The StartUp to ScaleUp Game Plan

Jan Quant is the Co-Founder and CEO of Screendragon a UK headquartered enterprise software scale-up who, soon after inception, successfully entered the US market and have continued to expand internationally despite having zero VC funding.

Jan explains

• How he transitioned from a financial and operational background in the music sector to becoming an enterprise software CEO
  
  

Head over to http://www.screendragon.com for more details on Screendragon and check out www.alpinasearch.com for more advice on globally scaling your enterprise software venture.

Neil Ryland is the CRO at Peakon - funded by EQT Ventures, Sunstone Capital, IDInvest and Tommy Ahlers – who's SaaS platform helps companies maximise their employee engagement, retention and productivity. Prior to Peakon, Neil was the Chief Revenue Officer at Huddle, one of Britain’s most successful VC funded enterprise software ventures - Neil re-located to San Francisco to spearhead Huddle’s US market entry.

Neil explains:

Head over to https://peakon.com for more details on Peakon and check out www.alpinasearch.com for more advice on globally scaling your enterprise software venture.

Alex Dunsdon has a portfolio of different roles – he’s a partner at early stage investor Saatchinvest where he’s invested in successful startups like Citymapper and also a co-founder at The Bakery who describe themselves as “a pioneer in accelerating open innovation”

Alex explains: 

• the fundamental requirement for any enterprise software venture to demonstrate that their solution addresses clearly defined user needs

For more insights into startups and innovation check out http://www.saatchinvest.com and https://www.thebakery.com and for advice on scaling software ventures head over to http://alpinasearch.com

Jon Prideaux is the CEO at BOKU who, on 20 November 2017, went public on AIM at an initial £125m valuation and quickly popped to £160m.

Boku’s platform brings merchants and mobile operators together to transform 5 billion mobile phone subscribers into the world’s largest pool of customers. That's more users than Visa and Mastercard combined! 

Jon provides the following insights:

Head over to https://www.boku.com for more details on Boku and check out www.alpinasearch.com for advice on globally scaling your software venture.

Alan Vey & Annika Monari are the Co-Founders at Aventus Systems, a pioneer in blockchain technology that’s been dubbed “the bitcoin of ticketing”. They closed one of the largest cryptocurrency funding rounds outside of The States just over 12 months after Aventus was founded: their $20m “Initial Token Offering” - led by Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund - was sold out in just 7 minutes!

Alan and Annika discuss: 

• Which types of business can best leverage blockchain technology

For more insights into Aventus Systems head over to https://www.aventus.io and for expert advice on startups and scale-ups check out http://alpinasearch.com/market-insights/

Luca Pagano is the CEO at BeMyEye, Europe’s leading crowdsourced in-store data as a service provider who closed a $10.5m Series C funding round in late November 2017. Previously Luca held leadership roles at Glamoo, Electronic Arts and Buongiorno.

Luca discusses: 

• The tricky challenge of replacing both the founder-CEO and his co-CEO at BeMyEye

Head over to https://www.bemyeye.com for more details on BeMyEye and check out http://alpinasearch.com for advice on scaling your enterprise software venture.  

Tom Bradley is Head of the Ventures Team at Oxford Capital. Tom, previously a partner at both DFJ Esprit and DN Capital, has been involved with successful scale-ups like Performance Horizon, Shazam and Neteconomy. The Oxford Capital Ventures portfolio includes promising startups and scale-ups like import.io, Ultrasoc and Redsift.

In this week’s episode you’ll hear about: 

• The mindset that the founders of European enterprise software startups must have if they are to succeed globally

Head over to https://www.oxcp.com/investments/venture-capital/ for more details on Oxford Capital's venture portfolio and check out www.alpinasearch.com for advice on globally scaling your software venture.

Wolfgang Allisat is the Chief Commercial Officer at Unbabel - "The World's Translation Layer". Unbabel - funded by the Notion Capital, Google Ventures, Faber Ventures, Matrix Partners, Schilling Capital and Caixa Capital - utilizes artificial intelligence to enable translations between companies and their customers.

Wolf has previously held international sales leadership positions at a number of successful software scaleups including Omniture where he was the first international employee and grew the European business to more than 1,100 customers and 200 employees.

Wolf discusses how enterprise software ventures can successfully expand their sales and marketing teams internationally including:

• The research and planning required to support successful overseas expansion

Wolf also discusses the way Unbabel have created a unique culture to resonate with the millennials they typically hire - including weekly company-wide surfing sessions!

For more information on Unbabel's AI-powered translation solutions head over to https://unbabel.com and check out http://alpinasearch.com/clients/ for advice on recruiting A-players to globally scale your software/SaaS venture

Joshua Wohle is the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Series B funded SuperAwesome backed by Mayfair Equity Partners, IBIS TMT, Hoxton Ventures and a host of other VCs.

SuperAwesome's technology powers the kids digital media ecosystem. Their products are used by hundreds of kids content companies and brands to provide kid-safe digital functionality, authentication and advertising.

Joshua is a serial entrepreneur having founded several tech start-ups - since starting his 1st venture whilst at school - including Targetz: a mobile, real-time, location-based community marketplace for services.                   

In today’s episode you will learn:

1. How Joshua launched his first startup as a 16 year old at school – even as a teenage entrepreneur he was selling to large enterprise clients like the private Swiss banks 

For more background on SuperAwesome, check out https://www.superawesome.tv and head over to http://alpinasearch.com for advice on scaling your software venture.

Shirin Dehghan was the Founder CEO at Arieso and is currently Chairwoman at OpenSignal.

Arieso provided subscriber experience geo-location and network optimization solutions for wireless operators and service providers. Funded by Qualcomm Ventures and Oxford Capital Partners, Arieso expanded across EMEA, Asia Pacific and The Americas before being acquired by JDSU for $85m in 2013.

Shirin now Chairs the board at OpenSignal, Funded by Passion Capital, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Qualcomm Ventures. OpenSignal crowd-source data on the performance and coverage of wireless networks around the world and use that data to produce independent and unbiased coverage maps for any network around the world.  Since launch, their mobile app has been downloaded over 20 million times and billions of data points have been collected in over 200 countries.

In this week's episode we’re focusing on the importance of sales and marketing for technical founders and the challenges of international expansion for startups and scaleups. You will learn:

• The lesson that all technical founders must learn – sometimes the hard way - about the importance of creating a strong sales and marketing machine

For more insights into OpenSignal check out https://opensignal.com and for advice on successfully scaling your software venture head over to http://alpinasearch.com