Viviana Faga of Emergence Capital

Entrepreneur Meetup

By Atlanta Ventures

March 7^th, 2018

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.

Check out the video recap and our photo story below.

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 (installed software in their own data center).

One of the biggest challenges, especially in the early days, [...] we still had a lot of battles with customers who believed that they wanted everything on premise.

Back then, 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. This is their sales data, it’s incredibly sensitive information. Why would it be in the same architectural stack as my competitors?

What’s next for Salesforce?

There’s a real opportunity for them to step back and ask themselves, “How do we re-engage our core users?”

At Yammer, Viviana helped educate users on how to use a collaboration platform for work. Before she arrived, the go-to-market strategy was focused on selling to every use case. She looked at who they were selling to, and their most successful customers, and was able to suggest "4 solutions": team collaboration, business transformation, social intranet, and employee engagement.

While there, Yammer grew from $6 million to $60 million ARR in 6 months.

Viviana’s advice for a SaaS entrepreneur leveraging a freemium model: “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.

The greatest challenge of Platfora (acquired by Workday) was figuring out how to stand out in data analytics. Venture-backed technology trends can cause a lot of competition overnight, and this can cloud the market. Running lean makes you concentrate on core functionality, delivering the right value to your customer.

There is a trend, and then all of these analytics companies were funded, and I think some of these companies have struggled. [...] 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.

What’s the best part of working at Emergence Capital?

Really helping [small startups with teams of 10] think through: what’s the vision, what could this become?

Thoughts on A.I.

A.I. shouldn't replace humans, but make them better, faster, and more productive.

At SalesLoft we like to talk about it as the "Iron Man”. Think of the movie Iron Man--you have the crazy smart character, but then, when he puts the Iron Man suit on, he’s even more productive, and faster, and fights the bad guys. It’s the idea, he’s not replaced completely by a robot, but he’s augmented by technology that makes him ten times more powerful.

-David Cummings

Sales and Marketing

The relationship between marketing and sales is critical. You want to build something that is scalable. Don't just cannibalize your existing inbound marketing leads by hiring sales reps.

What I’ve seen happen is you’ll have this really healthy inbound marketing engine. And startups will say “great, we’re spending zero money on marketing. I’m going to layer in a lot of sales reps.” Then what happens is it can cannibalize that healthy inbound engine, because now they’re not necessarily going out there calling and getting new leads, but just taking what was already coming in.

THoughts on picking a Venture Capitalist

Venture capitalists will be with you for a while. 10 years is an average exit. Some big firms aren't focused on the area you are, and might not be right for your market.