We’re excited to announce the launch of SaaStock19, our fourth global flagship conference, taking place once again in the city of Dublin. We’ll bring 4,000+ SaaS founders, executives, and investors together for three days of intensive knowledge and networking, all in the name of traction, growth, and scale.

We founded SaaStock because the SaaS industry needed an unbiased space to come together, connect, and create. SaaStock is a place for the best and brightest to meet like minds, fuel their ambition, and spark their imagination. We’ve come a long way since 2016, and we can’t wait to share the next step of our journey with you.

What’s New at SaaStock1

As has been the case since SaaStock’s inception, our 2019 conference will serve up a mix of actionable and inspirational content. Unicorn CEOs provide the show-stopping talking points, while founders and executives from the middle-ground of the journey, offer demonstrable learnings, strategies, and insights that people can take back and apply to their business. Whether you’re seeking traction, growing or scaling your business, SaaStock offers you the critical insights to ensure your success.  

Each iteration of the event is built on customer feedback. We know that keynotes are your favorite way to learn, and we’ll be adding plenty of data-driven, actionable, and insightful presentations to the 2019 agenda. These keynotes will be augmented by longer, more in-depth panel sessions, fuelled by provocative and well-informed moderators. We’ll deliver the cut and thrust of debate, clashes of opinion, thought-leaders battling it out for the benefit of the audience.

Whether you’re starting, sustaining or scaling your SaaS, our agenda will address the challenges, failures, and struggles of the journey, making sure the speakers spare no detail of the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to build a business. SaaStock isn’t one big pat on the back, it’s from-the-trenches insights and original stories. If you like that sort of realness, we’re the conference for you.

 

Hannah Chaplin SaaStock19 Saas conference

Introducing Content Themes

Themes help you navigate the content sessions with ease and allow you to plan your time onsite by function, industry, and interest. We’ve worked closely with SaaS leaders to identify the key trends driving the ecosystem to curate an impactful agenda that will challenge and inspire you in equal measure. We’ve broken down that insight into the concrete themes shaping the industry conversion, and those themes are shaping the SaaStock agenda.

Across the agenda, we’ll be exploring:

  • Marketing & Growth
  • Sales
  • Metrics
  • Hiring & Culture
  • Customer Success
  • Funding & Investment
  • Internationalization
  • Product
  • Pricing
  • Operations & Scalability

The themes will also be reflected clearly during SaaS.City, our 1-day accelerator, which will see a total of 15 actionable bootcamps this year. As the tradition goes, after they conclude, we will put the laptops aside to enjoy Dublin’s finest pubs in the company of new and old SaaS friends, concluding the night at our opening party.

Introducing New Stages

This year we are introducing new stages on the main floor:

Cirque de SaaS
Dedicated to the weird and wonderful, this stage will be igniting unconventional formats that breathe fresh life into old issues. Prepare for a day of game shows, AMAs, VC pitches, live teardowns, high octane debates, tech showcases and much, much more.

SaaStock Unplugged Podcast Stage
This your chance to get up close and personal with your SaaS heroes in an intimate and interactive setting. With roving mics, some of the best podcasters in B2B will host a myriad of dialogues, so bring your curiosity and inquisitive spirit and join the debate!

The Accelerate Stage
We’re revamping the pitch stage to better reflect the need-to-know nuances for the SaaS entrepreneur. Our Accelerate stage will cater to fledgling startups, offering strategic talks from investors, incubators and accelerators. Come for the pitches, stay for the insights.

Meet Our First 50 Speakers

We’re on a mission to bring you the brightest minds in SaaS. Here’s just a sample of the speakers we have signed up already:

Claire Hughes Johnson, COO, Stripe
Claire joined Stripe as COO in 2014, when the company had 165 employees. Now that number has grown to over 1,000. Along the way, the payment-processing startup has entered into partnerships with giants like Amazon and launched next-generation products like Atlas. Through all of that, she has learned a host about structuring the organization, building functional processes and an operating structure.

Leela Srinivasan, CMO, Survey Monkey
When Leela joined Survey Monkey as CMO, a little over a year ago, she outlined four major reasons for doing so – The opportunity to power the curious, showing the world how SurveyMonkey helps businesses win, embracing the “meta job,” an joining a diverse workplace where inclusion matters. We will see where she is with those and how she is balancing strengthening awareness and perception of Survey Monkey’s brand, educating the market about its enterprise capabilities and demonstrating traction with crucial customers.

Kathryn Petralia, COO, Kabbage
Kathryn fell in tech accidentally. A family friend asked her to be involved in a tech company he had invested in. Smart and inquisitive, she realized technology could be used to give people what they need faster and better than before. She ditched her graduate degree program in English to jump at the opportunity to join the tech industry and hasn’t left since. In 2009 Rob Frohweinr approached her with an idea for a lending business and Kabbage was born, offering one of the first platforms that provided a fully automated funding decision by analyzing a company’s real-time data instead of an outdated paperwork process. To date, the company has raised $2.3B and is a fully fledged unicorn.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshworks
Girish started what was named back then Freshdesk as a side hustle to his comfortable, well-paying job in Zoho in 2010. By 2011 he was out of Zoho to solve core customer problems rather than fancy features like supporting customers from their Facebook wall or converting tweets into customer support tickets. When he started, he was a nobody but has very much become a somebody since building an incredible unicorn.

Rory O’Driscoll, Co-Founder and Partner, Scale Venture Partners
When Rory bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles in 1991, he hadn’t the faintest clue of how his life would turn out. Nine years later, in 2000, he bought the venture capital wing of Bank of America. He now owns his own Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Scale Venture Partners, which has had successful portfolio exits such as Exact Target, a digital marketing software company he invested in, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011 and web analysis firm Omniture was bought by Adobe in 2010 for $1.9 billion.

Meet Our 2019 Partners

SaaStock would not be possible without the support of our partners. We have troves of them already and wanted to tell you about some of them. You can meet them in person at SaaStock19 and see the incredible solutions they have brought to the market that are helping businesses around the world operate better and grow faster.

We are fortunate to have the support of many of them since 2016. To name a few:

  • ChartMogul – the very first partner we ever got. There was no conference but there was a big idea and CEO and founder Nick Franklin agreed to back us because he believed it was the right thing for the community
  • ProfitWell – a true visit from Santa as the deal was signed on Christmas eve
  • Receptive – one of the great examples of the importance of in person human connection, as CEO and founder Hannah Chaplin had become a friend after the first London SaaS meetup back in September 2015
  • Chargebee – a proof that a personal cold email can bring magic, especially having in mind that CEO and founder Krish Subramanian has never sent a single cold email.  
  • IDA – the very organization responsible for convincing all the amazing SaaS companies to open their EMEA HQs in Ireland. They may have convinced us too ????

Our sincerest gratitude goes out to them for being there with us every step of the way ❤️

Some of the companies that found so much ROI last year that this year decided to upgrade:

  • Intercom, a platinum partner this year
  • Chargebee, a global gold partner, present in all six of our conferences
  • Pendo, gold partner at SaaStock19, as well as SaaStock East Coast and SaaStock West Coast
  • Leaseweb, a gold partner this year
  • G2 Crowd, a titanium partner this year

We are as equally excited to welcome many new partners such as:

  • Cognism, a sales acceleration platform, using patented AI technology, to provide B2B sales teams with a blend of real-time company, people and event data
  • Signaturit, a trust service provider that offers innovative solutions in the field of electronic signatures (eSignatures), certified registered delivery (eDelivery) and electronic identification (EID)
  • Egencia, a complete travel management platform, helps, enterprises, multinationals, and SMEs alike to stay on top of their travel logistics and spend
  • Personio, a holistic HR and applicant management software designed for startups, and small- and medium-sized enterprises
  • Beefree.io, a drag-&-drop email builder for creating mobile-responsive emails, quickly and easily

Pendo SaaStock19 SaaS conference

A Stronger Emphasis on Inclusivity

At last year’s SaaStock, we launched the first step to a D&I program to address the lack of fully diverse representation at our conference and within the industry in general – the #TakingStock Inclusivity pledge. We launched the pledge in cooperation with Zendesk, who we’re delighted to be working with as Global Diversity and Inclusion partner for 2019.

With their support, SaaStock19 will return with a practical programme to help you achieve true diversity and inclusion throughout your SaaS business. The pledge, augmented by free tickets for marginalized groups, is part of the solution. We also offer deep dive workshops and mentorship opportunities to bring underrepresented voices together, highlighting the issues around D&I and empowering you with the practical insights, tools, and confidence you need to take action.

Most of all, we are excited to foster a community based on allyship, and commit to safeguarding an inclusive environment (supported by our Code of Conduct) across all facets of the conference. We strive to make our events open, accessible and inclusive, and curate a safe space where our attendees feel welcome and valued.

Dublin Is Our Home

It was months before the Brexit vote had even been announced that we decided that Dublin was the natural home for SaaStock. The epicenter of many global and European SaaS companies, Stripe, Zendesk, Intercom, and many other SaaS unicorns all host their EMEA operations out of the city. We knew launching our flagship event in Ireland’s vibrant capital would enable us to foster lifelong partnerships with the best in the business.

Three years after the EU referendum, the doors for Ireland are more open than ever, as tech multinationals are beginning to see Ireland as the tech capital of Europe. Dublin has succeeded in two of the most critical facets of achieving tech hub status: attracting the world’s top companies and brightest talent.

There are so many logical reasons for making Dublin our home – but there are also a million emotional ones that make us love this small rock out in the middle of the Atlantic. Starting with the thousand welcomes the world’s friendliest people will give you as you descend on the Emerald Isle and its incredible scenery. What you will find in this city and this country is some of the best food in the world, all locally grown and produced, the creamiest pints of Guinness, and culture on offer that will see you going to different gigs every night. Whether that is traditional music, spoken word, stand-up comedy or theatre; whatever you are into, you’ll be sure to find the craic daily.

What’s in Store

Tailored content, meaningful relationships, and actionable takeaways that your business can benefit from immediately await you on October 14-16.

SaaS.City, the pre-event day filled with hands-on workshops and bootcamps taking place all around Dublin.

Startup Program Day, providing early-stage startups with invaluable mentoring and the chance to pitch to relevant investors.

Investock, an exclusive gathering connecting investors from leading international funds with influential angels, accelerators, and LPs to forge meaningful connections and engage in proactive debates.

Our two-day main conference with content based on company stage and topics of interest, an exhibition hall showcasing the latest and greatest, local and international SaaS products

Investor meeting zone with an advanced matchmaking app, to ensure that no potential opportunity is missed

SaaSociety, our premium, invite-only retreat for scaling SaaS founders of $3m+ ARR businesses and a select group of technology investors.

Are You Joining Us?

All of that, combined with the chance to take a break from the grind, socialize with like-minded peers, and unwind at a myriad of fringe parties, makes SaaStock19 an absolute must for SaaS practitioners.

There’s a reason why we’ve been referred to as the “Disneyland for SaaS Companies.” We live and breathe SaaS, and make it our business to ensure that every element of the SaaStock experience adds value to our attendees.