Emergence Capital
In the 22 years that Emergence Capital has been making investments, the venture capital firm says it’s never lost a partner to another firm.
That’s a surprising stat in VC, where partner turnover has become a growing source of anxiety for firms and founders alike. The stakes are high: when a partner leaves a firm to join another or to start their own firm, they may take founder relationships, deal flow, and institutional knowledge with them.
Other disillusioned investors are leaving the industry altogether. That churn can also leave a firm’s portfolio companies scrambling to bring in a new board member when they’d otherwise be heads-down building.
Emergence Capital thinks it’s cracked the code. The San Francisco-based firm is best known for early investments in iconic brands including Salesforce, Zoom, and Box. Like many Silicon Valley VC firms, it’s betting its future on AI. While the firm hasn’t invested in any major LLMs, it’s backed emerging names like $3.3 billion LLM infrastructure platform, Together AI, and $2 billion AI hiring startup, Mercor. The firm has a lean team of seven investment partners to manage those assets, which total about $3.2 billion, including its $1 billion seventh fund closed earlier this year.
Since its 2003 founding, Emergence has only had nine investing partners, two of whom have retired. No investing partner has ever left for another company.
“If you look at what has been happening at many firms, and I would say especially the largest firms out there, there has been a bit of a revolving door,” said general partner Kevin Spain, who has been at Emergence for 17 years. “That creates a lot of disruption and uncertainty for founders.”
Emergence’s response to that revolving door has been to carefully cultivate a distinct firm structure, from how it promotes partners to how it divides economics after a deal. Here’s how it’s approaching retention in an industry plagued by churn.
Emergence’s all-hands-on-deck strategy
Only one of Emergence’s six investing partners, Gordon Ritter, is a founder of the firm. Everyone else rose through the ranks over years of close collaboration.
Some associates have left the firm before reaching partner status. Other non-investing partners, such as Emergence’s operating partners, have also come and gone. But when Emergence decides to make one of its investors a partner, they stick around, Spain said.
“We don’t hand that title or those responsibilities out very quickly,” Spain said. “Once we do, we know that person so well and they know us so well that it feels like the right thing to do, and it feels like we are making a truly long-term commitment to one another.”
Emergence Capital
That retention benefits Emergence’s portfolio companies as well, Spain said. When a founder brings on an Emergence partner as a board member, they’re less likely to face unexpected turnover, a common pain point in startup-investor relationships.
The firm aims to invest with a high-confidence, low-volume strategy. Each partner typically makes just one to two new investments per year, which Spain said also leads to more fulfilling work for the firm’s investors since partners can go deep with the founders they bet on. “We don’t spray and pray,” Spain said. “We really invest with a lot of conviction.”
Emergence has set up its diligence process to necessitate that kind of conviction, too, by requiring each partner to do their own primary research on every deal. Spain said that approach helps Emergence bring a wider range of complex perspectives to the table on investment decisions, while ensuring all of its investors have skin in the game.
“In the end, when we’re making an investment decision, it really feels like we’re all owning it,” Spain said. “If the setup is as it is at most venture firms — ‘I voted for your deal, but I didn’t really feel that strongly about it and now it’s going sideways; that’s on you, go figure it out’— that’s not a great dynamic, either for the firm’s culture or for ultimately coming up with solutions to the company’s problems.”
The deal that keeps partners around
Emergence’s returns help. The firm says it has generated more than $8 billion in realized gains on less than $2 billion invested.
“You have to work hard if you want to win,” Spain said. “But it’s great to put the work in and see it pay off. If you don’t have that, I don’t think anything else is going to matter quite as much.”
Still, the returns for limited partners don’t tell the full story.
Spain remembers receiving an internal employee survey during his time in the early 2000s at Microsoft, where he helped manage the tech giant’s acquisitions and investments. A single question on the survey turned out to be a strong predictor of whether an employee would stay at Microsoft: “how would you rate the deal you’re getting?”
Spain thinks the same premise applies to venture capital. At some firms, the economics are opaque and tilted toward founding partners, he said. Rising stars may put the work in but still not see a clear path forward for their ability to climb the ranks or to access compensation that feels fair.
“If you feel like you are a star performer and you’re putting a lot of work in, and what you’re going to get in return is unclear, that’s when the deal starts looking not so good,” Spain said.
While Spain didn’t share details about Emergence’s compensation structures, he said the firm takes an “egalitarian” approach to distributing wealth, allowing partners to share the economics “in an equal way” as they move up in the firm.
He acknowledged that not every firm should look like Emergence. The firm’s smaller partnership and collaborative investment strategies could lend themselves more easily to transparent wealth distribution, conditions not every firm is set up to replicate.
Still, Spain worries that some VC firms with top-heavy structures are starting to show cracks.
“Great people aren’t always taken care of,” Spain said. “There’s no clear road map, particularly for the best performers. That gets people looking, or it dissuades them from staying in venture altogether.”
The post Emergence Capital hasn’t lost a single partner in 22 years. Here’s how other VC firms can fix their ‘revolving doors,’ according to an investor appeared first on Business Insider.
