Gordon Ritter

Investor

Gordon Ritter is a Founder and General Partner of Emergence. Prior to founding Emergence, he spent over 15 years founding and building companies which pioneered new markets including embedded web-based interfaces, server appliances, "On Demand" services for the SMB market and web-native application development.

He led Emergence Capital's first investment, in the cloud leader Salesforce.com. Gordon was named to the Forbes' Midas List of the top venture capital investors in 2007. He currently sits on the boards of Genius, Lithium, PivotLink, Veeva Systems and Zuberance.

Prior to founding Emergence, Gordon was co-Founder and CEO of Software As Service, a web services platform company he created with Marc Benioff, the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. Software As Service is the origin of Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. Prior to founding Software As Service, he was Vice President of 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. Prior to IBM, Gordon was co-Founder and President of Whistle, a pioneering Internet appliance and services platform for small and medium-sized businesses.

Before Whistle, Gordon was co-Founder and President of Tribe Communications, a networking infrastructure company. Tribe pioneered WebManage, acclaimed as the first HTML-based network management software. Tribe was acquired by Zoom Telephonics (ZOOM) in 1996. Prior to Tribe, Gordon was a VP of Capital Markets at CSFB in New York, where he headed the Collateralized Mortgage Obligation (CMO) group.

Gordon is married and has four young children, including a set of twins, and lives in San Francisco. He is currently a Trustee of Marin Country Day School. He has a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University where he rowed on the heavyweight crew. He also enjoys running, cycling, cross-country skiing and mountaineering.