Katelyn is an investor and entrepreneur. Katelyn is the founder and Managing Director of Avalanche VC, an early-stage venture firm investing early in technology companies that transform how people learn, earn, and own.
Previously, she was co-founder and Director at Delivery Associates, the leading public sector advisory firm implementing technology and large-scale reform worldwide. She served on the board until the company exited to a private equity firm in November 2022.
Constantly curious, she has invested in companies, funds, and founders building behind massive trends that are obviously the future. Katelyn grew up in Minneapolis and is frequently found in Austin and New York City. She has lived and worked globally, including in London, San Francisco, Seattle, Lagos, and Lahore.
In 2012, she co-founded and served as the Managing Director of Pearson Ventures (prior PALF), a $65M venture fund that invests in global EdTech companies. At Pearson, Katelyn invested in and served on the board of SPARK Schools, APEC Schools, Avanti, HarukaEDU, and Omega Schools. She also co-founded the Global Schools Forum, a trade organization for private schools in emerging markets. Katelyn also led the strategy and implementation of Pearson’s efficacy agenda and was on the founding team of the FT125 Club, a division of the Financial Times.
Katelyn started as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in San Francisco, serving technology companies and large financial institutions. She worked on the sustainability of credit markets with the World Economic Forum and presented at the Annual Meeting in Davos in 2011.
‘Let be be the finale of seem’
Let Be Be the Finale of Seem
Wallace Stevens
Katelyn is a Kauffman Fellow - Class 21, was named to Corporate Venturing Power List, was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2014, and was named a ‘Rising Star in Venture Capital’ in 2022 by Venture Capital Journal.
She is a frequent author and has published essays on economics, education, innovation, venture capital, corporate governance, and government policy that have been translated into over five languages and distributed worldwide. Katelyn writes a weekly newsletter called Declarative Statements and muses periodically on trends that are Obviously The Future.
She graduated from Duke University with high distinction in economics. Katelyn is now a member of Duke University's Learning Innovation Advisory Council, helping Duke imagine the future of on-campus and online learning.
Katelyn loves skiing, appreciating beautiful design, and reading. She is learning web development, the art of letterpress and printmaking, and kite surfing.
Startups driving access to the world’s largest TAM
Podcast
Breaking Down the State of Austin's Pre-Seed & Seed Funding
With Katelyn Donnelly and Rajiv Bala
Podcast
Investing in Disruptive Ideas and Technologies
Featured in The Tech Trek Podcast
Podcast
The Art Of Becoming: Evolving Your Personal & Professional Self with Dalglish Chew
Featured in Venture Visionaries: Behind the Business
Podcast
The Power of Story: Turning fiction into reality
Damien Walter, Science Fiction Community, TechnoOptimism Manifesto, Storytelling, SciFi as the great leveler
Podcast
The New Era of Entrepreneurial Storytellers
Wesley Wang, nothing except everything, modern film making, chess champion, everyone is an entrepreneur
Podcast
Board Walk Empire: The Power of Curiosity and Connection with Elle Beecher
Elle Beecher, Designing human connection at scale, Share values vs Shared interests, Viral Twitter moments 2x, improving emotional intelligence, unique community management approach
Podcast
Fanatical Learning Communities with Warren Carlyle
Warren Carlyle, Octopus Fan Club, LawNerds, Capturing Attention, Building Community, Neurodivergence as a Super Power
Podcast
Friendship Funnel with Nick Gray
Nick Gray, successful event formula, online friendship hygiene, viral posts, friends newsletters, doing things that don't scale
Podcast
Why Wisdom is in Short Supply with Dalglish Chew
Dalglish Chew, Inner Work, Growing up in Singapore, Coaching, English Ph.D., Coercive Productivity
Podcast
Empowering Parents: School Choice and Technology
Joe Connor, Odyssey Education, ESAs, Streamlined Technology Platform, Informed Choices
Podcast
Matching the Right School for You
Chris Neilson, industrial organization for schools, increasing competition, closing the digital divide in schools, implementing government policy
Podcast
GovTech: Solving Last Mile Delivery
Saad Rizvi & Al-Hassan Hleileh, urgency, technology brings transparency, delivering public goods, crypto as an extension of government, Dune
Podcast
The New Path to Home Ownership
Catalina Kaiyoorawongs, Qualifying for a Mortgage, Restructuring Student Debt, First Time Homeowners, LoanSense
Learn
Efficacious Edutainment
Learning that works, without feeling like work.
Learn
Return-on-Coaching for Venture-Backed Founders
Unleashing our secret weapon: a coach-in-residence
Earn
Skills, Skills, Skills
Now is the time. Skills matter more than ever.
Learn
Alternative Education Goes Mainstream
A little choice goes a long way. Parents are voting with their feet and, soon, with government dollars.
Podcast
The Real AI Expert
Deepak Sekar, Robotics to AI, merging AI & learning, critical skills for prompt engineering, Nostradamus' predictions
Podcast
The Formula for Greatness
Sir Michael Barber joins to discuss accomplishment, reflect on lessons in venture, opine on the future
Want to join us in building the future? Subscribe to our newsletter.
Thanks for subscribing! Stay tuned to find out what's Obviously The Future.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Change is the only constant. Everywhere technology is bounding ahead, and new, massive opportunities are emerging. Technology is surging. Yet, many legacy institutions are calcified in the past.
Basic human desires remain the same. Peace, stability, health, and progress have been priorities for humanity.
Technology is the driving force for improving quality of life, but the pace of change is now exponential. Humanity struggles to keep up. Meanwhile, the demographics of humanity are reshaping society as lifespans are increasing and fertility rates are plummeting. The pyramid of age is being inverted. This has profound implications that are in the midst of transformation.
Technology Exponential Graph
Linear institutions, exponential technologies and the exponential gap
Lifespans are increasing globally
Source: Our world In Data
Steady decline in the fertility rate below replacement
Source: Our world In Data
The old formula for achieving personal prosperity is failing to produce results. Learning outcomes are stagnating. People are demanding more autonomy and freedom. Digital platforms facilitate increased productivity, but incomes are often stagnant. Legacy institutions are unable to product results and that is now visible. The future is not fully here.
What is required for a prosperous society in a reverse demographic period is amid dramatic transformation. How people learn, earn, and own is at the core of what is being reinvented. It is still early days.
The future looks different, but how?
Shifts in demographics and technology create the conditions for societal changes. Culture, economic structure, and public policy all eventually change based on these immutable forces. We refer to the trends that emerge as avalanches.
Every avalanche starts with invisible changes underneath the surface. They are difficult to see, in small niches, and are imperceivable except to those who are determined to find them and desperately paying attention.
Once triggered, avalanches are unstoppable.
We conduct deep research, think analytically, and develop proprietary perspectives around these small shifts before they are broadly obvious.
We partner with founders who perceive the invisible trends, use the latest technological advances, and build the new reality. These founders have been building far before the landscape changed.
Our capital is deployed to catalyze and capture the value behind the avalanche.
Changing systems and producing results at scale.
We focus initially on technologies transforming how people learn, earn, and own because these are core to the human experience, and each contain tipping points.
Learn
At the foundation of every successful life is a learning journey. Human social brains are wired to be curious and experimental. Learning compounds and creates more demand for itself. As incomes grow, the share of GDP going to education rises.
In a society automated by machine intelligence, the value of learning and being learned will be foundational and exceptional. Salespeople teach their customers. Scientists pioneer new technologies based on significant knowledge bases. Skilled laborers fix the infrastructure that we live in. Everyone, everywhere, will be supercharged by computer assistants, but they will need to know the foundations and key skills to stay ahead.
PRISMS OF REALITY- The new platform for STEM Education using spatial reasoning
Earn
The world of work and career is fundamentally changing to be more platform-driven, flexible, and independent. The talent marketplace is now global, skilled talent can geo-arbitrage and jurisdictions will compete for talent.
Everyone is an entrepreneur, or they must learn to think like one. We invest in platforms that drive a shift to greater efficiency and empowerment and increase skills in every vertical.
HUMANLY.IO- AI-Driving easier and more equitable hiring
Own
In every society, optimizing ownership of assets is the key to success.
Demographic and technological trends is driving huge changes in the key economic parts of ownership.
Effective public goods are critical to every society, but traditional institutions have yet to adopt to modern times. Startups will implement and run last-mile delivery of government programs to achieve public goals.
Pensions and home ownership have traditionally provided a buffer of savings and stability for aging populations, yet their accessibility is changing.
In an AI-driven economy, owning data and rights to your intellectual property will be a critical element of wealth. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and programable money are technological solutions to decentralize ownership.
BLUESKY - End-to-end best-in-class software allowing for user control and ownership
We back founders catalyzing the future and building their life’s work.
We look for smart, thoughtful, and structured founders who take every element of their work seriously. The founders we back have prior work experience demonstrating excellence and high performance.
Founders who view their companies as their ‘life’s work,’ and who are solving a problem they care deeply aboutwill persist. Our founders view their customers' success as integral to their own. This alignment of incentives creates a powerful formula for results.
Our job is to talent and idea scouts and then deep partners to our founders. We will do whatever it takes to help them be successful post-investment. Sometimes this means getting out of the way. Sometimes this means taking an active, partnering role.
Massive Success
We will unlock of trillions of dollars of economic output when our founders succeed.
The outcome will be enormous when the Avalanche opportunity meets the determined founder and is catalyzed with capital.
All big things start small. We are dedicated to massive success in a decades-long time frame. We know anything is possible with enough grit, talent, and belief.
My Life’s Work
For me, avalanche is personal. I’ve built my career from my early days leading Duke’s largest student union to pioneering low-cost private school chains in the developing world to building Delivery Associates. I have a keen eye for talent and ideas who are undervalued and whose time has come.
My last venture was building Delivery Associates with Sir Michael Barber. As an analyst at McKinsey, I met Michael and instantly saw the power of deliverology in action. It was clear to me early that Michael was a unique and visionary leader whose ideas were fundamentally important to the world. It was obvious from the inbound demand from clients, customers, and jobseekers that Delivery Associates was needed in the world. While we raised capital, I invested my career and sweat equity from the early days of idea formation to the final stages of negotiation in the exit to Private Equity. I loved building the company into an institution that disrupted an industry and aim to do that again.
Over my investing and operating career, I’ve seen the power of capital allocators. Investors decide which visions get funded and where we invest our finite time. With Avalanche, as with Delivery Associates, I aspire to be the premier partner to the most outrageously ambitious founders who are building their life’s work.
I’m not in this business to collect lottery tickets, blindly accumulate assets, or jump into party rounds. I’m here to work with serious people on serious ideas. We are not commodity capital.
I love working with founders to will the future into existence. Investors who do the work and have conviction, particularly early, can create the avalanches we need to push society forward and crowd-in capital. This is my life’s work.
Lastly, our firm is serious about how we do business.
Think independently. We don’t care what the crowd thinks. We use our own judgment and collect primary evidence to form original perspectives.
Outrageously ambitious, long-term and relentlessly practical today. The future will be vastly different, but the reality of the world today needs to be addressed. We don’t lose sight of what’s needed on what timeframe.
Life-long relationships built on shared values. Success for us looks like building life-long relationships with our LPs, founders, team members and network partners. We are creating wealth together.
Stewardship of capital. We operate with humility, transparency, and integrity in all aspects of investing and capital management. Our goal is to maximize financial outcomes from all our partners.
Out cooperate the competition. We have a carry-share program for our network partners and advisors who help us build relationships and understand avalanche opportunities.
Join us.
We are amid huge societal transformations. We seek to investors, builders, and founders who share our long-term vision of the future and want to build together. This is our avalanche.
