MEET THE TEAM

Jeff Morris Jr.
Founder & Managing Partner

Menelaos Mazakaris
Investor and Head of Product

Doug Dyer
CFO

Jack Lipstone
Venture Partner

Yash Bora
Head of Research & Experiments

Jamesin Seidel
Head of Data Science

Maria Tangarova
Head of Founder Experience

Greg Clayman
Head of Talent & Education

David Zhou
Head of Community & Growth

Dakota Torres
Director of Finance

Karla Martinez
Finance & Operations Analyst

Lauren Hill
Chief Executive Assistant
Jeff began investing in crypto in 2016 as an angel and a crypto scout for Index Ventures. He was a seed investor in Dapper Labs, Compound Finance, The Graph, Dharma Labs (acq. OpenSea), Blockfolio (acq. FTX). His earliest crypto experiences were trading alts and sometimes getting rekt on EtherDelta, which was when he realized crypto needed better products to reach its full potential.
Jeff believes that everyone in the world should own digital assets and that we can onboard the next billion users by designing and building more accessible products. He currently serves on meta-governance for Ethereum Name Service as one of five elected leaders. Jeff was previously the VP of Product, Revenue at Tinder. In the role, he led the revenue team to become the #1 top-grossing app in the App Store & Play Store and grew the business from the early days of monetization through IPO ($20M to $1.2B ARR).
He previously worked in product at Facebook, where he led Instagram’s voter empowerment team focused on the US 2020 election. Instagram voter empowerment products resulted in the largest voter turnout operation in US history. He was also an early PM on the Novi consumer crypto team focusing on building merchant acceptance.
When not thinking about product user flows and evolving business models, Menelaos can be found instigating vigorous debates on geopolitics and how we can use technology to improve policy. He wrote his senior college thesis on AI policy at Penn where he graduated with a dual-degree from Wharton and the College of Arts & Sciences.
Doug Dyer, Chief Financial Officer, joined in October 2021 after serving as Chapter One’s “outsourced CFO” since January 2021.
He brings unique insights from four years as an outsourced CFO to numerous PE/VC funds and from more than a decade as an LP and direct investor. Doug supports Chapter One across several key functions, including finance, operations, investor relations, and investing.
Doug was previously an institutional LP and led private equity and venture capital investing at Texas Children’s Hospital, a $2B+ foundation.
Jack started his crypto journey in 2016 working on Ambo, a mobile wallet to make ERC20 token trading mainstream. Jack and his team were then acquired by MyCrypto in January 2019 where Lipstone became the Director of Business Development.
In May of 2020, Lipstone founded a DeFi protocol called Rari Capital which created a permissionless open interest rate protocol on the Ethereum blockchain and surpassed $1B in total value locked.
Jack has always had a strong passion for investing and is eager to meet founders and share his experiences to like-minded builders in the community who have a passion for improving the financial system and making products accessible to everyone in the world.
Yash is also an active blogger and enjoys writing about different web3 topics - check out his writing on Twitter @yb_effect. He was previously a full stack software developer at Salesforce and a product manager at Lunchclub. Yash graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Jamesin joined Chapter One in January 2022 as Head of Data Science. She came into crypto through the worlds of anti-spam, online safety, and professional sports betting.
Before joining Chapter One, Jamesin was the tech-lead for platform manipulation at Twitter. She focused on fake account detection, coordinated online harm, and election interference. Career highlights include developing algorithms to combat large-scale spam attacks, leading Twitter’s white hat investigations, and co-leading Twitter’s reporting on malicious automation and foreign interference during the 2016 Election for the Congressional Hearing. Prior to Twitter, she was a professional fantasy sports bettor working under Haralabos Voulgarious, using data and automation to get an edge in the sports betting market.
She is passionate about data visibility and data availability in web3 and is interested in how we can use blockchain data in sophisticated ways to expand the web3 ecosystem and drive investment decisions. Her writing can be found on her blog https://medium.com/@jseid212.
Her favorite ecosystem is Solana and she’s a huge Women of the World and Sad Girls Bar fan. Beyond crypto and work, Jamesin can be found on the poker tables and participating in a never-ending game of Gloomhaven.
Maria Tangarova is Head of Founder Experience at Chapter One, supporting our extraordinary founders on their building journey post-investment.
She is a culture enabler, an investor, and a founder at heart who has dedicated her work to building today’s economy with tomorrow’s tools.
Maria came into crypto by way of the music industry, reimagining fractionalized ownership and a more equitable creator/consumer dynamic. She is originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, grew up in a 4th-gen family of world-renowned classical musicians, and is a trained vocalist herself. While she grew up immersed in music, she discovered her itch for building early on, founding UTalent Records at the age of 19. She went on to lead collegiate development at the Recording Academy (GRAMMYs) and worked with the CEO of Gold Rush Vinyl as Chief of Staff to grow the world’s fastest-turnaround record pressing company.
After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin with a BBA in Investment Management, Tangarova went on to the legendary Capitol Music Group (UMG) investing in artists at Capitol, Motown, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Harvest, and Virgin Records. Within the web3 space she is a founding DAO member of stoi.org, a self-service microDAO creation platform for creative projects.
Maria is passionate about investing in good people, developing raw talent, and growing smart companies. She firmly believes in leading with purpose and following with product. In her free time, Maria enjoys hanging out with her pug and writing ideas in her inventor's notebook.
Greg joined Chapter One to focus on talent and education initiatives. With experience scaling multiple global companies, Greg partners with founders to design recruiting infrastructure and build world-class teams by identifying and hiring the top talent in the industry. He is passionate about bringing more people into web3 and guiding those looking to transition from their web2 careers.
Greg spent the past 3.5 years at Andreessen Horowitz, where he was the first partner hired to focus exclusively on web3 portfolio talent, as the portfolio grew from 6 to over 100 companies during his tenure. He brings a breadth of experience working at companies across various stages (from bootstrapped to Google), sectors (web3, TradFi, chat, gaming, etc.), and geographies (Silicon Valley, Stockholm, Toronto, Israel, and everything in between!).
Greg started his academic career at Brown and holds a BA from Tulane and an MS from Pepperdine. In his spare time, you can find Greg cycling, seeking out new boba shops and gluten-free bakeries, and headbanging in the front-row at a metal concert.

Dakota Torres
Director of Finance
Dakota joined Chapter One in 2022 as Director of Finance. Previously, Dakota was Senior Manager of Finance at Tinder, the #1 Top-Grossing app in the App Store and Google Play. He was responsible for managing and forecasting $1.7B of direct revenue across subscription and A La Carte product lines.
Dakota graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
Karla joined Chapter One as Venture Capital Analyst to focus on Finance & Operations Initiatives, as well as portfolio and market research.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Economics, she began her career in finance at PEI Asset Management, the largest real estate investment fund in Colombia. Most recently, she worked at a US-based PE firm, where she analyzed acquisitions and financial integration efforts. In this role, she was also involved in the concept development and launch of a novel co-living venture, which was a key asset in the firm's investment portfolio.
Karla is passionate about innovative business opportunities and this sparked her interest in crypto. Thanks to her international background and professional experience in different countries, Karla feels at home in the world and always brings a fresh perspective to the team.

Lauren Hill
Chief Executive Assistant
Before joining us Lauren attended the College of Charleston, where she majored in biology and held a finance director position at Charleston Miracle, a non-profit.
Lauren is passionate about crypto and real estate investing. She is looking forward to growing her knowledge even more while she is with Chapter One.
WE ARE
BUILDERS
AT HEART
We’re not just the product team that founders want when they are jamming, building, scaling. We’re also the team that will break down the walls and empathize with any issue at hand. We’re thought partners who help move the goal posts.
OUR MISSION
To make crypto easier to use through delightful products.
OUR VISION
To enable people to own their time, money, and ideas.
MEET THETEAM

Dakota Torres
Director of Finance

Lauren Hill
Chief Executive Assistant
Let’s stay in touch.The Chapter One community is constantly growing, and we’d love to have you on board! Join one of our online communities or Reach out atgm@chapterone.com We read every email!