The fundamental challenge in building a resilient business often boils down to talent. However, most companies approach hiring backwards.
In his powerful talk at BoS Europe 2025, Jobs to be Done (JTBD) expert Bob Moesta challenged founders to adopt a demand-side perspective: “employees hire companies more than companies hire employees”.
Bob’s research, based on over a thousand job transition interviews, asserts that “every job switch is caused, luck has very little to do with it”.
By understanding the progress employees are trying to make, leaders can drastically improve their teams and retention.
Robin Landy , a leading expert in software pricing strategy, delivered an insightful talk at BoS Europe 2025 focused on moving beyond simple price points to create sophisticated pricing structures based on customer value and segmentation.
He highlighted that many successful software companies still rely on outdated pricing structures (sometimes the same ones set by founders on day one), which are often suboptimal and fail to capture the increasing value delivered by continuous product development.
Ever feel like the relationship between a Founder/CEO and a Head of Product is… One awkward meeting away from a Netflix drama?
At Business of Software Europe 2025, Melissa Appel delivered a crucial guide for founders and CEOs titled “The Founders’ Guide to What Product Teams Need”, focusing on transforming potentially adversarial relationships into highly successful collaborations.
She opened with the story of two goats meeting on a narrow bridge, neither backing down, both falling into the ravine.
Sound familiar? Founders pushing last-minute ideas… Product leaders refusing to build unvalidated features… Both sides frustrated… Nobody wins.
Melissa’s talk is the antidote. She breaks down FOCUS, a framework every founder and product leader should honestly tattoo somewhere visible.
An insightful look into Elizabeth Lawley‘s talk at BoS Europe 2025 on the rapidly growing and complex world of AI companionship.
At BoS Europe 2025, Elizabeth Lawley took attendees on a deep dive into the controversial and fascinating world of AI companionship, exploring why humans are seeking digital relationships and what this trend means for our future.
Lizzie drew her experience creating experimental AI companions, including the widely unexpected success of AIs launched on LinkedIn. She presented data and profound user feedback suggesting that AI companions are serving a fundamental human need currently unmet by real-world interaction.
Here are the key takeaways from Elizabeth Lawley’s presentation:
At BoS Europe 2025, Ryan Singer, author of Shape Up, opened the conference by tackling one of the most persistent challenges in product development: how we use our time.
His talk, “Framing and Hard Conversations” wasn’t about productivity hacks or squeezing more hours out of already exhausted teams. It was about something much more fundamental: how to use our time and getting clear on what we’re actually trying to solve.
Ryan has this way of making you realize that half the stress we feel in product development comes from chasing problems we haven’t properly defined. We jump into solutions, scope expands, engineers stay blocked, and suddenly everyone is busy… but nothing is really moving.
What he reminded us is that the most valuable thing we can do is slow down long enough to frame the problem properly.
Benedict Evans produces his take on macro and strategic trends in the tech once a year and it is a must read. It’s been titled, ‘AI Eats the World’ for the past three iterations…
In 2025, in light of the rate of change, he’s decided to publish twice yearly.
Well worth looking through if you’re interested in an informed and non-hyperbolic view on where tech is heading.
Even without commentary, the slides speak for themselves.
Great analysis of where we are and where we might be going.
At BoS Europe 2025, Greg Baugues, took the stage with a talk that challenged a lot of assumptions about how we think AI works.
Using the quote“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, Greg made a clever connection between what feels magical about AI and what’s actually going on under the hood in his talk “AI You’ve Been Doing It All Wrong”, available now in the BoS talks library.
He showed how understanding that difference helps us use AI in a smarter, more effective way. Get to know more about it:
You’re not losing customers because your features aren’t good enough. You’re losing them because your story doesn’t hit where decisions are made: In the gut, not the brain.
At Business of Software Europe 2025, Sara Kathleen Gordon, a reformed brand strategist and General Manager, unpacked one of the most provocative questions in marketing:
What if the secret to great positioning isn’t logic… but desire?
In her talk, “The Seven Deadly Sins & Positioning” Sara explored how our deepest human motivations (the same ones that have driven behaviour for centuries) still shape how we buy, believe and belong today.
The Business of Software (BoS) Conference USA 2025 has wrapped up three incredible days in Raleigh, North Carolina, marking our third year in the city and our first at The StateView Hotel.
This year’s event brought together founders, CEOs, product leaders and builders from around the world to connect, learn, and share real experiences about building enduring, profitable, and people-first software businesses.
The venue was new, but the BoS spirit was the same: honest conversations, practical insights, and an extraordinary sense of community (plus a few hot peppers, of course).
Oh. And this year, hot peppers were officially added to the BoS tradition.
Missed BoS USA?
We’ll send you the talks as soon as they’re available.
The countdown is on: just 10 days until BoS USA 2025 kicks off on October 6 in Raleigh, NC.
The Business of Software (BoS) Conference USA 2025 brings together software founders, CEOs and emerging leaders who want to build profitable, enduring companies.
This year’s program zeroes in on the most pressing challenges SaaS companies face today: From scaling with clarity, to weathering economic uncertainty, to finding independence and making sense of AI’s impact on go-to-market strategy.
Here’s what to expect at BoS USA 2025: a world-class lineup of founders and leaders sharing unfiltered lessons, actionable frameworks and takeaways you can put to work immediately.
Most startups follow a familiar script: raise money, grow fast, and figure out the rest later. Buffer, the social media management company with over 1.7 million users and $4.25M in annual revenue, chose a different path.
At the center of this story is Joel Gascoigne, Buffer’s co-founder and CEO, who believed from the very beginning that building a company was not just about growth. It was about doing it the right way.
Joel first shared this journey on stage at the Business of Software Conference USA in 2014. Fast forward 11 years, and he is returning to the BoS Conference stage with a very different story to tell. Over that time, Buffer saw its annual recurring revenue dropped 20% over a four-year stretch, fought through the challenges, and rebuilt stronger than ever. Today, Buffer sits at new all-time highs with $22.3M ARR.
But to understand how they got here, let’s rewind to the early days.
Building a multi-billion-dollar company sounds glamorous. The reality? It’s messy, full of wrong turns, and often more stressful than it looks from the outside.
Dharmesh Shah, co-Founder and CTO of HubSpot, has spent more than 30 years in the software world. At Business of Software Conference, he shared some of the biggest mistakes he made along the way and what he learned from them. These lessons aren’t theory. They come straight from the trenches of starting, growing, and scaling one of the most well-known SaaS businesses in the world.
AI might be taking over the world but us poor humans need time together to process what that means. It’s never been more important for people to spend quality time together. BoS Conference USA, 6-8 October, is timely.
The Business of Software (BoS) Conference returns to Raleigh, North Carolina, October 6–8, 2025, uniting SaaS founders, CEOs, and product leaders from around the world. Over three days, attendees will hear from industry leaders including Jason Cohen, Joel Gascoigne, Chris Savage and others, and join in the “Hallway Track” conversations that move beyond surface-level advice to explore what it truly takes to build enduring, human-centered software businesses.
When BoS USA first came to Raleigh, one partnership helped make it possible and continues to fuel its success today. We’re proud to once again partner with the Center for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) for the third year running at BoS USA 2025.
As leaders in the fast-paced software industry, you love your work but it shouldn’t define you. Like many of your employees, you also have family, hobbies, and community commitments that matter. The real challenge isn’t just productivity. It’s managing the constant barrage of distractions so you can fully show up for every part of your life. This has only become more critical with the rise of remote and hybrid work.
Valentina Thörner, Head of Remote at Klaus and an expert on distraction management, points out a common oversight: much of today’s productivity advice was written by people with full control over their time and space. Her experience as a mother of twins made her realize that the real issue isn’t productivity methods, but distraction itself. Every interruption can cost 15 minutes to recover – an estimate that feels generous when a six-year-old is nearby.
Even if you don’t have children, your teams likely do. Learning to manage distractions is essential if you want a company where people stress less and produce more.
Are you looking for the big growth thing? A new marketing trick, methodology, tool, or partner that promises overnight scale, explosive growth, or miraculous efficiency gains.
You might be wasting your time.
There are no silver marketing bullets – and that’s OK.
In SaaS, speed is survival. But speed without the right direction is just waste in motion.
Bob Moesta, co-architect of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework alongside Clayton Christensen, offers a mindset shift embraced by companies like Apple, Intercom, and GitLab. It’s a lens that reframes product, sales, marketing, and even hiring around one question:
“What progress is someone trying to make, and why now?”
We’re very sad to hear the news that Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley has died at the age of 91.
Her story is nothing short of remarkable – a testament to courage, innovation, and heartfelt purpose.
From her beginnings arriving in England as a six‑year‑old Kindertransport refugee, she transformed personal adversity into a lifelong drive to build something meaningful. She founded Freelance Programmers in 1962, a pioneering remote‑only software company staffed almost entirely by women, long before remote work became commonplace.
Business today looks nothing like it did 20 years ago. Old ways of doing things just don’t work in a world where AI is changing everything, customers expect more than ever, and workplaces have been flipped upside down by things like COVID. Big companies have been overtaken by small, fast-moving startups and technology keeps changing the game.
So how do you lead in this new world? According to CEO coach Joe Leech, it’s time to rethink what it means to be a leader and become what he calls a “Modern CEO.” It’s not about small tweaks. It’s about changing how you think and lead.
Here are 8 simple lessons that today’s SaaS and software founders, CEOs, and leaders should know:
For many SaaS and software leaders, the pivot to remote work in 2020 presented an exciting chance to re-evaluate how their companies truly operate. However, this often led to an unexpected consequence: employees found themselves spending more time in video calls than in office meetings, leading to significant impacts on well-being and productivity. If “Zoom fatigue” and the constant pressure of being “always on” sound familiar, it’s time to explore a fundamentally different approach to work.
Amir Salihefendić, CEO and founder of Doist (the company behind Todoist and Twist), firmly believes that the future of work (whether fully remote, hybrid, or even back in the office) demands a new model of asynchronous communication. Doist itself has been remote-first since 2010 and asynchronous-first for many years, successfully scaling with over 120 people across 30 countries with no outside investment. This isn’t just about tools; it’s a “philosophy and a way to communicate”.
