"I started a company in Silicon Valley, but we decided to move to Chicago partly because we had to go the organic road. We had to save money ... So I kind of realised I more, back then, strategy. I had been a consultant MBA, but I was too theoretical about business and I realized, ‘Wow, the only way we're going to grow organically … we have to close the next deal on the table.’ And then I just shifted my priority to like, ‘Hey, what's the next steps to close the next deal?’ And I'm just gonna...

"As founders, we all had product backgrounds … we all understood this pain … like we all had this issue of how do you get data about how your software is being used? ... We install a snippet of code and then it just works. It captures everything that's like super empowering to me as a product manager" Eric Boduch, co-Founder of Pendo

"We looked at each other one night when we were working rather late, which we had a tendency to do. Right. Do we really want to run a consulting company? We looked at each other and we;re both like .. No! So then we start thinking, well, what do we want to do? And from that we said; ‘Well, we really like the idea of building a product!’" Eric Boduch, Co-founder of Pendo

"The US for us is a very large market, if not the largest. And they get to benefit from the luxury that they're existing in a huge market in their own right. They don't have to think about Europe until they're quite late in their journey. But per your comments in doing so, they grow a lot slower than anyone else [internationally]. And I think one way we're encouraging to think about that earlier is by providing them with the infrastructure that they can just turn on" Harrison Rose, CoFounder...

"The same day that I picked up my A-level results, I drove straight to Paddle's first office for our very first day at Paddle. The reason why a SaaS company should either win or lose shouldn't be how well they’ve invested in some of their billing infrastructure … or whether they've done that right or not. It should be on the quality of their products, and the value of that delivery." Harrison Rose, CoFounder & Chief Customer Office of Paddle in conversation with Stephen Cummins, AppSelekt...

"I realised in the process of hiring and going from 50 to 200 people, and taking really good individual contributors and making them managers … we didn't really think about firing. We didn't think about the negative aspect of that and basically pruning the rosebush ...... [on the reverse freemium] "we try to provide as much valuable value as possible to those end users for free, and then have discussions about upgrading to other features over time. If they never do, that's totally fine...

"YouTube on Blackberry's website was a bit of a challenge because a YouTube player functions as an outbound link to YouTube's website - which is an ad monetised platform …. that's how they make money. If your competitors are smart, they can advertise against the videos you have on your homepage". Michael Litt, CEO & co-Founder of Vidyard. Solving this challenge for Blackberry (v. Apple) was the birth of his scaleup, video hosting platform Vidyard

Transcript: Hande Cilingir: [00:00:00] We would like to be the biggest marketing software company in the world. I don't mean by, you know, biggest in terms of revenue, biggestin terms of number of people. Biggest means for us having an office in every region, you know, being a market educator, market builder or market maker in those regions. But the most important thing is we would like to do best, not in terms of total revenue, not in terms of the other stuff … but in terms of providing...

Transcript: Hande Cilingir: [00:00:00] I believe that being an entrepreneur doesn't mean to establish your own startup always. You can become an entrepreneur by writing a blog sometimes, or you can become an entrepreneur by changing something between a bigger organisation … because I believe that real entrepreneurship is all about creating an impact. So anywhere you can create an impact is a point at which you can become an entrepreneur. For example, to me you are an entrepreneur by making...

--- Transcript: Anna Gong: [00:00:00] I was bullied when I was in Florida growing up because it's a very white environment. Stephen Cummins: So you looked different. Anna Gong: Yeah, I looked different. Stephen Cummins: And you sounded different at the beginning, right? Anna Gong: I knew not a word of English when I landed in the US. And then walking home and you get picked on by these boys and they punch you in the gut. And then and I was telling the story to a bunch of...

--- Transcript: Anna Gong: [00:00:00] We tried higher hiring from some of the legacy or old school technology guys – you know from, IBM, SAP, and Oracle, and so forth. And no offense to any of these companies, but I think if you are so used to selling a commodity, or even traditionally to the IT [department], this this is very much about the business … C-level … you know … head of marketing, head of commercial, head of PnL … it’s a very different selling cycle, and also selling point. So...

--- Transcript: [00:00:00] Anna Gong: They've moved me to Singapore … and six months into Singapore, they said, we need you more in Japan! And then so I moved to Japan. And then I stayed there for two years. Turned around the business, year-over-year 220 percent. You know, there were a lot of naysayers like ‘why would you send a Chinese female to Japan? It’s a death wish! But, you know, events Stephen Cummins: Didn’t work out that way. Anna Gong: [00:00:20] Success speaks for...

We find out why it’s great to look for the most boring problems imaginable, and then set about making the solution sexy in order to attract the most talented people out there to the company. Final part of a 3 part mini-series with Stephen Cummins interviewing Larry Gadea, CEO & Co-Founder of Envoy for 14 Minutes of SaaS.

Larry describes Envoy as a Trojan Horse to “get into people’s offices though the front desk and through the visitor sign in to the rest of the office.” 2nd of a 3 part mini-series with Stephen Cummins interviewing Larry Gadea, CEO & Co-Founder of Envoy for 14 Minutes of SaaS. Larry reveals why his Trojan Horse strategy has turned his initially simple start-up idea into a platform for upgrading the office experience. #14MoS

Of all the great people Stephen interviewed for 14 Minutes of SaaS, CEO & Founder of Envoy, Larry Gadea, is the one that crossed the most thresholds (and facilitated the crossing of them of course) - from crossing land borders to entering offices to rapidly removing roadblocks on his entrepreneurial journey. Larry takes us through his early days in Google, Shopify and Twitter. He explains that while a clear value prop and a consistent user experience has been important in turning Envoy’s...

Concluding episode of a 2-part 14 Minutes of SaaS conversation in RISE Hong Kong - Stephen Cummins interviews Winnie Lee, COO and Co-founder of Appier. Winnie, a self-confessed workaholic, tells us why she’s happy to work 72 hours a week. She also explains why she believes Taiwan is a great choice of country in which to start up a software company

Stephen Cummins interviews Winnie Lee, COO and Co-founder of Appier  – an AI driven platform that helps enterprise scale B2B entities make better marketing decisions.HQ’d in the city of Taipei, Appier also has offices in japan and Singapore, and has raised 80M USD since this interview. The newspaper Taiwan News recently claimed that Appier is a new unicorn. Part 1 of a 2 episode interview that took place at RISE, Hong Kong #14MoS

Episode 80 of 14 Minutes is the final one of a 5-part mini-series. Stephen Cummins chats with Sean Percival, CMO at Whereby, formerly of 500 Startups and Myspace. "I talked a little bit about why Myspace lost. We were not narrow. We were in every vertical you ever could be in. So, in the early stage, you have to be ruthless about doing one thing great and not many things kind of okay ... I think this is where a lot of founders struggle, because they're smart people … they have so many ideas"

Episode 79 of 14 Minutes of SaaS is the fourth instalment of a 5-part mini-series. Stephen Cummins chats with Sean Percival, CMO at Whereby, formerly of 500 Startups and Myspace. "We're trying not to allow [Whereby] to become a large feature, bloated product, which is what happened to Skype, what happened to WebEx, and happening to so many these products. Zoom feels get might be going down that path .. I'm going to be a thorn in their side. And if they're not thinking about us, they will be...

Episode 78 of 14 Minutes of SaaS is the third part of a 5-episode mini-series. Stephen Cummins chats with Sean Percival, CMO at Whereby, formerly of 500 Startups and Myspace. "Dave McClure is slight controversial in some cases, but still a really good guy. Dave invested in Wittlebee ... And he said to me ‘I'm going to invest 50K dollars ... I don't think this is gonna work out though. And if it doesn't work out and you need a job, I want you to contact me first, that's all I ask.’"

Episode 77 of 14 Minutes of SaaS is the second instalment of a 5-part mini-series. Stephen Cummins chats with Sean Percival, CMO at Whereby, formerly of 500 Startups and Myspace. "That Wittlebee was a great business ... a year into it, we were making almost 3M dollars in annual revenue. Recurring revenue. And so it was going good, but the VCs were just like ‘Go! Go! Go!’ And I'm like, ‘Wait a minute. My inventory is breaking. My supply chain is not like ironed out. Like we're growing too...

Episode 76 of 14 Minutes is the first of a 5-part mini-series. Stephen Cummins chats with Sean Percival, CMO at Whereby, formerly of 500 Startups and Myspace. Myspace was 120 million active users at a time when the internet was nowhere near as big as it is today. It was a top 5 internet site at its peak and it invented the social graph. Sean worked across a host of roles in IT and software, but it’s wasn’t until he found marketing and content that he found something he was great at. And you...

E75 - Part 4 and concluding episode of a mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall. In this final episode we find out about Jonathan’s beliefs regarding a lot of faster developing tech areas – and, more importantly, why they should be adopted and introduced into the business with caution. And - he has some amazing advice for anyone seeking to start a business.

E74 - Part 3 of a 4-part mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall. Jonathan doesn’t see VC rounds as reasons to celebrate, but he does see VC as a no-brainer if the ambition is both huge and urgent – and his vision is to build the future of telephony in less than 10 years. He reveals a love for open office working - and explains why he believes in ever-increasing employee specialisation and Sales Fordism as they take on the challenge of onboarding 10 new employees a...