Coaching Networks advancements, announcing our new OIR program, and SaaS hacks to conserve cash
Issue 004
Welcome back to Surfacing, a monthly newsletter from Emergence Capital. Subscribers receive the most relevant news, thoughts, trends, and jobs in the B2B SaaS ecosystem on the last Tuesday of every month. Subscribe below.
🔦 FEATURED CONTENT
The Future of Coaching Networks is Here
By Gordon Ritter, General Partner at Emergence
The market is finally paying attention to Coaching Networks. With ZoomInfo’s $571M acquisition of Chorus, Zoom’s foray into conversation intelligence, GitHub’s launch of CoPilot, and GPT-3 text generation advancements, we’ve seen an increasing number of digital workflow companies begin to leverage Coaching Networks technology.
The technology behind Coaching Networks answers the question: How can we make information that other people have mastered accessible to you in your time of need?
The key ingredient in these networks is software that gathers actions from a distributed network of users and identifies the best techniques for getting a particular job done. The software acts as a real-time, on-the-job coach, guiding users to successful outcomes and gathering new data that are fed back into the system.
A lot has changed since we first started covering Coaching Networks. We attribute the recent adoption of Coaching Networks technology to four main things:
Boom in sensor data collection. The pandemic and rise of remote work undoubtedly accelerated the adoption of software. With so much of our work lives now taking place on Zoom and other digital tools, there has been a proliferation of data on how we execute our jobs every day. Zoom notices how much you pay attention during meetings, Chorus analyzes your speech on calls, Guru recognizes which internal documents you use the most, and so on. All of this data helps feed and strengthen each platform’s respective Coaching Networks engine.
People are more comfortable with Coaching Networks. As people become more comfortable with digital devices and wearables monitoring them in their personal lives (i.e., Apple Watches, Strava, etc.), they are also becoming more comfortable with Coaching Networks in the workplace. The throughline is that the technology is additive and helpful, rather than harmful. Instead of harvesting personal data with mal intent, Coaching Networks companies are focused on data privacy in order to ease adoption. At the end of the day, the more comfortable users are with Coaching Networks technology, the more valuable the system will be.
Coaching UI advancements with GPT-3. Ultimately, the hallmark of a strong Coaching Network is a well-designed UI. But up until recently, good UI was not ubiquitous among Coaching Networks. Now, with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, we can turn signals into human-readable advice. Similar to how a soccer coach watches players and provides advice on form and technique, we now have AI that can turn machine learning insights into human-relatable coaching.
GitHub CoPilot. Lastly, GitHub CoPilot gives us a look into a successful application of Coaching Networks in the dev tool space. With their AI pair programmer, developers can simply comment on an idea of the logic they want, and CoPilot uses AI to suggest code to implement the solution. Not only does it help developers cut down time learning new languages, but it also integrates directly into popular editing platforms, allowing developers to maintain their workflow.
At Emergence, we think about the evolution of cloud software as a continuum. The industry started with horizontal, industry-agnostic software like Salesforce, giving way to vertical-focused companies building the Industry Cloud. Today, we’re transitioning again towards narrower, Deep Collaboration software such as Figma, Maze, and Ironclad that focus on specific jobs.
Continue reading for a deep dive into the coaching continuum and our Coaching Networks landscape.
🚀 GO-TO-MARKET ADVICE
Spooky sales statistics
From Doug Landis, Growth Partner at Emergence
In the spirit of Halloween here are some frightening statistics:
75% of reps burn out, fail, or leave sales altogether
The average tenure of a sales rep is 14 months
60% of your sales managers will fail in two years
3% of people trust sales people (slightly above politicians)
What does all of this mean?
Focus on your reps. Give them training, tools, tactics, and viable quotas and comp plans that are attainable.
Don't forget to give your sales managers the same kind of love. Most front-line sales leaders haven’t been trained on how to be great managers. Give them the help they deserve as it's one of the hardest jobs in your company.
Since your reps spend less time in front of a buying group than they do updating their CRM, make sure they know how to multi-thread.
If you want help with this, I have a workshop that I’ll happily deliver to your teams. Reach out to dlandis@emcap.com.
🌟 THE LATEST
Welcoming Gillian Heltai as our first Operator in Residence
We are thrilled to welcome Gillian Heltai as Emergence’s first Operator in Residence. Gillian is the Chief Customer Officer at Lattice and brings 15 years of experience leading customer experience and sales teams at Comscore and Talkdesk. Throughout her career, Gillian has twice played a key role in scaling businesses between $10M and $100M ARR, with deep experience managing growth across customer segments and buyer profiles.
Continue reading to learn more about our new OIR program and Gillian’s contributions so far.
🔓 FROM THE VAULT
5 SaaS Hacks to Conserve Cash Without Cutting Costs
Originally published in 2019 by Joe Floyd, General Partner at Emergence
It’s hard to benchmark your costs. Everyone’s situation and company are different, forcing startup CEOs to walk a fine line with cash burn: spend too little and your startup may not grow fast enough to achieve escape velocity; spend too much and your startup might run out of life.
Even more difficult: it’s hard to cut costs after overspending. Before you get to the point where you have to cut into muscle, we recommend five financial hacks that can help you conserve cash without actually cutting your spend.
Read the hacks here.
💸 PORTFOLIO NEWS
Welcoming Coalesce to the Emergence portfolio
Coalesce announced their $26M Series A. Welcome, Armon and the Coalesce team!
Forma and Maze were featured on Business Insider’s ”16 most promising cloud-software startups of 2022, according to VCs” list
🔮 PORTFOLIO JOBS
Looking for your next role?
Check out the open opportunities at our portfolio companies.
G&A & Operations
Mezmo: VP of People & Inclusion (Remote)
Hi Marley: Senior Director, FP&A (Boston)
Maze: Controller (Remote)
Regal: VP of Finance (New York)
Eng, Product & Design
ASAPP: Sr. Director, Product Engineering (Remote)
Gusto: Head of Core Benefits Engineering (San Francisco)
Ironclad: VP of Design (Remote)
Vymo: Head of Creative - Brand Design (Bangalore)
GTM & Business Operations
Ironclad: Senior Director, Demand Generation (San Francisco)
Forma: Director, Product Marketing (Remote)
Betterworks: Director, Sales Development (Remote)
Salesloft: Director, Marketing Operations (Remote)
We have ~1,409 open roles on our portfolio jobs site. Check them out!
👀 EMCAP HAPPENINGS
Community Day @ the SF-Marin Food Bank
For our annual Community Day tradition, we switched things up and spent the morning volunteering on the assembly line at the SF-Marin Food Bank. By the end of our shift, we assembled more than 1,500 grocery bags for home delivery to SF residents with limited mobility. If your team is interested in volunteering, you can sign up here!
