Bolt-On or Built-In? Rethinking International Growth

Most SaaS companies plan for global revenue. Few build for it. Kevin O'Donnell has spent more than two decades in product and international growth at Microsoft, Nitro, and Dropbox, watching the same mistake on repeat. Companies treat localization as a bolt-on rather than a strategic imperative and wonder why international growth fails. In this episode, Kevin talks with Jason Hemingway about what changes when you treat global growth as an operating principle from the start, where AI is opening markets that were never economically viable before, and why localization teams need to stop counting words and start telling a revenue story.