Stephen Plume

Stephen Plume is Managing Director of The Entrepreneurs' Fund (TEF), a Silicon Valley seed-stage venture firm. He was a member of TEF's founding team in the late 1990s, returned to help form Fund IV in 2013/2014 and direct several of that fund's early investments, and has served as Managing Director since 2019. His career has alternated between enterprise-strategy/marketing consulting and operating leadership roles at startups and Fortune 500 companies. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Yale University.

On the operating side, Plume held executive marketing and general-management roles across a series of enterprise software companies. He was VP of Marketing at conDati (an AI/ML analytics company), Senior Marketing Director for the Dell Software Group where he led marketing for Dell | KACE (KACE Networks), and founding VP of Marketing at Accept Software, where he ran finance, marketing, business development, and professional services through the company's growth to acquisition. Earlier in his career he also worked with Offero. His strategy-consulting engagements have included major technology companies such as Apple, Adobe, Cisco, HP, IBM, Motorola, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.

Beyond investing, Plume works as an independent consultant in enterprise strategy and pricing, and coaches TEF portfolio-company executives on go-to-market and business strategy. He teaches and mentors widely: he has been a guest lecturer on strategy at the Presidio Graduate School of Business and Hult International Business School in San Francisco, is affiliated with SDA Bocconi School of Management's Digital Strategies faculty group, and is involved with the Tech Futures Group. He is a frequent judge of student business-plan and consulting competitions.

• Invests early in enterprise SaaS and SaaS-IoT blends, "typically with a high component of machine learning."
• Focuses on cloud-based B2B software and cognitive/AI-driven products; current interests span employee engagement, workplace safety, B2B digital commerce, behavioral health, fintech, and healthcare.
• Underwrites for outsized outcomes: *"for someone to take a bet on you, they're expecting venture returns. They need to be getting 10X their money out."*
• Wants clear, demonstrable customer value: *"customers need to be getting 10X their cost out, or they're not going to adopt you."*
• Advises founders to sharpen their ideal-customer profile before scaling: *"don't worry about anybody else right now, worry about your ideal customer profile. Because they are the ones who…will pay you more money faster than anyone else."*
• Deep believer in pricing/value-metric experimentation: *"There is so much opportunity to learn from low-risk pricing experiments…Get over that feeling, go out and experiment, and learn from it."*