The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 52 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Together.ai Scaled From $2M to Over $100M Revenue in 15 Months
“Together is a good one, where we were in the A in 15 months ago, they were at two million revenue. The business is now north of a hundred million revenue.”
The New SaaS Benchmark for the AI Era Is 'Quadruple 120'
“If I were to posit a replacement for the triple, triple, double, double phrase, Maybe it's something like quadruple one 20. And what I mean by that is, yes, you should be growing very quickly, perhaps quadrupling year over year, triple quadrupling, et cetera. …”
Emergence Capital Founders Forfeit Their Carry Upon Retirement
“Our founders made the very generous choice to when they step away from the business and retire to forfeit their carry.”
Saper: Market pull is more important than founder quality in startup investments
“The first one is market pull. Like that is the most important thing, I think, when you're evaluating a potential investment or starting a company. The second is the founder, because it's the founder's job to figure out how do you build something defensible in …”
Saper: VCs have no defensible reason to hold public stock without board inside info
“If we didn't have inside information, we'd have no defensible reason to hold the position. But as long as we're on the board, we have that information, you know, we can hold it.”
Jake Saper Has Never Had a VC Investment Go to Zero
“No, what you mean is I've never none of my deals have ever gone to zero.”
Subotovsky: Emergence's focused SaaS strategy outperforms diversified VC firms
“So for us at Emergence, we all love that phase, and that's why we should be a lot better than more diversified firms because we have a very targeted approach.”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital will not blindly exercise pro-rata rights
“So our strategy has shifted over the years from we want to participate in every round until the company goes public and beyond, to we're going to Be incredibly concentrated early on, and then we're going to help those companies find the right partners to suppo…”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital generates most fund returns from first two checks
“What we realize for our fund and our strategy, we typically generate most of the returns when we write that first and second check. Then everything else we do afterwards, it's not in line with the initial returns that we're generating.”
Floyd: Multiple co-founders increase the likelihood of premature, smaller startup exits
“Now, the flip side is, and this is something that a lot of people don't think about, from an equity perspective, especially from a returns perspective, having more founders makes the outcome less attractive. It also forces people to take earlier exits, because…”
Emergence Invested in Zoom at a 100x Revenue Multiple in 2014
“It would have been, it was going to be priced at two hundred million dollar post money valuation, and this, again, remember the company was at around two million in revenue, And this was a hundred X revenue in 2014, right?”
Selling Stocks at Lockup Would Have Lost LPs $2 Billion
“If we had sold them all at lockup, we would have returned two billion dollars less to our LPs.”
Emergence Capital backed Gusto over faster-growing rival Zenefits
“We had just invested in Gusto, which was a competitor that was growing not quite as quickly as Zenefits. But the reality is Gusto has endured and become a massive company, and Zenefits didn't.”
Saper: Emergence Capital's Fund III Is Top Decile Even Without Zoom
“The cool thing about that fund, though, is even if you took Zoom out, it would still be a top to sell fund.”
Emergence Capital's Fund III Has Reached a 16x DPI
“That fund, I believe was fund three, which is the same fund that has Zoom. It's the same fund that has some other really large outcomes. And so that fund is already at a, I think it's a 16 times DPI.”
Emergence Missed Out on $2 Billion by Not Selling Stocks at Peak
“What's interesting, and this just is like totally coincidental, if we had sold all of our shares at peak price of whatever, whenever the peak price proposed for that stock, we would have made two billion dollars more for our LPs.”
Saper: No VC Firm Makes All Its Money from 'Prepared Minds'
“The reality is, I don't think any venture firm makes all their money on prepared minds. I just think that that is bullshit.”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital missed out on investing early in Cloudflare
“So the biggest miss that I've had is when I first joined Emergence one of my good friends and classmates, Matthew Prince and Michelle, were getting started with Cloudflare, and I invited them to present here at Emergence, and I didn't know how venture worked, …”
Emergence Capital's strategy shift does not signal an enterprise SaaS decline
“I don't think that has any sort of embedded commentary on the future of enterprise investing. I think there's tons of opportunity left.”
Treskow: Emergence Capital is expanding into mobile enterprise, not leaving SaaS
“From what I saw is that they are embracing the role of mobile and distributed workforces. In, in the enterprise, which to me is actually supporting what I was just talking about in, in the sense that, you know, you're introducing more and more consumer-like el…”
Zoom was profitable when Emergence Capital invested in 2014
“It was competitive both because the, there was early growth, but also because the company was profitable. And so we didn't have to raise capital.”
Saper: True market pull requires buyers having tried hacking DIY solutions
“It's not a desperate problem if someone hasn't, if your buyer hasn't tried to hack together something on their own to solve it, or if they haven't bought an inferior product to solve it, or if they're not spending countless hours themselves dealing with it. Ot…”
Every Emergence Capital partner does reference calls on every investment
“So what it means is that for every investment we make, every partner does reference calls. Every partner calls customers. Every partner calls management references. Every partner does backchannel references.”
Emergence Capital Has Returned Over $8 Billion in Cash
“The dollars in capital, we've returned a little over eight billion dollars in cash.”
10% of Emergence Capital's Early-Stage Deals Go Public
“One out of 10 of our early stage investments have gone public.”
Saper: Zoom Returned Emergence Capital's Fund III Over 10x
“Zoom returned it, you know, more than 10.”
Saper: Veeva's market was only $400M when Emergence invested
“When we made the investment in Viva, a CRM for pharmaceutical companies, the entire market for that was four hundred million dollars globally.”
Saper: Emergence Capital targets double-digit ownership on partner-led seed bets
“So when we make a seed investment, we treat it like a core bet. It's a partner that's doing the deal. We're generally owning double digit percentages so that we really care.”
Saper: Top Emergence investments like Zoom were expensive, but Veeva wasn't
“They are not always expensive, but they are often expensive. So if I look back at our portfolio, Gusto was expensive. Zoom was expensive. Yammer was expensive. A lot of the good ones, Ironclad was expensive. But some of them weren't. Viva wasn't expensive beca…”
Saper: Private equity typically pays 3x to 5x ARR for acquisitions
“Savior is too strong of a word because most private equity outcomes don't generate incredible returns for the VC. So savior is not the right. It may be savior in the sense that like would get your money back. The sales loft outcome was an awesome one, but that…”
Saper Discloses Emergence Capital Has Participated in Pay-to-Play Rounds
“I personally have not yet been part of a pay to play. My firm certainly has but it sucks. It just feels bad on all accounts, but sometimes it's necessary to get the company funded.”
Saper: Emergence's AI Application Portfolio Companies Seeing Gross Margin Increases
“Most of our application layer companies that are providing applications on top of these products are seeing gross margin increase over time because of that competitive dynamic.”
Saper: Emergence Invested in Together.ai Believing Open-Source LLMs Will Become Dominant
“The clearest what you have to believe for that investment was that open source LLMs will be a dominant part of the market over time. That enterprises, that businesses are going to want to buy and use open source models and not just anthropic open AI and the cl…”
20% of Emergence Capital Investments Hit $1B+ Valuations
“One out of five have gone on to raise rounds at north of a billion dollars.”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital partners average one new investment per year
“So we invest in anywhere between five to seven new companies a year. That means that each partner here will do about one new investment a year.”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital prioritizes ownership targets due to portfolio concentration
“At emergence, given that we're focused on early stage, we're going to write a check and we're going to focus on ownership. Given that we have this concentrated portfolio, we need to get paid if things work out, because we're going to do a lot of work for those…”
Subotovsky: Next-gen startups will disrupt legacy email, CRM, and calendar incumbents
“Email, calendar, CRM, marketing automation, those haven't changed significantly in decades. So I believe that in the next 10 years, we're gonna see a lot of the leading companies in those categories disrupted by new generations of companies that are rebuilding…”
Subotovsky: Key startup board decisions happen in one-on-ones, not meetings
“And over time, what I realized is that those board meetings are great opportunities to align everyone, but most of the work gets done outside of board meetings. So the big decisions come up when you're having this one-on-ones with the CEO, the CMO, the head of…”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital targets 20 to 22 companies per fund
“We typically have about 20 to 22 companies per fund, and that works incredibly well, because over three to four years, we're gonna partner with five to seven new companies a year, and we're gonna build incredibly strong relationships.”
Subotovsky: Supporting full executive teams creates maximum leverage for CEOs
“Because what I realized is for a CEO, if you can help them build stronger relationships, and if you can help the executives be better at what they do, that helps the CEOs, and that helps the company. So I make it a priority to give the CEO leverage by helping …”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital requires unanimous partner enthusiasm to make investments
“We want to make sure that we have what we call unanimous enthusiasm, meaning that everyone around the table is excited, not just supportive, to partner with this entrepreneur.”
Floyd: Data shows startups with multiple co-founders have higher success rates
“I think if you look at the data, multiple founders generally increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.”
Floyd: Emergence Capital primarily backs founders from Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Oracle
“If you look at the entrepreneurs that we fund here at Emergence, you know, primarily a lot of them come out of the same few companies. Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Oracle.”
Emergence Capital knew Fund 5 founders 13 months before investing
“In our last fund, in fund five, we did this analysis. We knew the founders on average, 13 months before we made the investment.”
Emergence Capital bought extra Doximity shares at IPO and returned 3x
“In some cases we buy. So in the case of Doximity, you know, we were huge believers. We invested at the A, accompanied really well. We actually bought more at the IPO. And that's been a great investment. We've already returned three X you know, from where that …”