Hellos and a (partial) goodbye: Continued growth and evolution at Primary
Generally, the end of the year is a time of reflection, gratitude, and growth. At Primary, we’re feeling the change in the air and wanted to update you about changes and growth in our family. We’re officially welcoming Curtis Lee and Cassie Young as Venture Partner and Operating Partner respectively, and we’re sadly saying goodbye to Steve Schlafman as a full-time member of the team.
Steve joined Primary as a part-time Venture Partner about 18 months ago after leaving our uptown friends at RRE. At the time he was developing a passion for leadership development and executive coaching, and we spent a lot of time talking about incorporating that work into how we support our portfolio companies. Steve then toyed with the idea of becoming a professional coach while also writing angel checks from his own small fund, but as our relationship developed, we all agreed to see if Steve might fit in with what we’re building here at Primary. We’ve had an incredibly rewarding year+ working together, and Steve has had a huge impact on us and our work, but as we pushed to integrate his passion for coaching with our model for partnering with founders, we repeatedly heard that there’s a church and state dynamic to coaching and lead investors. Founders, understandably, don’t want the intensity and vulnerability of a coaching relationship with the people sitting at the top of their cap table. Ultimately, when faced with a choice between the two roles, Steve followed his heart and is planning to work with founders as a coach and angel investor.
Ben and I are incredibly excited for Steve as he forges this new path, and proud to see him take the riskier and less immediately remunerative path. We look forward to finding new ways to work together. One of the first will be as personal investors in his new angel fund, where he’ll be writing small checks that will not be in conflict with his core role as a coach and mentor. We think Steve will continue to have an outsized impact on the NYC community and we’re delighted to partner with him on that. But Steve will also maintain an ongoing role at Primary as a Board Partner, where he’ll be partnering with some of the founders he backed during his time with us, collaborating on deal flow, and exploring new ways to integrate coaching and seed-stage investing.
While we bring an end to our full-time partnership with Steve, we are pleased to have simultaneously added two talented, seasoned operators to our team. With Curtis Lee as a full-time Venture Partner, we are fortunate to gain a very experienced founder/operator, and most importantly, an entrepreneur who shares our values. Curtis has held senior roles at established companies like Google, Zynga, and Groupon, and also founded and served as CEO at Luxe, which he guided through raising over $70MM and ultimately a sale to Volvo.
We have been increasingly excited about the potential of our Entrepreneur in Residence program, as early efforts have resulted in a handful of very promising portfolio companies, including Chief, Ollie, and Kindred — each of which emerged from the efforts of founders working in our offices through their most formative company-creating stages. This program has been informal to date, and we are now eager to expand and professionalize it. Curtis’ experience as a founder and his deep empathy for that process and journey make him an ideal candidate to lead the charge in scaling those efforts. Beyond his EIR involvement, Curtis will also work on a range of more traditional deals. Given his track record with angel investing (ex: Superhuman, Honeybook, and Poshmark) and his work to date, we have high hopes for the impact he’ll have on our firm. We can say with certainty that he has already brought a valuable new perspective to our team. His singular orientation toward the founder experience has us all exercising a renewed focus on the founder journey as central to the experience we provide as a firm, and his legendary skills as a recruiter during his operating days are translating beautifully in attracting the best founders and others into our community.
Last but certainly not least, we are adding a new Operating Partner, Cassie Young, who is starting after the holidays. Cassie is a remarkably talented operator with a broad range of experiences across both consumer and b2b companies. She’s a rare unicorn of a startup polymath, having successfully operated as a consumer demand generator, a b2b marketer, customer success leader, sales leader, and ultimately Chief Customer Officer of a 600+ person business at CM Group. Cassie and I have known each other for nine years. We developed immediate and mutual respect, and it is fair to say that since our first encounter we have each been looking for the right opportunity to work together more substantively. After a couple of near misses around misaligned timing, we are thrilled that the stars have aligned to bring her here.
Cassie will wear many hats at Primary, but amongst her first goals will be to build out our go-to-market support capabilities. Ben and I have long believed that g2m would be a critical leg on the stool that is our Portfolio Impact organization, but we also knew that it would take a very special person to lead it. Cassie is that person, and we can’t wait to see what she achieves here.
Curtis and Cassie are each senior and very seasoned and successful operators who bring a world of wisdom and operating talents to our team. While we are sorry to see Steve go, when we consider the one step back, two steps forward nature of these changes, we are excited for where we stand today as we wrap up 2019 and look ahead to 2020 and beyond. Thank you for following along on the ride.
— Brad Svrluga, Primary General Partner and Co-Founder
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