Jake Yormak

Origin Story: In a couple sentences, how would you describe your path to becoming an investor?

During my time as a lawyer at Gunderson Dettmer representing startups, I cultivated relationships with entrepreneurs and investors in the NYC ecosystem. The credibility built during those days was the key enabler for the first fund. That, combined with the interesting deals I was seeing through Gunderson and our broader network allowed me to go out to colleagues, friends, angel investors, and others to discuss a fund.
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Investment Approach: What are the key factors you consider when evaluating a founding team?

We’re looking for entrepreneurs and teams with big visions and narrow focuses, who are passionate about what they’re building. A natural competitiveness and drive and, hopefully, indications of resourcefulness in their background, are always qualities we look for when evaluating founding teams. From a thesis perspective we’re looking for founders who are very data driven. There’s a lot of information out there. Intuition is important, but looking at the data and figuring out how to build a business, which customers to approach, etc. is paramount.
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What's your style and approach when it comes to working with founders post-investment? What are the characteristics of founders you've worked well with?

Story takes a hands-on approach to navigating the challenges of early stage companies, with a particular emphasis on how legal and regulatory barriers intersect with complex data technologies. It’s important for us to support founders from the onset.
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If I'm coming to pitch to you or your firm, what's the one piece of advice you'd give me?

Thoughtfulness and authenticity are key. Both of these values are pillars of our fund ethos and we hold ourselves and our founders accountable.
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How would you describe your own personal mission and values, and how do they impact the way you invest?

At Story we have high expectations of ourselves and our team -- excellence is expected -- and that bleeds into the types of founders and founding teams with which we surround ourselves.
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What do you like best about investing in NYC, and what’s your outlook on the future of NYC tech?

There’s no place we’d rather invest than in NYC. The density of talent here is unlike anywhere else in the country, and as that talent continues shifting into software, we expect NYC to provide by far the best venture returns for early stage investors -- there is still not enough capital to fund the next generation of entrepreneurs. It will take another 5-10 years for NYC to catch up to Silicon Valley in terms of engineering talent, but it’s a slow and steady process -- we believe NYC will ultimately become the #1 geography for startups. We also love investing in geographies with strategic advantages that are outside the Bay Area.