All the talks from previous Business of Software Conferences from one place. Great SaaS & Software Talks.

If you want to watch previous BoS Talks, you can access all of the publicly available ones from here, listed by year. The more recent talks will link to the video of the talk, a transcript, the speakers slides, any follow up online AMAs and attendee notes. Great talks on building SaaS and software businesses.

Enjoy!

#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers.

When we welcome new subscribers to the Business of Software newsletter, we point them towards our catalogue of talks from previous conferences. There’s over 200 videos that might be able to help them with their current business problem. You can find those 200 videos here.

As you can see, there are a LOT of talks and, sometimes, it is hard to find the one you need (especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for!). So, we encourage new subscribers to reply to the welcome email with a direct question and we try to suggest some useful content. Think of it as our ML enabled content engine; where ML = Mark Littlewood, not Machine Learning. Our regular subscribers can, of course, drop us an email any time with a question too and we will try to help.

There are some recurring themes in the questions that people ask so we thought we would share some of them with you our wonderful subscribers. Let us know if you have a challenge that might be interesting to others

Q | How to move from being a consulting to product business. Read on…

SoftBank Investor Presentation November 2019

With all the talk about WeWork and its disastrous pulled IPO, founder shenanigans etc, it is interesting to read SoftBank’s latest investor update. SoftBank’s Vision Fund has, rightly, come under scrutiny for its investments in WeWork and other ‘punchy’ investments. Their shareholder update is at significant pains to point out that (a) the value of the the overall entity has risen in the past three months by some $13 billion USD and (b) they have a cunning plan for WeWork…

Quite an ‘interesting’ read. We thought it was a parody at first. Much of it reads like some sort of junior school project. It illustrates some very ‘high-level’ thinking and that putting some charts into a report solves everything. Don’t forget, there is over $200 billion value of market cap in SoftBank Holdings. That a company of that size and complexity can produce such an astonishingly simple report makes us think, if your share price is underpinned by some businesses that shell off money, you get a lot of leeway to play.

SoftBank Investor Presentation November 2019

Laura Roeder, Founder/CEO, MeetEdgar

Laura Roeder is a signed-up member of the Bootstrapping club. Her Social Media scheduling SaaS MeetEdgar is proudly bootstrapped in a market that has some very well-funded competitors – Hootsuite alone has taken nearly $300 million in funding. Why start a business when your biggest competitor has so much cash to throw around?

Laura is convinced that being small and bootstrapped is an advantage when your competitors are big and funded. In this talk from Business of Software Conference Europe 2018, she explains some of the advantages with examples from MeetEdgar. Bootstrappers, be encouraged – there’s room for you in the market, however much money your competition has!

Video and Transcript below

Rita McGrath (Author, Seeing Around Corners) & Alex Osterwalder (Founder, Strategyzer)

At Business of Software USA 2019 we were joined by two titans of innovation thinking. Rita McGrath & Alex Osterwalder both gave fantastic talks at the conference and shared enthusiastically in the 3 days of learning. It’s probably fair to say that Alex made more notes than anybody!

Rita & Alex sat down together on the third morning of the conference to discuss the state of innovation as they see it in companies across Europe and the USA. A fascinating 10-minute discussion unfolded between two of the smartest people we know.

Watch the Video & Follow the Transcript below:

A Conversation with Andy Ellis (CSO, Akamai)

Andy was one of the speakers at this year’s BoS Conference USA 2019 and talked about why humans were awesome at risk management and why humans were awful at risk management. Subscribe to watch the talk when it is published. It is good. Very good. At the speaker dinner, we got into a conversation about how people can take the same data to come to derive completely different meanings. He’d been thinking about this and explained how you can take the Harry Potter stories and come to some very disturbing conclusions. In this discussion with Andy, he explains, using both Harry Potter and the Star Wars trilogy as examples. Very entertaining and thought-provoking… Harry Potter fans might not like it.

You will also learn how to tell whether your house is haunted. A true Halloween spooktacular!

Watch here…

Four Quick Takeaways from #BoS2019: Guest Post by Allison Grinberg-Funes

I learned a lot at the Business of Software Conference when I attended as a first-timer in 2018. Throughout the conference, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint takeaways that folks would be able to bring home to improve their individual growth or their team’s outputs. #BoS2019 was no different.

BoS is rare for how much it encourages community. I mean – have you ever been to another conference offering interactive notes? In the spirit of giving back to those who may have been actively listening or away fielding a client call, I took the time to record a few takeaways.

If you’re looking for something to jog your memory – or even better, a reason why you and your teammates should be at BoS2020, here are 4 quick takeaways* from Business of Software Conference 2019.

Join us on Thursday 14th November for a live online Q&A with Rich Mironov on Product Roadmaps & Prioritization

The roadmapping process is almost always broken. Roadmaps are met with frustration and boredom in equal measure. That’s Rich Mironov’s experience of working with Silicon Valley software companies for 35+ years.

Different voices in the company want different things. Sales need that one new feature for a big client, and they’re sure will only be ‘a few lines of code’. The executive team wants to know why you’re not getting more done. Support has hundreds of ‘good’ ideas from customers that they want to see. How do you manage expectations across the company, and create a product roadmap that prioritizes the right things while uniting your organisation?

Join us for a Q&A with Rich Mironov, product coach, seasoned entrepreneur, and author of ‘The Art Of Product Management’, who will be walking us through some tactics for designing a roadmap process that works.

Bruce McCarthy, Founder, Product Culture

Wouldn’t it be great if no one could argue with your decisions? How awesome would it be if you could cut through politics, opinions, and circular arguments and have a clear way to prioritize? In this talk Product guru Bruce McCarthy arms you with his battle-tested approach to prioritizing your most critical initiatives that will increase your organization’s focus by increasing confidence in your prioritization decisions.

Learn the method that Bruce used to focus his team on the few critical things that resulted in the sale of his company for $125 million. He’ll cover:

• Why prioritization is important
• What’s broken about prioritization
• Benefits of clear prioritization
• Methods of prioritization
• Scorecard deep-dive
• Success stories

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

🦞 Business of Software Conference USA 2019 – Some Highlights 🦞

The 13th Annual Business of Software Conference USA took place in Boston a few weeks ago – September 16-18 2019. What an incredible few days. A huge thank you to all the speakers and attendees who made it one of the most memorable ever, for all the right reasons. The talks will be edited, published and transcribed in the next month or so but until then, here are the slides, sketch notes, interviews and photos from some of the attendees.

Read on to see Slide Decks, SketchNotes, Highlights, and Photos from BoS USA

Why do speakers attend BoS? And what do they learn?

Each year at the Business of Software Conference, attendees hear insights from some of the smartest people in software, all willing to share their expertise with the community. Over the last 13 years, hundreds of speakers have shared their experiences and wisdom with the BoS community. At #BoS2019 this September, Allison Grinberg-Funes sat down with speakers old and new to learn their thoughts on the BoS community and what it’s like to be a speaker.

Guest Post by Allison Grinberg-Funes