There is a whiteboard in the Amity Ventures office with 35 names on it. Seven of those names now have commas and nine zeros attached. That is Patrick Yang's scorecard - twenty percent of every early-stage check he and co-founder CJ Reim have written since 2016 turned into a company worth a billion dollars or more. Not because they spray. Because they stop at five.
Yang grew up in Fremont, attended Mission San Jose High School - a campus that produces more Intel Science Fair finalists per square foot than almost anywhere in America - and went to UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. His degree is in Business Administration with an Engineering Leadership concentration, a combination that reads like a personality description: knows how things work, insists they work better.
"Amity" means quality relationships. Yang named the firm after the thing he actually sells to founders - not capital, but commitment.
Before Amity: The Analyst, the VP, the $450M Bet
Yang started at Morgan Stanley's Menlo Park technology investment banking group sometime around 2013 - the kind of apprenticeship that teaches you exactly how deals look from the outside. Then he moved to Highland Capital Partners, an $8B global venture firm, as a Vice President. At Highland, he didn't just manage a portfolio. He found nuTonomy.
nuTonomy was a small autonomous vehicle startup founded by two MIT robotics researchers, Karl Iagnemma and Emilio Frazzoli. Yang sourced Highland's investment. Less than a year later, Delphi - the automotive supplier racing to build a self-driving stack - acquired nuTonomy for $450 million. That is the kind of pattern recognition that earns you the right to start your own fund.
The Amity Model: Slow Down to Win
Yang and Reim launched Amity in 2016 with a thesis that runs counter to how most early-stage funds operate. Rather than building a sprawling portfolio of fifty or sixty positions and hoping for power law outcomes at the far end, Amity writes three to five checks per year. Lead the round. Join the board. Stay.
The name itself is a signal. "Amity" - a word meaning deep, durable goodwill between parties - isn't accidental branding. It's a contract with founders. The pitch to a first-time founder considering Amity is not "we have pattern recognition across hundreds of deals." It's "we have one person on your board and they are going to be there for every hard conversation you need to have."
What He Actually Looks For
Yang's language around founders is specific. He uses two words repeatedly: "obsessive" and "high-agency." The first is about conviction - the founder who cannot stop thinking about the problem even when the problem is telling them to stop. The second is about action - the founder who, when the obvious path closes, finds a non-obvious one instead of filing a help ticket.
His initial check size targets $1 to $5 million, and he has led rounds at pre-seed, seed, and Series A. The specific number matters less than the math behind it: at three to five deals per year and concentrated positions, every single check has to work. There is no hiding a bad bet in volume.
The Portfolio: Exits, Unicorns, and Active Boards
The Amity portfolio includes companies that define their categories. CaptivateIQ, which Yang invested in and continues to manage, is the dominant sales commission management platform and reached unicorn status. Evisort - where Yang sat on the board from the early days - was acquired by Workday in September 2024, one of the cleaner enterprise software exits of the year. Talkdesk, Socure, and other portfolio names have crossed $1B valuations.
On the earlier side of the portfolio, Yang currently sits on the boards of Sully.ai (AI-native healthcare documentation, invested April 2024), Controlrooms.ai (board member since December 2021), Arketa (fitness platform, joined July 2022), Element, Mayfair, and Usage AI. The board seat count - six active positions - is not a badge of busyness. It is a map of where he thinks the next round of category leaders is building.
Beyond the venture portfolio, Yang sits on the board of Advancing Women in Product, a non-profit that works to move more women into product management careers. It is the kind of board seat that doesn't show up in fund metrics, which is partly the point.
What Comes Next
Amity Ventures Fund III is currently at $1.8 billion in assets under management - a significant step up from the firm's early funds. The investment pace and strategy remain unchanged: three to five deals per year, lead the round, join the board, stay through the hard conversations. Yang continues to focus his deal sourcing on AI, SaaS, consumer internet, logistics, and audiotech, with the recent Sully.ai investment suggesting the healthcare AI wave is clearly on his radar.
The 20% unicorn hit rate is the kind of number that circulates in LP presentations and gets attributed to luck by people who haven't tracked the work behind it. Yang's record - from spotting nuTonomy at Highland to building Amity from scratch into a $1.8B fund with seven unicorn outcomes - suggests a more deliberate hand at work.