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Jim Baum is currently a Venture Partner at OpenView and serves on multiple boards including Logz.io, Applitools, project44 and DataStax. Jim previously served as President and CEO of Netezza where he drove the nearly $2B acquisition of Netezza by IBM in 2010. Jim also led Endeca’s early rise from tiny startup to the leading provider of innovative information access and delivery software solutions. Prior to Endeca and Netezza, he served at PTC as an Executive Vice President and General Manager. On this episode, Jim discusses his experience as a venture partner and the difference between joining a board as an investor vs. an independent board member, why sitting on a board is a great opportunity for executives and advice for expansion stage CEOs looking for the right board members.

Bill Wagner started his tenure at LogMeIn in 2013 as their first-ever Chief Operating Officer. In 2015 he was promoted to President & CEO and joined the board shortly after where he's played a key role in their rapid growth. Prior to LogMeIn, he was COO at Vocus, a cloud-marketing software company, and held multiple executive and operator roles prior to that. Bill discusses the largest drivers of growth when he joined LogMeIn, the philosophy behind their freemium model and his role on the board when he first started his tenure. Bill also explains how to get the most leverage out of the board, the importance of a diverse board that brings different experiences to the table, and how to search for key external board members.

John True has had an impressive professional run, both as an operator and as a board member. He is currently a GP at Cultivation Capital and has previously held executive roles at Guidewire Software, Fortify Software and EqualLogic. John takes us through his remarkable career, including his experience joining his first board and what he's learned from his (currently) 7 board seats. He also discusses the importance of devoting time to building relationships so you're top of mind when opportunities come about and how to make the biggest impact once you get a seat at the table.

Bill Welch was most recently the President & COO of Duo Security, guiding them through a successful sales to Cisco. He's also held key leadership roles at Zscaler (which went public in early 2018), Hewlett-Packard and Symantec and most recently took an independent board seat at Logikcull. Bill explains the importance of hiring the right individuals for your company and making sure everyone has a role in the journey (employees, customers, partners, etc.). He also explains how he explored board opportunities and the power of board mentors in your company.

A Chief People Officer may not be the first choice to add to a board, but it is a choice that all early stage startups should make from the very beginning. Marty Reaume, Chief People Officer at Twilio, has held multiple HR and People positions at companies like NetSuite and Fitbit. She also holds board positions at Ambra Health and SPS Commerce. Marty explains the importance of hiring HR and People talent early on in a business and key initiatives that are currently top of mind as the CPO at Twilio. She also explains when she started to get serious about joining a board and advice for a CEO building out her board for the first time.

Elisa Steele is currently the CEO of Namely and holds board positions at Cornerstone OnDemand (Chair) and Splunk as well as advisor roles at People.ai and Tile. Her past CMO experiences at Yahoo, Skype and Microsoft naturally led her to explore board seats where she could add her expertise and perspective. Learn how leadership teams can and should use their board as a resource, how roles differ on a board, the importance of using your network to explore opportunities and how to establish your voice on the board.

Caroline Tsay wanted to be a neurosurgeon when she grew up. Plans changed! Caroline has held leadership positions at Yahoo and HPE and is currently the CEO of Compute Software. She also sits on the board of Coca-Cola, Rosetta Stone and Morningstar. So how did this all come to be? In 2013, her boss introduced her to an executive coach that pushed her to build her own brand and explore board opportunities. In this episode, Caroline gives key insights on leveraging your network to find board seats, how board positions can make you a better leader and advice for executives looking to join their first board.

Anita Sands has spent much of her career in the financial services industry including leadership roles at UBS, Citigroup and RBC. She currently resides on the boards of Symantec, ServiceNow and Pure Storage as well as advisory positions at Accompany, Thrive Global and DocuSign. Anita has helped many businesses reach new levels with her strategic insight. Learn how to not only get on your first board, but navigate the position as a new board member. Also listen as Anita explains the importance of selecting the right board members and using them as a strategic asset for your company.

Steve Collins and Bill Conroy both sit on Instructure's (NYSE: INST) board among many others including Shopify, MuleSoft, etc. Steve has had a successful career as CFO (ExactTarget) and Bill with a focus in sales earlier on and CEO (Initiate Systems, acquired by IBM) later in his operator career. With distinctive skill sets, they naturally had different paths to the board room, but their messages around finding the stage of growth that is best suited for you are quite similar. Listen as they give advice on when it's the right time to join a board and how to play on your strengths as an effective Director.

Jenny Cheng led product program management at Salesforce during their explosive growth period from 2002 to 2011. Today she is an executive at PayPal focused on the intersection between the customer and the product. Learn what she did when she decided to get serious about joining boards, why she chose to be on the board of a smaller startup vs. a large public company and how to balance a board seat with your day job.

It's imperative to determine that you will have a good working relationship and share the same values with a CEO, well before you take a board seat. Karen Appleton Page was employee number seven at Box and her role evolved with the booming business over her nine-year tenure. When she began seriously exploring board opportunities this year, she realized that having the right chemistry with the CEO, much like she had with Aaron Levie at Box, would be key in finding the right fit. In this episode, learn how Karen broke boundaries as the first GTM leader at Box and about her recent journey to Deputy's board.

Welcome to Season 4 of BUILD! This season is all about the journey to the boardroom. We will be interviewing top leaders to highlight the steps that many successful executives have taken to get a seat at the table. This week, we have Blair Christie, former CMO of Cisco and current Board Member of MINDBODY. Learn about her transition from operator to board member, how mentorship played a role in getting on a board, how to get yourself heard at the table and much more.

As we conclude Season 3, it is only appropriate to do so at SaaStock. We sat down with Morten Primdahl, Co-founder of Zendesk, and Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Segment, to discuss their perspectives on what it takes to not only start a product led growth business, but grow it to massive scale.

Slack is known for their unprecedented growth in the SaaS community. They now have over 8 million daily active users! So, how did they do it? Fareed Mosavat, Lifecycle Product Manager, takes you behind the scenes into how Slack leveraged freemium and a bottoms up approach to achieve this scale.

Typeform leaders knew it was important to invest in customer success during the early stages of the business. David Apple, VP of CS, breaks down the team structure that has helped scale the business to over 3M users. Learn where to draw the line when it comes to segmenting customers who warrant a dedicated CS resource vs. purely self-service experience and the leading indicators associated with the success of the team. For more content like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.

Balancing fast growth while building for scale is no easy task. Wayfair's story started with hundreds of individual microsites and eventually turned into one of North America’s largest online retailers. Wayfair's VP of Marketing, Bob Sherwin, has been with the business through its explosive growth and has assisted in developing a best in class efficient marketing engine. Learn what happened behind the scenes as the business scaled, including how they expanded into the B2B market.

Dropbox is a poster child for product led growth - they successfully became the fastest SaaS business to reach $1B. Darius Contractor, Growth Engineering Lead, explains how they went about building virality into their product, the importance of visibility into key metrics and what the future of product led growth looks like. For even more content, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.

Lynn Tsoflias has held leadership roles across Sales and Customer Success at startups like Insightly to large tech companies including Microsoft and LinkedIn. In this episode of BUILD, she discusses her guiding principles to developing effective user onboarding to drive adoption. Learn the best way to structure your team to tackle onboarding and retention as your business expands. For even more content, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.

User activation is an important part of any growth function, but many startups fail to focus on this area. Shaun Clowes, former Head of Growth and Model at Atlassian and current Chief Product Officer at MetroMile, was tasked with building the growth function from the ground up for Atlassian's Jira product. He discusses the primary activation metrics they used and how those metrics shifted as the business scaled. Learn how to define you own activation metrics and how to create an onboarding flow that will keep users coming back to your product in this episode of BUILD.

Our 2018 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks are live! This year we surveyed over 400 companies, ranging from pre-revenue to $50M+ ARR with 40% of respondents coming from outside the US. Our massive data set gives you insights into trends around how fast startups are growing, the emergence of SaaS companies all around the world and the progress on hiring diverse candidates. Follow along at www.saasbenchmarks.com.