From 0 to 100 Employees: How to Scale with Speedinvest Markus Lang, Partner @ Speedinvest

SaaStr Europa 2024

1. From 0 to 100 Employees:
How to Scale with Speedinvest
Markus Lang
Partner, SaaS & Infra
Speedinvest

2. The startup lifecycle (at least in theory)
Pre-Startup Start-up Growth
-1 3210-2
Ideation Concepting Commitment Validation Scaling Establishing
growth
Vision & Mission MVP PMF Scale
time
Pre-Seed
Seed
Series A (and subsequent rounds)

3. Fundraising rounds of early-stage startups
Pre-Seed Seed Series A
Product Pre-market Ready for market Scalable
Traction No metrics Early metrics Metrics + revenue
Valuation €4-10M €8-20M €30M+
Capital need €0.5-2M €2-6M €10M+
Assets team,
(basic) technology,
massive vision
POC product, BM hypothesis
incl. GTM, market size
Unit economics
growth
Missing/unknown Customer pain solved, BM,
market size, GTM
POC business model,
meaningful revenues
Profits
This
might
Found
something!
Works,
grow it!

4. In other words:
Scaling a company is damn hard.
??????
20%
Graduation rate to Series A

5. 10 Golden Rules
…from 0 to 100

6. Team ??????
Spend more time on hiring than you (likely) want to.
Yes, it is worth your time despite your full to-do list.
Hire slow, fire fast.
Do both things by yourself, especially in the early days.
Your first ten hires will shape your culture.
Introduce processes slowly, but stick to them.
Structured performance management becomes key once you reach Series A.
#1
#2
#3
#4

7. Business ??????
Not all revenue is created equal.
(1) customer types (2) contract terms (one-off? pilot? SaaS or service?) matter
Burn Multiple is your friend to balance growth & efficiency.
Net burn divided by net new NRR
Try to lead with data from day 1.
Anecdotal evidence can kill your company
#5
#6
#7

8. Fundraising ??????
Deck, P&L, KPIs, Product Demo, VDR
Approach fundraising like key account management.
(1) Relationship > transactional (2) Ongoing > one-off
You raise round #1 on the promise, but #2 on progress.
(1) Raise as late as possible, as early as needed (2) Raise rather more.
#8
#9
#10

9. Key Takeaways
#1
Personally spend a lot of time hiring top talents that
promote your culture and get rid of a**holes fast.
#2
The best companies manage to belance efficiency & growth
even though its incredibly hard.
#3
Fundraising has to be a full-year priority.

10. KPI Cheatsheet: bit.ly/si-revenue
speedinvest.com/saas
[email protected]
Thank you!