SaaSy Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
We are a purpose driven organization that seeks to use our platform to improve the life experience of all whom we connect with.
SaaSy’s vision is:
Every B2B SaaS ‘go to market’ employee realizes their potential through world class leadership and enablement, delivered by an inclusive, collegiate and global community.
From our inception in 2016, SaaSy has sought to democratize access to world class leadership training through our public workshops that allow employees of smaller companies to come together and have a ‘big company’ quality of experience. We have quietly given away 10% of all our tickets to women as we seek to contribute to gender balance.
In Dec 2019 we made the decision to extend our impact to provide scholarships, mentoring and peer support groups to anyone who identifies as having affinity with an underrepresented group. We recognize that this is a huge responsibility and therefore we sought out an advisory panel with a diversity of experience and perspectives to guide us in this journey.
The following are the values we strive for:
Scroll to the bottom to meet our amazing DEI advisory council
Equity & Fairness
Everyone is afforded equal opportunity to realize their ambitions without regard for their identity or life experience.
Belonging
We are intentional in ensuring a universal sense of belonging is carried as a value by program participants, which initiates visible change in the workplace.
Cultivation of potential
We believe that fulfilling one's potential is an opportunity that should be available to all.
Cascading impact
We believe that every learner has a responsibility to teach. SaaSy programs imbue in the recipient a motivation to pass on new competencies to those behind them in alignment with their ability to do so.
What we are doing and how you can engage
There is much on our roadmap and the following areas are how we seek to deliver on the values above:
For Individuals:
Scholarships
Anyone identifying as belonging to an underrepresented group in SaaS is invited to apply for free training, mentoring and peer support via our scholarships page.
For Employers
If you share our values, then we would like to hear from you. There are several ways you can support us and/or receive value from our organizations:
Broadening your hiring pool
We have established a matching program for employers looking to access talented professionals who are underrepresented in SaaS.
Being recognized as part of the solution
Our impact is amplified through the support of employers who join us in providing scholarship funding and mentors for our underrepresented scholarship participants.
Reverse mentoring
Unconscious bias training doesn’t work. What does work, is Reverse Mentoring. Sponsoring employers are invited to nominate executives to be matched with scholarship students for monthly mentoring meetings that allow a reality check in terms of the actual experience of those who have a different identity to those of the executive.
If you are interested in learning more or discussing how your inclusion initiatives may intersect with ours, please complete the form below:
SaaSy DEI Advisory Council
Michael Tuso (He/Him)
Chili Piper
Michael Tuso has focused his entire career on making salespeople better through coaching and training on the context of growth and development. He’s a member of the LGBT community and has been active in the OutinTech community, has been an advocate for diversity particularly in sales teams. As a seasoned sales practitioner and manager of remote revenue teams, Michael was named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Sales Leaders by the AA-ISP, Sales Development Leader of the Year by the Sales Development Conference, and a top sales leader to follow by Crunchbase. He is currently the Director of Revenue Performance at Chili Piper, where he served as the first sales management hire and scaled the team from scratch. His passion is around equipping revenue teams with the tools to be successful and optimizing their performance through coaching, training, learning, and mentoring. He has been featured on dozens of national podcasts, is a guest speaker at conferences, and has been widely quoted in business publications.
Mandy Bynum Mc Laughlin (She/Her)
Mandy Bynum Consulting
Mandy is an expert in building cross-functional and human-centered teams. She has spent the last decade of her career creating systems and processes for organizations to work more efficiently and effectively, all while making Inclusion and Diversity a part of the strategy itself, not just a nice-to-have. She currently works through her own consulting firm to build bespoke Equity & Inclusion strategies for a vast range of companies and organizations, from Social Justice and Non-Profits, to Silicon Valley based tech companies.
Marianne Hindsgaul (She/Her)
Bobly
Norwegian by birth, international by experience, Marianne is the CEO and co-founder of Bobly – An engagement kiosk that connects visitors in real-time while the experience is top of mind. She believes in paying it forward and strives to help others – As a female founder, Marianne knows it is important to have other female founders supporting one another.
Matt Cameron (He/Him)
SaaSy Sales Leadership
Matt is the founder and CEO of SaaSy Sales Leadership – Having lived in 4 different countries before returning to New Zealand at the age of 11, he has a keen sense of how important a sense of ‘belonging’ is. The SaaSy values are core to Matt – His experience with www.witnesschange.org and as a sales leader at progressive companies like Salesforce.com have informed the SaaSy values and highlighted the opportunity for impact that a vehicle like SaaSy presents.
Misha McPherson (She/Her)
Coursera
Misha has 20 years in the tech industry. The first ten years of her career was in sales. The last ten years of her career has been in SaaS Sales Training and Enablement. Misha built programs at Yahoo! HotJobs, Monster.com, Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), Responsys (acquired by Oracle), Spreadfast, and Mixpanel before breaking off on her own to focus on companies that are building sales enablement for the first time. Misha is passionate about Sales Enablement as a way to make revenue scalable and predictable, and loves helping sales enablement leaders build transformational programs.
Carmen DeCouto (She/They)
SiSense
Carmen has been in sales since she became her parents’ first retail employee as a teenager. Seven years ago she made the transition to tech and has since held multiple go-to-market roles and currently serves as a Product Marketing Manager at Sisense. As part of the BI and Data Analytics tech space, Carmen is passionate about using data to disrupt markets and drive organizational change. Having studied economic development and human rights in college, Carmen is also actively involved in anti-racism work and LGBTQ+ advocacy both in her workplace and out in her community.
Leslie Truong (She/Her)
Stanford Children's Hospital
Leslie Truong serves in a new role as Diversity & Inclusion Coordinator at Stanford Children’s Health / Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. In her role, she collaborates with various areas of the organization and within the larger Stanford Medicine community to drive outcomes pertaining to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. Her experience also includes nearly 10 years of non-profit management and administration experience with the YMCA of San Francisco, where she was the lead for their Diversity, Inclusion and Global Engagement initiatives and the Associate Executive Director for the Shih Yu-Lang Central branch in the Tenderloin neighborhood of downtown San Francisco. Through the YMCA, she has also served on the national Asian Pacific Islander Leadership Network Employee Resource Group.
Simon Court (He/Him/His)
New Zealand Trade & Enterprise
Simon works at the intersection of data driven DEI, Design Thinking and people power. A global DEI architect, building a 40+ country DEI strategy for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, the business development arm of the New Zealand Government. Simon is actively involved in advocacy, LGBTQ+ youth work and LGTBQ+ entrepreneur programs. Known for his ability to coalesce people around a cause and build global networks with purpose, Simon believes that until outsiders feel like insiders and people see themselves in their own organizations, the need for diversity, equity and inclusion programs exist.
