SaaS founders crossing the Atlantic? Come to SaaSCity!

Winning the US?
Having worked with about 50 SaaS companies at Point Nine, our intuition has always been that winning the US market is a must on the path to the 100M ARR bar. Long before hitting it, the founding team of Zendesk moved to Boston and then to SF. So did Nicolas Dessaigne, the CEO of Algolia, Jens the CEO of Automile or Mathilde Colin the CEO of Front (see picture from last year’s SaaStr conference).
Willing to back our (often misleading) intuition with data, we recently looked at all the SaaS companies that passed the $500M valuation mark or were likely to have done so. As most of these companies are not yet public, we created a database based on Crunchbase and CapitalIQ data with all the companies that either went public and are valued over $500M, were acquired for more than $500M, had raised more than $50M in total or raised north of $30M in one single round. This methodology is obviously not perfect, but provides us at least with a good first proxy.
What we found was that there were many companies that were created in Europe and could get to this size, but only a handful of them had no operations in the US. We even found that there might actually have been only 4 or 5 of them that reached the 500M bar without any US operations.
The two consequences of these results are:
- As an investor primarily in European companies, we have come to advise most of our portfolio companies to enter the US market, and,
- we want to make sure we can be the partner of choice for European SaaS startups that want to cross the Atlantic.
We have many initiatives in that regard that I won’t describe here, but we thought that the SaaSCity day ahead of the SaaStock conference is a great occasion to cover that topic again.
SaaSCity
Hence, we’re very happy to announce our SaaStock side event in partnership with Algolia:
The event will be an exclusive 1-hour workshop for 50 people about US expansion. 4 experienced founders and 2 VCs will answer any questions you might have. Discussions will continue over a casual lunch.
Speakers
We have made sure to gather the right mix of operators and investors, who have all been through that path over the past years:
- David Skok, Partner at Matrix Partners
- Bill Macaitis, former CMO at Zendesk and Slack
- Jonathan Angelov, COO at Aircall
- Rachel Delacour, CEO at BIME (acq. by Zendesk)
- Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO of Algolia
- Christoph Janz, Partner at Point Nine
How to apply?
We want to make sure to build the right mix in the audience, and we will restrict the audience to 50 people. To secure your ticket, ask your most burning questions about going to the US by filling this short Typeform.
We’ll get back to you with an invite shortly after reviewing applications.
Lacking imagination? Here are a few samples of questions we have already received in the applications:
- What is the right timing to move to the US?
- What are the key success factors for doing SaaS sales in US which are different from the ones in Europe?
Still not convinced?
By filling the Typeform, you also enter a raffle to spend 2 weeks in Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr co-selling space in San Francisco for free! Time to put ideas in practice :)
Hope to see many of you there,
Louis & Karo and the whole P9 Team


