen of them she spent working between SAP and Ariba, moving up the ranks of product management. When she felt she had gotten too used to the comfy life that big organisations can create, Sarika jumped into the deep end joining Tradeshift, first as VP of product marketing and then raising up to Chief Strategy officer two years ago. At the time, the company employed 100 people and she was the first CSO. Nowadays the company employs 1000 people and at its last Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs, it was valued at $1.1 billion. No wonder then, that Tradeshift is one of the fastest growing Fintech companies in Silicon Valley. That has been achieved by navigating the complex network that Tradeshift offers to businesses and having both a disciplined long term vie

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit about how she and her co-founder and husband, Chris Nagele have run the company for the past nearly 19 years and have created both an effective and calm environment. During those 19 years, Natalie and Chris have built a lot of products and have shut down many of them. The ones that have stood the test of time have often been SaaS. Currently the company maintains Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. Wildbit currently employs 30 people who are spread between 6 countries. Natalie’s main goal throughout all this time has been to keep the company a sane place to work. She has never taken VC funding and has never imposed high growth, or unsustainable goals for the company. At the start of the year, however, Natalie and Chris introduced The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to help the company become more effective and productive. So far the experience has been great and they are already seeing great resu