SaaStr—the world’s largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs—held its fourth European conference in London on June 7 and 8, and Attuned was along for the ride!

Held at Tobacco Dock, a 200-year-old warehouse building that has been converted into one of the city’s most unique event spaces, this was the first time that SaaStr Europa had been held in London, and was the largest edition of the event to date, with more than 4,000 attendees, 400+ VCs, and over 100 workshops and sessions featuring heavy hitters from across the world of SaaS.

SaaStr Europa 2023 was held at Tobacco Dock in London

As ever, SaaStr Founder & CEO Jason Lemkin kicked things off with a keynote address that set the scene for the SaaS industry in 2023: It’s a tough time for SaaS companies generally, and, since everyone has to get twice as far on half as much money right now, efficiency has rarely been more important. Lemkin also stressed the significance of Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and the two questions that matter most for SaaS companies right now: How quickly can you grow and how efficiently?

Among the other big names in attendance was Joe Thomas, CEO & Co-founder of Loom. He recounted how his startup was just two weeks from running out of money in 2016, before a bold decision to launch a standalone video recorder turned things around in spectacular fashion, ultimately leading to 14 million (and counting) users and a $1.5 billion valuation.

Among Thomas’s insights were the need for founders to be able to roll with the punches and switch things up by orienting their short-term priorities around customers’ needs—”Make agility your superpower!”—and the keys to successful product-led-growth (PLG), including: Make a product so good that people tell their friends about it.

Indeed, PLG was one of the hot topics of SaaStr Europa 2023, and it was a subject that received a deep dive in a session intriguingly titled ‘Product is King and PLG is King Kong’. Here, Pietro Bezza, Managing Partner at Connect Ventures, Georgia Stevenson, Partner at Index Ventures, Stephanie Bowker, Co-founder at Ourspace, and Madeline Parra, CEO & Co-founder at Purple Dot, discussed ‘The PLG Trifecta’: Product-led distribution (PLD), which occurs when the product markets itself; product-led adoption (PLA), when the product sells itself; and product-led expansion (PLE), when the product up-sells itself.

Daniel Dines, CEO & Founder of UiPath (the largest cloud IPO of 2021) and Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel, also shared their unique insights into PLG, while sessions with Kyle Poyar, Operating Partner at OpenView,  Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-founder at Cockroach Labs, and Bill Magnuson, CEO & Co-founder at Braze, were among the other highlights.

But it was Lemkin himself who provided the most wide-ranging session of the conference with a two-hour open Q&A at the end of Day 2. As well as sharing some revealing personal anecdotes and providing specific advice in response to startup founders’ questions, he also dropped a number of his ever-quotable business bon mots, including:

• “Not everyone on your team really needs to be on your mission. But almost all the first 50 employees do. Hire pirates and romantics at least until you are truly ready to scale.”

• “Assume you’re unfundable until someone tells you otherwise” (in response to one startup CEO mentioning that they were “between Series A and Series B”)

• “There is no such thing as karma, but don’t get jaded and stay in the game and you’ll get opportunities”

• “Luck doesn’t exist, and if it does it comes from staying in the game”

• “Those that don’t quit will beat those who are smarter in the long run”

Lemkin also teased that London is likely to be the new permanent home for SaaStr Europa.

The next SaaStr event takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area from September 6-8, 2023.

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