14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life

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 this is what the company is and what it's going to do. It is rather the sum of a 1,000 ideas. And then 990 of them are not yours"

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 likely to buy from the one with one negative review ... The notion that, 'oh, you have to be perfect!' is actually not believed by your customers"

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 my competitors were there. So I thought, why isn't there a way where I can gather my customers' opinions and show it in a credible way so that people trust my business"

"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 that is the big audacious thing as well?’" Bill Magnuson, CEO CoFounder of Braze

"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. "So you have the full footprint of mobile performance. Then what we’re doing is 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 two datasets … that get us to customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, return on ad spend"

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 first thing that happened with equal co-founders was, ‘Christian, We need to rebuild the whole platform.’"

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 bullshit, the chances that something good will come out of it is so low … it’s zero actually."

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 company."

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 be small"

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."

Georg Petschnigg in conversation with Stephen Cummins at the Web Summit in Lisbon: "Start with the team ... Because like, who knows where are things gonna go? Like, you want to be with people you like .. that you learn from, right? Because there will be highs, there will be lows. And there might not even be light at the end of the tunnel. But you will enjoy the journey if you enjoy the people that you’re with. So it’s like you’re already a winner no matter what happens if, you know, if you have the right team"

Georg Petschnigg, in conversation with Stephen Cummins: "Having a tool for great thinking - Paper. Having a great tool to see inspiration and hold onto it - Collect. Having a tool to show, you know, your work -Paste. Having a great tool to deliver your ideas – Transfer. Right. So, we have a tool for thinking, seeing, showing and delivering. These are sort of the pillars of the creative process.And that's an incredibly exciting proposition, right? Because the world hasn't...doesn't understand that this exists yet. But it does. Like, we built it!"

Having a business that has a hybrid business model where you can counter and interact with your consumer … either with free or subscription. That's what makes it so powerful because you're actually … I think WeTransfer is one of the few companies that can dance with the big tech companies. But can do it authentically, because we don't we do not depend on their distribution.

Why did Bas and the team actually build WeTransfer? Well because they wanted to get behind great ideas. Okay? That's why it exists. Right? It's not to send the file. It is to make a client happy … to get like your music out … to deliver the great video! That's why they got into this! It’s the same reasons why we got started with Fifty Three! We got into it because people have those ideas locked in your head, and you have to get them out. And that's sort of where we then, you know, start thinking about … well, what if it's not about just sending files? But it's really about the transfer of ideas. It's about the movement of ideas. We want to be the company that's behind every great idea.

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.

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 soon"

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 fast.’ And they're like ‘Perfect. Keep doing that! And here's a little bit more money!’"

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 a cultural phenomenon. It was on the news every night. It was everyone's top. We were the first to kind of build the social graph - which everything is built on now. You know, Facebook, Linked, everything has a social graph. And we really started around that too. So, I mean it was everywhere. It was unavoidable .. Facebook were big data smart. And we were data dumb. We just didn't know really what was going on there. This is a big reason that Facebook won"

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 week.

E73 - Part 2 of a 4-part mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall. In this episode Jonathan talks about growing up in Paris with an inspiring Mum who immigrated from Bulgaria and became a business person, giving Jonathan a front row seat into the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur. It didn’t put him off because he started his career as an entrepreneur while still in university, aged 20.