Nino Marakovic and the case for staying power

In January 2016, Nino Marakovic put an unfashionable sentiment into a particularly unfashionable headline: “Good riddance to ‘big venture’ and ‘blitzscaling’.” Venture capital had acquired a taste for speed. He was asking it to reacquaint itself with the business underneath. There are easier ways to make friends in a room full of people selling acceleration.

The sentiment had a predecessor. In 2015, he had warned against assuming that favorable conditions would continue indefinitely. Taken together, the two interventions offer an unusually useful introduction to Sapphire Ventures’ co-founder and CEO. He invests in ambitious technology companies. He also seems willing to spoil a perfectly agreeable conversation by asking how the ambition will pay for itself.

That tension gives his career its shape. Marakovic helped turn SAP’s venture operation into an independent firm, backed software businesses including monday.com, and later supported a substantial commitment to artificial intelligence. Caution, in this story, leaves plenty of room for action. The interesting question is what earns his confidence.

A firm gets a life of its own

Before the Sapphire name appeared, there was SAP Ventures. Marakovic joined in 2006. The independent firm emerged in 2011; the Sapphire rebrand followed in 2014. Those dates separate three different jobs: joining an existing investment operation, helping establish its independence, and giving it an identity beyond the software company from which it came.

His earlier career included investment banking at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Robertson Stephens, followed by venture investing. Williams College supplied a degree in economics and psychology; Stanford supplied an MBA. Economics and psychology make a pleasingly practical pair for someone whose work involves both financial models and the people determined to prove them wrong.

Born in Croatia, he also lived in Austria and Italy before the Bay Area chapter of his life. The geographical variety is concrete; any tidy theory about what it did to his temperament would be guesswork. What his later decisions do show is a willingness to work across borders and, eventually, to move again.

The independence story also has a useful complication. SAP remained an investor. A firm could develop its own investment judgment while retaining a connection to a large enterprise software ecosystem. For companies trying to sell into established businesses, that connection had an obvious practical appeal: access to people who might actually buy the product.

The publicity department can wait

By 2016, Marakovic was quite explicit about the kind of organization he wanted. He said a large marketing operation did not fit Sapphire’s DNA. His shorter explanation was more revealing: “We are intensely focused on our investments and driving results.” It is an austere line for an industry that occasionally treats a podcast microphone as essential office equipment.

Tom Chavez, the Krux CEO, offered a founder’s description of the relationship. He emphasized substantive help and an absence of ideological fuss. His assessment matters because a founder experiences an investor through meetings, decisions and awkward moments. The logo on a pitch deck tells you rather less about what happens when the plan needs changing.

Sapphire’s enterprise focus gave that approach somewhere specific to operate. The firm was watching business software become easier to use, software subscriptions spread across functions, and analytics become a more central part of management. These were changes in how companies bought and used technology. Investing required understanding the customer’s working day as well as the founder’s presentation.

“We are intensely focused on our investments and driving results.”

Nino Marakovic, 2016

What he noticed about monday.com

One illuminating encounter came in 2017, when Marakovic and Rajeev Dham first met monday.com’s Roy Mann and Eran Zinman. Looking back at the company’s June 2021 public debut, the investors remembered both its rapid expansion and the founders’ unusual way of running it. The details they chose to celebrate were decidedly operational.

There was sales compensation. There was an internal business intelligence system. There was a willingness to make decisions that invited skepticism. None would win a beauty contest for dinner-party anecdotes. Together, though, they describe founders building their own machinery for understanding and expanding a business.

The customer list drew attention too. Alongside the familiar world of technology buyers were businesses such as Unilever, HSBC, Mars and the NHL. That breadth made the software’s ambition legible. Work coordination was a problem in many kinds of organizations, and the founders wanted a platform adaptable to those different needs.

Marakovic and Dham also highlighted monday.com’s Equal Impact Initiative for nonprofits. Their account of a worthwhile company extended beyond its financial milestones to what its software could enable. The IPO supplied an occasion to celebrate; the operating choices and customer reach supplied the explanation. In an investor’s retrospective, the choice of details is a small portrait of the investor.

The spreadsheets have people in them

Another relationship makes the personal element easier to see. Sapphire led ActivTrak’s $50 million Series B in November 2020, with Marakovic joining the board. The investment concerned workforce analytics: software for understanding how digital work gets done. The team’s experience was central to the case for backing it.

Executives Rita Selvaggi, Justin Endres and Shanel Vandergriff had worked together at AlienVault and, earlier, SolarWinds. Marakovic and Dham were drawn to that shared operating history. An experienced team brings more than a collection of impressive biographies. People who have already built together know something about how the others behave when the meeting runs long.

There was also a smaller connection. Marakovic and Selvaggi shared Croatian and Italian ties. He was Croatian and had lived in Italy; she had Croatian and Italian heritage. The investment account included the detail alongside the commercial reasoning. Even a software financing round can accommodate a little recognition between people.

Adverity provides another view of his interests. When Sapphire led its $30 million Series C in 2020, Marakovic pointed to market size, rapid growth and experienced leadership. The Vienna-based business helped marketing teams make sense of data. The problem was familiar and stubborn: companies could collect information much faster than they could turn it into a useful decision.

Help you can count

Marakovic’s review of 2020 put numbers beside Sapphire’s promise to support its portfolio. The firm reported more than 300 customer and partner introductions and more than 360 talent introductions. It also invested and committed over $970 million across 48 companies and venture funds. Capital was only one item on the work list.

An introduction is a modest unit of achievement. It can also be exactly what a growing company needs: a prospective customer, a distribution relationship, a candidate for a difficult role. These counts do not establish what happened afterward. They do make the intended service tangible. The phrase “helping founders” becomes easier to assess when somebody has kept a list.

Expansion reached the investment firm itself. In 2021, Marakovic and Beezer Clarkson relocated to help establish Sapphire’s Austin office. London and San Francisco were part of the wider office expansion. Later that year, Sapphire announced nearly $2 billion in new commitments, bringing its reported assets under management to $8.8 billion at that time.

Those are firm-level figures, belonging to a particular moment. They describe the scale of the institution he helped build rather than his personal wealth. The distinction is useful in a business where a large number can wander from one sentence into another and emerge wearing somebody else’s name tag.

A new boom, a familiar question

In July 2023, Sapphire announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in AI-powered enterprise technology companies. Marakovic described the opportunity in terms of productivity and economic value. The commitment covered several layers of the technology, from underlying models and supporting infrastructure to applications used by businesses.

It was a substantial expression of enthusiasm from someone associated with warnings about overheated growth. The two positions can coexist. His earlier criticism concerned how businesses were built and financed. An appetite for new technology still leaves the investor with questions about customers, execution and whether a product delivers something worth paying for.

His 2024 review emphasized tangible enterprise applications while acknowledging a difficult exit environment. The following year’s review, published in January 2026, returned to quality and durability as AI spread through business operations. It also marked Netskope’s public debut. The vocabulary had changed with the technology; the interest in execution remained recognizable.

There was institutional change in April 2026 as well. The core Sapphire Partners fund-investing team, co-led by Clarkson, joined LGT Capital Partners. Sapphire continued to manage and deploy more than $2 billion in fund investments with support from those departing team members. A long-established investment platform was entering another chapter.

Marakovic’s career offers a less theatrical subject than the usual venture legend. It contains a spinout, repeated partnerships, decisions about where to live and work, and attention to the unglamorous systems inside growing companies. The recurring drama happens between a promising idea and the organization capable of carrying it. He has spent much of his working life in that space, asking what will still function after the applause.