The Accel Playbook for Internationalisation with Philippe Botteri

**Alex Theuma** (0:10)
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Now on with the show.
In this episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, Alex Theuma is joined by Philippe Botteri, partner at Accel and investor in DocuSign, Qubit, Algolia, Doctolib, amongst many other notables. Philippe discusses the playbook of moving your SaaS to the US, making your SaaS global. You can find a short write up of my conversation with Philippe, including all names and links on saas.com forward slash blog. Welcome to The SaaS Revolution Show. I'm your host, Alex Theuma, and super excited to be joined today by Philippe Botteri, partner at Accel. Welcome, Philippe.

**Philippe Botteri** (1:18)
Well, thank you. Very happy to be here.

**Alex Theuma** (1:21)
A real pleasure, Philippe.
And we always start the podcast by getting to know our guests a little bit. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who is Philippe Botteri?

**Philippe Botteri** (1:33)
Sure. So as probably everyone guessed from my accent, I'm originally from the other side of the channel, so I'm from France.
Engineering background, I started my career with McKinsey.
I was fortunate enough to join in 1998, where McKinsey was working with startups.
And so I had the chance to work with a few startups for the first couple of years. And from there, I moved to software, which led me to transfer to the power office in 2003
And I was one of the first at McKinsey to work on SaaS, which was called at the time ASP, so application service provider. And then basically that led me to join Bessemer in 2006 to help them build their SaaS practice in the process. So we invested in a series of Gen 1 SaaS companies, including Cornerstone Demands, Iloquo, Intact. And I also had an eye on Europe, given my backgrounds, and invested in Criteo in 2009 And that kind of opened my eyes to what was happening in Europe. And I thought about the growth of the ecosystem, which was very promising. And then in 2011, when I got the call from Accel, I thought it was actually a very good time to come back to Europe and apply the learnings I had in Silicon Valley for the past 10 years and apply that knowledge to the European ecosystem. And since then, so I've been investing in European companies, a lot of SaaS investments with companies like DocuSign, Qubit, Algolia, Dr.Lib, PeopleDoc, and most recently, Penfit. And I also did a bit of market-based consumer investments with Blood by Car. And I must say that I think my bet paid off in terms of the growth of the ecosystem in Europe. And I was a bit afraid that there wasn't that much SaaS happening in Europe when I came back in 2011 And that's when, you know, it might put forward a mix of consumer and SaaS companies. But in the past few years, the SaaS ecosystem has really exploded. And today, I mean, MSS has spent more than 80% of my time on SaaS companies. And every day we see a lot of very interesting SaaS companies emerging from the continent.

**Alex Theuma** (4:17)
Yeah, well, you took the words right out of my mouth in terms of, you know, in Europe, it has really exploded, you know, of late. So many great SaaS companies, you know, are coming out of Europe these days. You mentioned some of them, Qubit, Dr. Lieve, Algolia. Tell us about your first European SaaS investments. You know, was that Criteo?
And if not, tell us who it was and why you invested in that particular company.

**Philippe Botteri** (4:48)
So, actually, so I would say Criteo was a retiring company. So it's more ad tech. So I wouldn't place that as a SaaS company. I mean, my first investment when I joined Accel was DocuSign, which was another European company. It was a SaaS company, but I had a very strong relationship with the management that had been working with their team since basically 2007 and helping them on the side and never had the right opportunity to invest. So in 2012, when the opportunity came up, I invested. I mean, for me, for DocuSign, the product was really obvious. I mean, you were seeing the world getting digital and signature was, you know, remained something that people were doing with a pen and a paper. And everyone has been through the pain of having to receive a PDF, you know, try to print and then sign and then try to find a scanner to scan it and then send it back. And with DocuSign, you do that in one click. And when you go through that experience, you say, well, every signature in the world should go through this electronic process.