Whether Scale at all Cost is Worth it for a SaaS Startup | TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

um now scale at all costs well we're in it we're not in Kansas anymore are we you know it's not 2021 whereas a markets are nuts and Bitcoin is going crazy um we are in 2023 so we're on a different place right now so how do you scale SAS you've got to we've got to be talking about this so um the the markets are changing so how do we but we've got to keep going as we've just heard from Catherine and her

panel so the best way of talking about this is to get up some fantastic experts on now Jill Chase from capital G and Guillermo Roche from versel to talk about the taxes they think that SAS startups should use today to keep growing right and the ones that they should avoid and to curate this wonderful conversation is going to be our very own not Ron Burgundy but Ron Miller from TechCrunch give them a round of applause everybody

[Music] afternoon everybody thank you for coming to the four o'clock session there's a good number of people out there I'm really happy about it we were having a fabulous conversation backstage about this and I'm pretty sure you're in for a treat when we get into this um you know we're here to talk about

transformation from growth to profitability and efficiency and it's something that seemed to happen like with the snap of your fingers in in 2022 it was as though a switch flipped and suddenly it wasn't growth at all costs anymore it was suddenly you know that you had to be efficient and you had to be profitable and I mean it had to be kind of like mind-boggling for for Founders but also for investors

and how they deal with those founders so the messaging just simply transformed and we're going to talk about what that meant and how that affected each of the parties up on the stage so Joe how did how did the way you communicate with startups change once this switch happened and and how how long like what was the time Horizon where you started to realize the

economic conditions were changing and I need to think about this differently yeah for sure well hey everyone thanks for coming um I'll quickly introduce myself and first of all I'm a little thrown off I thought this was getting moderated by Ron Burgundy but I guess not um I'm Jill Chase I'm a partner at Capital G which is alphabet's independent growth fund so I'm a growth investor who looks at mostly sort of series B through IPO companies and the reason I mention that is because it's quite relevant as it relates to how I

advise and interact with the startups in our portfolio um you know obviously the the market conditions have changed quite dramatically from sort of the 2020 2021 time frame into sort of the 2022-2023 time frame it all sort of starts with we always are looking at what's happening in public markets because we're sort of advising our companies as they move towards IPO and so when Public Market software multiples are quite High you might think sort of the private Market multiples for investing in the Private Ryan series BCD should also be high

because you can sort of justify that type of valuation when Public Market multiples are lower as they are sort of in this market environment given interest rates you might start to look back at the private Market multiples and and readjust that way and so what we've seen over the past year and a half is this correction because we've seen in the public markets the multiples go down and the corrections happen in the private markets correspondingly and so how that interacts with the way that we chat with and advise our portfolio companies is you know because we have this long-term time time Horizon towards