Abakar Saidov

Who is Abakar Saidov?

Abakar Saidov is the co-founder and CEO of Beamery, the London-based talent acquisition software company he helped build from a lean founding team into a venture-backed scale-up. By the time he took the SaaStock Europe 2017 stage, Saidov had already lived through one of the most consequential inflection points in any startup's life: the close of a Series A round and the scramble to deploy that capital without breaking the company in the process. His talk, "What Happens After Series A Raise: How to Spend It, Who to Hire, How Fast to Move," is a candid account of exactly that moment.

What comes through in Saidov's telling is a founder who scaled deliberately rather than recklessly. Before the raise, Beamery had been running, in his words, very lean — the founding team plus a handful of early employees. The Series A did not change the conviction behind the product; Saidov was explicit that they already knew the product was working and that there was demand. What it changed was the runway, and with it the obligation to bring in leaders who had operated at scale before. He is unusually frank about the difficulty of those first senior hires and about the mistakes he made himself, which gives his advice a hard-won, practitioner's credibility rather than the gloss of a victory lap.

This page collects Abakar Saidov's recorded SaaStock talk, with the transcript, so founders facing their own post-Series-A moment can learn directly from how Beamery navigated it. His perspective is most valuable for early-stage founders who have just raised, or are about to, and are trying to figure out where the money should actually go first.

About Beamery

Beamery is a talent acquisition and recruitment software company headquartered in London. It builds tooling that helps organizations attract, engage, and manage candidates, operating in the broader category of HR and recruiting technology. Saidov co-founded the company and serves as its CEO, and his SaaStock talk frames Beamery's early trajectory through the lens of disciplined scaling rather than headline metrics.

In Saidov's account, the company's defining early characteristic was how lean it stayed before raising. Beamery was carried by its founding team and only a small number of early employees, a structure that forced focus and validated demand before any aggressive spending began. The Series A was significant precisely because it ended that constraint: it gave Beamery the runway to hire real leaders in sales and marketing — people who had done the work before at scale — rather than continuing to stretch a small team across functions it was not built to own.

The themes Saidov draws out of Beamery's experience are squarely about go-to-market construction. Knowing the product worked and that demand existed was, in his framing, the easy part; the hard part was building the human machine to capture that demand without hiring the wrong profile of leader. That tension — between the pull to move fast after a raise and the cost of getting senior hires wrong — sits at the center of how he describes Beamery's post-Series-A period.

Key lessons from Abakar Saidov's talks

Spend your Series A on leadership before anything else. Saidov is unequivocal that the first thing Beamery did after raising was hire. After running lean with just the founding team and a few early employees, the round's real value was the runway to bring in experienced leaders in sales and marketing — people who had built and scaled those functions elsewhere.

Raise only when the product and demand are already proven. Saidov stresses that Beamery already knew the product was working and that there was demand before they leaned into hiring. The capital was not a bet on whether the business worked; it was fuel poured onto a fire that was already lit, which is what justified moving aggressively on leadership hires.

Beware the VP of Sales who is too enterprise, too big-company. This is the mistake Saidov calls out most directly, and admits he partially made himself: hiring a senior sales leader whose instincts come from large, established organizations rather than from building a function inside a young, fast-moving startup. He frames the senior sales hire as one of the hardest you make, and getting the profile wrong is a costly error precisely at the moment a company can least afford it.

Recognize that the hardest hires are the ones the raise forces on you. Saidov treats the leap from a tight founding team to a company with experienced functional leaders as one of the toughest transitions a startup goes through. The Series A makes it possible and necessary at once, and his advice is to approach those hires with humility about how easy it is to get them wrong.