Sharing the Secrets of Hyper-Growth: Making the transition from CMO to Venture Capital

Today, Emergence Capital announced my appointment as Operating Partner, and I couldn’t be more excited to join the team. After 15+ years building, designing, and launching brands such as Salesforce and Yammer -- two of the fastest growing enterprise SaaS companies of all time -- I am ready for a new challenge. I’m also craving the opportunity to share some of the secrets I learned working at those companies that led to their hyper-growth.

When I met the Emergence team, I knew that this was my dream role, and that I’d be working with a dream team.They are futurists that value the team above all else, an approach that has created an inclusive culture founded on trust.  

By joining Emergence, I’m being given the opportunity to work with one of the most successful venture capital firms in the industry that has consistently doubled down on the enterprise SaaS space (even when it wasn’t “sexy”) -- an area that I know well and love. Emergence was recently named 2017 NVCA venture firm of the year -- a well-deserved accolade that recognizes its long history of predicting the future of the Cloud by making bold bets on category-defining companies such as Salesforce, Yammer, Veeva, Zoom, Successfactors, Box and ServiceMax to name just a few.

In my new role, I’ll partner with Emergence Capital portfolio companies on strategy, branding, growth, and operations - helping them scale and reach their true potential. Additionally, I’ll evaluate start-ups for potential investments, helping the team determine where to place bets.  And finally, I’ll lead the Emergence marketing and talent efforts, helping our portfolio companies become the dominant industry leaders we strive to build as a firm.  

I could not be more excited to join the Emergence Capital team.

In discussing the role with friends, many of them successful founders, they all wanted to know: “Why move into venture? Given all of the negative attention that the VC industry has garnered recently, why now?”

Here’s why: I’ve been very lucky to be a part of some of the most wildly successful, category-defining, enterprise software companies ever created. And wow - I have learned SO much working for some of the most talented, gravity-defying CEOs out there. Now I’m ready to share some of the mistakes I’ve made, and many of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Because one thing is certain - there are secrets that those hyper-growth companies have in common. There are clear patterns that all of us can learn from.

What most people don’t know about me is that my passion for entrepreneurship began early-on. I’m the daughter of Mexican immigrants who embody the American dream. When they immigrated 50 years ago, they believed that the streets in America were paved with gold, and for them, they were. When he arrived here, my father caught the entrepreneurial bug and decided to start his own small business as a landscape architect in San Jose. My parents fostered that entrepreneurial spirit in me at a young age. Because my parents had no formal education, they asked me to process all of their bills and write all of the checks for their business beginning when I was just in the 4th grade. I guess you could say that serving as an Operator was in my genes, even at a young age!

Starting a company takes a lot of courage, grit and resolve. And the path to becoming a successful company is never linear. Below are just a few things that I’ve learned along the way that I hope to expand on in future posts...

#1 Architecture is destiny.

We all know the story of Siebel vs. Salesforce --and we all know who won. But, while everyone thinks Salesforce was a surefire success story, there were actually a lot of learnings along the way. There are many factors that contributed to this David vs. Goliath success story, but architecture ultimately determined Salesforce’s success, as it became its core differentiator.

#2 What keeps your company together through the good and the bad is its culture.

While architecture served as Salesforce’s moat, its culture became its foundation. Back in 2004, when I joined Salesforce, the culture was everything. It was zen-like, yoga was held onsite, Koa (Marc’s yellow lab) was a regular visitor, we wore Hawaiian shirts on Fridays and we were required to donate 1% of our time to the community. While that type of environment may conjure up visions of a permanent vacation, the opposite was true. The company was bold, and we were on a mission to change the world through one clear and inspiring tagline - “the end of software”. This tagline defined its culture and bonded us in a way that made it possible to weather the highs and the lows, like when there were a series of service interruptions that ground all development to a halt for a year.

A few years later I joined Yammer. The Yammer culture was very different from Salesforce, but equally moving. CEO David Sacks preached a “culture of dissent”, where anyone could walk into his office and debate with him. The org was highly decentralized, titles were irrelevant, and it truly embodied the product that it built. If Enterprise Social Networks were created to give everyone a voice, Yammer lived it. And its unique culture, coupled with its focus on building the best social network, ultimately led to its $1.2B acquisition by Microsoft.

And there’s more to come...

As Operating Partner at Emergence, I’m ready to share the secrets of hyper-growth I’ve been so lucky to be a part of with its portfolio companies.  I’m looking forward to helping our CEOs think through how to scale their businesses, starting with building a world-class team. Perhaps I’ll walk them through how to think about future-proofing their architecture, or how to build a culture that can last the test of time, from Day 1. I’m honored to have the opportunity to work with the Emergence Capital team and I am excited to find a way to move the industry forward, one company at a time.