17 Talks From Seasoned Entrepreneurs
At every Business of Software Conference we record the talks so that you, the great people of the internet, can join in the feast of learning that our attendees get to gorge themselves upon. We release new talks regularly right here on our blog.
Below, you’ll find the 17 videos we’ve published so far this year. Speakers include Rahul Vohra (Founder/CEO, Superhuman), Wade Foster (Founder/CEO, Zapier), Jane Austin (Director of Product Design, Babylon Health), Jared Spool (Founder, UIE), and many more.
We’ve grouped them into 6 categories, for you to browse easily:
- Leadership
- Product & UX
- Building Teams
- Creativity
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Models
Come, join a multitude of SaaS entrepreneurs at the great watering hole of knowledge to learn from some incredible teachers.
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1 – Leadership
In this talk from BoS USA 2018 Peldi shared another honest update about his worries in Balsamiq’s milestone 10th year. On realizing he’s still too integral to the business, Peldi started the ‘Winter 2018 Injected Turbulence Project’ – delegated product design and engineering management, deleted Slack and witter from his phone, and stopped watching their internal wiki. What did he learn?
Wade Foster and his co-founder started Zapier (it rhymes with ‘happier’) back in 2011 during a hackathon. Now, the company has over 160 employees and no office. Zapier is a fully remote company and has no intention of changing that. Here, Wade shares his processes for running a fully remote organization – how Zapier goes about hiring and onboarding their employees, how they run meetings, and how they work to continuously improve their culture. There’s also a great Q&A and a follow-up hangout with loads more on running a remote company.
Tom Adeyoola’s self-confessed list of ‘fails’ at previous jobs is… significant. Technology launched before the market was ready, a funded company run into the grown, struggling to reach the heights of an American counterpart. However his current business, Metail, is going from strength to strength. Here, Tom outlines some of the key things he learned during his ‘fails’ that have helped propel Metail to the level of success they’re currently experiencing with the help of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Innovation is hard. It takes more than a clever idea to make a business. Tendayi Viki works with entrepreneurs in startups and large corporates who are looking to innovate. Here he presents 8 business model questions to consider when attempting to innovate, followed by a Q&A with some great questions about innovating in a large corporate.
2 – Product & UX
While building Superhuman, CEO/Founder Rahul Vohra built a Product-Market Fit Engine. Using Sean Ellis’ Product-Market Fit Survey, Rahul and his team set up a process for optimizing Superhuman’s Product-Market Fit. At #BoS2018, he laid out the framework and explained how they use it. This talk is incredibly practical – watch it, learn it, apply it in your company. There’s also a follow-up hangout with some great Q&A on how to implement Rahul’s methodology.
Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. What do we believe – our gut or the data? In the world of KPIs, some practices, like growth hacking Monthly Average Users (MAUs), have hurt the online experience. What can help designers have better instincts? What do you really need to help management interpret data and create analytical experiments that provide design insights?
Carl Ryden has been a regular attendee at Business of Software Conferences for a long time. His company PrecisionLender has been seeing incredible growth over the past few years, providing a huge amount of value in the banking sector. In this talk, Carl talks about how PrecisionLender use AI to offer a valuable service to their customers, and what he sees as the future of AI.
How can good design be integrated into your business profitably? Jane answers the question by considering the ‘anti-problem’, sharing 10 ways designers and business people can guarantee their behaviours and activities will ensure they never see eye-to-eye, their efforts will be wasted and everyone involved will know it is not their fault. You will probably recognise most of these techniques in action in your own organisation… Watch, and learn how to integrate design into your team effectively.
Growth is often measured in terms of market share, customers or revenue, with the onus on marketing and sales to grow the business. Expensify however, has become the fastest-growing ERP software in the world not by growing the sales or marketing teams, but by developing a uniquely user-driven product. In this talk from BoS USA 2017, Expensify Founder/CEO David Barrett shares his insights on building product-led growth, and what it means to create a product so engaging that it can spur and maintain its own growth organically.
3 – Building Teams
There are 3 reasons your team isn’t doing what you want them to do, says Mikey Trafton.
- They don’t know what you want them to do
- They aren’t motivated to do what you want them to do
- They’re not capable of doing what you want them to do
In his 3rd talk at Business of Software, Mikey picked up from where he left off at the end of his previous talk ‘How To Recruit A Badass Team‘. You’ve hired a great team, but you need to learn how to manage them. Mikey is here to help you help your employees succeed with processes, tools, advice, and war stories from his experience as an entrepreneur.
Hiring a group of talented people is difficult. Making that talented team work together well, now that’s even harder. In this talk from BoS Europe 2018 Alison Coward gave some great advice on how you can design the way a team communicates and works together to ensure you get the most out of everyone on the team. If you’re looking to improve your team’s collaboration, this is a must-watch.
4 – Creativity
After years of smuggling creativity into the corporate sector without getting busted, Tania learned that we don’t need to be in a job that is distinctly creative in order to be distinctly creative in our job. In fact, no matter how tedious the task, or how buttoned-up the office environment, we can all learn to conjure imagination anywhere, anytime. How? By choosing to stand out rather than fit in. Tania shares tools and strategies for taking more creative risks, leading with more imagination, facing fears and embracing obstacles as an opportunity to accelerate growth, and the ability to find inspiration where others see only limitations.
When is a creative idea a good idea? How do you manage creativity within your organization? And how can looking at history help you to be creative now? Scott Berkun, author of The Dance Of The Possible, spoke at Business of Software Conference USA 2017 about how to unlock your creativity and pursue it in your workplace. Looking back at examples from history including The Eiffel Tower, the invention of the Post-It Note, and the development of the Computer Mouse, Scott’s talk is all about how to think creatively at work – and why it’s so important.
5 – Sales & Marketing
No marketing channel scales infinitely. That’s the message Nilan opens his talk from BoS Europe 2018 with. So how do you build sustainable marketing to keep your business growing sustainably? Drawing on past experience working with early-stage startups and as VP Growth at TransferWise, Nilan gave a three-pronged talk on the subject:
- Learnings from running Marketing at early-stage startups
- Optimizing for Word-of-Mouth at TransferWise
- The Economics of a Mission-Driven Business
This talk is full of stories and marketing tips from the first 6 years of TransferWise – highly recommended!
Paul Kenny is no stranger to the Business of Software Conference stage. A sales coach with experience working with software companies including Redgate and StackExchange, Paul has a huge amount of experience and insight to share on the process of selling your software. In this talk from BoS USA 2017, Paul talked about the important things to get right to set your company up well to turn your software into money.
6 – Business Models
There are few people as qualified to talk about the landscape of software investment as Bill Janeway. On joining Venture Capital firm Warburg Pincus in 1988 he built their IT Investment practice, which focussed heavily on Enterprise Software. It’s fair to say that they were pretty successful, investing in companies like VERITAS and BEA… In this talk, Bill looks at the state of the software investment market and comments on how the move to SaaS has affected the enterprise market.
Warren Buffett said “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” We’ve all experienced that feeling of immense ignorance as leaders of software businesses. One area of constant anxiety is not really knowing how adjusting or changing one component of our business will impact the whole. Software businesses contain an incredible number of moving parts and variables. How can we isolate and study them? For most of us, it’s a combination of trial and error and learning from others’ mistakes when they’re brave enough to share them. Matt wondered: could he write software to simulate the future of his business?
Learn how great SaaS & software companies are run
We produce exceptional conferences & content that will help you build better products & companies.
Join our friendly list for event updates, ideas & inspiration.