The 28 SaaS Superstars speaking at SaaStock New York

Silicon Valley is no longer the only place to be if you’re into SaaS. Far from it. The East coast, led by SaaS hotspots like New York and Boston, is proving to have as much of the terroir that the West has. It has an added allure brought on by European founders who use it as a stepping stone into the vast North American market without the compromise of sleep over an insurmountable time difference.

SaaStock on Tour New York is our attempt to give that part of the SaaS universe justice, showcasing the strengths in founder, VP and VC wisdom spread up and down the coast.

Whether you are growing SaaS in the region or considering it as your US HQ, this is your chance to learn from the experts and those a few steps ahead on the journey. Join us at SaaStock on Tour NYC on June 20th.

David Skok, Managing Partner, Matrix Partners

It’s no easy task to speak about the rich professional path of David Skok with brevity. Or capture just how much he has done for the global SaaS community with his knowledge. David founded his first company when he was only 22 — and this was back in 1977. What followed were four successful companies, an insurmountable cloud computing and SaaS knowledge, and deep VC experience. David has been a Managing Partner at the VC firm Matrix Partners since 2001, where he focuses on funding internet and software startups. HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, and Diligent Technologies, are only some of the companies he has invested in. On June 20th David will grace the stage twice: once to sit for an interview with Seth Besmertnik and once to give us the rundown of the top 10 metrics to grow your SaaS business.

Talk Description: The SaaS business model is highly dependent on a series of inputs. Small changes in these variables can result in major improvements in performance. In this talk, David Skok will break down the SaaS business model, and show which variables have the greatest impact on performance. He will then explain how to use these metrics to align your organization to drive growth and long term cash flow.

Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor

Seth Besmertnik is one of those people born with entrepreneurial and innovative zeal in their blood. He is the co-founder and CEO of Conductor, the world’s leading organic marketing company, where he leads a team of more than 200 people. He cannot count the amount of times he thought it was the end of the road for Conductor. The times he was just waiting for a knock-out punch to put an end to it all. He would read Ben Horowitz’s “The Struggle” and say to himself: “this is me… this is how how I feel.” Quiting, however, was never an option and all is well when it ends well — Conductor was recently acquired by WeWork. Which is why if Seth was to give you one piece of advice, it would be this: it can seem like there is no light on the horizon — but there is. He will give much more on the SaaStock on Tour New York stage, sitting for a conversation with David Skok.

Talk: Never Give Up — The Conductor story — A 10 year journey to Exit

Howard Lerman, Co-founder and CEO, Yext

The Founder of Yext and Confide, Howard Lerman has taken a company from a dorm room in Duke University to IPO. In 2006, Howard co-founded Yext, a SaaS platform for digital knowledge management that has been recognized as one of the most promising and fast-growing companies in the U.S. On April 13th, 2017, Yext rang the NYSE bell, officially becoming one of the biggest public debuts ever for a startup born in New York. On the stage, Howard will share some of the techniques he has learned along the way, from the beginning, through growth, and beyond.

Talk: Jedi Mind Tricks of the Entrepreneur: lessons learned building tech companies

Vivek Sharma, CEO, Movable Ink

With a solid background in computer science and innate knack for business, it was not difficult for Vivek Sharma to quickly move from engineering at Cisco to a managerial position at Blue Martini Software. Soon enough, he was leading the Eastern North America and EMEA sales at the platform-as-a-service for developers Engine Yard. In 2010, Vivek co-founded Movable Ink, which helps email marketers deliver relevant and personalized messages through using intelligent content. Oh, and yes, it’s one of the fastest growing tech companies in New York. They have just reached $40M in ARR.

Talk: 10 Lessons I learned growing past $40M in ARR

Liz Cain, Partner, OpenView

For Liz Cain, the path from technical support, sales operations, account management, and marketing to AVP of Worldwide Business Development at NetSuite wasn’t that long. In her fruitful career there, she launched and managed the Business Development Representative (BDR) and Solution Consulting Associate (SCA) teams, which grew to 170 people under her guidance. In 2016, Liz joined the Boston-based VC firm OpenView Venture Partners. At first, she took charge of Go-to-Market strategies for the portfolio companies. She was recently promoted to General Partner, joining the mere 8% of female partners at US VC companies.

Talk: Finding the right partner for your startup

Doug Landis, Growth Partner, Emergence Capital

Sales productivity is where Doug Landis thrives. One of his first jobs was at Google, where he was a Skills Training Manager, before he joined Salesforce as the Senior Director for Corporate Sales Productivity. Doug then moved on to become the VP of Sales Productivity at the Cloud Content Management company Box. For the last two years, he has been a Growth Partner at Emergence Capital, a renowned VC fund focusing on early and growth-stage business cloud companies. Doug helps portfolio companies scale to large SaaS successes through creating a platform for winning go-to-market insights and strategies.

Talk: Finding the right partner for your startup

Matt Turck, Managing Director, Firstmark Capital

Matt Turck may be in venture capital today, but he is no stranger to entrepreneurship himself. He co-founded the enterprise search software startup TripleHop Technologies, and launched Bloomberg Ventures. For the last five years, Matt has taken the position of Managing Director at the New York-based early-stage venture capital firm FirstMark Capital. The company’s current investments include ActionIQ, Cockroach Labs, Dataiku, Helium, HyperScience, Kinsa, MissionU, Phosphorus, and Sense360, among others.

Talk: Finding the right partner for your startup

Vanessa Liu, VP, SAP.iO Foundry

Besides a tech innovator, business builder, and digital media entrepreneur, Vanessa Liu is a prominent supporter of women in tech. As a child, she says science and space was all that was on her mind, while always being fond of crafting stuff. Her professional path in tech started at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company, where her expertise was growth. In 2011, she partnered with Andy Russell to create Trigger Media, a digital media venture fund. Today she is the VP of SAP.io Foundry in New York. She invests in B2B enterprise startups that are led by women in areas like AI, blockchain, and data analytics.

Talk: Finding the right partner for your startup

Jessica Lin, Co-founder & General Partner, Work-Bench

Jessica Lin leaves a mark through leading by example. Ruling both enterprise technology and venture capital management, Jessica graduated Harvard University, managed projects at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and quickly became a manager at Cisco. In 2014, Jessica co-founded Work-Bench, an enterprise-focused venture fund based in New York. She also stands behind the Women in Enterprise Series, a monthly event that gathers female tech entrepreneurs from the Work-Bench network.

Talk: Things To Learn the Hard Way: Lessons in Early Enterprise GTM

Patrick Campbell, CEO and Co-Founder, ProfitWell

The “first boots on the ground” when it comes to solving business issues, Patrick Campbell is probably the world’s foremost expert on pricing. In the past months he has offered a pricing teardown to every subscription business you can think of, from Spotify and Netflix to NYTimes and X. In 2012, Patrick co-founded Price Intelligently, which offers an innovative price setting tool that helps businesses price their products and services according to their true value.

Talk: How to find the right price for your product

Dominique Levin, Managing Partner, Winning By Design

Dominique Levin is one of those unstoppable women that knows how to handle life work balance and be amazingly successful. She has occupied managerial positions at Intel, Crimson Investment, LogLogic, and AgilOne. In 2016, she co-founded Winning by Design. There Dominique designs and applies growth strategies for SaaS and other B2B companies. Her expertise lies in areas like demand generation, sales development, account-based prospecting, and expansion of current customer base.

Talk: Science of Sales: Learn how you — as a SaaS Entrepreneur — can approach Sales as a Science and discover the Few Moments That Matter in sales in which you should pursue excellence. Divided in three parts, this talk will explain why Sales in SaaS require a new proposition and a new GTM methodology; which are the moments that actually matter and how to excell in them; how to setup a SaaS sales process that you can trust.

Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of Marketing, Hubspot

Meghan Keaney Anderson’s professional path has always been about communication — and the skill to reach an audience in the best possible way. She has been with HubSpot since 2011, initially as Product Marketing Manager and then moving up to Director. For almost three years, she has been the Vice President of Marketing, responsible for the product marketing and content strategy. In that role she has launched the Growth Show podcast,and has seen the blog reach 4.5 million views a month, while its social media reaches two million followers. Her specialties include content and product marketing, inbound marketing, analytics, public relations, and lead generation.

Talk: How We Broke a Year-Long Traffic Plateau by Upending Our Editorial Strategy

Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO, Datadog

Alexis Lê-Quôc fancies software architecture and engineering. So much so that he has spent the last 17 years in developing various software solutions. Today Alexis is the CTO of Datadog, a tech company that is revolutionizing monitoring for hybrid cloud applications. He dedicates his time to operations, evangelism, and customer support. Alexis is also a Techstars startup accelerator mentor.

Talk: New York State of Mind — When/why and how to scale to the US

Tomer Tagrin, Co-founder and CEO, Yotpo

From a team leader in the Israel Defence Force for two years, Tomer Tagrin has turned into an internet junkie entrepreneur. With a degree from Tel Aviv University, he went on to start his professional path at Intel. In 2011, he co-founded Yotpo, a powerful customer content marketing platform which helps companies collect and make the best of customer reviews.

Talk: New York State of Mind — When/why and how to scale to the US

Ben Hindman, CEO, Splash

Ben Hindman was the National Events Manager for the renowned e-newsletter Thrillist. That gave him plenty of opportunities to express his creative potential in over 70 experiential marketing programs. It also prepared him for co-founding his own star company — Splash. Splash is the world’s first event marketing software, which is being used by the likes of Uber and Spotify. The tech company has proven widely successful in helping all kinds of event organizers — from music gigs to recruiting programs — improve their strategy and execution. As for Ben, he’s simply referred to as the party scientist.

Talk: New York State of Mind — When/why and how to scale to the US

Edward Chiu, Co-Founder and CEO, Catalyst

Edward Chiu has been up and about in the tech world — from California to New York. After two years as a Sales Engineer at Engine Yard in the San Francisco Bay Area, he moved to New York to become Director of Customer Success for the fastest growing cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean. In the beginning of 2017, he co-founded Catalyst Software, where his team is building a highly intuitive Customer Success Platform (CSP). At SaaStock on Tour New York, Edward will be joined by a Krish Subramanian and Rachel Orston to talk about all things user adoption. Discover the fundamentals to help you drive stronger user adoption and WOW! your users to becoming your advocates.

Talk: How to build a strong user adoption strategy in order to make your customers successful

Rachel Orston, CEO, UserIQ

Rachel Orston made her first professional steps at broadcast media, only to quickly turn to tech. She passed through a number of renowned tech giants, including taking the roles of Marketing Director at Dell EMC and Vice President of Client Advocacy at IBM. With more than 15 years of working on large-scale enterprise products, she has grown engineering teams from 0 to 40 people. For more than a year now, Rachel has been leading UserIQ as its CEO. UserIQ defines itself as the Customer Growth Platform™, which helps SaaS companies grow. Sitting in a panel about user adoption, Rachel will share the basics of what makes a strong user adoption strategy in order to build a solid foundation for the success of your users.

Talk: How to build a strong user adoption strategy in order to make your customers successful

Krish Subramanian, CEO, Chargebee

Krish Subramanian is a successful example of a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He started out in his home India as Tech Lead and Project Manager at Tata Consulting Services. In 2011, Krish co-founded Chargebee, a California and Chennai based SaaS business. It offers companies smart subscription billing software with world-class customer support. Joined by two fellow SaaS CEOs, Krish will help attendees learn how customer success strategies must scale as your customer base grows, and will leave with practical tips on how to keep it simple and sane along the journey.

Talk: How to build a strong user adoption strategy in order to make your customers successful

Dave Blake, CEO, Client Success

When it comes to customer success and great relationships with customers, Dave Blake knows it all. From being the Client Success Manager on a small team trying to manage success for a rapidly growing startup, to the executive managing a large, global organization with 100+ CSMs. At both ends of that spectrum, the solutions for managing customer success were the same: cobbling together a few fields on Salesforce, many spreadsheets, custom dashboards, and a whole lot of hustle. Dave believed he could change that. Client Success was born.

Talk: How to build a strong user adoption strategy in order to make your customers successful

Michelle Danis, Director of Customer Success, Danis

Michelle Danis has risen from Customer Success manager to Director of Customer Success at Datadog in the span of three years. What she says she loves most about the job is the chance to speak with solution engineers, the finance team, or product team all in the same day, all in order to provide the best possible answers and help to Datadog’s customers.