SaaStr 033: The Fundamental Challenges of SaaS M&A with Villi Iltchev, Partner @ August Capital

Villi Iltchev is a Partner @ August Capital and prior to joining August Villi was a member of the leadership teams at Box and Lifelock. Before that Villi was a Vice President @ Salesforce where he led the strategy and acquisitions teams; being directly responsible for over 30 investments in the likes of Hubspot, Box, Mulesoft and many more amazing companies.

In Today’s Show with Villi We Discuss:

• How Villi made the transition from the world of operations to investing with August?
• What were Villi’s biggest takeaways from working with titans of SaaS; Box, Salesforce?
• What was the M&A environment like back in the 2000s? What was the driver behind mass consolidation? What did the on premise perpetual license business model enable companies? Where did customer success lie in this environment?
• Multiple Clouds: What is the challenges of this? How will this evolve over time? What are the current solutions?
• Customer success lies with the vendor: What do you think caused this pivotal transition? How central should customer success be to an early stage SaaS company’s strategy? What are the main benefits of customer success to you?
• SaaS distribution: Why do reseller arrangements not work? How would you like to see this evolve in the future?
• Sales productivity: What is the productivity effect of giving another product to sales? What happens to aggregate sales?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:

• Jason Lemkin
• Harry Stebbings
• Saastr
• Villi Itchev