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Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, one of the most iconic venture firms in enterprise software, with a portfolio that includes Zoom, Gusto, Veeva, and Together AI. Emergence has backed some of the most category-defining B2B companies of the last two decades, and Jake has spent nearly 12 years at the center of that deal flow.

What sets Jake apart is a life lived on both sides of the creativity question: he backs the companies building AI but also performs across genres from blues to metal as a working musician.

In this episode, Jake brings that rare combination of investor rigor and artist instinct to one of the hardest questions AI is forcing us to face, and whether you leave reassured or unsettled may depend entirely on how much of your identity is wrapped up in the work you create.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How AI will democratize the creation of art but commoditize its execution, ultimately causing the value of live, dynamic human performances to skyrocket.
• The stunning acceleration of startup growth, with top-quartile B2B software companies now scaling from zero to $1 million in ARR in just four months.
• How the flood of AI-generated content is turning attention into the real bottleneck, and why curation and point of view become the new competitive advantage.
• Why Jake believes the market will self-regulate the anthropomorphization of AI agents in the workplace, and where that logic has a hard limit.
• What Geoffrey Hinton said about building AI "like a mother," why it was both comforting and deeply unsatisfying, and what it reveals about AGI risk.
• Why Jake argues disclosure matters during this transition period, but what he actually wants people to ask about art as AI becomes a normal creative tool.

Explore this conversation:

00:00 Why AI Makes It Easier to Build a Demo and Harder to Build a Moat
05:25 From Cell Towers to Venture Capital: Jake Saper's Path to Emergence
08:53 How AI Is Compressing Startup Growth: From 18 Months to 4 Months to $1M ARR
18:05 What Art Actually Is: Compressed Human Experience and the Act of Making Meaning Shareable
23:30 How AI Can Unlock Latent Creativity in People Who Don't Think of Themselves as Creators
26:55 Why Disclosure Matters When Trust and Authenticity Are at Stake
30:19 Navigating a Post-Truth Era: When Everything Looks Synthetic, What Do We Believe?
32:14 Why the Value of Live Performance Is About to Skyrocket
35:58 As Soulless Entities Multiply, Soul-to-Soul Human Connection Becomes More Valuable
40:38 What Geoffrey Hinton Said About Building AI "Like a Mother" and Why It Was Unsatisfying
43:04 Why the Most Enduring Art Has Always Been About Transfer, Not Authorship

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Jake on LinkedIn
• AI fun fact article
• On How AI Is Revolutionizing Creativity in Art, Music, and Education

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Daniel Lereya is Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com, the AI work platform trusted by 60% of the Fortune 500 and valued at approximately $8 billion. He joined the company when it had 30 people and $4.5M ARR, and has since grown his team from 5 to nearly 900 people as monday.com crossed $1 billion in ARR.

In this episode, Daniel draws on nearly a decade of scaling one of the world's most adopted work platforms to share what it actually takes to rebuild product thinking from scratch when AI changes everything you thought you knew.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why the instincts that made monday.com successful are the exact ones Daniel says had to be dismantled to build AI-first products.
• What the critical difference is between building a demo that impresses and an agent that actually works in production, and where most teams get it wrong.
• Why Daniel believes wrapping AI inside rigid workflows produces better results than giving agents full discretion, and what monday.com learned the hard way.
• What happened when 2,000 of 3,000 monday.com employees started building their own apps in just two weeks, and what it revealed about the future of who gets to build software.
• Why Daniel argues that when an AI agent makes a mistake, the real question leaders should be asking has nothing to do with the technology.
• Why the biggest barrier to AI adoption is not the technology itself, and what Daniel says companies must stop waiting for before they start.

Explore:

00:00 Why AI Adoption Is Harder Than It Looks
00:53 Introduction + AI Commerce Standards: Google, OpenAI & Visa
04:30 Daniel Lereya's 9-Year Journey Scaling monday.com to $1B ARR
09:00 How AI Forces a Complete Reset in Product Thinking
12:25 The "AI Month" Initiative: Pausing R&D to Rebuild from Scratch
14:57 Building AI Products When the Output Is Non-Deterministic
20:47 What 250,000 Customers Taught Us About AI in the Real World
25:38 Responsible AI: Guardrails, Governance, and Data Control
31:28 Who Is Responsible When an AI Agent Makes a Mistake?
37:04 The Future of Work: Humans, Agents, and What Comes Next

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn
• AI fun fact article
• On How we can take back control from Big Tech
• https://peoplereign.io/podcast/

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Lisa Davis is a technology executive who has served as CIO and tech leader for some of the world's most complex organizations, including Intel, Blue Shield of California, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Department of Defense.

She is now focused on shaping the next generation of leaders and advocating for women and diverse talent in STEM through her board work, executive coaching, and her forthcoming book, The Only Woman in the Room: How to Win in a Workplace Still Built for Men.

In this episode, Lisa draws on 30+ years leading technology at the highest levels of government and enterprise to make the case that the future of AI depends on who gets to build it, and as long as women remain locked out of those rooms, we are getting it dangerously wrong.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why women's representation in STEM has fallen from 34% in the mid-1980s to 22% today, and why that decline is a crisis for the future of AI, not just the workplace.
• Why the real risk isn't the technology itself but the leadership teams making AI decisions without diverse voices at the table.
• The structural systems that were never designed for women to thrive, and why redesigning them is a business imperative, not a social favor.
• Why current corporate layoffs are being falsely attributed to AI, and what leaders need to start saying out loud.
• Why girls begin dropping out of math and science as early as middle school, how cultural norms around "bossiness" suppress leadership potential, and what parents and organizations can do to intervene earlier.
• What Lisa says women who finally reach the executive table must do differently, and why most don't.

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn or visit her website to learn more about her book.
• AI fun fact article
• On how to navigate life transitions with Bruce Feiler, award-winning author and popular TEDx speaker