Episode 122 of 14 minutes of SaaS  – Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann – 3 of 3 –  chats with AppSelekt CEO Stephen Cummins in Lisbon: "Market beats the team, beats the product. In the sense that picking the right market is often more important than anything else. But then getting the right team in place is more important than you having a good idea or not because it's the initial idea ... it's going to evolve. It's not like you’re sitting in the bathtub with the rubber duck and saying...

Episode 121 of 14 minutes of SaaS  – Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann – 2 of 3 –  chats with AppSelekt CEO Stephen Cummins in Lisbon: "It’s ok to get negative reviews. Actually negative reviews can be more valuable for you than positive reviews ... We did an AB split test where we're showing consumers a page with one negative review. And the other page has zero reviews. And then we do a split test that says “so which one are people more likely to buy from? And people are far, far more...

Episode 120, 1 of 3. Trustpilot CEO Founder Peter Mühlmann interviewed by Stephen Cummins, CEO & Founder of AppSelekt for 14 Minutes of SaaS. "I sold a lot on the eBays of the world and then I thought, actually I would like to start my own website also ... nobody bought because they suspected that it was just Peter sitting in a basement with his friend, two kids, selling electronics ... that was it was actually true. And I didn't want to refer them to the eBays of the world because all...

"If something needs to be audacious and if something needs to be comprehensive in order for it to really make the change, you gotta figure out a way to invest in that. And I think that, you know, when you look at … a great example is looking at Space X where they have this big audacious goal but they’ve figured out, you know, in… in as lean as you can get in the rocket world. Like ‘How do we actually sell something to the market so that we can go in and we can learn? And we can fund the thing...

"Fundamentally, this problem that we’re trying to solve which is; 'How do we understand people better while they’re interacting with the brand in order to, kind of, communicate with them in a way that’s more valuable to them?' That’s a fundamental human reality and it’s one that’s not tied to any particular generation of technology. And it’s also one that’s not tied to a category of business" Bill Magnuson, CEO & CoFounder of Braze

App Annie CEO Ted Krantz in conversation with Stephen Cummins - part 3 of 3. "Keep your head down and get it done. There's too much of a tendency today to self-promote, to push and ask for the constant, you know, next level. And I think you have to … there's a mix of make it happen and let it happen .. And then you've got to round yourself out .. Sometimes executives, even at the highest levels, they have a very difficult time balancing execution and strategy"

App Annie CEO Ted Krantz in conversation with Stephen Cummins - part 2 of 3. "We're taking our domain as the industry standard for market data on mobile, and marrying that with 1st party data. You have the full footprint of mobile performance. We're moving from metrics that we do traditionally like downloads, revenue, monthly active users, daily active users; to strategic C-Suite metrics that we can now calculate with these 2 datasets … CAC, lifetime value, return on ad spend. We're mission...

App Annie CEO Ted Krantz in conversation with Stephen Cummins - part 1 of 3. "I've had three legends that I've been pretty close to. Craig Conway early on at Peoplesoft, you know. And then I moved over with Tom Siebel at C3. I’m very close to Bill McDermott still today at SAP"

Bob Moore, CEO & Co-founder of Crossbeam, in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "Start with something that you know and you've empathy for and you think you can have some success behind, and that success will propel you potentially into that thing being great and huge"

Bob Moore, CEO & Co-founder of Crossbeam, in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "80 percent of companies say 'we are a platform'.  We can't all be platforms. A platform is like the baseline thing on which everything here should be built. It's a mesh of these companies self-identifying as platforms, but the real word should be 'ecosystem'"

Bob Moore, CEO & Co-founder of Crossbeam, in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "I knew I wanted to start a company before I knew what company I wanted to start. And that is a really problematic way to get into it, because I think a lot of people end up in this mode where you're a hammer looking for a nail"

Christian Gabriel talking with Stephen Cummins "They started off saying, ‘You know, yeah, we'd love to build Capdesk. If we can get, you know, 15 percent of your company in warrants, we'll build it.’ And once we built the prototype and our second funding round came up, I then asked them, you know, how much would it cost to hire two of you to go full time? And they gave me this ridiculous price. So then I said, 'You want to be equal co-founders, then? ... And they said ‘Yes. Wow!’ And the...

TripActions Co-founder Ilan Twig in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "When I worked for HP, there was no goal and everything was certain. And I'm just thinking about it right now. But that was the reality back then. That's why I was a walking dead. At least for me, I need to have something to aim for. And I need to wake up in the morning knowing that I need to solve something. I need to challenge myself with something. Be true to yourself … because when you start masking it with whatever...

TripActions Co-founder Ilan Twig in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "Expenses are a pain in the butt. What you optimise for when you travel for work is completely different than what you optimise for when you travel for leisure. We thought if there is a way that we could then make people think about how they make their decisions when it comes to corporate travel more similar to how they do it when they book their leisure travel, there is an interesting opportunity for saving money for the...

TripActions Co-founder Ilan Twig in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "We sold StreamOnce, but I didn’t really feel that I filled a desire of building a company in the valley. It’s a nine month journey. So really there was nothing. We knew that the next thing would have to be big. And in order for that to be big, the market must be big. You know, there are markets you can have the most amazing idea, but if the market is small and you are the most successful with no competition, it will still...

TripActions Co-founder Ilan Twig in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "I never try to impress. I always assume I know less. And I think this created space for wonderful relationships. And relationships are so important when you start a company."

Episode 106 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the final instalment of a series of 6 with Georg Petschnigg. We learn about the immense influence of dance, and seeing falling as a source of momentum, on so much of what he does. We also hear moleskin notebooks described as books waiting to be written. He may be an entrepreneur in the land of digital, but Georg derives his inspiration from the real world. As a result, waxing lyrical on analog experience is never too far away from the conversation. Georg...

This is the fifth and penultimate of a six-episode series recorded with Georg Petschnigg at the Web Summit in Lisbon. We find out how Fifty Three, although it built great tools, never shipped the manual to creativity until it joined up with WeTransfer – a company that better understood the power of content. We learn that hand-writing is not dead … and that in this world of selfies and personal branding, there’s still seemingly much more people in this world that care far more about creating...

Episode 104 of 14 Minutes of SaaS is the 4th is a 6 part series with Georg Petschnigg recorded at the Web Summit in Lisbon. We hear why WeTransfer can dance with the big tech monoliths like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. And we also get a history lesson in the maritime origins of the stock exchange, which originated out of Amsterdam

In episode 103 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the third in our 6 part series with WeTransfer Chief Innovation Officer Georg Petschnigg, he explains why he was compelled to build both a software and a hardware product from scratch and at the same time in order to deliver on why of Fifty Three … that is … to get behind great ideas.  In doing this Fifty Three managed to deliver a phoenix-like resurrection of the stylus. And we learn how he saw WeTransfer’s acquisition of Fifty Three as an entrance, not...

In this, episode 102 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the second in our 6 part series with Georg Petschnigg, we hear about his work as an engineer in the world of video compression. And how an hilarious chance meeting with a Stanford professor in a dance class led to Georg discovering he had been a designer for years without knowing it, not just a great engineer. We also learn how the naming of the company Georg founded in New York, Fifty Three, related to the human body and the enablement of creativity.

In episode 1 we learn how influential Georg’s grandfather, architect Hubert Petschnigg, was in his life. And why, for designers, it’s very important to master as quickly as possible the process of creativity – once one has achieved that mastery, the mind if free’d up to focus on Why something should be brought into our world, and from that What that something should be.

"You do need obviously commitment and perseverance – so obviously only pick an idea you really willing to almost die for. Because you will have struggles, every one of my companies had struggles. And so really having that belief that this really should come into the world is super important - so you can get through the tough times."

"G2, at the beginning there was a lot of skepticism in the first couple of years ... the first 2 million bucks we have to fund ourselves ... VCs were like “I get the concept, but are enterprise users going to share? … and how long is this gonna take you?” And we couldn't generate any revenue either for a couple of years. We had no metrics. So we were fortunate, we could do it because we believed in it so much"