Agenda
October 27th
Three Easy Steps to Capture Global Opportunities
As our economy becomes increasingly global, is your business prepared to succeed? KUDO Co-Founder and CEO Fardad Zabetian shares his insights on how to capture global opportunities.
Welcome and introduction
Survival of the Fittest: Investing in Today’s SaaS Market
The venture capital world is faster, and more competitive than ever. For investors hoping to get into the hottest SaaS deal, things are even crazier. With more non-traditional money pouring into the sector, remote dealmaking now the norm, and an increasingly global market for software startups, venture capitalists are being forced to shake up their own operations, and expectations. TechCrunch sits down with three leading investors to discuss how they are fighting for allocation in hot deals, what they’ve changed in their own processes, and what today’s best founders are demanding.
Data, Data Everywhere
As companies struggle to manage and share increasingly large amounts of data, it’s no wonder that Databricks, whose primary product is a data lakehouse, was valued at a whopping $38 billion for its most recent funding round. We’re going to talk to CEO Ali Ghodsi about why his startup is so hot and what comes next.
SaaS Security, Today and Tomorrow
Enterprises face a constant stream of threats, from nation states to cybercriminals and corporate insiders. After a year where billions worked from home and the cloud reigned supreme, startups and corporations alike can’t afford to stay off the security pulse. Find out what SaaS startups need to know about security now, and in the future.
Data warehouse: the foundation of the modern data stack
The modern data stack is changing rapidly, with new technology emerging everyday. Increasingly, though, architectures are being built around the data warehouse. In this panel discussion, experts will discuss why this new architecture has emerged, what specific technologies are driving the trend and what the data stack of the future looks like.
AI Ethics at Enterprise Scale
Keeping AI models fair and unbiased is a tough enough job in the lab or with a single product. How can it be accomplished at the scale of business being done by Amazon and Salesforce? Amazon AI Applied Science manager Nashlie Sephus and Principle Architect of AI Practice Kathy Baxter will discuss the responsibilities as opportunities of putting ethical practices to work in enterprise applications.
Automation's Moment Is Now
One thing we learned during the pandemic is the importance of automation, and that’s only likely to be more pronounced as we move forward. We’ll be talking to UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, Laela Sturdy, an investor at CapitalG and Dave Wright from ServiceNow about why this is automation’s moment.
9 Security Tips For Startups
When startups are in the beginning stages of growth, it becomes harder to balance between taking necessary security measures and bringing the product to market. You don’t want to slow iteration speed, but you also know that there are security steps that need to happen in order to grow the business. How do you balance these competing objectives? Christina Cacioppo, Co-Founder and CEO of Vanta, shares nine practical tips for building your product with security in mind and how to engage in conversations around security expectations from the start.
How do High-Growth Companies use Technology to Inform Strategy and Drive Results?
Fast-growing companies are in a constant state of transition, as high performance and growth can lead to ever-changing business priorities and challenges. Hear from a couple of SAP’s hypergrowth customers about how they use technology to inform their strategy and ultimately drive business results. SAP Managing Director, Midmarket and Ecosystem Greg Petraetis will share how businesses grow from being innovators to disruptors to category leaders and how the technology they choose can impact the future of their business productivity.
Was the Pandemic Cloud Productivity's Spark
One big aspect of SaaS is productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. We’ll talk with executive Javier Soltero about the role Google Workspace plays in the Google cloud strategy.
Disrupting Product Innovation
Innovation is a business imperative in today’s global economy. In fact, 84% of executives say innovation is key to their growth strategy, according to a McKinsey report. While companies need to innovate at scale to stay competitive, engineers need the right tools to avoid the many challenges associated with the product development process. In this session, hear Jon Hirschtick’s entrepreneurial journey and how cloud and SaaSification of the industry can accelerate product innovation as well as tips on scaling businesses into multi-million-dollar companies.
Accelerate your growth using agile market research throughout the product lifecycle
Conducting market research at each stage of your product lifecycle is a critical component to a successful product launch and sustained growth in an increasingly competitive market. While traditional market research can be costly and require a specialized team, agile market research software makes it possible for anyone on your team to get the insights you need fast. Join Momentive.ai to learn how to conduct your own market research to identify what kinds of products and features users value most, get insight into the competitive landscape, and track your brand’s awareness and shifting perceptions over time.
Optimizing SaaS Productivity: Why SaaS Sprawl prohibits growth?
SaaS represents an increasing share of the installed software estate – in cloud-born companies, often 100%. If not managed and optimized, an uncontrolled adoption leads to SaaS Sprawl, sometimes called “Shadow IT”. Sub-optimized usage of SaaS subscriptions, increased risk, and audit exposures will become a headache when scaling a business. This talk illustrates frequent pitfalls and proposes the needed processes, skills and capabilities of the emerging SaaS Management discipline for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs.
The Future is Wide Open
Many startups today have an open source component, and it’s no wonder. It builds an audience and helps drive sales. We’ll talk with Abby Kearns from Puppet, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti from Kong and Jason Warner an investor at Redpoint about why open source is such a popular way to build a business.
How Microsoft Shifted from on Prem to the Cloud
Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for over 15 years and he was a part of the shift from strictly on prem software to one that is dominated by the cloud. Today he runs one of the most successful SaaS products out there, and we’ll talk to him about how Microsoft made that shift and what it’s meant to the company.
Things Fall Apart At $10MM ARR: Lessons For Growing Your SaaS Company
The strategies that get you to $10MM ARR look very different to those that get you to $50MM or even $100MM. At the $10MM growth inflection point, most software companies need to pivot their approach and often find they are facing new – often seemingly insurmountable – challenges. The team at Vista Equity Partners – one of the largest enterprise software investors in the world with over $81 BN AUM – have worked with many founders and companies to successfully bridge this transition. In this session, Rene Stewart, Co-Head of Vista’s growth-stage Endeavor Fund, discusses the missteps and misconceptions around software company growth and what you can do to achieve success that scales beyond $10MM ARR.
How Startups are Turning Data into Software Gold
The era of big data is behind us. Today’s leading SaaS startups are working with data, instead of merely fighting to help customers collect information. We’ve collected three leaders from three data-focused startups that are forging new markets to get their insight on how today’s SaaS companies are leveraging data to build new companies, attack new problems, and, of course, scale like mad.
Taking Your People from Startup to Scale
As your business grows, you need to help your people grow with you. And, in a world that is transforming faster than ever, the methods of developing your team don’t cut it. In this session you’ll hear from Max Wessel, Chief Learning Officer at SAP, about how to build a culture and workforce that is flexible, adaptable, and fit for a rocket ship.
Building a Hypergrowth SaaS Startup in a Remote World
It’s hard to stand out in today’s startup market, given the sheer number of companies building, launching, and fundraising. But despite all the busyness, Workboard has made waves. Competing in a crowded niche, Deidre Paknad’s upstart tech company has posted huge growth despite COVID-19’s disruptions. We’ll sit down with the CEO to dig into how she managed to scale her company in both revenue, and human terms, despite the global pandemic. Founders, expect to learn something!
What Happens After Your Startup is Acquired
We’ll speak to three founders about the emotional upheaval of being acquired and what happens after the check clears and the sale closes. Our panel includes Jyoti Bansal who founded AppDynamics, Nick Mehta from GainSight and Monica Sarbu who founded Packetbeat that was acquired by Elastic.
Setting Data in Motion
Confluent, the streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka, was born out of a project at LinkedIn and rode that from startup to IPO. We’ll speak to co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps to learn about what that journey was like.
Future Forward: How Machine Learning and Human-in-the-Loop Approaches Are Expanding the Capabilities of Automation
Digital transformation efforts in a number of industries have driven massive adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) over the past decade. The hard truth is that RPA is a decades-old technology that is brittle with real limits to its capabilities. It will always have some value in automating work that is simple, discrete, and linear. However, the reason automation efforts often fall short of their aspirations is because so much of life is complex and constantly evolving – too much work falls outside of the capabilities of RPA. In this talk, Varun Ganapathi, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of AKASA will discuss how exceptions and outliers can actually make automation stronger and how emerging machine-learning-based technology platforms combined with human-in-the-loop approaches are already expanding what it is possible to automate across a number of industries.