Work-Bench Promotions: Kelley Mak & Priyanka Somrah
In founding Work-Bench, there are a few key tenets that define who we are as a firm and a culture. One of the more important of these is finding hungry, smart, and humble talent from nontraditional VC backgrounds, bringing them into the fold, and empowering them to let their talents shine.
Today, we are thrilled to achieve an important milestone on our Work-Bench journey, promoting Kelley Mak to Partner and Priyanka Somrah to Senior Analyst.
Promoting Kelley Mak to Partner
Kelley joined us in 2016 from Forrester Research as an Associate. At Forrester his superpower was the ability to grok extremely technical cybersecurity concepts in conversations with startup founders and executives, and then switch gears and talk about high level strategic trends with Fortune 500 CISOs and CIOs. This background has served him well at Work-Bench as he’s both led investments and our corporate engagement activities.
Kelley was promoted to Principal when we launched Fund 2 and grew to lead our cybersecurity and cloud-native investment coverage. He currently works closely with our portfolio companies Algorithmia, AppLand, Tilt, VISO Trust, and more to be announced. Kelley also maintains and grows our tentacles into the Fortune 500 and high growth tech companies through corporate roundtables, enterprise playbook lunches, and executive briefings.
One founder recently put it best, calling Kelley “another co-founder on our journey” after Kelley’s early contributions spanned numerous customer intros to nail their initial use case, extensive product feedback based on deep market intelligence, and tons of late night conversations spanning other parts of his business.
But in our eyes, you haven’t seen Kelley in full action until you’ve seen him in all his fearless glory at karaoke 🎤… his range is inimitable!
Promoting Priyanka Somrah to Senior Analyst
Priyanka joined us full-time right out of college as an Analyst, after already working with us for almost two years as an intern. She is the only NYU junior to ever cold email us about how much she loves enterprise software. If you enjoy our Enterprise Weekly Newsletter every Friday, then you have Priyanka to thank for that, as she has spent years curating the lede, articles, and fundings.
Priyanka dove right into the world of data infrastructure and in sharing her thoughtful market perspective on our blog, has earned the respect of seasoned entrepreneurs and VCs. She is the author of our comprehensive and well regarded Data Infrastructure & Analytics 2021 Report, writes her highly-read monthly Data Source substack, and has been a critical partner on the extensive research, diligence, and support it takes to identify, win, and scale our companies.
Priyanka brings a tireless work ethic and can-do attitude each day, and knows how to bring the 🔥 on Slack when she’s burning one of us!
We couldn’t be more proud of Kelley and Priyanka and all of their impact to date, and know they are just getting started. We can’t wait to celebrate them soon in true Work-Bench style, over a late night of karaoke.
Please join us in congratulating them!
- Jonathan Lehr and Jessica Lin
