Entrepreneur Meetup: Viviana Faga of Emergence Capital
Viviana Faga is an Operating Partner at Emergence Capital. She has more than 15 years of experience designing and building brand categories for companies like Salesforce, Yammer, Platfora, and Zenefits. Viviana is a go-to-market expert, and continues to help create scalable growth engines that drive successful exits.
She joined us early in the morning for our Simply SaaS Meetup with 30+ entrepreneurs eager to hear more about her journey.
The Early Days of Salesforce
In the early days of Salesforce, people didn’t trust the cloud. The term “SaaS” wasn’t a thing. Salesforce had to evangelize multi-tenant vs on-premise software.
“We had to do a ton of work on evangelizing this concept called multitenancy, which is just like an apartment building. You have shared companies sharing a core tech stack, and that was something that people really, really struggled with, especially if you were selling to these larger customers.”
Yammer: From $6M to $60M ARR in 6 Months
At Yammer, Viviana helped educate users on how to use a collaboration platform for work. She looked at who they were selling to and their most successful customers, and identified four solutions: team collaboration, business transformation, social intranet, and employee engagement.
“You have to think through: how do I get those users to continue to come back and find value in the product? Engagement is key, don’t just stop at acquiring users. Customer success is critical.”
Thoughts on Funding and Focus
“When you talk about funding, it’s good to run lean, because it forces some really tough decisions for the business. You have to pick a few core things and do them really, really well.”
Sales and Marketing
The relationship between marketing and sales is critical. Don’t just cannibalize your existing inbound marketing leads by hiring sales reps — build something that is scalable.
Thoughts on Picking a Venture Capitalist
Venture capitalists will be with you for a while — 10 years is an average exit. Pick a VC that’s focused on your area and your market.
“Pick a VC that you’d want to marry.”
Photos by Luke Beard