The Rising Waterline for SAAS

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As the “waterline” rises in SaaS, only the most durable businesses will keep compounding: those with true product depth, efficient growth, and defensible distribution. In this VC-focused fireside chat, Murray Newlands and Brian Gerster explore how investor expectations are shifting across fundamentals, multiples, and category dynamics. We will discuss what separates resilient SaaS winners from the rest as the market reprices risk and rewards real staying power.

Speaker Bios

Murray Newlands, Partner at IASV Seed Ventures

_{Murray is a renowned entrepreneur and seasoned Venture Capitalist, currently serving as a Founding Partner at Open Future Technology. He was recognized by The Huffington Post as one of their Top 10 People to Know. His professional journey includes a key strategic role at Turing.com, where he contributed to a successful fundraising round, ahead of the company’s $4 billion valuation. He also advised the Draper Nexus Network of Things Fund. Previously, Murray was a partner at OnePiece Labs, the web3 division of Uphonest Capital. Now, at Open Future Technology, he leads a web3 and AI-focused incubator while actively engaging with Silicon Valley’s founders and developers. As a contributing writer, Murray has shared his expertise through articles in notable publications such as Forbes, The Guardian, Inc Magazine, Time, Business Insider, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Mashable, among others. Graduated London Met. Univ. with BA of Laws. He gained his Green Card by being recognized by the US government as an “alien of extraordinary ability.” Newlands is the author of “Online Marketing: A User’s Manual” published by John Wiley & Sons. He has also published “How to Get PR for your Startup: Traction” and “Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals”.}

David Gerster, Investment Partner at Fusion Fund

_{David Gerster is an Investment Partner at Fusion Fund, an early-stage venture fund based in Palo Alto. Prior to Fusion, he was an investor at the JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, a $100M early stage proptech fund. At JLL, he led the fund’s efforts to invest in the Series A of OpenSpace, which later raised a Series D at a valuation of more than $900M. He has also invested as an angel, most notably in the first rounds of Cloudera and Alation.}

_{Prior to JLL, he was the Vice President of Data Science at BigML, where he promoted the idea that data science is easy by speaking at conferences and teaching workshops. During his time at BigML, he gave talks at CERN, the Predict Conference, ML Prague, Big Data Spain, Papis.io, DataLead (UC Berkeley), DataBeat (VentureBeat), and more than a dozen other venues.}

_{At Groupon, he built an elite data science team that trained the first machine-learned models for mobile deal relevance. At Yahoo, he led the project to collect billions of URL clickstreams in Hadoop and use them to improve Yahoo’s main web search algorithm. He holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.}