Saper: Revenue growth without high margins isn't product-market fit
Jake Saper · Jake Saper, GP @ Emergence Capital: "We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions" · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 10, 2025 · at 1:16:50
Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital, warns that AI-enabled service startups often confuse rapid top-line sales with genuine product-market fit when discounting services at low margins.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What that doesn't tell you is have you used AI to provide a high margin service, right? You can sell a lot of something, but if you haven't figured out a way to have a good business model around it, then it's not really product market fit.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jake Saper
Saper: Focused startups are outpacing incumbents in capturing AI value
“The thing I've changed my mind on is I'm less fearful that incumbents will be able to accrue most of the value. The reality is, like, it still early days in this game, and things could change, but thus far, the startups are outpacing, the focus startups are ou…”
If Jake Saper Were to Short a Public Stock, It Would Be IBM
“If I were to short a stock publicly, it'd be IBM.”
Saper: Multi-stage VC seed programs create signaling risk for founders
“Most multi-stage firms treat their seed programs as an option program, right? They write small checks. Often it's their junior people writing these small checks and they use it as a way to track the company to see if it breaks out. If it does, then they try to…”