Santi Subotovsky
General Partner, Emergence Capital. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderemcap.com ↗
Santi Subotovsky is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, known for leading its early-stage investment in Zoom and serving on its board through and following its 2019 IPO. He previously founded SaaS e-learning platform AXG Tecnonexo and co-founded Puente Labs to support Latin American founders scaling globally.
2shows
2appearances
37statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
16said about them ↓ Everything Santi Subotovsky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Subotovsky: Silicon Valley consensus believed video conferencing was a solved market
“I don't fault people here in the Valley for saying video conferencing is done. It's not going to happen again. It's a race to the bottom. There's no room for a new player.”
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 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.”
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: Multi-stage VC funds follow on in only 30% of early investments
“A lot of entrepreneurs underestimate the negative effect of signaling. They raise from this multi-stage funds, and this multi-stage funds are incredibly focused, and typically they follow on on about 30% of their earlier stage investments, and that's an incred…”
Subotovsky: VC will be disrupted by specialized capital, not mega-funds
“I feel that venture capital is going to get disrupted, and I feel it's not going to get disrupted by humongous funds. It's going to get disrupted by people who are funding businesses and are providing the right capital for the right needs.”
Subotovsky: VC should only fund early risk, not proven models
“Venture capital should be used For discovery, for product development, early on when you're taking a risk, then when the model is working out, you should be able to access a different type of capital, and we're gonna start seeing those distinctions for differe…”
Investors are a terrible target market because VCs are notoriously cheap
“Investors are not a great market. I mean, we're very cheap. We don't like to pay for technology and it's a small market, so it's going to be very hard to build a big company if you're just targeting investors.”
Subotovsky: VCs rejected him in 2010 due to demographic background
“I talked to a number of venture firms, and the message that I got from a lot of venture firms was that given my background, I was not a perfect fit for venture. And when I double clicked on what they meant by that, it was more that there were not a lot of Lati…”
Subotovsky: Venture capitalists are fundamentally sales reps
“I mean, if you distill everything down to the essence, we're sales reps as venture capitalists.”
Subotovsky: VC demographic biases dictated which entrepreneurs received funding
“People had very strong biases in terms of who's the right person to be in venture, who's not. And that translated into who's the right entrepreneur that I want to back and who's not.”
Subotovsky: Two-week fundraising cycles are problematic in most cases
“It's like getting married after meeting someone online for two weeks, chatting, and then the next thing you do is you get married. That's, I mean, the majority of the cases, that's going to be problematic. You might get lucky every now and then, but it's going…”
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, …”
Subotovsky: Founders usually avoid live product demos during pitch meetings
“When someone's pitching, they typically try to stay away from demos because they don't work.”
Subotovsky: Zoom founder Eric Yuan prioritized fit over maximizing valuation
“Eric has always been this incredible human being focused on the right thing and not focused on, oh, I want to get the best customer or the best deal or the best valuation or the best pricing. He's always focused on finding the right customer, the right valuati…”
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: 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: Enterprise SaaS requires solving business problems, not just pleasing users
“If you don't do that, if you're not solving a real business problem, and you're just solving something that the end user wants, but that's it, you're not going to be able to build a true enterprise company.”
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 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: 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: 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.”
Subotovsky: Ending an investor relationship is harder than getting a divorce
“At least if you get married, you can get a divorce. Here, divorces are much harder to pull off.”
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…”
The other half of the tape: Santi Subotovsky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 16 times in 11 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 13Harry Stebbings 2Jake Saper 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 13
20VC 3
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 14 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- 1374 Your Dish Network Repair Man Probably Uses This $1m+ ARR Tool For Communication
- 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises
- 1496 Employee Engagement Platform in Brazil Passes $1.8M ARR, Raising $3m on $10m Pre
- 1492 Industrial IoT Platform Hits $150k MRR, 3x YoY growth
- 1488 ECommerce Solution Hits $8m in ARR and $8m in Services, Raising $20m on $60m pre?
- 1484 Content Marketing at Scale Passes $3m ARR, 500 Customers
- 1480 Social Listening Tool Raising $6m on $22M Pre Money (10x Valuation)
- 1474 Advantages of IoT+SaaS with $2.5m Revenue CEO of Senorberg
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Santi'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 | 23 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | General Partner, Emergence Capital | 1 | 14 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Top Founders → |