#52 - AI Teachers, Deskless Workforce & The Passion Economy with Zak Kukoff

**Sam Parr** (0:10)
Yesterday, we asked people to do a thing. We told them that we would send them a gift. I don't know what we said. Oh, I know. They could ask any question they wanted to ask, and me and Shaan would answer it.

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
We'll do a Q&A.

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
And in exchange, they had to subscribe, unsubscribe, and subscribe again. We're trying to game the podcast ranking system.

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
We're willing to have our real listeners click farm it, but we're not just paying somebody in the Philippines to do it. That's our line.

**Sam Parr** (0:36)
I'm down to do it. No, I'll do that.

**Shaan Puri** (0:38)
Okay, well, so far, that's been our line.
We dropped the Stu episode today. People are liking that. Dude, Christians everywhere are hitting me up.
The CEO of Prey reached out. I was like, hey, dude, prey.com, how are you? Because we've been talking about religious stuff for like two or three. It's been a theme across a couple episodes, and we went super deep on it. I don't know if you listen to the one with Stu. And so a bunch of people who are like church tech, a bunch of church tech entrepreneurs reached out.

**Sam Parr** (1:07)
I had a rabbi email me about this podcast. I also had another guy email me saying I'm out of a job and Stu is going to replace me. And for the record, I'm great with that.
I'm totally fine with that. Okay, so we have a guest here.

**Zak Kukoff** (1:23)
Yeah, what's up? Who are you? Hey, how's it going?
I'm an investor at Emergence Capital. We're an early stage enterprise SaaS fund. We're known for investing in Salesforce, Box, Yammer, Zoom, Veeva, Gusto, etc.
It's a pretty cool job to get to meet with some of the most interesting people in the world all the time. I get to be the dumbest guy in the room, although we'll see after this room at the end of the podcast how I'm feeling on that one.

**Shaan Puri** (1:45)
Yeah, you should be the smart guy here.

**Zak Kukoff** (1:47)
So, I got all my bad jokes at the end. Just keep the good jokes in, get rid of the bad jokes.

**Shaan Puri** (1:51)
So that portfolio is pretty badass. You said Salesforce, Zoom, Yammer, blah, blah, blah. Are those like, you guys get in that Series D and you just get the logo or did you like actually invest before it was obvious?

**Zak Kukoff** (2:03)
We predominantly invest in Series A. So we do about 85% Series A, 15% Series B, Zoom, we're the largest investor of, Veeva, we were the only...

**Sam Parr** (2:12)
What's Veeva?

**Zak Kukoff** (2:13)
Veeva Systems was a pharmaceutical R&D, still is a pharmaceutical R&D.

**Sam Parr** (2:17)
That sounds huge.

**Zak Kukoff** (2:18)
Yeah, it's a huge... I mean, think about for a second, like, you know, 10 years ago, right? Nobody was thinking about vertical SaaS as an investable category. The conventional wisdom was, oh, SaaS is a small category, but sort of if you go horizontal across 30 different industries, maybe there's enough investable space there.
And Veeva was the first multi-billion dollar hit in vertical SaaS. It was kind of Salesforce, but just for pharmaceutical companies. And they've done phenomenally well. We were the only institutional investor who led their Series A, and they went straight from Series A to IPO. So a huge, huge app from there.

**Sam Parr** (2:51)
And before this, you worked at Flexport and then you had your own thing.

**Zak Kukoff** (2:55)
Yeah, years and years ago, back in 2011, started a company called Trued Today in the edtech space, where we can talk all about that because that was a very fun experience.

**Shaan Puri** (3:04)
Ask us how we know each other.

**Sam Parr** (3:06)
I asked them how they know each other. Let's hear the answer.

**Shaan Puri** (3:08)
How do you guys know each other? We met downstairs.
He's a funny guy on Twitter. And I was like, hey, funny guy of Twitter, come on the podcast.

**Sam Parr** (3:17)
I think the exact response was, all right, go, make me laugh.

**Shaan Puri** (3:20)
Dance, dance for me.

**Sam Parr** (3:22)
What do you mean he's funny? He's woody.

**Zak Kukoff** (3:24)
Yeah, what do you mean I'm funny?

**Sam Parr** (3:25)
Please say nice things.

**Shaan Puri** (3:27)
Like, okay, I'm going to find one of your tweets that's funny.

**Sam Parr** (3:30)
Like, do you make, like, wise cracks?

**Shaan Puri** (3:32)
Yeah, he's trying to make a joke.

**Zak Kukoff** (3:34)
I would say I make-