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Arnbjörn Eggerz: Thanks a lot for your valuable time. You describe yourself often as a nerd, but you became a VC. Then you are all over the place from Iran to Venezuela. So, who is Michiel Kotting and what made you become an investor?

Michiel Kotting: I have a healthy dose of curiosity and ADD, which makes me love the work of being an investor and meeting great entrepreneurs and ideas day-in, day-out. My experience in tech, starting companies (successfully and unsuccessfully) and running large teams gives me a deep respect for the entrepreneur in front of me.

Arnbjörn Eggerz: For me it is interesting that you directly point in your answer towards the entrepreneur, a role you had yourself. So, I wonder: What was the particular reason that made you decide to become an investor? Was it an opportunity coming up or more mission driven like “I didn't like the VC model and decided I want to do it myself and improve it”?

Michiel Kotting: It definitely wasn’t premeditated. What happened was that I started my second company with the backing of Accel, which I did as an EIR (entrepreneur in residence). So, when I was starting the company, I was sitting in the offices and I joined the Monday meeting and I

Here we publish a list with various SaaStock16 reviews and videos:

Review by Episode 1 - an investor that makes early stage investments in businesses that are powered by software

It is four weeks after SaaStock16 in Dublin. With the necessary distance and reflection, I can only say that it was a high-quality event. Compliments to the SaaStock 16 team.

It was definitely time to have a dedicated SaaS event in Europe (see here). The sector is maturing and fast evolving in Europe. Thus, it is s a good sign of the development in the European SaaS arena that such an event finally could take place.

But what are the most important lessons from the conference, besides meeting like-minded people working with an interesting business and delivery model?

Here are three great lessons I want to share with you:

Product market fit and the history of SaaS – is SaaS (still) innovative?

I must be fully honest. I would not have

European SaaS is emerging both in quality and quantity as e.g. the impressive number of participants at SaaStock showed.

One of the best known investors in European SaaS (and even based in Germany) is Point Nine Capital, the Angel VC.
After SaaStock16 Christoph Janz, co-founder and managing partner took the time for an interview to talk about the fund, latest issues in European SaaS and his takeaways from the conference.

The interview includes the ...

European SaaS is emerging both in quality and quantity as e.g. the impressive number of participants at SaaStock showed.

One of the coolest SaaS startups in Europe is Algolia, the search API. And during SaaStock16 there was the opportunity to interview Nicolas Dessaigne, CO-founder and CEO.

Nicolas has been so nice to sit down with me after a long conference day to talk about the latest in European SaaS and his company and him as founder.
The interview includes the ...

 If you ever tried to compile a list with European SaaS events, one quickly figured out that there was nearly no one in Europe and no way to think about an event like SaaS Str.

Sure. There have been some events e.g. organized by VC's like Point Nine and Christopher Janz in Berlin, but they are for portfolio companies, friends and selected participants.
You could maybe name the Eurocloud event in Germany, but the focus here is not on SaaS alone but cloud in general.

For the rest the topic SaaS was just one among the many sectors on the various startup events you can frequent in Europe.

a new and promissing SaaS event in Europe

Great news - this is going to change now: on October 15 and 17nd 2018 there will be SaaS Stock 2016 in Dublin, a conference in Europe exclusively built around the topic SaaS - especially B2B SaaS and European SaaS startups - for the first time.
Iceventure will of course participate which for us seems to be "a must", especially since the list of speakers and participants already looks more than interesting. The agenda also has a number of promising topics.

The top three topics on European SaaS from the agenda

As agendas are always good indicators of hot topics in an industry and you might not be able to attend I shortly present my top three SaaS topics:

Nr 1 - Don't F**k up: Scaling into the US

A fast market entry into the U.S. is it obligatory for European SaaS companies. Because the U.S.A. is the most important core market for software and an important element in the growth strategy (more in this interview). A consolidated insight into this topic for confronting our view is of course very interesting. Both participants from the company side - Nicolas Dessaigne of Algolia and Ray Smith of Datahug.com (besides there will be also Will Prendergast for Frontline Ventures) hopefully divide into and share many important experience from their own growth story. Especially the case of Algolia is very interesting in my point of view given they are based in France. It is a pity that CartoDB does not participate, too.

Nr. 2 - The customer success maturity model

Customer success and the roll of the customer success manager are still very much unknown in Germany and Europe. E.g., we very often encounter the question if at all and when this role should be introduced in a SaaS company. Thus, I am looking forward to see the model and criterial others deploy around this role and mission critical goal.

Nr. 3 - Genius or luck what it takes to build a successful SMB SaaS business

The title alone is very interesting. Because it still remains a fact that the diffusion of SaaS in Enterprise Software is only around 20% to 30%. This fact is interesting especially from the macroeconomic view we at Iceventure often take and consider it one of the unsolved questions concerning process innovation and competitiveness. This is for the fact that especially SMEs should particularly profit from SaaS solutions and therefor adopt faster. On the other side, especially small businesses have difficulties adopting SaaS partially for the data security issue partially since enterprise business SaaS solutions still need a lot of internal IT expertise to be used accordingly. Thus, I expect that this is triggering a good discussion.
Both speakers Alex Ferrera from Bessemer Venture Partner and Martin Henk from Pipedrive are a very promising. Moreover, this not only for the fact that I found the approach of Pipedrive to estimate the market volume to determine the target group very promising.

This concludes the top three SaaS hot issues list and I think customers of our SaaS business model seminar will profit form new inputs of these topics of the agenda at SaaS Stock.

But it is not only the excitement of finally having a European SaaS event that drives us to Dublin. It is more the fact that the event is a very good occasion to discuss a couple of issues with other participants, too.

The status fundraising for European SaaS is here among the first on the list (and a good reason to update our PDF who invest in European SaaS). By the way, the participation rate of investors (and the number of those who send partners) is very high and reported to be around 100. A great indicator that finally European SaaS moves. So think twice as SaaS startup, if you will not participate.

Then it is very important for me to hear what other participants think about the development of the customer acquisition costs (CAC) in recent years. In addition, what is their reaction to the developments? Because there are some real doubts recently that CAC are too high in comparison to the realistically realizable CTLV, but will stay so, given that there is more financing around coming from VCs and due to the favorable monetary conditions by FED and ECB.
Thus the question is, should you adjust CAC and the individual marketing strategy or might it be much better to adjust the pricing screw.

In sum, there are many issues on the agenda to discuss and to exchange experience around Software as a Service in Europe. It seems to be a great SaaS event already today, around which more reports and articles follow.

 I have been asked the questions many times in the last years: SaaS in Europe in principal a good idea, but who invests in them?

The good news is, there has been quite a change as we find an increasing numbers of Europe based SaaS only VCs as well as US veterans investing in Europe. In addition, many funds invest at least parts of their portfolio in Software as a Service in Europe.

This does not make it easier to start and scale a SaaS business to €100 M in Europe, but at least it is a starting point.

If you know an investor that is missing, drop as a line or a comment. I plan to update the list in intervals.
No liabilities for accuracy or completeness

Check our other resources on SaaS in the links below

If you want to know more about all KPIs and sides of the SaaS business model check out Iceventure's SaaS online training or read our articels on saas here on the blog. Get your idea or company off the ground: 1h Start-up Online Consulting

SaaS in Europe is still far behind compared to the U.S. with about 20% adoption rate. This is not only valid for users, the camp of Europen SaaS start-ups was also rather small. This is changing as was visible on the Web Summit 2015.

The interview is the third in a series of portraits of European SaaS startups to show their solutions, potential and problems.
Thus it was a pleasure to talk to Gherardo Carullo, Founder of Enoron, a London based SaaS startup by an Italian founder.'
The solution is for lawers to manager all their

SaaS in Europe is still far behind compared to the U.S. with about 20% adoption rate. This is not only valid for users, the camp of Europen SaaS start-ups was also rather small. This is changing as was visible on the Web Summit 2015.

The interview with Michele Barbera from Spaziodati is the second in a series of portraits of European SaaS startups to show their solutions, potential and problems.