The Ledger
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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.”
Crunchbase organically became the system of record for private companies
“Crunchbase has become the system of record for private companies, and they have done that organically without any major investment or any defined strategy.”
Emergence spun Crunchbase from AOL to build a next-gen Dun & Bradstreet
“So when we spun it out of AOL, we had the thesis that we could create a next gen B to B database. So think of next gen Dan and Bradstreet with a much more efficient and organic data acquisition model. So think of LinkedIn, but for companies instead of for peop…”
Less than a third of Crunchbase's original users were actually investors
“More than one third of the use case for Crunchbase, the lookup use case, original Crunchbase use case, We're not investors. We're salespeople. They were using Crunchbase for prospecting, and that's what got us excited. One-third was HR-related, people in the r…”
Crunchbase's historical network moat is nearly impossible to recreate from scratch
“The power of the network is something that is very hard to recreate. If you were starting from scratch, then you can create a great tool, a great platform. But if you don't have the history that crunch base has, it's going to be very hard to build that.”
Emergence invested just $7 million to spin Crunchbase out of AOL
“So we invested seven million dollars.”
Emergence Capital invests exclusively in B2B cloud companies
“We're focused exclusively on B to B cloud. We don't do anything outside of that.”
Emergence Capital typically invests $5M to $10M in Series A rounds
“So typical check size is anywhere between five to ten million dollars going in, It's a series A”
Emergence interviewed 85 CEO candidates before hiring Jager McConnell for Crunchbase
“We talked to over 85 CEO candidates for that process, and we ended up getting, I mean, we're fortunate to get Jagger McConnell from Salesforce”
Crunchbase rebuilt its entire software architecture after the AOL spinout
“Over the last couple of years, we rebuilt everything to make it scalable, because it was a great asset when it comes to data, not necessarily a great asset when it comes to software architecture, and also when it comes to business model.”
Emergence Capital's $330 million fund was 60% deployed by mid-2018
“So the last fund was three hundred and thirty million and we're about 60% deployed.”
Emergence Capital targets a concentrated portfolio of 20 companies per fund
“So we're probably going to invest in another seven companies. So each fund we invest in 20 companies.”