Katelin Holloway

Who they are

Katelin Holloway is Founding Partner at Seven Seven Six — a former public school teacher who ran people at Reddit and Pixar before co-founding a VC firm with Alexis Ohanian and building Cerebro, a proprietary tool that scores founders on coachability.

Person

Katelin started as a public school teacher — an origin that quietly shapes everything she's done since — before moving into HR and people operations, eventually landing at Pixar Animation Studios and then Klout. She built her reputation as VP of People and Culture at Reddit, where she was later known as Chief People Officer, speaking at LinkedIn Talent Connect on 21st-century HR and running people through Reddit's most turbulent growth years. From there she moved into venture as a Partner/Investor at Initialized Capital, where she worked alongside Alexis Ohanian — and in 2020, the two co-founded Seven Seven Six together, with the firm closing its $150M Fund 1 in June 2021. The through-line is treating human capital as a strategic asset: whether she was writing org design at Palantir, running culture at Reddit, or now backing founders at Seven Seven Six, the bet has always been that how you build a team determines what the company becomes. She built Cerebro, a tool that scores founders on product and traits like coachability, bringing her HR instincts directly into due diligence. She writes at katelinholloway.com and posts on LinkedIn on people and culture, parental inclusion, womxn in the workforce, and founder mental health — and hosts All Hands, a Lattice-produced podcast on the future of work. Possibly — her teaching background is what makes her unusually diagnostic about founder coachability in a way most investors are not.

Company

The most recent moves show Seven Seven Six operating well beyond conventional early-stage bets: in 2026 the firm acquired ONIT, a college sports trading card company, expanding into college athletics, and led Starcloud's $170M Series A for orbital data centers. In February 2026, the firm also participated in the $1.75M pre-seed round of Veritas Labs, a startup using hack-proof chips to combat luxury goods counterfeiting. The firm has raised over $1.3 billion in assets under management across multiple funds as of early 2026, with a portfolio that includes 15 unicorns, 1 IPO, and 11 acquisitions — including Sorare, Envoy, and Ro. Seven Seven Six runs its operations through a proprietary system called Cerebro, which handles portfolio monitoring, team scaling, and LP relations — the firm treats itself as a technology company that deploys venture capital. Portfolio company AC Momento was acquired by TickPick, and the firm also became a team owner in the women's professional golf league WTGL.

Market

Seven Seven Six competes in early-stage venture against Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Benchmark, and Founders Fund, while differentiating on a founder-centric, human-capital-first thesis and sector breadth spanning fintech, healthtech, space economy, clean tech, and Web 3.0. The firm operates in a VC environment increasingly shaped by geopolitical and industrial priorities — US-China tensions affecting supply chains, regulatory scrutiny around data privacy and antitrust, and sovereign and corporate players entering deals with strategic intent. Seven Seven Six's bets on space (Interlune, Starcloud) and defense-adjacent technologies position it at the intersection of commercial and national-security capital flows.

Network

Katelin's closest working relationship is with Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and her co-founder at Seven Seven Six, with whom she collaborates on firm leadership and investment strategy. Chris Vanzetta is a partner at Seven Seven Six and a peer leader within the firm. Portfolio companies she discusses publicly include Poppy Seed Health, Tend Lab, Dispatch Goods, and Doodles.

Alexis Ohanian· Co-founder, Seven Seven Six
Chris Vanzetta· Partner, Seven Seven Six

How they likely show up

Career arc from public school teacher → people ops → VC investor → signals she builds frameworks for developing people before she builds theses about companies — diagnosis comes first.
Built Cerebro to score founders on coachability → she systematizes judgment rather than relying on gut; expect her to have structured frameworks for things others treat as intuitive.
Long run in people operations at Reddit through major growth → comfortable with ambiguity and organizational chaos, likely does not spook at messy founding-stage situations.
Founded All Hands podcast and writes at katelinholloway.com on people, culture, and founder mental health → she is a public thinker who tests ideas externally; she'll engage with well-framed challenges to her views.
Moved from operator to investor at Initialized Capital before co-founding her own firm → high agency; she doesn't wait for permission to build the thing she thinks should exist.
Possibly — her consistent theme across teaching, HR, and investing (human capital as the strategic asset) suggests she filters most decisions through a people-first lens before a market-size lens.

Conversation tips

→ Reference Cerebro specifically — she built it to bring HR rigor into founder evaluation, and it's the clearest signal of how she differentiates her investment practice from other VCs.
→ Ask about the teacher-to-investor arc directly; it's genuinely unusual and she's had time to articulate what it means — she'll have a real answer, not a rehearsed one.
→ Engage on the future-of-work and founder mental health threads she writes about; she posts occasionally but with conviction, so she'll notice if you've actually read her.
→ Don't treat her as 'the people person' at a tech firm — she's a co-founder who co-raised over $1.3B in AUM and led deals like Interlune and Starcloud; lead with the investor identity.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on Cerebro — she built a proprietary tool that scores founders on coachability, effectively turning her HR toolkit into investment infrastructure. Ask how it's evolved as the portfolio has grown.
Reference the Starcloud deal — Seven Seven Six led a $170M Series A for orbital data centers. It's a long way from people ops at Reddit, and the through-line she draws between culture and capital allocation is worth pressing.
Lead with the All Hands podcast she hosts for Lattice — it covers people, culture, and the future of work, which is exactly where her operator past and investor present converge.

Discovery questions

When you're scoring a founder on coachability with Cerebro, what does a high-coachability signal actually look like in practice — and has it ever been wrong in a way that surprised you?
You went from running people at Reddit to leading deals in space infrastructure and college sports trading cards — how do you apply a human-capital thesis to bets that far from the org-design world?
The firm positions itself as a technology company that deploys venture capital — how does Cerebro actually change the LP relationship compared to a traditional fund's reporting?

Avoid

Don't frame her contributions to Seven Seven Six as primarily cultural or operational support — she is a co-founding partner who shapes investment decisions, not a people-ops function bolted onto Ohanian's fund.

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