Gordon Ritter

Gordon Ritter General Information

Biography

Mr. Gordon Ritter is a Co-Founder and serves as a General Partner at Emergence Capital Partners. He is a Chairman at Veeva Systems. He served as a Board Member at Insightly and Retain AI. He serves as a Board Member at Common Sense Growth. He also served as a Board Member at Zuberance. He served as an Advisor and Board Member at High Alpha and serves as an Advisor at Hi Marley. He also served as a Venture Advisor at Chaac Ventures. He serves as an Advisor of Aquabyte. He also served as a Board Member at Employeechannel. He serves as a Board Member at Textio, Whistic. He served as a Board Member at Chorus. Before founding Emergence, he spent over 15 years founding and building companies that pioneered new markets including embedded web-based interfaces, server appliances, "On Demand" services for the Small and Medium Business market, and web-native application development. In 2003, he led Emergence Capital's first investment, in Salesforce.com. In 2008, he invested in Industry Cloud pioneer Veeva Systems when the company had 25 employees and less than $2 million in revenue. He has played a key role in the company's development (now a public company NYSE: VEEV) and he is currently Veeva's Chairman. He was named to the Forbes' Midas List of the top venture capital investors in 2007, 2012, 2014, and 2015. Before founding Emergence, he was a Co-Founder and served as Chief Executive Officer at Software As Service, a web services platform company he created with Marc Benioff, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce.com. Software As Service is the origin of Salesforce.com's Salesforce1 platform. Before founding Software As Service, he ran the $3 billion IBM Global Small Business division, created as a result of IBM's acquisition of his company, Whistle Communications in 1999. He was responsible for IBM's launch partnership with Salesforce.com. Before IBM, he was a Co-Founder and served as President at Whistle, a pioneering Internet appliance and web services platform. He was also a Co-Founder of Tribe Communications, a networking infrastructure company and he served as Vice President of Capital Markets at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York. He has completed a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Princeton University.