The Saas Revolution Show

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

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we take you back to the SaaStock18 stage for a special Ask Me Anything session with William McQuillan, Partner at Frontline. Without any preselected questions, William answers everything on the spot at the Traction stage. After leaving university, William was one of the founding employees of Ondra Partners, a startup investment-banking boutique. William’s work at Ondra led him to discover his passion for rethinking an industry, and he shortly thereafter co-founded Osmoda, a fashion e-commerce company creating a new way for young and up-and-coming designers to sell online. During the same time, William was also the Global Ambassador for the Sandbox Network, a community of over 1000 innovators under 30. It was through his work at all those places that William experienced firsthand the difficulty that European founders have when fundraising. This inspired him to join the other two partners, Will Prendergast and Shay Garvey to set up Frontline, a fund that would

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Nazma Qurban, Chief Revenue Officer of Cognism about how she has managed to build a predictable outbound sales machine in the past 2.5 years. When Nazma joined Cognism she was the first sales employee. The company had one paying customer so the world was hers to conquer and bring in the revenue. Nazma knew the way to go was outbound so she started building a predictable outbound strategy. Driven and ambitious, Nazma would go to every networking event she could and knock on many doors to get a ton of advice and spur as much interest about Cognism as possible. Two and a half years later she has built a team of 25, mostly comprised of graduates that she carefully upskills. The learning mentality is still present among them and you would be hard-pressed to go to a meetup in London and not run into someone from Cognism. The efforts have paid off. The retention of employees is incredibly high and nowadays Cognism earns $5M in ARR. Cognism’s is a truly

On this month’s episode of the Struggle, with talk with Joachim Klein, President of ThreeKit. Originally from Germany, Joachim has been living in San Francisco for the past three years.  ThreeKit is Joachim’s fourth foray into Enterprise SaaS, a field he is fully subscribed to at this point. He started off his path in a company called BigMachines, the subject of the conversation on this episode.   Joachim joined it in September 2000 as EMEA MD, nine months after BigMachines had been started. The startup helped manufacturing companies provide the best possible quotes for their big machines. Joachim remembers the first year as particularly exhilarating. They were receiving a lot of interest from prospects, had many great conversations with them and all in all got a lot of praise for the problem they were tackling. On top of that, they had raised $30 million in funding so there was plenty of money in the bank. Bullish about the future of the company, BigMachines hired a lot of people that year, preparing for the

This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is John Doran, Director of Engineering at Phorest Salon Software, a cloud-based management solution and marketing suite for salons and spas.  Born and bred in Dublin, John has always loved building product and iteratively improving it. Phorest is the first SaaS product he was involved with, jumping in from professional services. which he found far more unsatisfactory. When John joined Phorest four years ago, there were only 5-6 engineers who all reported to Ronan Perceval, CEO and Founder of Phorest.  Two years into his tenure, John became the Director of Engineering. For a while, he continued operating under the flat structure he inherited but quickly that began to cause problems. Individually siloed and not in sync, the engineering development suffered. John and his team began to experiment with changes and are on a journey of continuous improvement. Listen on to learn: The warning signs that the engineering team will need to be restructured One change John and

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show we chat with SalesLoft CMO, Sydney Sloan. She shares lessons from her vast experience in customer-focused marketing and the metrics she has learned to swear by and report.  Sydney has always been customer focused. Even back in the 90s when there were no CRM systems and no one spoke about the importance of myopically focusing on the customer. At the time she was doing what would end up a 15 year stint at Adobe - the place Sydney says she grew up in a way. At trade shows she would stand beside her sales colleague and have long conversations with people who visited their booth about their problems and challenges. Towards the end of her time in Adobe, she finally had a more customer experience role, leading the Customer Marketing. From then on, there was no going back. Her career would see her work for companies such as Jive Software and Alfresco. A little over a year ago, she joined Salesloft where she has been building a strong relationship between Marketing and

This week’s guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is Sophia Eng, VP of Growth Marketing at Trade the Fifth and Founder of Women in Growth, a support group for female executives. In August 2017 an article she wrote in response to an internal memo that a Google engineer had written to discredit the ability of women to be in STEM careers, became viral overnight. Quoting outdated facts, the internal memo was leaked to the public and as soon as Sophia read it, she wrote a manifesto to urge women and other minorities to speak up and tell their stories so the facts can be straightened.  On the episode, Sophia shares more about the experience and what has happened since. She talks in detail about the continued importance that people of diverse backgrounds tell their story, how vital it is not too give up on efforts to bring more diversity and inclusion in tech as we are only at the tip of the speer and one characteristic that women and other minorities possess that is essential for innovation. A child of Vietnamese immig

The start of Dan Martell entrepreneurial path has all the markings of a Hollywood film - driving a stolen car, chased by police, with a gun beside him. The latest guest on the Struggle, the Canadian 5-time founder has quite the story of trials, tribulations on the way to success. Beyond being a dad, a husband and a Canadian, Dan would tell you that his defining characteristics are someone who is driven, someone who constantly asks what is possible and what does he need to do to fulfill his dreams and goals. We know where, when and how his entrepreneurial story begins but what has followed since is as interesting, tough and educational. A lot of it was, in his words, soul crushing. It took him nearly 10 years and 2 failed companies to get a better idea of how to do business right. That coupled with coming across the book “Love is the killer app” gave him the knowledge to be successful. 15 years and three more companies after, Dan has managed to achieve successful exits all the while learning a massive amount o

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Rory O’Driscoll, Partner of Scale Venture Partners and talk about the things he believes SaaS entrepreneurs should be mindful of even as the SaaS industry seems to be thriving. Originally from Ireland, Rory moved to California 28 years ago. For 25 of those, he has been investing in enterprise software with Scale Venture Partners and its predecessor. In that time he has learned a lot of things about the world of venture funding, starting with the fact of just how deceivingly easy all of it seems, yet how difficult it is to make the right decisions about entrepreneurs and their companies and have the conviction to see them through the tough times.   Rory has also learned to count his blessings and remember that a lot of the successful bets he has made have a lot to do with luck. That humbleness is what keeps him cautious even in the best of times for SaaS and in this interview he shares some of his reservations about valuations, market saturation, the i

One of the last sessions at SaaStock18 was a bonus chat that brought a double dose of Canadian accents - April Dunford, the world’s foremost expert on positioning sat for a conversation with Mark Organ, CEO and founder of Influitive. Even though they spoke at 4;20 on the day weed was legalised in Toronto, the topic they covered on the day was slightly different - category creation. On this week’s episode we are bringing you their entire chat. Category creation had been coming up again and again during the two days of the conference. It’s something that Mark, who has started 7 companies in his career, two of which category creators, is all too familiar with. His first one was Eloqua, which he founded 20 years ago and the second is his current company, Influitive, which he started 8 years ago. In their conversation, April and Mark talk about the origin story of each, to what extend Mark realized he was creating categories at the time, how he sold the idea to funders and customers, and many other. Both agree jus

On the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we speak with Alison Murdock, CMO of SocialChorus, a platform for planning, creating, publishing, and measuring employee communications. Alison has spent the last 25 years in Silicon Valley working in a variety of media and SaaS companies. She started her career wanting to be a writer and her very first job was writing for a magazine in Paris. As she transitioned more into marketing, writing remained a fundamental skill for her and to this day, Alison believes that what companies choose to write or speak about matters most. Everywhere she has worked, she has always aimed to find the crux of the issue that companies are trying to nail with content and the story they are trying to tell. When it comes to Social Chorus that is a particularly important thing to focus on as they sell to a plethora of companies, that are often undergoing digital transformation. In this interview Alison shares many nuggets from her experience including: How to stand out in the sea o

On this month’s episode of the Struggle, Alex Theuma speaks with Liam Boogar-Azoulay, Head of Marketing at MadKudu, a predictive lead scoring solution for SaaS companies. Liam has had somewhat of an unusual path professionally and personally. When everyone was moving to Silicon Valley, he moved away from it, landing in Paris. While most people would hone their skills in a particular area first and then dare to start their own company, Liam’s first job was starting Rude Baguette, a blog devoted to startups.   He had started it almost as soon as he moved to Paris. Rude Baguette would end up being one of the biggest startup publications in France, which employed 10 people. That is until Liam brought it to bankruptcy, a slow one as you will hear him describe in this interview, but a bankruptcy nevertheless. In retrospect, he knows exactly what went wrong but at the time some of his flaws were hidden. One thing he realized from the experience is that he had enjoyed building the brand far more than being a CEO. Wit

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with SaaStock East Coast speaker Eran Ben Shushan. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Bizzabo, a holistic event management platform, and shares how to make better hiring decisions​ as a company grows. Originally from Tel Aviv, Israel, Eran moved to New York, three and a half years ago, as soon as the company found product-market fit. A former air force officer and a system’s engineer, Eran had his first experience with the magic and challenge of events over 12 years ago. His fascination with events was so intense that he decided to dip his toe in building a platform for them. He started Bizzabo with two other co-founders 7 years ago. Initially it was improving networking at events and aiming to engineer serendipity for attendees. However, early on, Eran and his two co-founders saw a far bigger opportunity. Nowadays Bizzabo boast two offices, an employee count of 120 and has to date raised $57 million in VC funding. The growth has been tremendous but what Er