In Conversation With Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel | What’s happening in European SaaS?

**Isak Rauti-Hajsak** (0:00)
Trying to get back to the basics of great products. Power comes from sharing information.

**William von der Palen** (0:17)
Hello everyone, welcome back to the Soaked by Slush podcast. My name is William von der Palen, and with me in the studio is Isak Rauti-Hajsak.
Hi William, I almost looked at the camera. Today we have an interesting guest once again, as we usually tend to have on this show. So welcome to the Soaked by Slush podcast, Philippe Botteri.

**Philippe Botteri** (0:40)
Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here.

**William von der Palen** (0:42)
Great to have you. Do you want to tell the listeners who you are and what you currently do?

**Philippe Botteri** (0:50)
Sure. So I'm a partner with Accel, so we're a global venture firm. So we started about 35 years ago in Silicon Valley. So this is where we have our roots and culture, doing early stage investments in technology companies in Silicon Valley. And over time, we realized that Silicon Valley did not have the monopoly of innovation. So we opened an office in London in 2000, so 21 years ago. So we've been on the ground here for more than 20 years. And we also have an office in India. So today, we are one of the very few early stage venture platform with a truly global network and coverage. And this is that network that we give to our portfolio company and hopefully give them a strong competitive advantage.
And from a stage standpoint, so the core of the business is kind of seed series A, early stage investments. Over time, we also have added growth capabilities.
So we have a global growth fund, which can invest at a later stage in the business. So anything from $40, $50 million up to $150 million.
And the three key areas where we are investing overall is anything around digital consumer, anything around FinTech and online payments, and anything around cloud computing, SaaS, analytics and security, which is what we're gonna talk about today. So we have evolved into a full stack platform. So we have anything from seed to late stage, and we do that on a global basis.

**Isak Rauti-Hajsak** (2:32)
Yes, can I also ask, what is your background? What do you do?

**Philippe Botteri** (2:35)
Yeah, so I joined, and that I think ties nicely to do this discussion. So I joined Accel 10 years ago.
Before that, I spent about a bit less than 10 years in the Valais. So I was with another firm called Bessemer Venture Partners.
And before that, I was with McKinsey, both in their Palo Alto office, and I started my career with them in Europe, as you can guess from my accent, and from the other side of the channel. So I was born and raised in France. But I think so the question is like, why did I move back from Silicon Valley to London in 2011? And so I was kind of lucky to start in venture 15 years ago, so I was in 2006, basically, which was at the beginning of cloud and SaaS. Like when I was starting in venture and in the Valley, I think the world, the question was like, is SaaS and cloud the fad, or is that really gonna last? And I think I wrote my first blog post, which is why I disagree with Tony Zingale, who was like a well-known CEO, he was CEO of Mercury Interactive at the time. And basically he was doing a keynote at a conference saying that basically SaaS would disappear.
And so really I wrote my first blog post and well, now I think SaaS and cloud is actually the future of software. So from 2006 to 2011, at Bessemer I helped build their cloud practice, investing in Gen 1 SaaS companies like Cornerstone on Demand, Elokwa, Intact.
And in 2010, investing in a company called Criteo, which was kind of the first big data play around kind of online advertising, around retargeting. And it kind of opened my eyes about what was happening in Europe. I saw this great company out of France. They were growing from five to 15 million in a year, and no one was really paying attention to it because no one was really looking at Europe. And then a year later, I just got the call from Accel, and I was like, wow, something seems to be happening in Europe. Like, we're seeing stuff there that shows that it's starting to happen. I wanted to be on a global platform, so I thought, if you want to build global businesses, you need to be global ourselves. So that was very important to me, and I really liked the team there. So I made the move back, packed my bag, landed in London mid-2011. And then at the time, I was like, well, a lot of what I did in Silicon Valley was around cloud computing and SaaS. But at the time, like 2011, 2012, 13 and 14, a lot of the action in Europe was around the kind of the first-generation marketplaces and consumer services, but not much was happening on the cloud front. So for the first three years, I invested in companies like Car and Fiverr on the marketplace side. And I was still looking for these cloud companies. And the first one I found was PeopleDoc in 2014, and then in 2015, I invested in Algolia and Dr.Lib and started to see that a new generation of founders was building these great cloud companies. And then looking back in 2016, like seven out of 10 of our last most recent deal that Accel was actually a cloud company. And I was like, wow, something's changing now.