Jake Saper
General Partner, Emergence Capital. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorauthor@jakesaper ↗LinkedIn ↗emcap.com ↗
Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, focusing on enterprise AI, agentic software, and AI-native services. He led diligence on the firm's early investment in Zoom and backed companies including Ironclad and Mechanical Orchard.
1shows
1appearances
66statements
15resolved
13supported
1contradicted
87%fully supported
9said about them ↓ Everything Jake Saper said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Salesloft Was the Highest Multiple Ever Paid by PE for Software
“Which was the biggest outcome that it was the highest multiple ever paid by private equity for a software company. Companies required for 2.3 billion dollars.”
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.”
Saper: Private equity will consolidate most legacy website builders
“I think there will be consolidation, there will be private equity, and there will be a few that reinvent themselves. There will be a few that are nimble enough to figure out how to adapt to the new era, but I think most will get consolidated.”
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.”
Bolt Scaled From Zero to $20M Revenue in Two Months
“We're seeing examples like Bolt, you know, which went zero to 20 in two months”
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 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.”
Jake Saper Would Sell Grok at a $50 Billion Valuation
“So I sell Grok, and I think the reason I sell Grok is I don't yet know how, what niche they've carved out in the market.”
Saper: OpenAI feels expensive at $300 billion valuation
“OpenAI feels expensive, but they have a strong consumer brand.”
Saper: Buy Anthropic at $60 billion valuation if application layer improves
“I probably buy Anthropic assuming they can figure out the app, you know, the app stuff more.”
Jake Saper: Most VC founders retain firm ownership after retiring
“The vast majority of founders of firms, when they retire, they retain a meaningful portion of the ownership of that firm.”
Emergence Capital Has Returned Over $8 Billion in Cash
“The dollars in capital, we've returned a little over eight billion dollars in cash.”
20% of Emergence Capital Investments Hit $1B+ Valuations
“One out of five have gone on to raise rounds at north of a billion dollars.”
10% of Emergence Capital's Early-Stage Deals Go Public
“One out of 10 of our early stage investments have gone public.”
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: Zoom Returned Emergence Capital's Fund III Over 10x
“Zoom returned it, you know, more than 10.”
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: 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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
The other half of the tape: Jake Saper's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Frankel 5Harry Stebbings 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 9
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 5 mentions in 1 episode
2020 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jake's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | General Partner, Emergence Capital | 1 | 66 | 87% 13/15 | full record on 20VC → |