20VC: Zoom From Series A to IPO, How VCs Can Provide CEOs with Additional Leverage and Why The Negative Effects of Signalling Are Very Real with Santi Subotovsky, General Partner @ Emergence Capital
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Santi Subotovsky is a General Partner @ Emergence Capital, one of the valley's leading venture firms of the last decade focusing on enterprise & SaaS applications. Within their incredible portfolio is the likes of Salesforce, Zoom, Box, Veeva Systems, SuccessFactors and many more. As for Santi, he has led deals in the likes of Zoom, Crunchbase, Clearbanc, Top Hat and Chorus.ai to name a few. Before Emergence, Santi founded AXG Tecnonexo, a SaaS e-learning company in Argentina which he expanded to 150+ employees across Latin America and the U.S. Santi is also a founding board member of Puente Labs, an organization that helps founders of Latin American high-potential growth companies scale their businesses globally.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Santi made his way from founding a Latin American EdTech business to being one of the valley's most successful investors of 2019 with Zoom's IPO? What was the biggest barrier he faced when getting into VC? How did he overcome it?
2.) What does Santi believe his superpower as an investor is? What did Santi see in Eric Yuan and the 30 person team at the time that made him believe they would be successful? What made how Eric thinks about presents product so special? What did the relationship building process look like between Eric and Santi in the early days?
3.) How does Santi like to work with his portfolio companies? How does Santi think about time allocation across the portfolio? Why does Santi believe it is crucial to not just spend time with the CEO but the exec team also? Where does Santi most like to provide value and leverage to the CEO? Why does Santi believe all VCs are just sales reps?
4.) Why does Santi believe that a vertically focused fund is the optimal strategy to pursue today? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks? How does Santi think about the obvious overlap between consumer and enterprise today? With the thematic focus, how does Santi think about loss ratio and batting average? How does Emergence approach the element of both ownership and price? Where do they optimise?
5.) With larger and larger funds, how does Santi see the future of venture? Why does he believe that we will see vertically focused capital-as-a-service? What does this look like in reality? Is Santi concerned by the extended window of privatisation that is now present in today's capital markets? How concerned is Santi by the compression of fundraising timelines and what does that to investor
founder relationships?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Santi’s Fave Book: Candide by Voltaire
Santi’s Most Recent Investment: Openpath
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Santi on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are back for another week in the world of the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, |
| 0:03.4 | and I also all messages on Instagram, as you know, at H. Stebbings, 1996. |
| 0:07.6 | You can't forget the two bees. |
| 0:09.0 | Always love to hear your thoughts and feedback there. |
| 0:11.1 | To our show today, though, and I had heard so many great things about today's guest before the episode. |
| 0:15.3 | Not just about his track record, though, but what a genuine, kind and good person he's been to work with for his founders. And that really comes across in the episode I was really pleased to see. |
| 0:23.3 | And so with that, I'm so excited to welcome Santee Subotovsky to the hot seat today. |
| 0:27.3 | Now, Santee is a general partner at Emergence Capital, |
| 0:29.9 | one of the Valley's leading venture firms of the last decade, |
| 0:32.4 | focusing on enterprise and SaaS applications. |
| 0:34.8 | Within their incredible portfolio is the likes of Salesforce, Zoom, |
| 0:38.3 | box, Viva systems, success factors and many more incredible companies. As for Santee, |
| 0:43.4 | he's led deals in the likes of Zoom, crunch base, Clearbank, Top Hat and Chorus.aI, just to name a few. |
| 0:49.4 | And before emergence, Santee founded AXG Technonexo, a SaaS e-learning company in Argentina, which he expanded to 150 employees across both Latin America and the US. |
| 0:59.0 | And I'd also want to say a huge thank you to the very wonderful Michelle at Clearbank, Michael at Toppan, and Eric at Zoom for providing some fantastic questions suggestions today. |
| 1:06.0 | I really do so appreciate that. |
| 1:08.0 | But before we get into the episode today, I'd like to give a big shout out to my friends over at multiple. |
| 1:13.0 | Widely regarded as the go-to firm for game-changing companies when it comes to building your brand, |
| 1:17.6 | crafting your culture, and gearing up your growth. |
| 1:20.0 | They've worked with breakthrough companies such as we transfer, pipe drive, mix cloud, unbbbles, Signal and Kalo. And when we set up stride.V.C, they were the first call we made to help us get our story |
| 1:30.1 | straight. |
| 1:30.7 | And what makes Multiple really special is their empathy for and experience of the entrepreneurial |
... |
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