14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life
Stephen Cummins
122 episodes
3 months ago
Listen to wisdom from the true champions of SaaS. Stephen Cummins interviews founders of hyper-growth SaaS ScaleUps. Interviews are conducted face to face at major tech events in Dublin, Lisbon, Berlin, Hong Kong & New Orleans (no remote calls). We examine the personal histories, learnings & opinions of the world’s most successful SaaS StartUp entrepreneurs. And because they speak at these major events, they have strong communication skills. Stephen ensures that the core topic is the founder he's interviewing, and not just the current rocket ship the founder is helping scale.
We cover most of these in each episode; short life history, the WHY, day in the life, personal motivations (many are financially secure), personal attributes leading to success, weaknesses, what makes the current SaaS company special & successful, advice for entrepreneurs, opinion on the future of work & future tech, what they’d do if they walked away, work-life balance, the city they work in, distributed or remote teams v co-located or in-office teams.
Lend us your ears for less than 1% of one day in your week to gain a deeper understanding of the cutting edge of SaaS, as well as insights into the human stories behind it all.
We’re interviewing the true champions of SaaS – from giants to exciting scale-ups. They will share their ups and downs, their vision of the future of human experience, how they approach innovation and sales execution, and how they stay grounded while driving extraordinary success in the cloud. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur (or if you are on that road already), join us!
“To dare is to loose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” Soren Kierkegaard
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Listen to wisdom from the true champions of SaaS. Stephen Cummins interviews founders of hyper-growth SaaS ScaleUps. Interviews are conducted face to face at major tech events in Dublin, Lisbon, Berlin, Hong Kong & New Orleans (no remote calls). We examine the personal histories, learnings & opinions of the world’s most successful SaaS StartUp entrepreneurs. And because they speak at these major events, they have strong communication skills. Stephen ensures that the core topic is the founder he's interviewing, and not just the current rocket ship the founder is helping scale.
We cover most of these in each episode; short life history, the WHY, day in the life, personal motivations (many are financially secure), personal attributes leading to success, weaknesses, what makes the current SaaS company special & successful, advice for entrepreneurs, opinion on the future of work & future tech, what they’d do if they walked away, work-life balance, the city they work in, distributed or remote teams v co-located or in-office teams.
Lend us your ears for less than 1% of one day in your week to gain a deeper understanding of the cutting edge of SaaS, as well as insights into the human stories behind it all.
We’re interviewing the true champions of SaaS – from giants to exciting scale-ups. They will share their ups and downs, their vision of the future of human experience, how they approach innovation and sales execution, and how they stay grounded while driving extraordinary success in the cloud. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur (or if you are on that road already), join us!
“To dare is to loose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” Soren Kierkegaard
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."
Episode 106 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the final instalment of a series of 6 with Georg Petschnigg. We learn about the immense influence of dance, and seeing falling as a source of momentum, on so much of what he does. We also hear moleskin notebooks described as books waiting to be written. He may be an entrepreneur in the land of digital, but Georg derives his inspiration from the real world. As a result, waxing lyrical on analog experience is never too far away from the conversation. Georg also deconstructs his defining characteristics and motivations, and offers some sage advice for other adventurous entrepreneurs out there.
This is the fifth and penultimate of a six-episode series recorded with Georg Petschnigg at the Web Summit in Lisbon. We find out how Fifty Three, although it built great tools, never shipped the manual to creativity until it joined up with WeTransfer – a company that better understood the power of content. We learn that hand-writing is not dead … and that in this world of selfies and personal branding, there’s still seemingly much more people in this world that care far more about creating for others. But we start with Georg’s perspective on how the landscape has, to a large extent … the physical landscape … shaped many of the core cultural characteristics of born and bred Amsterdammers. And why the city has evolved into a sophisticated, multilingual environment that champions pragmatism, openness, collaboration, and tolerance … And also why, with native and adopted New Yorkers, there’s a sense of grandiosity, energy, individual risk taking .. and a sense of infinite possibilities seems to be much more pervasive in that massive city.
Episode 104 of 14 Minutes of SaaS is the 4th is a 6 part series with Georg Petschnigg recorded at the Web Summit in Lisbon. We hear why WeTransfer can dance with the big tech monoliths like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. And we also get a history lesson in the maritime origins of the stock exchange, which originated out of Amsterdam
In episode 103 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the third in our 6 part series with WeTransfer Chief Innovation Officer Georg Petschnigg, he explains why he was compelled to build both a software and a hardware product from scratch and at the same time in order to deliver on why of Fifty Three … that is … to get behind great ideas. In doing this Fifty Three managed to deliver a phoenix-like resurrection of the stylus. And we learn how he saw WeTransfer’s acquisition of Fifty Three as an entrance, not an exit. And not just entry into to a huge channel – which WeTransfer is of course. More than that. A truly brand based acquisition - a meeting of minds and values across the Atlantic from New York to Amsterdam. And synergistic products of course. All to empower this new entity to be a major catalyst for the birth and growth of great ideas at a global level.
14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life
Listen to wisdom from the true champions of SaaS. Stephen Cummins interviews founders of hyper-growth SaaS ScaleUps. Interviews are conducted face to face at major tech events in Dublin, Lisbon, Berlin, Hong Kong & New Orleans (no remote calls). We examine the personal histories, learnings & opinions of the world’s most successful SaaS StartUp entrepreneurs. And because they speak at these major events, they have strong communication skills. Stephen ensures that the core topic is the founder he's interviewing, and not just the current rocket ship the founder is helping scale.
We cover most of these in each episode; short life history, the WHY, day in the life, personal motivations (many are financially secure), personal attributes leading to success, weaknesses, what makes the current SaaS company special & successful, advice for entrepreneurs, opinion on the future of work & future tech, what they’d do if they walked away, work-life balance, the city they work in, distributed or remote teams v co-located or in-office teams.
Lend us your ears for less than 1% of one day in your week to gain a deeper understanding of the cutting edge of SaaS, as well as insights into the human stories behind it all.
We’re interviewing the true champions of SaaS – from giants to exciting scale-ups. They will share their ups and downs, their vision of the future of human experience, how they approach innovation and sales execution, and how they stay grounded while driving extraordinary success in the cloud. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur (or if you are on that road already), join us!
“To dare is to loose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” Soren Kierkegaard
