OUR TEAM

we are

proud enterprise nerds from corporate IT.

we work

alongside you to build a repeatable sales process from 1 to 10 to 100 enterprise customers.

We invest

at the sweet spot of Seed rounds.

We know

the ins and outs of enterprise go-to-market, including the must-ask questions when hiring your first AE, the outbound BDR sequences that work, and how to make SOC II audits suck less.

We CONNECT

you with the right people at key customer accounts, while also preparing you with the right context, messaging, and backchannel feedback for meetings to help ensure deals get done.

Jonathan Lehr

Co-Founder & General Partner

Favorite food:

A pint of Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked Froyo

Fun fact:

I’ve seen Regina Spektor and Death Cab for Cutie in concert 15+ times

Favorite NYC activity:

My 92Y Men’s Basketball League

Jonathan is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Work-Bench, where he focuses on investments in areas including machine learning and AI, cloud-native infrastructure, and security.

Jon founded the NY Enterprise Technology Meetup in January 2012 and organizes monthly meetups of the 10,000+ person group as a way to promote collaboration for the enterprise tech ecosystem in New York including entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 technologists, investors, and graduate students.

Prior to Work-Bench, Jon worked at Morgan Stanley in the Office of the CIO in IT. There he partnered with internal technology clients to facilitate the selection and on-boarding of emerging technology startups. He has written about enterprise technology trends for publications such as The Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal and TechCrunch.

Jon is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he received a BSE in Bioengineering, with minors in Mathematics and Economics.

Jessica Lin

Co-Founder & General Partner

Favorite birthday lunch:

Taco Bell

Best talent:

The incredible ability to fall asleep easily on planes

Bucket list:

Hug a panda

Jessica is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Work-Bench, where she focuses on investments in future of work and enterprise applications. Jessica is passionate about growing and supporting women in enterprise tech, launching our 2023 #Womenterprise Summit, 2018 Navigate Summit and our Founders of Enterprise Startups (Who Are Women) Database.

She is also a Forbes contributor, writing about emerging tech companies that are creating and enabling jobs for Americans.

Prior to Work-Bench, Jessica was a Learning and Development Manager at Cisco Systems, where she worked with the Engineering organization on Agile transformation, innovation and culture.

Jessica is actively involved with the education and workforce development community in New York City, as a longtime adult GED educator.

Jessica received a B.A. from Harvard University in Government and African Studies, where she developed an aspirational design and experiential education summer fellowship program in Cape Town, South Africa and Paris, France.

Kelley Mak

General Partner

Favorite movie genre:

Romantic comedies

Biggest fear:

Mustard

Favorite Food:

Chicken parm (sub or over pasta)

Kelley is a General Partner at Work-Bench, where he focuses on investments in areas including security, cloud and developer tools.


Prior to Work-Bench, Kelley covered the security market as an industry analyst at Forrester Research. Kelley also leads corporate engagement at Work-Bench, where he is the key point for the firm's relationship with forward-thinking technology executives across the Fortune 1000 and web-scale organizations. He works closely with these leaders on enterprise technology trends transforming data and analytics, infrastructure, security, and the future of work.

Kelley is a graduate of Boston College with a B.S. in Physics and Philosophy.

Priyanka Somrah

Principal

Dream job if you weren’t in VC:

Astronaut

Favorite book:

The Divine Comedy

Favorite song:

A Brand New Day by BTS

Priyanka is a Principal at Work-Bench where she focuses on sourcing and evaluating investments in the data operation / management, developer tooling, and cloud native infrastructure spaces. She is passionate about NYC’s startup community and values working closely with founders. Priyanka authors the Data Source Newsletter on all things data infrastructure, analytics and tooling.

Priyanka holds a B.A. in Economics with a concentration in policy from New York University. During her time at NYU, she worked in Service Operations at the Office of the CIO.

Daniel Chesley

Principal

BUCKET LIST:

Scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef

Favorite book:

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

FUN FACT:

Never had a sip of coffee

Daniel is a Principal at Work-Bench where he focuses on sourcing and evaluating investments in the machine learning and AI, developer tools, and enterprise application spaces. Daniel also authors the More Intelligent Newsletter, where he shares the latest thematic research and technology trends he’s digging into.

Prior to joining Work-Bench, Daniel was a Product Manager on the Machine Learning team at Hyperscience where he was responsible for pre-trained machine learning models, synthetic data generation, and use case expansion. Previously, he was a Go-To-Market Strategy Lead and began his career at IBM in financial services.

Daniel graduated from the Smeal College of Business at Penn State with a B.S. in Finance with a concentration in Corporate Innovation and holds a minor in glaciology.

Kira Colburn

Head of Platform

Favorite birthday treat:

Ice cream cake

favorite childhood food:

Mac & cheese

bucket list:

Run the NYC Marathon

Kira is the Head of Platform at Work-Bench. In this role, she leads the firm's content vision, strategy, and production across multiple platforms and assists in communications planning for portfolio companies. She also authors Work-Bench’s Enterprise Weekly Newsletter.

Prior to joining Work-Bench, Kira worked at Sparkpr where she focused on public relations and integrated marketing campaigns for the agency's venture capital practice group.

Kira holds a B.A. in Communications from Muhlenberg College. During her time there, she also studied Public Health.