Since its inception 3 years ago, SaaStock has become THE main gathering of the European SaaS community. Being primarily a SaaS investor at Point Nine, we always look forward to contributing by organising a tactical side event on the first day of the conference.

Being based out of Berlin but investing globally (we’ve invested in 20+ geographies so far, from New Zealand to SF), we strongly believe that you can start a SaaS leader from anywhere in the world. But this is only possible if a startup can successfully internationalise, hence our dedication to help the broader SaaS community think about the topic in a tactical manner.

Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO of Algolia, Bill Macaitis, CMO of Slack/Zendesk, Rachel Delacour, CEO of BIME, David Skok, GP at Matrix Partners, Jonathan Angelov, COO ofAircall, and Christoph during last year’s workshop about US expansion.

Last year, we organised a workshop about US expansion and had a fantastic time hosting 50 founders and the lineup that you’ll see on the left. But while we believe that you need to win the US market in almost all cases (the data from this post tells why), we also want to help founders expanding to other countries.

With that in mind, for this year’s workshop, we’ll speak more broadly about geographical expansion in other European countries or in the US!

Speakers

Operators

We’ve tried to lineup speakers from different European countries but also ones that started expanding in other countries at different times. The idea is that they can give tactical advice not only to founders that are thinking about internationalizing but also to those who have already moved and are looking for best practices when they’ve reached different stages.

Morten Primdahl, is one of the three founders of Zendesk. Very early on, right after raising their Series A with CRV, Morten moved to the US, first to Boston and then to SF. Having been there for nearly a decade and growing the company from a little more than 10 to nearly three thousand, we could not find a better person to speak about how to transition to the US.
Phil Chambers, the CEO of Peakon is also a Danish entrepreneur. Peakon has raised more than $30M since they started and are now selling in the Nordics, the UK, France, Oceania and in the US. Hard to find a better geographical coverage!
Gideon Pridor is the VP Marketing of TravelPerk. Prior to Travelperk, Gideon successfully expanded from Israel to the US, another interesting move we will cover during the workshop.
Beyond being our local Irish entrepreneur, Conor O’Loughlin is the founder and CEO of Glofox. He recently moved to the US to expand his business there, he’ll have the freshest memories (and pieces of advice) on how to think about US expansion when you’re a European founder.

In case you didn’t notice, we also had mainly French founders last year, you’ll notice that we’ve diversified a little the origin of our founders this year :)

VCs

We’re also pretty proud to announce our lineup of VCs:

David Skok is a General Partner at Matrix. We’ve renewed almost entirely our panel for this year but we could not resist inviting David again.
Adam Marcus, Managing Partner at Openview in Boston will also join us. Openview has built a special expertise in helping companies from outside of the US to expand in other markets. They even have a dedicated team focusing on the topic of market expansion.
And finally, Christoph will bring his experience working with European companies like Algolia, Contentful or Zendesk during their US expansion.

Secure a ticket?

As with last year, we want to make sure to build the right mix of audience, and so we will restrict the audience to 50 people. To secure your ticket, ask your most burning questions about internationalisation by filling this short Typeform.

We’ll get back to you with an invite shortly after reviewing applications — please apply before September 30th!

Lara, Louis and the rest of the P9 Team

Need inspiration to find a question or still not convinced to join us? Here are the slides from last year with some of the questions people asked through the Typeform.

Embedded content: https://app.ludus.one/cb7d4da7-8e14-4c95-bf56-35530125e2bf/full

Best practices internationalising a SaaS…