Jake Saper, GP @ Emergence Capital: "We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions"

Saper looks for customers who are desperate for a solution—people who say they’d quit if the tool were taken away or would pay out of pocket—before he worries about sophistication of metrics or even founder background.

Many AI apps are seeing extreme top-line growth, but Saper expects average retention cohorts to disappoint; the durable winners will anchor themselves in daily workflows, proprietary data, or domain-specific models that drive >120% net dollar retention.

Emergence explicitly defines 3–5 deal-specific assumptions needed for a company to return the fund (including dilution, market structure, defensibility, etc.), then gathers evidence for and against each to discipline yes/no decisions.

Every Emergence partner does customer and reference calls and often on-sites for “priority deals,” creating a shared, first-hand understanding of the business—and, post-investment, a broader bench of partners actually engaged with the company.

Saper argues that even with tools like Bolt or Cursor, enterprises still need vendors who provide a point of view on the workflow, keep software current, and offer a “throat to choke” and potentially outcomes-based guarantees.