Promoting Yaz El-Baba to Principal
Congratulations, Yaz!
It is always an honor to announce promotions and ensure that members of our team receive recognition and attention for outstanding work. At Emergence, we have even more reason to celebrate. Promotions reflect the exemplary work and success of the individual, but because we primarily fill our ranks from within, promotions also signal the strength of our team and our culture of mentoring, coaching, and challenging each other toward excellence.
We built our firm on an apprenticeship model of hiring high-potential associates and cultivating their immense potential from within. Aside from our founders, every General Partner started at Emergence as a junior investment professional. For nearly two decades, this model has paid dividends by preserving not only our investment quality but also our collaborative, values-based culture.
This brings us to today’s news. We’re proud and excited to announce that Yaz El-Baba has been promoted to Principal. A Palestinian-American, Yaz grew up in an extended entrepreneurial family. He brings a unique and global perspective to his work at Emergence and is always on the lookout for ways to help everyone around him.
Though this promotion is unsurprising to anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Yaz, we wanted to share a few examples of Yaz’s outsized impact so far at Emergence. We’re sharing these through the lens of each of our core values.
We All Focus to Drive Conviction
Yaz's first founder meeting at Emergence was with the team at Assembled, more than a year before we ultimately led their Series A. He partnered with Jake to build our thesis on the future of the workforce management space and our conviction in the founding team. Along the way, he introduced the founders to a variety of customer prospects and collaborated with them on market analysis, culminating in our decision to partner together.
Yaz’s enthusiasm for diving deep into a space, understanding customer pain points and developing a differentiated perspective on ideal solutions continue to play a core role as we develop new investment theses.
We All Strive to be Your Most Important Partner
At Emergence, we all strive to be each founder's most important partner. From tireless recruiting efforts to critical support with follow-on fundraises, Yaz leads the way in delivering on this promise.
Aside from his high energy and optimistic spirit, Yaz’s business acumen and network, particularly in the world of BizOps, continue to add significant value for our founders.
We All Win Big in the Long Run
When one of us wins, we all win. Nobody knows this better than Yaz. As a boxer—and the former captain of the University of Michigan’s boxing team—Yaz brings his hunger to win and willingness to coach to our team in and out of the office. He took on restructuring our sourcing program, which enables our team to better identify outstanding founders early, and he generously hosted everyone at his apartment to learn about and celebrate the Muslim Eid celebration.
Yaz has acted like an owner of our firm from day one. His insane work ethic and generosity of spirit are embodied by the most common feedback in his 360 reviews: “I love working with Yaz.”
We feel so lucky to get to work with Yaz, and we’re excited about his continued success and leadership at Emergence. And congrats to the entire team that mentored, challenged, and cheered him on toward such phenomenal success.
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