How We Spent $7m To Spin Crunchbase Out of AOL
Santi Subotovsky is a General Partner at Emergence Capital. Prior to joining Emergence, Santi founded, AXG Tecnonexo, a SaaS e-learning company in Latin America. He expanded the company to 150+ employees with operations across Latin America and the US. Santi is also a founding board member of Puente Labs, an organization that finds and selects the best founders of high potential growth companies from Latin America and helps them scale their businesses globally. Santi currently serves on the Boards of Civitas Learning, CrunchBase, High Alpha, Quasar, Restorando, Tophat, Xapo and Zoom. Santi received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in Economics from St. Andrew’s University in Argentina. He is Kauffman Fellow and an Endeavor Entrepreneur.
Outside of work Santi is passionate about traveling internationally. He spent 6 months backpacking around the world and continues to work on a personal goal of visiting at least 50% of the world countries. He is an avid opera and classical music follower and, like almost every Argentine, he is passionate about soccer.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
00:48 – Nathan’s introduction to today’s show
01:40 – Why Santi enjoys being a founder more than being a VC
02:05 – How Emergence Capital has been funding B2B cloud software for 15 years
03:03 – Why they want to be leader of Series A rounds
03:24 – Why Emergence Capital’s biggest winners thus far have been Crunchbase and Zoom
03:50 – How Crunchbase has become the system of record for private companies
04:50 – How they spun out Crunchbase from AOL over the course of 9 months
06:55 – Why Santi thinks Mattermark didn’t work
08:25 – Emergence Capital’s thesis behind growing Crunchbase long-term
10:36 – How Crunchbase uses the power of the community to compete with companies like Owler
11:55 – Why contextual analysis of data from Crunchbase draws visitors
12:54 – Why Emergence Capital uses a multi-pronged approach to source deals
13:50 – Emergence Capital’s resources to help companies scale sales and marketing
14:45 – Why they are extremely proactive in building relationships with entrepreneurs
16:01 – How their last fund raised was $330M and why they look to invest in 20 companies per fund
16:20 – Why they spent $7M to spin our Crunchbase from AOL
17:21 – Santi Subotovsky’s favorite business book
17:45 – CEO Santi Subotovsky follows
18:32 – Santi Subotovsky’s favorite online tool
18:50 – Average hours of sleep per night
19:20 – If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be?
Famous 5
Last business book read?—Candid
What CEO do you follow?—Eric Yuan of Zoom
What is your favorite online tool?—Zoom
How many hours of sleep do you get?—7
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be?—Silicon valley exists!
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