Jonathan Gale has taken two of Europe’s biggest SaaS success stories from early product/ market fit to global scale.

Highlights:

- Capital efficiency is a critical output of product market fit

- Choose a market in which less than 1% market share means hundreds in millions in revenue

- Don’t confuse constraints for objectives

- Emotional alignment with strategy is critical

Read more: https://notion.vc/resources/why-great-product-is-the-foundation-of-every-saas-success-with-jonathan-gale/

Playing long games for big stakes in the public and private markets with Rich Goold, Partner and Head of Tech Law at EY

Highlights:

- Map out your long term value journey

- Think about why the people founders surround themselves with is critical for long term success

- Think about your advisers - legal, financial, etc - as being partners, not cost centres

- Build your universe of buyers and establish long term relationships

- Over the next five years we expect the M&A market for European tech to be very healthy

- Why public markets need to evolve to meet the needs of tech businesses

- What trips people up on the path to a successful acquisition

Read more: https://notion.vc/resources/playing-a-long-game-for-big-stakes/

And: https://notion.vc/resources/helping-tech-founders-finding-their-way-through-the-public-and-private-markets/

Raising venture capital with Jos White, General Partner at Notion. Jos shares the lessons he’s learned as a founder and investor from thousands of investment pitches. He believes founders are no.1, but there’s much more to consider, why he passed on some opportunities, and what he's looking into for future investments.

Read more: https://notion.vc/resources/raising-venture-capital-with-jos-white/

And: https://notion.vc/resources/fundraising-at-series-a/

And: https://notion.vc/resources/fund-raising-why-i-sometimes-pass-on-great-opportunities/

Vasco Pedro is the CEO of Unbabel. He tackles the challenge of internationalisation, critical to any ambitious European technology company - if they want to build a category defining company thinking about when and how to internationalise is a critical decision and has profound implications on the business from an organisational, commercial and technological perspective.

Vasco also argues that there is little time for founders to learn on the job and one of the most important challenges is for founders to bury any hubris or entitlement and to hire game changers with proven experience alongside or even above themselves if they want to achieve their potential.

More: https://notion.vc/resources/accelerating-the-shift-to-a-world-without-language-barriers-with-vasco-pedro-ceo-unbabel/

Lilly Bacher is Global Head of Pricing at ProfitWell and works with tech founders and product teams around the world to conceptualise, effectuate, and realise pricing strategies with new products, legacy products, perpetual to SaaS, and so on.

Key points:

- Please talk to your customers and understand, at a granular level, their willingness to pay.

- Don’t overlook the impact that pricing has on monetisation – more so even than just selling to new customers.

- Don’t just set and forget. C, commit to an ongoing strategy to optimise your pricing.

Learn much more: https://notion.vc/resources/pricing-please-dont-set-it-and-forget-it/

Lea Hickman is a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group (svpg.com), a firm dedicated to helping technology companies on product vision, strategy, discovery, design and development process through advisory, consulting and training services.

Key points discussed:

- Why mindset is the biggest difference between best tech companies and the rest

- Why product managers in startups need to be gritty and scrappy

- Why founders need to avoid falling in love with their ideas

In-depth read: https://notion.vc/resources/building-tech-products-loved-by-millions/

Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, the category defining and leading customer success company for SaaS businesses around the world. Nick kindly joined Notion to take part in our Pain of Scale podcast to discuss why customer success is so critical to success in recurring revenue businesses.

Key points:

- CSM is about way more than churn, it’s about deep and intimate customer understanding.

- Why a customer success manager should be one of your first five hires.

- How customer success is evolving and driving convergence between customer success and product development.

- Why in today’s economy companies must deliver shared success.

Read the full story: https://notion.vc/resources/why-customer-success-is-a-values-driven-movement/

Brynne Kennedy, founder of Topia, the leader in the emerging category of Global Talent Mobility, discusses her first hand experience in designing a category from initial market insights, to the importance of building and aligning communities to help customers move to the future of work.

- Why categories really matter is that all homo sapiens want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

- Category design, when done well, can create enormous amounts of discretionary effort.

- Why building a category is a team sport.

We wrote even more here: https://notion.vc/resources/why-building-a-category-is-a-multiyear-endeavour/

This podcast explores the growing pains every startup will face as they succeed. Step one is to recognise the stage you are at and recognise the transformations the leadership and the business will need to deliver in order to maintain constant 2-3 X annual growth, adding $10’s in millions in revenues and potentially growing an organisation from 50 to 250 people in a very short period of time.

- Empowerment and delegation are a force multiplier for any leader, but especially the CEO.

- Separate yourself from your business and look down on it with an impassionate eye.

- Identify your skills gaps and bring in “Pillar People”

In-depth article: https://notion.vc/resources/the-tell-tale-signs-a-start-up-is-ready-to-grow-up/

Dennis Fois, CEO, NewVoiceMedia, reflects on the challenges of leading a scale up through fast growth, the importance of vulnerability and permission to fail and why radical simplification and execution are the difference between winning and losing at scale.

Highlights:

- Why CEO’s must abstract themselves from the problems they are trying to solve

- If you build a great team, you must let them shape the vision

- On bastardising McKinsey’s Three Horizons!

- Stand back from your ideas - the moment you find yourself defending an idea too hard start to question yourself.

- In a world of no absolutes it is vital people can develop ideas without fear of failure.

- Why Dennis learned to love the SFD - the shitty first draft!

- Why radical simplification and execution are the differences between winning and losing at scale.

In-depth article: http://notion.vc/resources/radical-simplification-and-the-beauty-of-execution-with-dennis-fois/