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Read how they built some of tech's most succesful startups.

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Read: Goodbye, Unicorn Status.

While one billion dollars is certainly impressive, I’m here to tell you it’s not the only impressive number. Maybe we should widen our gaze and challenge Unicorn status as the ultimate (or only) goal for SaaS startups in New Zealand.

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Read: Blackbird's Phoebe Harrop - What a VC Wants

Being responsible for the capital of their funders, the reputation of their funds, and the success of their portfolio companies, means VCs apply a huge degree of rigour during the screening stage. Once both parties have signed and money changes hands, that carries over into what both parties hope to be a long term relationship. However, Phoebe says, it’s “not like being at the principal's office.” A healthy investor-investee relationship treads the line between mutually beneficial mentorship, pragmatic transparency, and not oversharing every anxiety, whacky idea, and side quest.

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Read: Carter Perez - Field notes from USA SaaS Expert

Calling in from the United States this week, we spoke with Carter Perez, co-founder of Revenue Chemists, a SaaS marketing agency in Palo Alto. In the last four years, they have worked with over 40 companies. Carter is also a fractional GTM leader, working with companies like Aiden Technologies and Ookla. He has spent most of his career in tech but started out at Xerox. Carter has a passion for the “phenomenal problem” of scaling companies, having achieved multiple exits during his career. In this week’s longform article, we’ve put together “field notes” from Carter, laying out his insights from the coalface of global tech growth.

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Read: Ryan McMillan - 5 Years as a Founder

Time flies is certainly a cliche, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I’ve been a founder for five years now. There wasn’t a big countdown, nor a party (though perhaps a missed opportunity for one).

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Read: Tim Duggan - Leadership Lessons for Time Poor Founders

As an entrepreneur himself, and having interviewed dozens of fellow founders while researching his books, it was a privilege to hear firsthand Tim’s lessons on entrepreneurship, creativity, and work. We’ve bundled these lessons together, so you can use them now, or bank them for later.

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Trends: ChatGPT-4o and the Future of Search

‘Wow’ is probably where I’d start. We’ve been told that the rate of improvement for LLMs (large language models) and GPTs (generative pre-trained transformers) will be fast, but ChatGPT-4o’s latest demo knocked me off my seat. The integration of video and voice to the app, along with faster processing times made the experience several times better than before (even using the free version). Trialling the product myself over the weekend got me thinking: ‘How will this change search engines?’

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Read: Serge van Dam - Playbook for Global Growth

Serge is a tech and SaaS veteran, angel investor, board member, operating partner at Movac, advisor at NZTE, advisory council member at KiwiSaaS, and previously CMO at Fiserv (MCom) before a successful exit. Serge’s modus operandi is scaling up his time and using it for good. He dedicates about 500 hours each year to helping others. Reflecting on his career so far, Serge says that failure is not only the best teacher, it’s the only teacher. When he took his first fintech startup, MCom, to the US in the early 2000’s, there wasn’t a blueprint for exporting NZ tech. Most of you reading this are founders and marketing leads. The Raise is all about raising the ambition and raising the bar for Kiwi and Aussie SaaS companies. So this week I’ve put together a playbook of wisdom shared during my conversation with Serge. Watch, read, grow. Then take your SaaS business global - bigger, better, faster.

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Trends: The Tik is Toking

ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has 9 months to divest their operations in the US before Federal Legislation effectively bans it, prompted by concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data through the short-form video app.‍

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Read: JD Trask - Unpacking the AI Hype Cycle

Learning how to use AI feels like we are in a giant classroom and the teachers have left the room. There’s every archetype of person, we are making the rules up as we go along, and we are relying on our human good to avoid a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation. The smart kids know how to use it, the rest of us are feeling self conscious that we don’t know enough yet.JD’s outlook on AI boils down to a simple idea - it takes experimentation to derive meaning. 

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Trends: The Power of LinkedIn for B2B

Linkedin is a powerful channel for B2B content distribution. If you’re thinking of building a Linkedin audience, my recommendation would be to put some thought into your strategy and create a clear point of difference. Personally, I believe quality and impact is more important than consistency, especially as we see a proliferation of new creators trying their luck on the platform today.

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Read: Sonya Williams - Startup Mythbusting

Our conversation with Sonya on The Raise this week got us thinking about what assumptions are made while building startups. Her experiences illuminate the nuances of every founder's journey. She unpacks some commonly held beliefs within the startup world. Sonya talks about getting started, forming a team, collaborating with your competition, and getting investors who back your mission.

Ryan McMillan provides a take on the future of search
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Trends: How search is changing, and not in the way that you might think

Search engines have dominated the internet landscape almost since Google’s inception in 1998. But, search is changing, and not in the way that you might think. Why? Well, the first thought that comes to your mind might be ‘AI’, which is the most obvious disruptor of the search engine business. It’s easy to pay attention to the zigs (AI) but don’t let that cause you to miss the zags. Us humans search for content in all different types of ways, and the biggest shift in search engine behaviour right now is actually a move towards ‘social search’ as the preferred method to answer your search queries.

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Read: Sebastian Cox - What's Special about Venture Studios

Seb unpacks for us what it’s like working with a venture studio, his rules of thumb for deciding if an idea is worth pursuing, plus some insider thoughts on creativity, team building, and capital raising.

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Read: Jo Blundell - Serving Customers in Tough Times

Jo Blundell was one of the first product marketers at Xero during its hyper growth phase in 2015. She then became the Head of Product and Marketing at Timely off the back of its $7m capital raise from Movac in 2017. Under her leadership, Timely eventually exited at $100m+. Jo is a director of climate-tech venture CarbonCrop. She recently launched ArcStudio, an agency developing brand and go-to-market strategies for scale-up-stage companies.

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Read: Chris Heaslip - From False Summits to Funding Rounds

Chris Heaslip, founder of global donation platform Pushpay, doesn't mince words. In a recent interview with The Raise, he candidly admitted: "The customers we had in New Zealand didn't matter for anything." This bold statement isn't about downplaying Pushpay's Kiwi roots, but rather highlighting his global vision from day one. However, the road to global success was far from smooth. Heaslip, an accountant by training, had already attempted and failed at 18 startups before Pushpay. It took years of "pain," as he puts it, to finally crack the code. Heaslip's journey offers valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs building scalable startups.

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