This year, SaaStock will feature something we’ve never offered before – a Global SaaS Startup Pitch Competition. During our competition, we hope to find the most promising B2B SaaS startup of 2018 and showcase them on our main stage. Winners will take away a $25,000 cash prize, a huge amount of perks from our partners, many PR opportunities as well as extensive promotion.
If you are a B2B SaaS startup with less than $1M ARR or less than $1M in investment and have a subscription-based product – we invite you to join. Deadline is Friday, September 21st so hurry up and apply.
Want to know who will be listening to and assessing your pitch? Here’s a list of all the judges.
Semifinals
Joyce Liu, Principal, Dawn Capital
Joyce Liu has actively participated in the European tech ecosystem since 2014. As a Principal at Dawn Capital, she is focused on Enterprise Software across Europe and is looking to connect to driven and talented B2B SaaS founders. She is currently involved in Templafy, Bitmovin, Conversocial, and Crate.io.
April Dunford, Market Strategy and Positioning
With 16 product launches behind her back, April Dunford has acquired deep and extensive knowledge and experience in market positioning and strategy. She is also experienced in creating new markets and expanding already existing markets.
As a Founder of Ambient Strategy, April works with startups in developing their market strategy, and with big companies in product introduction and market positioning. April has held executive roles in several startups and large companies and has acquired and sold several startups.
Mark MacLeod, Founder, SurePath Capital Partners
For close to 20 years, Mark MacLeod has worked in helping fund, grow and exit venture-backed startups. He has been CFO at various companies, such as FreshBooks, Shopify, Tungle, Frank & Oak, Varagesale, and a number of others. He is the founder of SurePath Capital Partners the premier strategic financial advisor for emerging tech leaders.
Over the years, Mark has raised millions in capital from investors across the world and has sold companies to Airbnb, Blackberry, Rackable Systems, and others.
Rob Scharf, COO, Crozdesk
As COO and Director of Board at Crozdesk, Rob Sharf is responsible for the company’s business development, growth across all channels and partnerships. In the grander scheme of things, Rob is passionate about improving technology and processes and enabling people to achieve more.
He wants to see sustainable success, fights for cognitive heterogeneity and thinks ethical and moral consideration play a necessary part in the adoption and implementation of any new technology.
Amy Neale, Vice President, Start Path, Mastercard Labs
Amy Neal is Vice President & Senior Business Leader at Mastercard. There she leads the six-month ‘Start Path’ startup engagement programme for companies across the globe. She and her team are focused on identifying, mentoring and partnering with startups that are building the future in the commerce, payment and FinTech sectors.
Dave Grow, President and COO, Lucidchart
So how does a company go from a freemium to enterprise and gain over 10 million users? And how do you do that by getting $40 million in funding, and not using a cent of it? You should ask David Grow.
David has been at Lucidchart for 8 years. While he wore many hats in the process, his greatest challenge and opportunity was to architect the business model that transformed the company from freemium to Enterprise. With over 96% of Fortune 500 companies using Lucidchart, David has plenty to share with fellow entrepreneurs, investors, advisors and others.
John Thompson, Co-Founder, Chairman, Coach and Advisor
For over 7 years, John Thompson has assumed chairman, non-executive and advisory roles for various investor backed tech companies. His specialities in those roles include SaaS, Enterprise Software and Professional Services companies.
As non-executive chairman and later CEO of UserReplay, he helped the company grow from zero to millions, and become one of the top 100 fastest growing British companies. He currently chairs the Board of PE-backed Wax Digital and ProspectSoft, and also serves as an advisor to several London startups as well as to early-stage VC Forward Partners.
Gene Murphy, Entrepreneur in Residence, Bank of Ireland
Gene Murphy loves startups! He is passionate about working with early-stage FinTech and general early stage tech startups and entrepreneurs. To that end, he used to be a co-founder of both Startup Ireland and Startup Boost. The former is a grassroots network for the Irish startup ecosystem and the latter a global pre-accelerator program that works with pre-seed and seed startups.
Currently, Gene works as E.I.R. at Bank Of Ireland and sets up co-working spaces and tech incubators. He also organises the DublinBeta startup showcase, the Startup Weekend Dublin, and Drinkabout Dublin. Needless to say, Gene is an essential part of the Dublin startup ecosystem and has loads to share about tech, startups and entrepreneurship.
Niamh Bushnell, CEO, TechIreland
Niamh Bushnell is the CEO of Tech Ireland, a not-for-profit that maps and tracks all product innovations in Ireland, and showcases Irish innovation sector by sector. Tech Ireland also tracks multinationals in Ireland, as well as global investors in Irish companies. This year Tech Ireland also launched the €100m Campaign with the goal of supporting Irish female company founders to reach €100M or more in funding, in 2018.
Colm Doyle, Developer Relations Lead, EMEA, Slack
Colm Doyle is an experienced software engineering manager with a history of working in high performing engineering teams, and a passion for building great software. Colm currently leads Slack’s EMEA Developer Relations as well as helps key partners leverage the platform.
Colm’s side-projects include an initiative to encourage people to vote more in elections, the “Who is my TD” project that provides citizens with information about their local representatives, and others.
Ben Costantini, Co-Founder & CEO, Startup Sesame
Ben Costantini runs Startup Sesame – the largest global network of Tech events and first event acceleration program for startups. Startup Sesame helps startups connect to and attend events that will help them grow and raise funds. It also helps scale-ups, investors and corporates to engage with the European tech ecosystem and tech event insiders.
As an expert in cultural and event industries, Ben helps entrepreneurs and investors during the early and growth stages of their companies. He is also the founder of Connectors Studio and the curator of Symposium Stockholm.
Finals
Patrick Campbell, Co-Founder & CEO, ProfitWell
Like many others in this list, Patrick Campbell is an example of how to build a business that goes through the roof. And he can also tell you something about what it takes to do that – such as making the choice of scale over lifestyle and dedicating yourself to developing a product.
From SaaS pricing and SaaS metrics/unit economics to bootstrapping, Patrick has a lot of knowledge and experience to share with fellow entrepreneurs who want to grow their business and develop their products.
Itay Rosenfeld, CEO, Voxbone
Itay Rosenfeld wants to make communications strangely simple. Itay has close to 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry which he utilises at Voxbone to ensure the company’s growth and success. Voxbone revolutionises business communications by making hyperlocal voice and messaging services available on demand in 9000+ area codes across 60+ countries.
Prior to joining Voxbone, Itay also worked as head of verticals sales at ECI Telecom, direct sales and business development at Tejas Networks, and at Cisco Systems.
Will Prendergast, Partner, Frontline Ventures
Will Prendergast is a Founding Partner of Frontline Ventures. He has spent the last decade focusing on software companies and in particular infrastructure layer companies. So far he has invested in the first round of investments for companies such as Britebill, Barricade, Orchestrate, all of which have been acquired. He has also invested in AMCS and Currencyfair, both of which have raised several tens of millions since.
Will spends a good deal of time on developing investor and corporate relationships in the US with the aim of benefiting the companies that are currently in Frontline’s portfolio.
Tiffany Apczynski, VP of Public Policy and Social Impact, Zendesk
Tiffany Apczynski joined Zendesk in 2010 as one of its earliest hires. She was Zendesk’s original head of corporate social responsibility, which gave her the opportunity to build a global social impact framework that dynamically adjusts to Zendesk’s changing workforce, regions, and more.
Tiffany is also behind the drafting and executing of San Francisco’s Community Benefits Agreement which was held up by the city as the “gold standard” to be followed. Thanks to Tiffany’s efforts on Zendesk’s social responsibility strategy, the company has been recognised and awarded several times for its outstanding work.
Excited about the opportunity to pitch in front of all these great people? So are we. We look forward to each and every startup team that will be brave enough to get out on stage and deliver a pitch. Apply to be a part of it before September 21st at midnight.