The View from the Office.

Katelyn Donnelly and I met up for a cappuccino at Cafe Reggio, an iconic spot in the West Village a block from Washington Square Park which I have long wanted to visit.

Cafe Reggio was opened a century ago by Domenico Parisi, an Italian immigrant, who is credited with introducing cappuccino to the U.S. The cafe’s original 1902 espresso machine is still on display. The cafe has attracted famous artists from Jack Kerouac to Bob Dylan. 

Katelyn is the founder and managing partner of Avalanche, a venture capital firm based in Austin, Texas. She and I first met three weeks ago in Omaha at the Berkshire annual meeting.

Venture is a tough market to break into. Her career trajectory — like many things in life — seems like a combination of intent and serendipity. 

Katelyn grew up in Minneapolis and studied at Duke before joining McKinsey. At McKinsey she went to work for Sir Michael Barber, a former UK civil servant. He invited her to work on a project to reform the educational system in Pakistan that was going to take eight weeks but ended up taking eight months. 

Barber left McKinsey to join Pearson and Katelyn followed in 2011 as his chief of staff. The role at Pearson led to her co-founding and managing the company’s venture arm, Pearson Ventures, a $65 million fund that invests in educational technology. 

In 2013, she co-founded with Barber, Delivery Associates, a London-based advisory firm that helps governments and social impact organizations improve operations. The company was sold to Trill Impact, a private equity firm, in 2022. 

After a decade at Delivery Associates, Katelyn returned to VC with the launch of Avalanche, a fund targeting pre-seed and seed-stage companies. The fund started investing in earnest in 2024, with most investments targeted for four years. 

Her early investments have included Bluesky Social and CivicMarketplace, a one-click solution to government procurement contracts. 

We talked about how the VC landscape has changed in the past decade. At that time, many firms were still relatively small, insular, and male-dominated. A16Z was just five years old! By some measures, the VC market is ten times as large today. 

I asked Katelyn if she had any advice for founders pitching VCs. She said that it’s important to tell a clear and succinct story about the business that conveys passion. 

You have a better chance of getting funded if you are solving a specific problem. It’s not good to be all over the map. “If you are doing everything, you are doing nothing,” she said. 

One more thing, she said: “Never show fear.”