Event category: BetaKit Keynote Stage

Serial entrepreneur, Louis Tetu, has seen this tape before. Throughout his 30+ years leading multiple international technology businesses at 3 public software companies, Tetu has learned how to weather economic storms to ensure no good crisis goes to waste.

While no one could have predicted some of the macroeconomic or political issues that were on the horizon, one thing was very clear to Tetu: a decade of economic growth and low cost of capital could not last forever. Tetu’s current company, artificial intelligence platforms leader Coveo, had arguably one of the better-timed IPOs of 2021, raising $247M in November 2021.

In times of turbulence, as in times of growth, you can always set your business up for success by thinking long-term and developing strategies to take advantage of the environment, by thinking differently. Now that a perfect economic storm is upon us, leaders must remind themselves that there is a sun above the clouds, despite not seeing it.

Louis will share personal views, inspired from his experience, about how to think about growth, talent, workplace, efficiency, markets and products in turbulent times, and how to emerge stronger longer term.

In August of 2021, Kathleen Chan, CEO & Co-Founder at Calico raised a CAD $2.6 million seed round which included Serena Williams. Shortly after, in November 2021, Shawn Hewat, CEO & Co-Founder of Wavy, raised a CAD $2.5 million seed round. In this SaaS North session, Shawn & Kathleen alongside early-stage investor Eva Lau will sit down with Betakit’s Douglas Soltys to talk about raising capital. In this candid session, you will learn what investors look for, how to navigate the process of raising your first round and how to manage your investors afterward.

In the world of SaaS, it is common for sustaining growth to be more challenging than attaining initial traction. What do you do when you're trying to reach the next growth milestone, but nothing really seems to stick? Squeezing ad channels doesn't quite net the big, dramatic result in growth you were expecting. You're at a loss for what part of the market to focus on next. Slow or unexciting growth happens all the time, but there are ways that we can overcome the slowness and beat the "Slow SaaS ramp of death". In this talk, Asia Orangio, CEO and Founder of DemandMaven, will take you through the complete end-to-end process of how SaaS companies can find growth opportunities that may not seem so obvious. Plus, see a case study of how she helped her client take advantage of those growth opportunities and 10x their revenue.

In April of 2021, Autodesk, the publicly traded software company announced that it acquired Upchain, a Toronto-based startup offering a cloud-based product life cycle management (PLM) service.

In this behind-the-scenes tell-all from tech entrepreneur, John Laslavic, you’ll hear the learnings on how John built (and eventually sold) Upchain: what worked, what didn’t, and what he would do differently, building, scaling and ultimately getting acquired.

Alison Taylor, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Jane, began her entrepreneurial journey by opening a multi-disciplinary healthcare clinic called Canopy in 2011. Running and owning a small business taught Ali the foundations of business along with a deep empathy for the life of a small business owner.

In 2014, Ali and co-founder Trevor launched a new business called Jane. Jane is now being used by over 100,000 practitioners around the world to run their practice. In this unapologetic founder-focused talk, Ali will talk about Jane's story, growth, challenges, failures, successes, and more. She'll teach you Jane's unique growth model along with their approach to sales, support, and customer success as well as her lessons learned from growing a 8-figure product-led SaaS business.

In this talk, Dan Martell, 5x SaaS founder, will teach you how to scale rapidly and improve your business operations and outcomes. But most importantly, he will show you how to grow your SaaS without the 100-hour work weeks or the founder stress. In other words, he'll teach you how to scale your SaaS business, fast, while avoiding founder burnout.

With over two decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur and founder, Dan Martell will teach you the secrets to work smarter, awhile growing your SaaS. He’ll dig into the practical steps that will allow you to start buying back time immediately, while also developing operating procedures and hiring practices that will ensure rapid and robust growth. Lastly, he will teach you how to invest in your newfound time wisely—at work and at home—so you keep building your empire while living your best life. Get unstuck, reclaim your freedom, and build your empire.

The PLG movement gained prominence during the boom times. But it’s even more relevant today amid a recession. This is because PLG can deliver CAC-efficient growth, while also reducing costs across your company. Get the PLG playbook to help you navigate the downturn from Blake Bartlett, software VC and the guy who coined the term “product-led growth” way back in 2016.