long-term-investing
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Gordon Ritter
Gordon Ritter is Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he co-founded in 2003 that became one of the defining forces in enterprise SaaS investing. He backed Salesforce in its earliest days, co-founded a SaaS company with Marc Benioff, championed Veeva Systems when it had 25 employees and under $1M in revenue (now a $35B public company), and helped land Zoom's first institutional check. A four-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Ritter closed Emergence's seventh fund at $1 billion in March 2025, focused on AI-native enterprise software. Away from the portfolio, he has summited Denali, run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps, and serves on Princeton's Board of Trustees, where he shapes AI and education curricula.
Jake Saper
Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm that backed Zoom, Salesforce, and Veeva before the rest of the world caught on. Over a decade at Emergence, he has become one of the loudest and most credible voices on AI-native services — companies that combine human expertise with AI to displace the $200B consulting industry. His 2024 essay 'The Death of Deloitte' earned him a cease-and-desist from Deloitte and a loyal readership of founders rebuilding professional services from scratch. A Yale and Stanford-trained operator-turned-investor, he grew up in Austin watching serial-entrepreneur parents build companies, started his own career selling rocks door-to-door from a Radio Flyer wagon, and today holds board seats at category-defining enterprise companies while maintaining a side career as a self-described 'mediocre guitar player.'
Luke Nosek
Luke Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, where he served as VP of Marketing and Strategy. He later co-founded Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, before launching Gigafund in 2017, a venture firm focused on transformative technologies. As the first institutional investor in SpaceX and board member since 2008, Nosek has championed ambitious, decades-long investments in space exploration, AI, and frontier technologies, embodying a contrarian approach to venture capital that prioritizes world-changing impact over short-term returns.
Ben Carlson
Ben Carlson is a CFA charterholder, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and one of the most widely-read finance writers in the United States. Through his blog A Wealth of Common Sense, co-hosted podcast Animal Spirits, and six books, Carlson has built a reputation for translating Wall Street complexity into plain-English wisdom that ordinary investors can actually use - advocating for simplicity, patience, and behavioral discipline over market-timing and stock-picking.