B2B SaaS Finance and Metrics - A European Perspective - with Joyce Mackenzie Liu, Pegafund

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show.
welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Joyce Mackenzie Liu, founder of Pegafund and early stage B2B SaaS finance thought leader across Europe. Today, we will be covering three main areas. The B2B SaaS market maturity across Europe, financing options and financial trends for European B2B SaaS founders to understand, and the metrics that matter for early stage European B2B SaaS companies. Are they same as in the US? Joyce, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Joyce Mackenzie Liu** (1:17)
Hi, everyone. Thank you, Ray, for that introduction. I'm super honored and also humbled that you invited me as your first guest to talk about all things Europe and SaaS related. A little bit of background on myself. I'm actually Canadian in case you're wondering where the accent is from, but I started my journey in finance, in particular in software over a decade ago. In 2009, first working at JPMorgan on the banking side, and then started focusing in particular on software investments when I moved over to Aries in 2012, to look at late growth and also publicly traded companies and how to take those businesses private. I first became curious actually about Europe overall and what was happening over here in terms of the tech ecosystem in 2013 So it's quite early days in the second wave of entrepreneurship that has really grown and expanded a lot over the last six, seven years. And that was largely off the back of Zendesk, which we all know is a great customer support and success company today listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They had just filed their S1 in early 2014 Zalando at the time, as well as Rocket Internet, were looking to go public on the Georgia Borsa also in October of 2014
And so all of these little, let's say drops in the ocean is what got me curious about what was happening over here. And so I decided to take a leap of faith after having conversations with over 60 different people, both founders and investors in the ecosystem over here, to figure out what was going on and to be part of the ecosystem because I had a feeling that things were just going to blow up in a really big way. And that has definitely been the case. If we look at UiPath, which is just most recently filed to go public this past week, that's actually a European company, a company that was born in Romania. And so I think Europe right now is really the hot topic in both the venture and also overall tech community. But one of the things that I feel is really lacking, having worked in this environment for the past six, seven years, is just a really solid understanding of finance and specifically how finance relates to SaaS and SaaS scale-ups and growth companies. And that's the reason why I started Pegafund earlier this year, is to really help share that knowledge that I've learned over the years around software investing and particularly companies at the early stage and hope to level up the leadership both at the founder level and at the C-suite level when it comes to what are the best practices around scaling a high growth SaaS company.

**Ray Rike** (3:51)
Great. Thank you for that introduction. And I want to dig in to more. I was watching your latest SaaS talk on the Blueprint Sessions and you talked about why finance is an essential function for early stage scaling SaaS companies. But let's zoom out for just a minute and talk a little bit about the European market for our listening audience, which today is primarily US and Canada based. And I'm looking very forward to expanding into Europe now. But Crunchbase says there's around 15,000 to 18,000 SaaS companies in the world, which I find it very hard to believe since there's 13,000 Martech and SalesTech vendors just in those two segments. I've seen estimates more in the 30,000 to 40,000 range around the world. But what's the current state of maturity of the European SaaS marketplace? And what are the primary differences between the European SaaS ecosystem and the US. SaaS ecosystem from your perspective?