Founders, Forget About FOMO

Issue 002

Aug 30, 2022

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

FOMO Will Shorten the Lifespan of Your Company

By Gordon Ritter, General Partner at Emergence

The past few years saw massive venture fundraising and skyrocketing valuations for software companies. It benefited companies that could grow quickly, even if that early growth was not correlated with long-term defensible value. The period rewarded founders if they focused almost exclusively on revenue growth, and the resulting fundraising success that came with it. With the recent economic downturn and slowing pace of fundraising, most founders are struggling through this rapid adjustment from Fear of Missing Out (aka FOMO) to just plain Fear. The reality is that FOMO sucks for making long-term decisions.

It seems the resounding message to founders during this time has been to extend your runway and weather the storm. But time and time again, we’ve seen that bold leaders and companies are hardened in bad markets, and massively accelerate in good ones. The common thread is they never let FOMO take hold. Instead, they were driven by an internal conviction that they were on the right track.

In this piece, we took a look at how the founders of Emergence portfolio companies Zoom, Veeva, and Salesforce avoided FOMO to build iconic public software companies.

Read the piece here

🚀 GO-TO-MARKET ADVICE

Navigating Product-Market Fit in Today's Environment

By Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence, and Lotti Siniscalco, Partner at Emergence

Achieving strong product-market fit (PMF) matters now more than ever. With budgets tightening, products that may have appeared to have PMF in the previous market may be more “nice to have” in this one.

At the end of the day, companies that achieve PMF do so because they solve a desperate problem for their customers. But what other factors contribute to product-market fit? And how can founders adjust to achieve PMF in today’s market?

A few weeks back, we hosted a small group discussion on PMF with Andy Rachleff, a PMF lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, former VC, and Co-Founder and former CEO of Wealthfront.

Read the recap

🌟 THE LATEST

We’re hiring Associates!

Interested in joining Emergence? We’re looking for a few associates to add to our investment team.

Our associates actively participate in all stages of the investment process from identifying & evaluating potential investment opportunities to supporting current portfolio entrepreneurs. You will be working directly with one General Partner to co-develop investment theses, take company pitches, source new opportunities, nurture relationships, attend the occasional board meeting, execute diligence, and more. This is a true vertical experience where you will have the opportunity to learn every aspect of venture capital.

This full-time role is based in our San Francisco office.

Apply here

📰 PRESS

Our team featured in the news

30 Minutes to President’s Club Podcast | Leveling with your buyer and setting clear expectations using “purpose, plan, outcome” (PPO), featuring Doug Landis

Silicon Valley Business Journal | Lotti Siniscalco Named SVBJ 40 Under 40 for 2022