SaaStr 274: Messagebird CEO Robert Vis on Scaling To A $60M Series A, Why You Should Not Try To "Scale" & Why You Need To Build Your Business Like A House

Robert Vis is the Founder & CEO @ MessageBird, the company that allows you to talk to your customers via Voice, SMS and Whatsapp. The company raised a monster $60M Series A from Accel and Atomico with only one prior investor being Y Combinator. As for Robert, prior to MessageBird, he was co-founder and CEO of Zaypay.com which focused on driving mobile payments into 50+ countries, enabling 1.5bln users to pay for virtual goods through their phones (sold to Mobile Interactive Group (MIG). 

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Robert made his way into the world of startups and SaaS and came to found Messagebird? What was the a-ha moment for him? 
• Why does Robert believe the most important element of being a founder is “thinking big”? How as a founder do you balance between thinking big with investors and then the day to day in the weeds with the team? How does Robert as Europe’s mentality of thinking big today? Have our ambitions exceeded what they have been before? How does being in Benelux change how Robert thinks about global ambitions and growth ambitions?  
• What does Robert mean when he tells founders, “don’t try to scale”? How does Robert think about knowing when a business is ready to scale? Where do many founders go wrong in the preparation for scale phase? What does one need to get in place before scaling?
• Why did Robert wait 6 years before raising any VC money? Why did he decide then was the right time? Once the raise was in, did he feel the pressure of suddenly having a lot of VC funding? How did his mindset to capital allocation change post-raise? How did he see his decision-making process change post raise? How did raising from the US differ from raising in the UK? 

Robert’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Robert know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his time with Messagebird?
2. What keeps Robert up at night? 
3. What are Robert’s strengths and weaknesses? 
4. What advice in SaaS does Robert most often hear that he disagrees with?

Read the transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Robert Vis