Our Portfolio Is Growing Fast—So Is Our Team

When Ben and I started Primary, we wanted to set a new standard for seed investment and provide New York City founders the most comprehensive support available anywhere. Over the years, that commitment has manifested itself in the largest portfolio impact team of any early-stage VC and a dynamic investing team sourcing and working on new opportunities.

Over the past year, in what has been a historically active time for NYC seed investments and VC funding as a whole, we’ve been maintaining our edge with a rapidly expanding team. Let me introduce you to some of our latest new additions:

Our most recent hire is Paige Moelis, an Associate joining us from NYC’s iconic growth fund, Insight Partners. She will be leveraging her experiences at Insight as she tackles next-gen enterprise applications in a variety of different sectors. Paige started her career in Tel Aviv at Microsoft’s Accelerator, and it was there where she found her love for early-stage investing. She graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude with a BS in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

A little more than a month in to her life at Primary, Alicia Scully is already speeding along with building out a robust technical talent recruiting arm for our portfolio, joining long-timer Gina Yocom as a Director of Talent. Alicia started her recruiting career right after graduating from Colgate University and worked her way up quickly to building and managing teams and divisions at two contract recruiting firms. She met Operating Partner Cassie Young through her proactive work organizing professional events to drive her talent pipeline—her hustle and creativity as she brought together New York tech and startup leaders really stood out to us in her candidacy.

Tobias Citron isn’t exactly a new hire—he’s worked with us as an MBA Associate for almost two years now while getting his degree at Wharton. In fact, many of us frequently forgot he was only working here part-time, as he did an incredible job building out our NYC Founders Fellowship along with Partner Brian Schechter. Now, he’s focusing on that program and pre-seed and incubation opportunities. The NYC native previously helped start Radicle Labs, a research and advisory business incubated by New York-based venture studio Prehype, did the management consulting rounds at Deloitte, and received an AB in Public Policy from Princeton.

In Kai Cash we’ve added another true New Yorker to the team. He grew up in The Bronx, went to my alma mater, Williams College, was a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, and was most recently a Financial Analyst at Microsoft, where he aided in maintaining financial models related to Microsoft’s carbon tax revenues, carbon offset portfolio, and venture capital arm (M12). As an Analyst, Kai focuses on investing in enterprise technology across all industries and has already supported a number of deals we’re excited to announce soon. 

Katheryn Thayer came on as Director of Brand and Marketing in April, and immediately started working on our just-launched overhaul of our website and brand identity. She oversees editorial, design, events, and partnerships and advises portfolio companies on narrative building and comms. She has a background in both journalism and brand storytelling, at Forbes as a Staff Writer and Special Features Deputy Director and at Kickstarter as Director of Brand Content. It was her scrappy, creative, and insightful work at Kickstarter that really grabbed our attention, and she’s already had a big impact upping our game from a brand and content standpoint.

We’re thrilled to have this new cohort of talent on board here and are particularly excited to see that as we grow and mature as a firm, the quality of talent that we are attracting is steadily increasing. This crew bodes awfully well for a bright future ahead for Primary. I hope you’ll welcome them all to the NYC seed scene when you come across them—hopefully IRL sometime soon.