Sanjay Poonen

A few weeks back, I watched Maggie Hott, GTM leader at OpenAI, confidently navigate her first board meeting at Unify. Having worked with her through Emergence Capital's Operator in Residence (OIR) program, seeing her immediately contribute valuable insights made me think about how most board members receive virtually no training for this critical role. At Emergence, we've built our firm around developing board excellence. We grow all our partners from within and have established a culture of mentorship focused on board service. Junior investors aren't thrown into the deep end—we pair them with senior GPs to observe effective board dynamics firsthand. My initial experience was at DroneDeploy alongside my partner Kevin Spain, where I got great mentorship before taking on independent board responsibilities. We extend this methodology to our OIR program, where operators learn how to be effective board members. Based on my experience mentoring directors, here are the fundamental principles I share with first-timers for how board members can best support founders: 1. Reframe the purpose: Problem-solving, not reporting If your board meeting is primarily reporting, you're wasting your management team's time. Information sharing should happen asynchronously, with board members engaging with materials before the meeting. This enables the live session to leverage collective intelligence on critical challenges. This rarely happens because many directors overextend themselves across too many boards—another reason we maintain a disciplined investment pace. 2. Master the Socratic approach The most valuable contribution often comes through thoughtful questions rather than declarative statements. Your objective is to enhance the decision-making capability of management. I enter each meeting with 1-3 specific areas where I know I can add value, focusing questions on these topics. 3. Follow-through separates professionals from amateurs Diligently document your commitments, establish clear action items, and execute them. It's crazy how just doing this proactively makes a board member stand out. 4. Understand your unique contribution to the board ecosystem A high-functioning board resembles a great basketball team—you need complementary skills, not redundant ones. In every meeting, I stay conscious of my distinct value relative to others in the room, whether that's SaaS expertise, AI knowledge, or a particular relationship dynamic with the CEO. I calibrate my role based on needs—sometimes assertively addressing areas where others have less experience, other times asking probing questions where fellow members have deeper expertise. -- To my knowledge, Emergence is the only VC firm with a formalized program dedicated to board excellence. It's an investment that yields returns where they matter most—in bending the odds of success for our founders. Founders, I'm curious: What board member behaviors have you found most valuable?

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Major tailwinds behind the rapid growth of Lux Capital portfolio company Bluenote -- leveraging cutting edge AI to streamline medical writing for life sciences. Keep up the amazing work, Fatima Sabar and Katsuya Noguchi and team! https://lnkd.in/g2v5bQwF

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Our first Vital Signs of 2025 is a fun one – I sat down with Hemant Taneja the CEO of General Catalyst. GC is one of the world’s largest venture capital firms and has invested in companies like Livongo, Cityblock and Hippocratic AI. We discussed a ton of interesting things including whether we'll see $100B health tech startups, buying a health system, what will succeed in AI, and more. Some highlights: 🏥 $100B health tech companies Hemant believes there will be multiple $100B healh tech companies that are defining the spaces they’re in – for example, a company that can decrease the $150B spending on payment processing in healthcare. He adds that every GC incubation aims to become that large. 🏥 Why General Catalyst bought a health system Hemant argues that no single company can transform healthcare alone, but rather, innovation and partnerships are key to building out the trillion dollar ecosystem. He advocates for radical collaboration over disruption. GC had been partnering with health systems for a few years when it wanted to accelerate its partnerships and create the blueprint for healthcare innovation. This led to their interest in Summa Health to do hands-on transformation work. 🏥 What’s next for AI x venture Hemant does not think AI will be a bubble that bursts. But, he explains that the ecosystem is constantly changing, so companies need to be constantly iterating, with the most adaptive companies being most successful. He also encourages taking on harder problems and thinking on longer horizons, as those will yield the best outcomes. He shares that AI defensibility won’t be in the software but instead the relationships and collaborations companies can foster. 🏥 Getting tech-enabled services right Hemant’s contrarian take is that companies that are the worst from the margin perspective, such as many services solutions, will lead to some of the most exciting IPOs in the next few decades. He asserts that AI is the biggest opportunity for these companies, and it’s important for founders to decide whether this technology will act independently or serve as a companion solution to humans. This decision requires thought around what creates the best consumer experience and the task’s level of responsibility (e.g., revenue cycle management vs. diagnosing patients). Some really great takeaways on the future of healthcare investing & innovation in this episode! Listen to our full episode below: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gVTkNKDe Spotify: https://bit.ly/4heSk8w Apple: https://bit.ly/3PTk3ja

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Cohere Health’s Series C: Case Study… McKinsey estimates that there is nearly $1 trillion of healthcare administrative expenses each year, of which $200 billion is just on financial transactions. There are a staggering nine billion medical claims processed each year. A hornet’s nest of policies and procedures have evolved to manage these expenses from complex formularies, deductibles, co-pays, and prior authorizations (PA). Just in 2023, there were over 50 million PAs, 99% of which were for procedures for Medicare Advantage members. It was this market opportunity that Cohere Health was created to address. The vision of the company has always been to drive deeper payer/provider collaboration and in so doing create a “touchless authorization” business model. The company has successfully commercialized a suite of next-generation PA products that significantly rearchitect the way care pathways are delivered. Recent advances in AI have further catalyzed a drive to meaningfully improve clinical and administrative efficiencies for payers. In order to continue its rapid scaling and development of additional products, Cohere Health today announced a $90 million Series C financing, led by Temasek, a close partner of Flare Capital. Other thoughts/observations... https://lnkd.in/eAB-JvUp Flare Capital Partners

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#AmTech Weekly Roundup: Ambience Healthcare raised $243 million in Series C funding from Oak HC/FT, Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Optum Ventures, and Town Hall Ventures. Ambience is building AI documentation software to record patient appointments, generate comprehensive medical notes, and standardize coding/authorization workflows.   Michael Ng, Nikhil Buduma    Reveal Technology raised $30 million in Series B funding from Ballistic Ventures, Shield Capital, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others. Reveal’s two main offerings are 3D mappings generated from drone videos and mobile biometrics. They are deployed with the US Army, Special Operations Command, Marine Corps, and other NATO forces.   Garrett Smith    Prophet Security raised $30 million in Series A funding from Accel and Bain Capital Ventures. Prophet is applying agentic AI to Security Operations Centers (SOCs), or hubs for cybersecurity defenses within an organization.  Kamal Shah, Vibhav Sreekanti #VC #HealthTech #Healthcare #Defense #Cybersecurity

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The healthcare workforce is one of four themes we are betting on at Terrarium, where we think technology and AI will catalyze massive changes to the status quo, driving outsized impact on the industry as a whole. We published a white paper today on why building for the future of the healthcare workforce is prime ground for startups, and where we think returns are going to concentrate: https://lnkd.in/e6hsR2VA. Why are we betting on workforce solutions? Simply put, the opportunity is massive. There are not enough healthcare workers across all licensed roles to meet demand, a shortage crisis that will only get worse if nothing is done. Meanwhile, the cost of labor post-Covid--driven primarily by surging contract staffing fees--has become untenable for employers. Labor increased from 50% of hospital OpEx (2011-2019) to 60%+ of hospital OpEx in 2023. These costs are no longer predictable and are eating away at already razor-thin margins in most cases. We have heard from large health systems that contract staffing fees account for over half of recruitment costs, and that total costs of labor shortages are estimated into the hundreds of millions of dollars when accounting for lost revenues alongside direct costs of attrition and replacement. 💸 Healthcare is also the most licensed industry in America, and structural barriers to education and licensure that slow the entry of new professionals into the workforce are a major hurdle to innovation at the top of the talent funnel. We think this hurdle can also act as a defensible moat, however, for companies that do successfully gain traction in this space. 🎓 All to say, we are focused on building and investing in solutions that don't just treat the symptoms, but aim to fix the root cause of the problem: 🌱 Solutions that GROW the workforce, and 🤖 Solutions that OPTIMIZE the work itself If our POV resonates with you, please reach out! We are looking for EIRs to incubate new companies in this space alongside us, and we also write checks to pre-seed and seed teams already on their way. Special thanks for the insights to: Mark Rosenblum, Yaniv Sadka, Austin Dirks, Stephen R. Saine, Hank Capps, MD FAAFP, Laura P. Dannels, PhD, MBA, SPHR, Gabriel Szaszko, Wellstar Health System, Cleveland Clinic, Northwell Health, Mount Sinai Health System, Carl Madi, Lee Hudson Teslik, Alexi Nazem, James Hueston, Rachel Parlier, Raquel Scott, MBA, Zachary Fleitman, Grace Dhanraj, Tanya Beja, Tara Sullivan, Brittany Wadhwani and many others! Company Ventures Terrarium

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