Brian Jacobs

General Partner, Emergence Capital Partners

Brian Jacobs founded Emergence Capital with Jason Green and Gordon Ritter in 2003. He has over 20 years of venture capital experience, a deep national network and an understanding of how technology startups can become market leaders.

Prior to founding Emergence, Brian was an early General Partner at St. Paul Venture Capital. During his 10 years there, Brian helped to grow the firm to one of the 15 largest venture investors in the country and led the firm's Silicon Valley investing activities. His prior venture capital experience was at Security Pacific Venture Capital. Brian also worked for the Raychem, RCA, Westinghouse, and Polaroid, and he holds several patents.

Brian was named to the Forbes' Midas List of the top venture capital investors in 2006 and 2007. He is an experienced board member who has served on dozens of public and private boards. He currently serves on the boards of Intacct, YouSendIt, InsideView, Bill.com, Janrain and Donuts.

Brian's reputation for helping entrepreneurs build market-leading technology-enabled service companies comes from his active involvement in HireRight, BigFix (sold to IBM), nQuire Software (sold to Siebel Systems), NetPerceptions (NETP), WebTV (sold to Microsoft), NextCard (NXCD) and others. Brian has backed leading companies in other sectors, including Lexar Media (LEXR), Microchip Technologies (MCHP), and many others.

Brian has a MS and BS in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. and an MBA from Stanford.

He is happily married with two children. Brian loves adventure travel with his children and cycling in the mountains.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart