The Startup Guide To Growth

The metaverse holds out the promise of elevating the current digital landscape by merging real-life scenarios and the digital space, and by integrating more technology-centric forms of commerce, such as digital tokens and cryptocurrencies. To get some insights, we sat down with two metaverse builders: Cathy Hackl, the Founder & Chief Metaverse Officer of metaverse consulting firm Journey, and Erika Wykes-Sneyd, the Global VP Marketing for Adidas Originals, Collaborations & Basketball & Lead of Adidas Web3 Studio Adidas and Adidas Originals for this episode of The Startup Guide to Growth podcast. Our guests discuss the relationship between brands and the metaverse today: how large companies are approaching the metaverse, and how entrepreneurs may engage in the next trillion-dollar market opportunity. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Rui Pedro Silva, former CIO at ERIKS and current VP Digital & Sales Tech Global Platforms at Adidas, chats with Abhishek Lahoti, Sapphire's VP of Business Development in EMEA in this in-depth discussion about what start-ups need to know when trying to sell to an Enterprise in the European market. Rui's first-hand experience at ERIKS, a large industrial company based in the Netherlands, helps shed a light on how large companies differ from their American counterparts. From the end of PoCs to multi-lingual, multi-national scale to privacy and security, this conversation walks through the essentials of successful Enterprise selling in Europe, straight from the buyer's mouth. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Early on in the pandemic, nearly every business moved to a remote model. More than two years later, and many companies have adopted some sort of remote-friendly approach, including the increasingly popular hybrid workforce model. At the same time, there’s a strong call to action for organizations to focus and expand their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In this episode, Sapphire’s Partner and Head of the Talent Network, Elizabeth Patterson speaks with Barbie Brewer, Chief People Officer at mParticle (formerly, Chief People Officer at ClickUp, Chief Culture Officer at GitLab and VP, Talent at Netflix) about how remote/hybrid is helping drive equality and diversity, particularly amongst women, the steps companies need to take to ensure women and underrepresented minorities aren’t left behind in this new model of work, the impact of the Great Resignation on diversity, equality and inclusion and more. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

In this episode of Startup Guide to Growth, Sapphire’s Abhishek Lahoti, Head of our International Expansion Center of Excellence, speaks with Kiki Stannard, Managing Director at Zedra, a global expansion, wealth and solutions based in London. Kiki's specialty is in advising companies on HR practices across Europe. When it comes to the UK versus Ireland versus the Netherlands, start-ups need to understand exactly how to deploy and employ successfully. Tune in to hear Kiki walk through the fascinating intricacies between European countries, how these differ from the U.S., and how to plan appropriately for your European leap. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Engineers often sit on the front lines between market laggards and category leaders, and their skills are in short supply. The market for skilled and dependable engineers is more competitive now than ever before, with the Great Resignation intensifying the War for Talent. In this episode, David Carter, Sapphire’s head of the Infrastructure and DevOps Center of Excellence, speaks with Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI, a leading continuous integration and delivery platform used by the world's best engineering teams to radically reduce time from idea to deploy, about how to successfully scale engineering organizations in the current market. Tune in to hear how Rob and his team approach attracting talent, ways to avoid burnout, steps to improve retention, and how to measure overall productivity as your organization grows and matures. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

How do you set up your company for GTM success in Europe? Rico Mallozzi’s guest today is Robbie O'Connor, the General Manager of Notion, who’s had considerable experience with Google and Dropbox. In this episode, Robbie discusses how Europe presents incredible opportunities, but also incredible challenges, especially for startup tech companies. First off, you need to be mindful of your target region’s culture. Localizing your marketing strategy while integrating just enough innovation so as not to make your potential customers uncomfortable is essential. If you want to take a closer look at GTM success within Europe, then this episode’s for you. Don’t miss this! Robbie is the General Manager for EMEA at Notion, and their first feet on the ground in the region. He'll lead the way as Notion builds its enterprise motion, launches in new languages, and serves more customers across borders. He has experience heading EMEA sales at Asana and Dropbox, and before that was in charge of enterprise partnerships at Google Maps. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Building anchor partnerships is key to building your business. When it comes to channel partners, finding the right people is always the goal. Build partnerships around the world to help spread your brand. Learn how to find anchor partnerships with Seann Gardiner. Seann is the Senior Vice President of ThoughtSpot, who handles all their partnerships globally. He joins host Rico Mallozzi to talk about the importance of partnerships. Learn his partner model and how building relationships is important for your platform. Find more business opportunities today.Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Selling open source is different from selling in an enterprise SaaS environment. Rico Mallozzi's guest is Javier Molina, the Senior Vice President of MongoDB. Javier discusses with Rico how the reality of every business is the need to drive revenue. This is where the open-source managed service model comes in. In this model, the core functionality of the software is still available to anyone for free. But there are additional features customers can choose to purchase. Join in the discussion to learn from Javier’s sales and marketing strategies! Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

As SaaS companies continue to thrive in today's digital age, they are expected to constantly innovate as technological innovations happen. This makes the role of growth in this sector extremely important. Rico Mallozzi is joined by Marie Gassée, the VP of Growth at Confluent, to explain how they approach massive changes and shifts in today's ever-evolving self-serve model. She discusses how they experiment with their processes to achieve the most practical ways and what a good SDR compensation looks like. Marie also explores the significant contribution of data science in the go-to-market and why she loves this particular field so much.Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! www.SapphireVentures.com

Revenue operations is an increasingly trendy model of commercial leadership that essentially brings together the operational teams under an umbrella leadership that allows for greater coordination. As companies look to transform, accelerate revenue, and improve productivity, the RevOps model eliminates the siloed nature of these operational teams and expedites the execution of change. Dan Carpenter has taken on this kind of role four times in his career. In his most recent position at PTC, he leads a team of 400 professionals who are responsible for the company’s revenue operations. This wealth of experience uniquely positions Dan to speak about all things RevOps, which he competently does in this conversation with Rico Mallozzi. Listen in as Dan shares his take on the roles and responsibilities of a best in class RevOps organization, the key balances between process, analytics and go-to-market strategy, how sales enablement can be supercharged with RevOps, and what makes a great RevOps leader. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Sales is the lifeblood of a company's growth trajectory. However, when not properly executed, it can be a contributor for cost overruns and stalled growth. So what can you do to veer away from underperformance in your sales organization and achieve the results you should be getting? Stephen Hallowell of Highspot joins this episode to give us the answers. Having led major sales transformation efforts at some of the fastest-growing technology companies over the past several years, Stephen has the strategies to help us develop sales productivity in our companies. He discusses getting strong sales efficiency across your teams, understanding the importance of operating a best-in-class sales enablement team, and when you should think about starting a sales enablement function. Join Stephen in this conversation as he moves us deeper into the topic, guiding us with the wisdom to not only know what great looks like, but also scale it in sales. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Digital experience is all about giving people the best experience with as little friction as possible. DocuSign uniquely excels in this regard with a core product that is itself digital. Through its well-known eSignature product, DocuSign has become an early adapter of product-led growth before that very concept even existed. As people started to find themselves working remotely in the context of the pandemic, the company experienced an unprecedented growth in sales as people began to appreciate the pain point that it addresses. The company’s SVP, Robin Joy believes that even when the pandemic goes away, DocuSign will retain its command of its market because of the ease and efficiency that it offers. In this conversation with Rico Mallozzi, Robin shares how DocuSign defines digital experience, how her team has helped introduce millions of people to the platform through compelling web experiences, and how the company is gradually expanding its niche as a broader agreement cloud platform. She also discusses the role of performance marketing and enterprise tech and how best to manage leads between marketing and sales. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

When startups think about growth, they often focus on product and sales, but what is commonly overlooked is the critical role design can play in customer adoption. Steve Boak, the VP of Product Design at Datadog, and Rico Mallozzi explore the role of design in a developer tool company, how design can be a contributor to product adoption and growth, why it's important to let customers experience the whole product and the role of design in a DevOps company. They also get into how you can be consistent yet provide customization within your product, and the future of enterprise tech UX. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

Usage-based pricing is not new. We’ve been using it for decades on our electric bills and whatnot. What’s new is that it has gained a lot more acceptance at present when it comes to pricing enterprise software. What is driving this acceptance and how has it helped SaaS startups in their growth? Sam Lee, the Director of Pricing Strategy and Monetization at Snowflake, discusses how this system works for his company and how it can work (or not work) for others. He also shares other insights about pricing strategy, including a discussion on why value-based pricing has become the most popular paradigm at present, as well as how companies can hone in to the perfect pricing mechanism for their products. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

There is no one standard in creating a sales engine for a team, but any leader can drive everyone towards success by knowing the right factors to take into consideration for this. Joining Rico Mallozzi to discuss the right recipe for this is Kyle Coleman, the VP of Revenue Growth & Enablement for Clari. Together, they share how to determine the right synergies to apply in a sales engine, how to always align core values to business processes, the attitude of embracing failures, and the best strategies for hiring people to the team. Kyle also talks about his experiences and challenges in today's mostly virtual setting by telling the story of their transition to remote work, as well as a few important tidbits in doing email marketing. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com

How does a tech startup claim its rightful place among the ranks of goliath competitors? The team at Sumo Logic knows that it can’t just ram its head against 800-pound gorillas in the marketplace, so it devised ways to enter the house from the sides. The company’s Chief Revenue Officer, Steve Fitz is here on the show to explain how Sumo Logic combines a bottom-up sales motion with a top-down sales approach. He also talks about how to break down demand generation between sales and marketing, how to create real customer-centricity with your customer, and how to find the best sales candidates for your firm. Possessing over 25 years of experience in sales leadership, Steve throws in a few nuggets of valuable sales wisdom that you wouldn’t want to miss. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! SapphireVentures.com