14 Minutes Of Saas

And, you know, the name, you know, is very much inspired from like working with industrial designers, but also like being familiar with the body. The length of average arms reaches Fifty Three centimetres. That’s the space between head, heart and blank canvas. It's in that circumference where, like, people do their best work. And we wanted to make sure that our tools, which are essential to us for creation, would fit into that space. That’s essentially where in one number, we essentially wrapped up, like mapped to the human body what we set out to with Fifty Three.

Part 1 of a 6-part series for 14 Minutes of SaaS. Georg Petschnigg in conversation with Stephen Cummins. "It's funny because my childhood rebellion then actually ended up…  you know, leaving that sort of entrepreneurial spirit of the household home and then joining a major American corporation. So I ended up joining Microsoft out of college then and starting my career there. And that was more like, yeah, that's …. my rebellion was working for the man!"

"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"

"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 focus on that kind of like tunnel vision and kept doing that … and then started closing more deals"

"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 & Chief Customer Officer at Paddle in conversation with Stephen Cummins of 14 Minutes of SaaS

"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 founder & CEO

"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 because they're using us versus a competitor" Michael Litt, CEO and coFounder of video hosting platform Vidyard

"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

Part 3 of 3 episodes with Hande Cilinger, CEO & Co-founder of Insider. in conversation with Stephen Cummins in Hong Kong. She talks about the importance of founders developing company culture and finding good people that align with the same core beliefs and principles

This is part 2 of 3. Recorded at RISE in HK, Hande Cilingir, Insider CEO & Co-founder in conversation with Stephen Cummins. We learn how Insider got product market fit, and how they’ve scaled. We get a fascinating perspective on Turkish history, and she discusses work-life balance for founders

1 of 3 with Stephen Cummins chatting to Hande Cilingir, CEO & Co-founder of Insider, a growth management platform for digital marketers. We hear about Hande's humble background in Turkey, the influence of her parents, her education, and the influences of London and Shanghai

3 of 3 recorded at RISE HK, Anna Gong, the CEO & Board Member of Perx tells Stephen Cummins about being bullied in school growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Florida. She talks about how the perceived difficulty of entry into south-east Asia actually represents an opportunity. Anna also reflects on what keeps her motivated, and people that influenced her

2 of 3. Anna Gong, the CEO & Board Member of Perx in conversation with Stephen Cummins.  Anna talks about escaping her lucrative corporate straight-jacket to a baptism of fire in Perx - where she pivoted to turn the company right side up. She also explains how she couldn’t hire people of the right standard from old-school software companies

1 of 3. In RISE HK, Stephen Cummins chats with Anna Gong, the CEO of Perx- an enterprise B2B SaaS company using machine learning to augment customer loyalty. She has strong self belief is an arch creator of hyper-growth. She's moved from Guangzhou (China) to Florida to many cities in Silicon Valley to Singapore to Japan. As CEO, Anna practically re-founded Perx

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 brand into a hyper-growth software meme. Episode 1 of 3.