Season A - Ep. 8: Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners on SaaS Startups

Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners discusses his experience as a startup founder and his move to VC, the latest market trends, Scott’s investment process, as well as qualitative and quantitative characteristics of companies he likes to invest in.BIOScott brings more than 20 years of product, engineering, and SaaS expertise to his role as a partner on Norwest’s enterprise team. He focuses on early- to late-stage investment opportunities in enterprise SaaS with a focus on companies building business applications taking advantage of human-assisted AI, advanced behavioral analytics, client-agnostic platforms and industry-specific solutions. He currently serves on the boards of Bluecore, Leanplum, MindTickle, Qualified, Singular, and Socrates AI.Scott most recently served as Senior Vice President of Product Management for Salesforce Service Cloud, the industry’s #1 enterprise customer service platform. While at Salesforce, he also served as Head of Engineering, Product, UX, and Documentation for Desk.com.Before joining Salesforce, Scott cut his entrepreneurial teeth building multiple consumer and enterprise software companies including a multi-brand e-commerce service with an integrated multi-channel customer service platform, an enterprise privacy middleware platform and a consumer metasearch engine.TIMESTAMPS00:10 Scott’s background and why he joined Norwest Venture Partners05:18 COVID’s effect on startup creation09:50 Post COVID SaaS valuations11:10 Investment Process – from sourcing to investing18:30 Qualitative and quantitative characteristics Scott is looking for in startups26:57 Common mistakes startups make32:35 Fundraising advice to founders34:32 Bonus Question