LIVE from SaaStr Europa 2024: Workshop Stage- Tuesday

Hi everyone, so I'm going to be kicking off some of the Brain Dates today. So thanks a lot for taking the time to attend my session. So just to give a bit of background about me, my name is Phoebe. I'm a vice president at Innovia Capital, which is a Canadian growth equity equity firm. So a bit of background about Innovia and my role before we sort of dig into the session today. So Innovia, as I said, is a Canadian growth equity firm which was really founded 15 years ago to help scale up the domestic ecosystem in Canada, as what we found— there are too many sort of great companies, great tech talent, and great universities, but all too often they were selling out either to the US or moving over to the Valley. Um, so with that strategy starting with a sort of venture strategy. We backed some of the early Canadian tech champions including Lightspeed, Hopper, and BenchSci. And then my role, as you can tell, I'm not Canadian. I sit in our London office. And then why did we find Europe an exciting opportunity? And that's really— we saw a lot of the same trends that we saw in Canada, i.e., a lack of scale-up capital, and particularly ones where the partnership have a lot of operational expertise. and that's something where we wanted to really be able to help entrepreneurs of the future, particularly expand over to North America. Now, as you can see, the title of the session today is really around CFOs. So why are CFOs interesting for us as a VC firm? I think one, it's really a position close to our hearts based on the partnership that we have. So the London office is headed up by Patrick Pichette, who used to be the CFO of Google for quite a long time. And we also have Rafe, who is the CFO of Deliveroo, also in our office. And we have people of similar caliber elsewhere. So I think that's something we're highly aware of, the challenges and obstacles that are faced by CFOs today, but also with our investor hat on, really thinking through what are the opportunities, particularly from a software perspective, to better serve a lot of these CFOs. See if this works. There we go. So I guess a bit of setting the scene. I think the role of this presentation is twofold. So one is discussing how the role of the CFO itself has had to change to be more strategic, particularly in the current market environment where there is increased operational complexity that a lot of these CFOs have to deal with, no matter if they're a small SMB all the way up to large enterprises. And is the second is the solutions. So historically enterprise customers were very well served in terms of a CFO's tool stack. For instance, the SAP, IBMs of this world. However, now there's an opportunity both to liberate small and medium-sized businesses from manual complexity that they're now dealing with, and also at the mid-market to be able to give them access to tools historically only available to larger businesses. So taking the, the first part of this presentation, so a bit more about how we see the role of the CFO. So I think a lot of the core priorities are the same as they've always been, but they've been forced to change. And I think having spoken to both our partnership and also other, obviously, CFOs in our portfolio companies, these are the four points really came true on the, on the left-hand side. Where I think really to, to highlight is a categorized obviously by 3 main pillars. The first is obviously reporting the past, so more backward-looking. That's where a lot of CFOs historically spent their most time. Managing the present and the day-to-day, particularly around cash flow in the current market, and also budgeting and planning for tomorrow, which is essentially where a lot of strategic finance unlocks the most of its value. However, there's obviously has numerous obstacles, particularly over the past few years. I think the three I would highlight, I think one is really the high degree of manual processes coupled with increasing data needs. So today a lot of people have to stitch numerous different Excel together requiring numerous employees and operating teams' time to do this. So that's obviously expensive, slow, and it's prone to error. The second is just the broader digitalization of our world, which has really resulted increased volume and complexity of data where there are competing central source of truths in terms of different datasets, which makes it increasingly difficult to CFOs to manage what is like the real operating performance of the business today. And last is market complexity. I think everyone in this room is obviously familiar with this, but I think the three things here obviously regulation, digitization, and also a challenging macro environment, which makes the need particularly to manage your cash flows even, like, even more important than it was previously. So this is where the role of the strategic CFO really steps in. And I think I put, I put up here that they're the key organization changemakers. And I think it's really worth highlighting that's because CFOs have the opportunity to be the master of all the data within the organization. So that's not just from traditional role in FP&A in terms of forecasting and planning, but also across multiple stakeholders. So that's, you know, collaborating with strategy and operations and including best practices in terms of the sales process, etc. And I think looking ahead where that is most mission-critical is particularly at the growth stage, which is obviously where I sit. So as businesses progress from seed, Series A, Series B, all the way up to pre-IPO, the CFO has a key role in implementing those key processes and best practices. So on the, on the data-driven rigor, I think I listed some bullet points on the right-hand side, but it's all about, as I said, the control and synthesis of this mission-critical data. So here they have the responsibility to drive data-driven processes and key insights and deliverables throughout the organization. As I said, not only is this in FP&A, but it's also in terms of budgeting, best practices, and really establishing your north star KPIs. And on the flip side, not only is it about driving growth going forwards, but really being able to identify costs and areas of inefficiencies within the business, which we can tackle going forward As many businesses are focused particularly on the path to profitability. So where, where can SaaS and software leaders really help support this transition? So current tools are really failing our CFOs today, and I'd say that is actually across the stack, both from small mom-and-pop shops, so small SMBs, all the way up to large corporates. And here we have new software is really required to liberate these CFOs, to help them elevate them to to be a more strategic role, really sitting at the right-hand side of the CEO in terms of key decision-making. And here is sort of linking a lot of the things that CFOs themselves need to do. So these tools need to be mission-critical, demonstrate clear ROI, ability to increase agility and minimize complexity within an organization, and also have strong integration into existing systems. And then looking across, this is just a sort of a cut across the ecosystem of where in particular we're excited about different areas of opportunity. And here this is split between really one on the left-hand side, who are the— we have the liberate SMBs from these manual processes. As I mentioned, these are expensive, time-consuming, very cumbersome. So how can we help these entrepreneurs really be able to upscale skill their own businesses today. And here I list, I think, 3 main areas which are most exciting. I think one is FP&A. So I've mentioned a lot around Excel and the, the difficulties using Excel in business organizations, but it's tools who are, who are enabling entrepreneurs to really upskill themselves beyond just traditional Excel methods. So there are quite a few in this space like Causal, Abacum, etc. Who are really sort of liberating entrepreneurs from this process. The second is invoicing, so accounts receivables and payables, and this all ties into working capital. As we all know, cash is king, and particularly for small SMBs who often are in traditional industries, in the current market environment, cash constraints are increasingly pertinent, and there's no, there's no better need to implement sort of receivables and billings platforms. Particularly given I think it's over 80% of invoices are still manual today. And the last is accounting. So we've had quite a few of the early-stage accounting players, accounting software players, so the Xero and Sage of the world, but still enabling entrepreneurs to digitize mission-critical functions, particularly around accounting, bookkeeping, which are very time-consuming, where CFOs' time can be better spent on better value-added tasks. And then secondly, on the mid-market, I think here the opportunity is really to give a lot of these mid-market customers the tools that enterprise customers have historically had. So I've listed 3 verticals here, so cash flow, treasury, and adapting to emerging business models. And on the cash flow side, it's really upgrading legacy systems. So you have some initial earlier stage players like the Anaplan, Board International, but often they're not necessarily SaaS-led. They're not— they don't have the same go-to-market capabilities or product functionality that a lot of emerging players are looking for today. The second is treasury. So historically, treasury, you needed to have a huge treasury team at a large enterprise. It was very difficult if you're a smaller, smaller business to really be able to get access to that. So it's solutions like Treasury Spring or Kyriba on the software side who are able to upskill these CFOs and give them a toolkit which was not previously available to them. And the last is adapting to emerging business models. So the world as we know it has obviously changed as it was 20 years ago. So for instance, across procurement, tax, billings are all impacted by things like a broader transition to subscription models. Or usage billing, or on the procurement side you also have— and on the tax side, sorry— things around VAT management as we go to more e-commerce use cases. So these are the broader areas that, that we're excited by, which I sort of wanted to present today and get a better sense from the group in terms of your opinion on it as well. And so yeah, I think that sort of basically brings to a close before I open up the floor to discussion, which I'm looking forward to. Um, so just to summarize, what are the key takeaways? So one is really the CFOs today, uh, whilst their core role hasn't changed in some ways, they're really constrained by numerous obstacles, which is characterized by increased complexity, uncertainty, and volatility. The rise of strategic CFOs have really risen to meet these challenges, which is particularly important as businesses scale up. So they're able to drive data-driven processes and leaven up the finance function of the entire organization. This broader transition really requires a new generation of SaaS tools to best meet these needs across both finance verticals and also business size, as I highlighted in the previous slide. And then, yeah, I really wanted to also set the floor with this presentation, and I've included some discussion points here, but I wanted to open it up to the group both in terms of your perspectives on how the CFO's role as an operator has had to change. So where else are the main mission-critical pain points that are being neglected? And also other emerging areas of innovation that perhaps I've highlighted, perhaps I haven't, and where, where you see the biggest opportunity set from a software perspective today. So yeah, I'll open it up if anyone has any opening remarks or questions they would like to share. Yeah.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Thank you. Yeah, on the first question, it's really topical for us because I'm part of a growth services firm and we do fractional CFO across a ton of clients. That's our core business line. And under that CFO's role as an operator, we've seen with some of our latest clients, a lot of the ownership around data is coming under the CFO. And basically the first thing when we come in, you know, we have the intro calls and everyone says, yes, our data is great. It could use a bit of a revamp, but it's amazing. We can make decisions. And then you go in and it's like a chart of accounts with like 1,000 different duplicative accounts that's like nonsensical and they don't know what they're doing. And so we've actually started taking a lot of ownership over, okay, let us sort out the data issues because first off, it's impossible to make any meaningful decision without that. And we've seen more and more founders being happy with this and seeing the CFO as the data owner. And we know we, some of the things that you mentioned, we've started leveraging or trying to leverage, bringing on more execution-focused resources to clean up the data, going to even outsource data science shops. Specifically, we have some clients where their whole business model is just a huge dataset, and there you probably need to be a bit more data-heavy. And then the last thing is just introducing that automation so that you can first read the data without 55 analysts having to parse your QuickBooks and another few tools to actually get it into a report format. And for us, it starts with simple things like Looker Studio, where you can just rely on some small APIs and a few Google Sheets that they're at least, you know, they're manually managed. But if you're kind of clean and organized with your data, you can still make decisions. But I think one of the most mission-critical pain points today is just data cleanliness and data organization. And it probably moves more, especially in small companies. We use— we mostly work with SMBs and like mid-market companies. They don't have a budget for a data team. They don't have a budget for a chief data officer. So like it's probably the CFO that has to do this. After all, the CFO is responsible for the shareholder reporting, all the KPI reporting, so it just makes sense. So that's one of the things we've seen from firsthand experience lately.

Yeah, and I completely agree. I think that is really, that the ability to control that mission-critical data is really for me what sets apart strategic CFOs. And I think it's also worth highlighting that it's easier said to like an SMB, oh, you should be strategic and automate your data this way. It really is, as you said, it's a process. It's a process of learning. It's a process of being able to integrate data most effectively within the organization. And the last point, as you mentioned, is really on automation. So particularly on an SMB perspective, how can you automate day-to-day tasks? So bookkeeping, board reporting, if they have that, to really enable these entrepreneurs to free up a lot of their time.

Yeah, thank you. Just following on from what you were saying then, I think I find it absolutely exactly my experience as well. But also I think building on that, there's the finance systems, but there's also then the sales systems, the operational systems that you need to get your data together. You need to make sure that reference data is the same, master data is the same across all those things. You need to then get the metrics downstream in a coordinated way that they can be linked up to those back systems, to those systems as well. So I think that's really going to be driving what the CFO, and as you say, the CFO is becoming the owner of data in many of these cases, will be driving to get better FP&A, even better SNOP as well. So really, I'll catch up with you later.

Thank you.

I think, uh, we're talking about data a lot, which is great, but one of the things we've seen at least is that CFOs are not necessarily operating— at least through '23, they were not operating with what I would say logic or data or anything. There was a lot of fear operation, right? So if we think about the model, the venture model, etc., you have to spend capital in order to grow, and I don't think many of us, if any of us, so, you know, in the growth SMB all the way to Series C stage, the taps were sort of shut off in, you know, in '23. We're seeing rebounds now with people actually expending capital. But I wonder, I just, for the group, I suppose, but particularly as it goes to another enterprise application layer, how we actually push the sentiment, you know, of a CFO making investment chaining to ROI, trying to, you know, quantify what the expected outcome is supposed to be from these tools moving forward. Because, you know, we do see shifts. People now have to grow not at all costs but at a reasonable cost. How do we get to that definition of reasonable cost? And what are the CFOs actually gonna be thinking about, caring about, focused on, and how do we surface that data? At the appropriate time, in the appropriate fashion, with the right level of cleanliness. I think that's when we think about the data layer, coming at it from a RevOps perspective, at least, that's the things that we're seeing the most. And I don't see today, at least, applications in the market that are catering to that in a one-stop shop or even a simple way for an SMB, you know, growth-style company. So, I'm curious to hear what others think.

Thank you very much. Very, very impressive talk, Russell from HubSpot.

One, we have a very big CRM and marketing platform and customer success tools, and I would actually say that finance is probably the only major front office function that HubSpot doesn't have a tool for. When I look at the finance team, I think they are probably lagging lawyers and salespeople in terms of tech adoption.

And you, you referenced Excel be gone.

I, I think none of us will be alive and Excel will still be here. Like, I'm pretty sure that is, that is the case.

For your portfolio companies, how are you driving adoption? Like, get people to start, like, implement these tools, and then how do you maintain usage over time?

Yeah, I think it's As I said, it's very interesting. I think you have a very big mix between— we, for instance, we talk a lot about SMBs. You have other SMBs which are startups, and you have SMBs who are hairdressers, barbershops, etc. And how those two different sets adopt these types of tools is very different. So obviously the sort of startups and scale-ups in general across software tools have been early adopters for the past sort of 10, 20 years. So I expect them to be able to drive a lot of your comments around the ability to upskill the RevOps division, that would be done in terms of broader adoption by these sort of scale-ups. I think the issue around the SMBs is where it's more complex because these people, they don't want to necessarily change their systems. Whilst it might not be working amazingly, it works for them and they understand it. So I think that takes time. But then similarly, I think, which I didn't really highlight as much in this presentation, The broader themes around digitization is not just about the economy, it's also regulatory. So for instance, in the UK you have Making Tax Digital and other sort of schemes that are really forcing people to digitize a lot of their base. So with that, digitization becomes this ability to control the datasets, and that's sort of really where you can sort of weaponize it to use that better for your business, both on the top line and from a cash flow perspective. So that's sort of how we, how we think about it. And then the CFO's positioning, as I said, it's really one— CFO tools need to be able to demonstrate a very clear ROI for these CFOs, because as you, you've probably seen the market, you have quite a few different point solutions which are interesting, provide maybe a little bit of additional functionality, but don't fundamentally change the game. So it really needs to demonstrate the strong ROI and integration into existing systems so they're easy to use and the value is very clear. So that's sort of something that we see a lot from a sort of tooling perspective where we see the most value. Any other points?

Yeah, and I thought it was a very interesting point which you raised about using— even just highlighting the there about Excel, but how much do you think there's an issue of people using the tools badly versus you need additional tools? Because yeah, it's something we, we build custom solutions to automate board reporting using Microsoft suite. And the way most people use Excel is like buying a Rolls-Royce to house a chicken. So it's just, you know, what do you see as the limit, you know, as the tools that you would use from that reporting, but also What limitations do you see from things not being bespoke? Because we often see with clients that they look at these solutions that actually can't cut the data and put information in the right format. So then they have to go back to Excel even though they've got various different FP&A tools.

Yeah, I think in some ways that really goes to the opportunity in this like mid-market space because you have obviously SMB functionality on the, at the micro level can be very simple, strong UX, very intuitive. But at the enterprise, obviously you need, you know, you have significant finance teams, so across different subsidiaries it can get very complex. But the mid-market, as you mentioned, you're sort of stuck between SMB functionality is not quite bespoke for us, but enterprise is way too bespoke, so it's way too expensive, no one actually uses it. So I think that's really an opportunity for innovation. And in terms of sort of where there is sort of opportunity for people to use these tools better, I think from an SMB side, for me, I think adoption just takes time, and it's really about enabling tools that are very easy to use, intuitive for these entrepreneurs to be able to scale them up. And as I mentioned, really have really strong ROI, because if, if, if you're not able to demonstrate that to a small business, there's no way that they're going to adopt you or take a risk of changing their processes that they've done today. So that's sort of how I see both of those areas.

Yeah.

I think from— sorry, from my side, in the CFO role as an operator, I'm like an ex-CFO now in venture, and I think one of the key roles when I was coming into a business was trying to tackle the organizational, like, silos. Each person looking at their own individual piece of data, and a lot of the kind of key factors that built into the model from a bottom-up were held by product or by marketing or by all of these different areas. Not just the data being siloed, but also the the influence over that, like, KPI was— you as a CFO, you can't— you do a lot of diagnosing, but you can't really influence if you're not bought in. So I think a lot of the human element of that— we talked a lot about tools, but being able to plug in and say, like, okay, yes, A, I need access to the data to be able to understand retention or marketing or all of these different elements. But also taking away some of the infighting that can happen between organizations. As an outside observer in the strategic element was a lot more smoothing the gaps and bringing people together to understand how it all builds to a cohesive vision. And then on the, like, other side of the table now, and what I felt a lot was I didn't know where, where we sat within the wider, like, what was, what good looked like. I could say, hey, we have a problem, and I know that this is not going to build towards our targets to get to the next funding level. But what, what does top class look like versus not? There is a lack of external data for the early stage. You can't afford to pay for a lot of stuff. So the kind of data side of once you have the data, what does— what do you do with it? What do you look like? I felt like there was a lack of tools for putting it all into context for what you need to fix for the next funding round for what good looks like. So have you seen anything on the external data side?

Yeah, I think we're out of time, so I'll give my 30 seconds on this. I think, I think the point you mentioned around stakeholder management is really key because being a— oh, being cut off— being a good CFO is obviously not just about budgeting, forecasting, etc. Like, particularly on the forecasting perspective, how you control the data from all those different disparate teams. The best CFOs really control that, and they drive a lot of the sort of forecasting from many different functions. But I'll probably have to pause there because I— whether next week is going to come on. But thank you everyone for your time. Really appreciate all your comments.

Please welcome to the stage Sruthi Ramakrishnan, Head of Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations at Google Cloud. Everyone hear me?

Okay.

Hi everyone. I need to say this off the get-go. I thought this is going to be a a small setup where I can sit with all of you and talk to you and be a brain date, and I was suddenly tricked to doing this big event. So excuse me if it's not as good as you think it goes. And if you can all come a bit in front, I'd really like it. We can make this more intimate. You look like you're too far away. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you so much. Excellent. I kind of felt this morning like, you know, when— When you were young and it was your birthday and a lot of people said they'll come. And then it's the day and then nobody really turns up early and you're nervous. That's kind of how I felt today. But thank you for turning up. Super, super nice to see some friendly faces here. So let me introduce myself. I think I've given you a fancy title. What I did, to be honest, is put my topic on Gemini. Gemini is Google's internal LLM, which is awesome, right? And I'm like, give me a funky title. So it gave me this funky title and it looks really nice. So, uh, it's— it's— don't read much into it. It's just— it's just AI helping us with all our presentations nowadays and making us look more intelligent, which is nice. So my name is Shruti. I, um, a little bit of background about myself. I started off in my career as an investment banker, so I used to JP Morgan in finance. I started off doing everything that they told me to do. So it was leveraged finance, raising debt for a lot of companies, doing M&A for shipping companies. And then, and then somehow, somewhere, I ended up doing a cloud IPO. And I was like, wow, tech is awesome. Like, we don't really need to look at every region and see their regulation and their industry, but tech is— everyone uses tech globally, right? And that took me to the world of tech. And then over the last 6 years, I did a lot of deals in the tech space. And some of the 2020, 2021 valuation bumps were thanks to us bankers, where we valued a lot of companies at 40x revenue, and the market thought that that was real, but wasn't real. We were creating the bubble, and we all know that. And then it all came crashing down. But anyways, uh, the The good part is that's when I fell in love with SaaS and tech and cloud. And I was like, I know how to value a company. I know how to, how to look at it from an investor angle. How do you operate a business? That was, that was my next thinking. And then that's what took me to Google Cloud where I've been there for 2 years now building the go-to-market strategy for our UK cloud business. So as you all know, the cloud business is about $30 billion for UK. Globally. UK, uh, for, uh, for you, for globally, and UK is about a billion. So just to give you some statistics around it. And, um, what we do in the go-to-market organization is we try and sell our products. That's as simple as that. Uh, and, uh, sometimes we're successful, sometimes we're not, because we're selling so many things. And you all know the AI hype now, and everyone's like, sell AI, but how do you sell AI? Nobody knows. Of that, right? So I wanted to go a bit into— oh, okay, am I doing that properly? Oh, this one. Okay, there you go. All right, that's again a fancy infographic from AI, but it's really useful to put my thoughts down. So one of the things that we do in Google is we We work with founders, a lot of startups, and then we have something called Google for Startups programs, which is, uh, if you're a founder in a Series A, Series B company and you're really looking to start, um, growing your customer base but you don't have much money to invest in, say, GPUs, TPUs, and AI and models— like, everyone's saying they're leveraging AI, but how many of them are actually using the LLM models, which is very costly? So we in Google, we do call startups. We have accelerator programs. And then we put them on our credit programs. And if you want to connect about that, I'm happy to get in touch after this. But we put them on our credit programs. You can use our tools for free. And then once you're set up, you can start paying Google. So a lot of startups come to us. And while they get a lot from us in terms of how— what technology to use, which model to use, how to set up their cloud for the next 3 years to scale, a lot of them really struggle with go-to-market. I— how do I define my market? How do I define my customer? At what point do I know that my target customer has been defined properly? And then where do I go for a sales strategy, a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy? Am I right? Am I wrong? Right? So there's There's a lot of questions around that. Is this the right time to hire a sales rep? Okay, now I think I'm doing well. I think I've got 5 paying customers. Maybe I need a VP of sales, right? So there's— and then they're so fast into going to the next step that sometimes, you know, that classic question of lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, all of this, are we doing the right thing? There's so much question. So what you'll see here is us in Google Cloud are here. We're at the Series B and beyond. And what we obviously have is we're a market leader. So in terms of product market fit, for us product market fit doesn't make any sense anymore because we have 20,000 products, right? So everything is at a different stage in terms of fit. So we, when we start to look at our go-to-market strategy in terms of the target customer, sales pricing, and marketing, we're in that stage when we need to define a list of customers that we will not serve. We've kind of gone through the stages of looking at our segmentation as SMB, corporate enterprise, digital native, traditional. We've done so many different varieties of segmentation that we've now reached a point where we know who our customers are, which product takes what customer. And now we're almost defining a no list because we know that these customers are not going to give us any money over time. They're churning fast. They're using a lot of our resources, and we're not really getting any benefit from them. So we stopped using them. And then in, in sense of sales, we have 400 reps, sales reps and CEs in UK alone trying to sell our products. So if you put that in an EMEA and global knowledge, you can see the size of our sales force. So almost all of our activities on how is how on how we manage that how we deliver unit economics, how do— how we don't pay much in compensation, and how we keep our profits at bay, right? And then the pricing and marketing just follows. So if that's us, then how are the other customers tackling it? Like, how is a pre-seed company defining its target customer basis? Does— do they know that at that point they've not even hit product-market fit? So they should obviously be meeting customers, customer running them by their product, understanding if this is the right fit, reiterating, going to the next customer, right? At this point, you can't segment your customer by size or by adoption or by anything, right? So this was almost my stab at trying to understand that what is the most important objective at every point, what is the milestone, and then that milestone defines the go-to-market strategy. I'm going to pause there. And obviously people do questions later, but I'd like to have some of your thoughts. I mean, some of you are founders. How are you— do you have someone running your go-to-market strategy? If you do, do you have a framework for it? Do you have a guidance for it? Do you always stick to it, or do you switch your pricing and marketing strategy based on who you meet? It'd be nice to know. So I'll just open it out to the crowd and then go to the next slide, maybe. Talk too much. Yes, go on. Can we just speak?

Yeah.

John, we have a product and we're market fit, so I'm just looking at your—

Yeah.

Hello. Yeah. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, tranche-based pricing, we're very much in outcome-based pricing, yet we're early.

Got it.

I mean, I don't I don't put any pricing on the website, you know, and yeah, I basically sell it for as much as I possibly can. I've got no customers here. So I don't— I mean, this is really good, yeah, but I think sometimes sort of the rules aren't—

we have to slightly change. But I think my thought process almost on tranche-based pricing was that at that stage when you're seed, right? You've, you've obviously got your customers. Have you segmented your customers as by size or by, you know, really not really, right?

We're probably somewhere between product-led and, and we definitely have many of the right customers. Yeah, some, some around that area.

Yeah. So you're just custom pricing based on—

we have a project price we don't publish, and, you know, we got quite a lot of variability in the pricing charge, depending on the outcome they're going to get out of our product. So it's sort of in that sort of— I guess needing to be flexible at whatever stage you're in.

In terms of pricing, yes. But what I've kind of looked at in Google internally is we do try to do outcome-based pricing sometimes. For some of our customers. And where that ends us up in our stage is that if we don't stick to SMB being tranche-based and corporate being a particular pricing, and then enterprise and strategic customers get custom outcome-based— if we don't stick to that, we often end up aligning our resources to the wrong place and end up with a customer acquisition cost which is too high to justify the lifetime value, right? So it's almost like I mean, at a different stage you can, you can make different decisions, but then this is kind of the initial framework if someone is looking to get in. And then how, how and when do they move to the next stage? It's kind of my thinking. But I completely get you, this could be flexible. But if you are a new first-time founder and you need to have a framework, what would you use? That's, that's kind of thinking here. Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah.

There's an interesting phenom now. I see strong market presence sort of towards the right.

Yeah.

Which, you know, social is such a big channel for so many early-stage startups now, right?

Yeah.

You have B2B influencers out there.

Yeah.

You know, and frankly it's astonishing, right? When you really think about it, the power that a brand can have pre-customers, pre, you know, create enough controversy and you get enough people knowing your brand and fuels your go-to-market. I just wonder, you know, I think that's a bit of a double-edged sword, right? Because if you have such a big brand, it leaves you open to exposure, particularly if you haven't checked the boxes to get up to that stage. But I would say that earlier and earlier folks are establishing that brand, using any capital they do raise to establish the brand, and then having that be a flywheel.

Very interesting. Yeah.

I think there's some interesting points around defining and refining your market that are getting skipped to pro or con in today's—

Absolutely. Absolutely. But humor me this. I mean, someone like a Google, when we started Google Cloud, we didn't need to worry about branding because we had our brand already. But say we're a new SaaS customer which is coming and doing something which is which was considered very boring in the market. But then the most boring things generate the maximum revenue, right? If you see in our own business, AI generates nothing. We still have compute and data, which is generating the maximum amount of revenue. And when, when, when you're doing something like that and you, you really need to invest in creating a brand, uh, and you to use that marketing strategy, especially in B2B, if you're selling to big enterprises and then you don't really have that option of going into like social media channels because you're building something very boring, then, then is it the right time to then be putting all your eggs into marketing channels like that? Or would you rather use like a content— like you've seen, I don't know if you've heard of Substack or you've heard of LinkedIn nowadays, people almost use that as marketing channels because you go and you market what what the industry needs and make it like a content blog. And then you're like, hey, we have the solution which will help you here, right? And that's almost free to an extent, but then it gives you the desired outcome that you need, and you're not really putting all your money into a B2B influencer which is not generating you anything. So it's almost like the ROI question mark that you have, right? That's— that was my thinking there, but, um, Happy to hear more.

I can only speak from my own experience.

Yeah.

I just sold my company 3 weeks ago, bootstrapped to a decent size.

Congratulations.

But we didn't, we didn't have money to spend on, you know, marketing.

Yeah.

So it was all just going to the rooms, being there, building a brand and so on. And I hate social media. I'm not a social media person, but then I look into the world and I see Adam Robinson with retention.com. I see Sam with Pavilion. I see Jason with Saster, right? Everybody is building these, these machines, these brands.

Yeah.

And those are all established brands, but it's happening earlier and earlier.

It's happening earlier and earlier.

And it doesn't have to be influencers. They're creating themselves into influencers, which is fascinating too.

That's very fascinating.

And it's happening earlier and earlier. But at the same time, it leaves them open to— we don't know who we're talking to. We're just putting stuff into the void, creating controversy. I don't know, interesting stuff.

Super interesting. Absolutely. Anyone else? Any thoughts? Go on.

I just have a question. So, Cephal from Cape Town, Delta V. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Who owns the GTM function?

Who owns the go-to-market function? That's a great question. So in Google, yeah, I mean, In Google, I'll tell you, because we're a huge company and sometimes there's always this question of who wears the jacket, right? For us, I would say it's the VP of Sales, right? Because they own the outcome. Even though it's— I'm the strategy team, I build the strategy, I build a quota, and I build the behaviors. But still, and, and who I report to is the COO, and then there's sales head. But then the— almost the way we build it is we have a mirrored organization where every salesperson has a COO. And while their job is to drive revenue, their job is to keep them in check, right? So I think these two people together drive the go-to-market strategy, the go-to-market, right? This is for a huge company, right? But for a smaller company, it's all founder-led and founders doing sales, founders doing go-to-market. But once you say go to Series C, I would say that having a head of sales and a head of operations is almost like two sides of a coin to balance each other, and they drive go-to-market because unit economics is what becomes important after that, right? I don't know, I'd like to have your thoughts on that, but that's how we operate inside.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Anyone else? How are you building it in your organization, your go-to-market? Any ideas? Yeah.

Hi.

Yeah. Hi, I'm Indrek. I'm the VP of product marketing at Miro. I just wanted to comment that depending on the sort of industry that you're trying to sell to, it really depends like how this matrix also works out. So we're a 25-person company. Our target industry is e-commerce. So some of the industries are like really behind others.

Yeah.

And we're doing only enterprise sales. So for us, although we are at the seed stage, there is no product at growth. And also hire direct sales team for top tier, which is in your matrix under Series B. We're already there because—

very interesting. Yeah. Yeah, so you're saying that the end—

Exactly, 10+ paying customers. Yeah, just hit 1 million ARR. Yeah, but for us it's, it's only like, uh, sales-led.

So I have a question for you. How did you, how did you know that your customer base is only enterprise and everything else is out the door? Uh, did you start like that?

Is, is reliant on the number of SKUs. So it is a visual AI that powers the tagless product discovery, right? And it really depends on the number of SKUs that customers have. So for us, it's like upwards from 100,000 products.

Products, exactly. So my question more was like, in a generic startup, by the time they come to that point where they understand that they need to focus only on enterprise and SMB and corporate is, is a no list, it takes, it takes some time to get there, right? So if you already know that and you're that your product only catches one market, then probably this is not relevant and you're, you're already at that space. But then the question, the question that you ask yourself is, are you, are you hiring a sales team for the right product? So if you have 6 products, does this team need a sales team, or does this product need a sales team, or does that product need a sales team? That kind of almost goes— the analysis then goes into that, right? At what stage do you need to hire a sales team for which product? Which is what we're facing right now because we, at this point, because we know AI was the next big thing, we took all our sales force from other products and we pushed them into AI this year. It's like, okay, go drive that, right? Then that becomes the reprioritization, but it's all under the big bucket of matching resources to the outcome eventually. I often feel that that's very hard decision to make as an organization, especially if you're aiming to go from one stage to another, right? So I completely get you. If you already know your market and your target, then probably it's, it's not relevant. But other decisions then become relevant, right?

Yeah, I think we did the uncommon thing and we didn't like start with SMB and then move upmarket. We started with enterprise. We started with enterprise, yeah, based on the product that we have already proven with enterprise. We are like now doing like spin-offs for SMBs as well.

Nice.

Like self-serve. So we started from there.

Yeah.

So if you're— if you— then you know that what's your strategy for each target market, and then you won't overstep there, right? I think that's a very— that's almost like a lucky, uh, if you can build a product which is already enterprises adopt in the beginning, and then you're not seeing much competition, then that's great because that's a real need that you're solving, right? But a lot of startups that I've seen, they often struggle with, should we sell to individuals? Should we sell it to mid-market or enterprise? And then they're always in that rut of, are we doing the right thing at the right time? And then often need a framework to put that in space. So that's probably the experience that I've had. But good to hear. Anyone else? I think we have 5 more minutes. Go on. Yeah, hi, I'm Himani and I run an organic marketing agency for SaaS businesses. Uh, so, uh, you know, I wanted to understand that because, uh, we have worked with, you know, early stage and even unicorns as well, right? But there they have not stopped working on founder-led marketing yet. Got it, right? So do you really suggest that, you know, going forward, yeah, you know, that stage, yeah, should we stop focusing on, or it is all about ROI-driven or something like that? That's a great question because the way, the way I would almost look at the next stage is founder-led marketing should be prioritized. Because at— when you go to the next stage, it's like we've, we've— when you refine your target customers, you have strategic customers which are the top, right? And then you have enterprise, SMB, if you're doing size. You're doing adoption, if you're doing regional, you can have different types of segmentation that you use, right? So then the founder should probably focus on the target, the ones with the highest ROI, or what you think has the highest ROI, and everything else becomes more scalable, um, costs which you can, which you can justify and which can reach a higher volume, but it's not much of an investment from your side, right? That's, that's why I think It all starts with targeting the customers and segmenting them. And for your business, what's the right segment? And then where does a founder put their time? So almost in our organization, the VP of sales spends all their time on the strategic customers, and that's it. And everyone else, everything else is then done via different routes. But then it's not necessary that the strategic customers are our spending customers. They can also be greenfield, like we must be earning nothing from them. But they have the highest potential. So we still— so that targeting is almost the first step. And then everything else follows as a strategy. But like you said, sometimes it might never work to kind of box it that way. But for a new founder to have a framework almost wins. So I was almost— the next thing was framework makes the game work. It's like this has worked for me in my life, but it might not work for someone else. I have an experience of only working with JP Morgan or Google Cloud, structural places where frameworks work. But maybe for a smaller place, that doesn't work, right? But then, yes, thoughts. Yes. Anyone else? I mean, we have 3 more minutes. Go ahead.

I got one more question. Yes. So our customers are developers. They hate salespeople.

Yeah.

Okay, they never want to hear from salespeople.

I know, I face that.

I'm a founder CEO, but I'm a sales guy basically. So I'm the salesperson. I've got a little bit of help from somebody who's part-time. Yeah, they want to find us, they want to self-search, they want to— and they'll talk to the salesperson right at the end, you know, basically. So our problem is, our challenge is, well, how do we, you know, get them to come to us?

Yes.

Okay, we We don't use Google Cloud for our own cloud service. We use Hetzner. It's cheaper. And I'm watching every penny. Maybe we'd use Google Cloud if you could help me—

Join go-to-market. Yeah.

And I've had the same conversation with Amazon. I've had the same conversation with Azure. And nobody's yet really given me the evidence in your world. Yeah, that you can help me find customers.

Yeah, it's a great—

and I don't think there's a silver bullet here. Yeah, throw it in your marketplace. If I thought I could get customers, then I'd do it, and I'd move from this lower-cost— yeah, hosted service to you.

Yeah.

And by the way, we're just about to take on our first very large GCP customer that you guys would care about. So I think, you know, we're very small, but— yeah, but I don't know. I mean, I'd certainly partner with you, but you need to help me find customers.

Absolutely. I mean, we're looking for you. We're looking for you, right, on our end. But let me be honest with you, even we haven't succeeded with developers. That's our biggest problem.

Any developers here?

You're so annoying. So it's a tricky market. So we do all these in our— the problem with us is we have unlimited funds, right? So we can try everything to attract them, and it's not for not trying. We've, we've done hackathons, We've tried to look cool and developed a separate sales team just for developers, but then they're just a different animal, right? They don't want to talk to us till the end. It's exactly the same problem that we're facing. So if we had to do a joint go-to-market, we both won't benefit because we don't have developers and you don't have developers. But that's the problem. And the thing is, I think AWS has cracked it. I shouldn't be saying this, but they've cracked it. But there's some way in which If you think that join go-to-market is your way, then among the three, you must almost see who's best with developers and go with them. That's kind of what I'd say. But we're not— we're not great at— sorry, I'm being timed out in 27 seconds. But we can, we can touch base and I can put you in touch with my sales team, right? But it's a puzzle we're all trying to solve because this is, this is the, this is the— oh, we changed our go-to-market to completely focus and put all our efforts on winning developers. It's half a year and we still haven't won them. So it is a challenge for all of us, even for the biggest cloud provider. Yeah. All right. I have timed out, but thank you so much. It was really fun today. And hoping we can connect again. I don't wanna be all on my own.

It's like summer when I grab your body, pull you close.

I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. Don't stress, don't stress. Oh no, I don't want to be all on my own. It's like summer when I grab your body, pull you close. I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. There's no shame in that.

When you put your arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest.

You are in my life, I will Relax. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. Please welcome to the stage Jane Redden, partner talent and platform at Albion Capital.

Let's talk about a dream. If you're a co-founder or a founder, It's your dream, and it's definitely the dream where the content of your character will be front and center. It's the thing that you care about more than anything else. It's the thing that makes all the hard work worth it, makes all the long hours, the rejection, the setbacks, the skinny bank balance It makes it all worth it because you believe in it so much. And you don't want to do it alone. Totally get that. So you ask your school buddy to join you as a co-founder, or you ask your MBA alum to come along for the ride with you. Or you join an accelerator program— Entrepreneurs First, Y Combinator— and you are matched with a co-founder. Or perhaps you meet in a previous role at work, and you got on really well. You were, you were absolute buddies, and you thought, okay, this is going to be an awesome thing that we can do together. Who am I describing? Who's the co-founder in the room? Is anybody co-founder? Okay, amazing. Co-founder? Yep. How many co-founders do you have? Two. You've got two. There are three of you. Awesome. Um, how did you meet?

Uh, during college.

During college? Okay, awesome. Do you mind me asking a personal question? Are you friends?

Yep.

Yes.

Okay. Did you start as friends?

Okay.

And you're still friends now? OK. And after 12 years. Amazing. Amazing story. Thank you. You see, friendship does form a core part of the relationship, the co-founder relationship. My challenge to you, though, is that it has to be so much more than that. In fact, to cultivate a successful, long-term co-founder relationship, It has to be a highly productive partnership, because it's your ticket to wealth, and it's the ticket to achieve your dreams. Here's the rub: companies fail, startups fail, because of co-founder relationships more than you are likely to get divorced. And that's the highest rate it's ever been in the UK right now. So it must be this productive partnership where one plus one equals three in terms of output and progress. And we see it so often that those co-founder relationships that start well in the beginning can't sustain the journey through the roller coaster of a startup life. It's even more important now because times are tough, right? We all know that, uh, it's still a very tough market out there. So that internal alignment is more important than ever. It has to be there. So I'm an organizational performance specialist of startups. I've been doing it for 25 years, and I love it. I love working with you founders in the room. You are organizational engineers. You're responsible for the quality, the bar, when it comes to strategy and when it comes to communication, when it comes to the level of resilience and adaptability in your organization. Your co-founder title is a badge. It's not a role. And I work in a fund, and by the time you're getting institutional funding, being a co-founder itself is not enough to demonstrate that you've got the leadership skills to be able to grow a company. So it is, in fact, your leadership skills that you bring to bear in the relationship that is co-founder dynamic, that is this early group that you form, the 3 of you, or the 4 of you, or the 2 of you together, and then you add to that this productivity lens born out of your, your role as leaders that will, that will move the dial on your business. The good news is that Albion VC, we massively believe in that, which is why I'm a general partner. I sit at the top table and we talk about organizational performance of our portfolio companies all the time. And my hope is that after today, or at least a snapshot of today, will give you an insight into a toolkit that will help you know how to be more explicit and more deliberate and more mindful in the way that you build that resilience and adaptability in leadership. And that's the secret sauce that I would love to share with you today. Because when you do that, you're focused, but you're focusing on building that human connection in your business, which is so important when things are going well and if things start to go a bit wonky. So what do you do if things go a bit wrong? Definitely hold short accounts, definitely address those problems, but how to address the problems is another thing entirely. So, do I hear you ask— I do, don't I? I hear you ask, "What is that thing? What is the secret sauce?"