Today we are pleased to announce that Scale Principal Jeremy Kaufmann has been promoted to Partner. Team members Sam Baker and John Gianakopoulos moved into more senior roles at year end as well. This caps a year of team growth that also saw Eric Anderson promoted to Partner as well as multiple new hires across our investing and Portfolio Operations teams.
Jeremy began his career as a data scientist and policy researcher, first at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York focused on trends in student loan accumulation and then at the Analysis Group where he concentrated on healthcare economics, drug pricing, and market access strategies. Jeremy’s grounding in data workflows, data tooling, and analytical methods from these experiences have brought immense value to our investing team. His fluency in these topics comes across in his popular article on how to measure the growth rate of a startup in the earliest days of company formation and when sharing his thoughts on data-driven investing and the value our portfolio companies can derive from our SaaS benchmarking tool, Scale Studio.
Jeremy is a veteran of the Strategy and BizOps team at Salesforce, where he learned how a best-in-class SaaS company hires, optimizes, and incentivizes one of the top-performing GTM teams in the industry. His learnings from Salesforce have been invaluable for our portfolio companies and mesh well with Scale’s mandate of helping our portfolio companies make the transition from founder-led growth to a repeatable go-to-market machine. We were fortunate enough to snag Jeremy in 2015, and since then he has advanced quickly through the investing team ranks.
At Scale, Jeremy is a vocal advocate for the power of AI and Machine Learning to transform markets, augment the capabilities of workers, and increase software adoption in vertical markets where software spend has previously been limited. He spoke recently about the potential for synthetic data in AI/ML, and his efforts there led to a recent unannounced investment in the space. Jeremy spends a lot of time thinking about what he calls the “AI border wars”, which describes how emerging systems of intelligence (cognitive applications) are currently in a battle for prominence with large incumbent systems of record to establish dominance in enterprise workflows. His original thinking on the topic inspires his work at Scale and has contributed to our investments in KeepTruckin, Esper, Flatfile, TechSee, Solvvy, VergeSense, Viz.ai, Proscia and an unannounced investment in the video intelligence space. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Jeremy to the partnership!
Two other team members received well-deserved promotions at the end of 2021. The first is Sam Baker, who became our newest Principal. Sam joined us in 2016 after work at Scale portfolio company Box as well as Tilt.com before it was acquired by AirBnB. Between his contributions to deal teams like Socure and Locus Robotics, Sam also finds time to research and write on topics like the next-gen Customer Success tech stack, the “third wave” of restaurant technology, and investing in online marketplaces.
John Gianakopoulos was promoted to Vice President. Since joining Scale in 2018, John has applied his product management background in fintech to work on investments like Papaya Global, Socure, and Spruce. He is passionate about companies bringing automation and intelligence to both vertical software and fintech, and contributes insights to the team from his time as a Product Manager building lending products at QuickBooks and personal finance tools at Personal Capital.
As previously announced, 2021 was a year of team growth in seniority and size. Eric Anderson was promoted to Partner and Noah Gross to Senior Associate. We welcomed several new investing and Portfolio Operations associates:
- Max Abram joins us from Kayne Anderson’s growth equity group
- Anika Ayyar brings experience as a former Google product manager
- Misha Bansal held roles at Orbital Insights and JPMorgan
- Edi Danalache, Portfolio Operations Associate, joins us from McKinsey
From everyone at Scale, please join me in congratulating Jeremy, Sam, and John!