SAAS NORTH is excited bring back our partnership with BetaKit for another year! Re-introducing, the BetaKit Keynote Stage!
BetaKit is known for sharing cutting-edge, timely insights on Canada’s tech ecosystem – The BetaKit Keynote Stage is where you’ll see the people that are building and financing Canadian SaaS.
Check out the keynote sessions that SAAS NORTH + BetaKit have in store for 2022!
-More speakers to be added, schedule subject to change.
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.
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 burnout.
With over two decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur and founder, Dan Martell will teach you the secrets to work less and play more while building an empire. 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. And 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.
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 business.
The investment frenzy we all witnessed in the fall of 2021 has suddenly come to a standstill. Investors are pulling back the reigns to re-evaluate their portfolios and investing strategies. The fallout of this free-for-all has seen SaaS start-ups downsize and brace for lower valuations.
Many startup founders are asking: what’s the path to weather this economic downturn? We curated three seasoned investors to convey their perspectives on the state of the market and what this means for valuations, resource allocation and raising money during this precarious time.
In the world of SaaS, it is common for sustaining growth to be more challenging than attaining initial traction. In this talk, Asia Orangio, will take you through real-life case studies of how she helped her clients find hidden growth opportunities to increase their revenue. You’ll walk away with strategies and frameworks you can apply to reignite stalled SaaS Growth.
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.
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.
Over the last eight years, Toronto-based B2B software startup Loopio has grown from 3 Co-founders to a 280-person strong company boasting over 1,400 customers. From 3+ years of bootstrapping, to being VC-backed for another 3+ years, and most recently, their Private Equity investment ($252 million CAD), Co-founder & CEO Zak Hemraj has had to constantly evolve himself and the company. In this session, you’ll learn about Zak’s key takeaways from each distinct chapter of growth, how he’s had to evolve as a CEO, and some challenges & failures along the way.
As a leader in the SaaS, recurring revenue world, your job is always getting harder. Competition is increasing. Your customers are expecting more from you. The relative value of your features is declining. The strategies you’ve used to grow your company in the past aren’t going to work for you. You can either adapt to the new SaaS economy or fall behind.
Given these shifts and some unique and proprietary SaaS market data, Chief Strategy Officer at Paddle and Founder of Profitwell, Patrick Campbell will be showcasing the results of a deep study on what’s shifted (and how you can thrive despite these challenges).
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.
You’ve made the very challenging decision to downsize your workforce. It wasn’t easy. But nonetheless, here you are, preparing to lay off a percentage of your staff. You know, if this process isn’t handled properly, it could cause a huge disruption to your Saas business (and affect more folks down the road).
More than 81,000 people have been laid off from the tech sector worldwide this year, including thousands at Canadian companies, and further cutbacks are likely. As a Founder/CEO or senior operator, how can you navigate big, tricky changes (such as downsizing) and how can you gracefully overcome obstacles that set you up for success in the long term?
Join Founders, Miranda Lievers, Co-Founder and COO at Thinkific and Kris Hartvigsen, CEO + Founder at Dooly as they have a candid conversation about their layoffs. They’ll talk about what they went through, how they did it, what they regret looking back, the advice they’d give to other founders and exec teams, and more.
As your SaaS companies grows, it becomes increasingly important to identify expansion opportunities. Global expansion is a huge opportunity for revenue growth. But with many cultural, financial and practical differences to consider, gobal growth depends on careful strategy and commitment.
In this session, join executives at Hubspot, Clio and Stripe as they talk about their approaches, challenges and global expansion strategies. This session will cover everything from readiness, commitment and resources as well as measuring success and the return on investment.
Paddle is quite a non-traditional, forward-thinking tech company with a non-traditional Founder at its helm. Join Christian Owens, Founder & CEO Paddle, and Meagan Simpson, Senior Editor for BetaKit as they talk about Paddle’s journey from 0 to $1.4B and the lessons, stories, and hard-won advice that comes along with building and scaling a SaaS business that serves SaaS businesses.
8 finalists will be selected by our judges to pitch their SaaS company live at SAAS NORTH in front of our audience of SaaS investors & entrepreneurs.
James Povitz
Principal NAventures
National Bank Of Canada’s Corporate Venture Capital Arm
Melissa Allen
Executive Director
League of Innovators
Russell Samuels
Pertner
Whitecap Ventures
Meryeme Lahmami
Principal
Pender Ventures
Katheleen Eva
Venture Capital
StandUp Ventures
Kelly Jacques
VC Investor
Inovia Capital
Patrick White
Managing Director
L-SPARK
The Firehood’s savvy Angel investors will be onsite at this year’s conference – looking to unearth your SaaS/tech gem! This is your chance to meet active women angel investors from across Canada.
Claudette McGowan
Co-Founder
The Firehood
Danielle Graham
Co-Founder
The Firehood
