Irish Founders' Playbook for Winning the US; with Dylan Scully, Frontline Ventures

Dylan Scully is an early-stage investor at Frontline Ventures, a transatlantic venture fund investing in B2B tech and AI across Europe at pre-seed and seed, and in the US at Series B and beyond. Frontline’s thesis: to build a category-defining company, you need to win both Europe and the US; it’s not an either/or.

In this conversation, Dylan draws on his background as a founder (Matchday) and his time at Accenture’s global innovation team to give data-backed, practical advice to Irish founders thinking about US expansion. We cover the “SaaSpocalypse” debate, what enterprise buyers actually value, the real cost of entering the US market, and what gets Frontline excited at the pitch table.

Show Notes

• Frontline’s dual fund strategy — early stage across Europe, growth stage in the US, and why the transatlantic network matters

• The “SaaSpocalypse” — will enterprises build everything in-house as code costs go to zero? Dylan’s clear-eyed view on why most won’t, and why AI-native startups beat incumbents bolting on features

• Build vs. buy in the age of AI — why enterprises buy opinions, reliability, and a product roadmap — not just lines of code; the Donna portfolio example on AI agents sitting in front of systems of record

• Is now a bad time to expand to the US? — Frontline ran sentiment analysis via portfolio company Signal AI: for every 1 negative European article about the US, there were 13 positive ones

• The 40% rule — European B2B software companies generate ~40% of IPO revenue from the US. Flip side: US software companies generate 30–40% of IPO revenue from Europe. The interdependency is massively underestimated.

• Exploring the US from day one — treat it as a separate product-market fit exercise; 4–6 trips/year; the Workvivo/Zoom playbook for using European subsidiaries to get warm intros to US HQ

• What founders get wrong about US costs — salaries, agencies, visas, travel all add up. But founders equally underestimate the value: one homogenous market, shorter sales cycles, bigger budgets, higher ACVs

• The 300% rule — when pitching US VCs, weight your US revenue and users 3× higher than European equivalents. A US investor won’t be impressed by your 1,000 European customers if you have 20 in the US.

• What Frontline looks for — team and market account for 95%+ of the decision. Speed of learning + strong contrarian opinions backed by data are the leading indicators they watch for.

Guest Bio

Dylan Scully is an early-stage investor at Frontline Ventures, focused on pre-seed and seed investments in B2B tech, software, and AI across Europe. Before joining Frontline, he founded Matchday (sports fan engagement platform) and spent several years at Accenture as Commercial Strategy Lead for their global innovation team, working with C-suite clients on adopting emerging technology.

Links

• Frontline

• Dylan Scully on LinkedIn

• Dylan’s Substack

• Frontline US Playbook

Contact — Want to get in touch? Email podcast@digitalirish.com