Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
One of the earliest employees at Uber, Andre Charoo saw firsthand what it takes to build a global tech powerhouse. Now, as General Partner of Maple VC, Andre invests in Canadian founders building the next generation of companies. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Andre shared more about his principle of “durability” and how to create stronger startups.
Key takeaways:
- Initial demand can be alluring, but make sure to track costs of acquisition, cost to service, and retention as well to get the whole picture.
- Product-market fit is a continuum, but you can feel it through inbound demand and high retention.
- Focus on compounding your product, adding every sprint to build the best possible solution for your ideal customers.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
The best companies aren’t necessarily the ones that sell for billions—they are the ones that last. The ones that become part of everyday consciousness and persist over long periods of time.
Andre Charoo, General Partner at Maple VC, calls them “durable” companies. He was part of one himself, as employee number 25 at Uber, and now he hopes to invest in “durable” founders for the future.
Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Andre shared more about how to build the foundations of durability into your company at the earliest stages.
Durability in hindsight
Analyzing companies for durability, Andre found they have a few key things in common.
- A founding team with non-linear backgrounds that has a non-consensus view of the future.
- Product ideas—based on that future—that many intelligent people think are stupid.
- An opportunity to own a small TAM before either dominating a big market or creating a new category.
- Initially unscalable go-to-market tactics that net early fans who became evangelists.
“Durable companies that can persist and compound over a long period of time and make their way into everyday and everyone’s consciousness,” said Andre.
Spotting durability at Seed
It’s easy to spot durability after the fact, but Andre believes it leaves clues at the early stages.
First, it’s about the ambition of the founders, which speaks to their non-linear backgrounds and how they might approach building a category.
Second, it’s clarifying all the assumptions that prop their unique insight. Said another way, it’s understanding what needs to happen in order for their insight to be correct.
Third, it’s validating whether the team is truly building a new way to offer a product or service that the market hasn’t seen before.
Examples like this abound in Canadian tech. For example, Workleap (formerly Gsoft) learned the insight that mid-market businesses didn’t need every feature that enterprise software offered. A lot of people said the mid-market was an untenable space. By building for this segment—and charging a fraction of the price of competitors—the company grew to centaur status with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Legaltech behemoth Clio had the insight that lawyers wanted high-quality technology and would happily move beyond paper filing cabinets. Many thought the idea was stupid; the company raised over $1 billion for its Series D round in mid-2024.
Building durability
Here are Andre’s tips for building the skills of durability—then bringing that into your company.
Uncovering insights
Discovering secrets comes from being out in the world; the key is to be open to the secrets around you and to push through the negativity that will surely come your way.
“A unique insight can come from a set of experiences that you saw that other people did not see or that you experienced that other people did not experience,” said Andre. “[It can come from] interacting with customers even when you were employed at a company where other people were not interacting with those customers.”
“But not everyone has the ambition, endurance, and persistence when you’re being told no,” Andre continued. “That’s the first order effect that you’re going to face for a very long time.”
Zeroes, ones, & twos
Andre encourages all founders to understand themselves more deeply; he uses a framework he calls “zeros, ones, and two.”
- A “zero” is an inventor. They have the technical ability to bring an idea to life.
- A “one” is a builder. They are often the visionary who can see something that others can’t, and they can find the “non-obvious” starting point for the company.
- A “two” is an operator. They focus on execution and operationalizing different areas of the business.
“The trick is you need all three to build a durable company in this world,” said Andre.
This is complicated by the fact that it’s mostly builders who can find the other two personas—Andre said it’s rarely the other way around.
But the good news is that most people can function as all three, depending on the context.
Andre shared himself as an example—he was an operator at Uber in the early days. He tried his hand at being a builder with his own startup, but that context didn’t fit and it failed. However, he’s now a builder at Maple VC, with advisors covering “inventor” and “operator” personas, because the context matched his vision and skills.
“Which role is your superpower best served in the context of what you’re building?” said Andre. “Everyone needs to find their thing. That’s my version of founder-market fit.”
Sometimes durability means joining someone else
Rather than seeing builder as a vaunted status only applicable to founders, Andre believes all three personas (zero, one, and two) can apply inside of an organization as well.
Your vision, for instance, might be a new way to build a business unit inside of a global firm. Your invention skills might be a game-changing feature. Or your operational skills could unlock massive growth as a COO employee, rather than co-founder.
“The faster and the more self-aware you can be of what your superpower is and where you should be playing in the ecosystem, particularly as it relates to startup building, the more impact we will make,” said Andre.