Katelin Holloway

Who they are

Katelin Holloway is Founding Partner at Seven Seven Six — a former Pixar and Reddit people exec who co-founded the firm in 2020 and built Cerebro, a proprietary tool that scores founders on coachability and product traits.

Person

Katelin studied Interdisciplinary Health Services at Western Michigan University, then earned a JD from UC Berkeley School of Law — an unusual pairing that signals she thinks about organizations with both operational and structural rigor. She started as a public school teacher before moving into HR, which frames her whole career: she has always been in the business of developing people. She ran people functions at Pixar Animation Studios, Klout, and Palantir, then became VP of People and Culture at Reddit — a role she made visible enough to headline LinkedIn Talent Connect and the Capital Allocators podcast. In 2019 she moved to Initialized Capital as a Partner, bringing her operator lens to early-stage investing, and in October 2020 she co-founded Seven Seven Six with Alexis Ohanian from day one. Alongside the firm she hosts the All Hands podcast (produced with Lattice) on leadership and organizational culture, writes for TechCrunch, and publishes at katelinholloway.com covering people ops, founder mental health, parental inclusion, and women in the workforce. The through-line is consistent: she has always monetized one insight — that human capital is a strategic asset, not a support function.

Company

Seven Seven Six's most recent moves push well beyond software seed rounds: in March 2026 the firm led Starcloud's $170 million Series A for orbital data centers, and in February 2026 it participated in Veritas Labs' $1.75 million pre-seed round targeting luxury goods counterfeiting. Earlier in 2026 the firm acquired ONIT, a college sports trading card company, and became the second team owner in the women's professional golf league WTGL — a pattern of bets that span deep tech, sports, and consumer. The firm has raised over $1 billion across three funds and now manages over $1.3 billion in AUM, with a portfolio that includes 15 unicorns, 1 IPO, and 11 acquisitions including Sorare, Envoy, and Ro. Seven Seven Six runs its operations through Cerebro, a proprietary platform for portfolio monitoring, team scaling, and LP relations.

Market

Seven Seven Six competes in the early-stage venture capital market against firms like Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Founders Fund, and Benchmark — all of which it has co-invested alongside. Its differentiation is a founder-first, operationally hands-on posture backed by Cerebro, plus a deliberate sector spread across Web3, healthtech, space economy, fintech, and climate tech. The broader VC environment faces increasing regulatory scrutiny around antitrust and data privacy, alongside geopolitical pressures — particularly US-China dynamics — that complicate portfolio companies' supply chains and market access.

Network

Katelin's closest working relationships are her co-founding partners at Seven Seven Six: Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder) and Chris Vanzetta, as well as fellow founding partner Mariano Gonzalez Vasconcelos. She is also a member of the Athena Alliance executive community and has maintained a notable ongoing relationship with the Initialized Capital team from her time there as Partner.

Alexis Ohanian· Co-founder, Seven Seven Six
Chris Vanzetta· Founding Partner, Seven Seven Six
Mariano Gonzalez Vasconcelos· Founding Partner, Seven Seven Six

How they likely show up

Career arc from public school teacher → HR exec → VC partner → firm co-founder → signals someone who thinks about developing people as a compounding, long-game investment, not a transactional activity.
Built Cerebro — a tool that scores founders on coachability — → brings a structured, data-informed lens to what most VCs treat as gut-feel judgment; expect her to ask precise questions rather than vibe-check.
Active public writing across TechCrunch, Medium, her own site katelinholloway.com, and the Seven Seven Six blog → comfortable owning a point of view publicly; responds well to intellectual engagement rather than soft rapport-building.
Hosted the All Hands podcast and appeared on Capital Allocators, LinkedIn Talent Connect, HumanX 2026, and Web Summit 2024 → high-frequency conference and media presence suggests she is most energized in dialogue-format settings, not pitch decks.
Possibly — JD from Berkeley alongside an operator career (no apparent litigation or in-house counsel role) → the law degree likely sharpens how she structures founder agreements and fund terms rather than indicating a legal career path.

Conversation tips

→ Ask about Cerebro specifically — she built a tool that quantifies founder coachability, which is a pointed bet about what makes or breaks early-stage companies; she'll have a real thesis behind it.
→ Reference her teacher background — she brings it up herself as foundational to her people philosophy, and it opens a more candid conversation about how she actually evaluates talent vs. how most VCs claim to.
→ Come with a specific view on the Starcloud or Interlune bets — deep tech and space are real conviction areas for the firm right now, not a surface-level trend play.
→ If you write publicly or host a podcast yourself, mention it — she invests time in being visible and tends to engage more substantively with people who do the same.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on Cerebro: she built a proprietary tool inside Seven Seven Six that scores founders on product instincts and coachability — a bet that the thing most VCs call intuition can actually be made systematic.
Lead with the Starcloud Series A ($170M for orbital data centers, led by 776 in March 2026) — it's the firm's largest recent move and a long way from seed-stage SaaS, which signals a deliberate expansion of thesis worth asking about.
Mention All Hands, the podcast she hosts with Lattice — it's one of the cleaner expressions of her core argument that people operations belongs at the strategy table, not in the HR back office.

Discovery questions

Cerebro scores founders on coachability — how has that framework held up when you revisit the portfolio two or three years in? Does coachability actually predict outcomes?
You went from being the CPO at Reddit to co-founding a VC firm on day one — what did you have to unlearn from the operator role to make that transition work?
The firm's recent bets span orbital data centers, women's golf, and college sports cards — what's the connective tissue in that portfolio, or is diversification the point?

Avoid

Don't treat people and culture as a soft backstory to get through before talking about 'real' investing — it's her core intellectual framework, and she'll notice immediately if you're waiting for the VC part to start.

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