Today, Andy Chen and Amy Lin, Coatue and NFX alums, respectively, announced Catalyst by Outcast Ventures. Catalyst is the first founder formation engine for the top 1% of builders to found companies with co-founders they’d never meet otherwise.
Andy was previously a General Partner at Coatue's early-stage venture practice, investing in companies including Figma, Scale AI, Persona, and Distyl. He was also a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he led technical executive recruiting and also founded the KPCB Fellows Program. Amy joined NFX at its founding as Chief Product Officer, building AI systems that scaled one of the largest seed funds.
"Identifying talent has been the throughline of my career, from recruiting thousands of engineers and tech execs at Palantir, Figma, Airbnb, Stripe, Twitter, Slack, Square, and DoorDash to founding KPCB Fellows at Kleiner Perkins," said Andy Chen. "Markets rotate. Exceptional founders stay exceptional. The biggest bottleneck to world-changing companies isn't the idea - it's the density of talent at the earliest stage. Catalyst was built to bring that density together and set the circumstances for the right teams to form.
Company formation, the highest-stakes moment in venture, has long been left to chance and proximity. Under the assumption that familiarity leads to better outcomes, many founders choose co-founders from their existing networks, former co-workers and classmates. The data says otherwise. Andy and Amy’s Billion-Dollar Founder Study analyzed every U.S. tech company that either went public or was acquired for more than $1 billion in the past 20 years. While startup mythology tells us great companies are born from chemistry – college roommates, former coworkers, best friends who “just get each other,” – the numbers prove otherwise.
“In pre-seed and seed, the founding team matters most. I’ve seen it from both sides: as a technical founder who built and sold a YC-backed company, and later across 200+ seed investments at NFX,” said Amy Lin. “Yet the highest-stakes decision in company building – choosing a co-founder – is still left to chance. The more successful you become, the harder it is to find the right partner. Your network fills with people who work for you, not peers who will build with you as equals. We created Catalyst to close that gap.”
Currently twice per year in San Francisco, the fund brings together 60 exceptional founders, including repeat founders of $1B+ companies and senior engineers from companies like Applied Intuition, Palantir, Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic. Beyond access to a high caliber network, Catalyst provides founders with a workspace in SF, a first check, and $1M+ cloud & compute credits from AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more.
Applications for Outcast’s next Catalyst formation cycle are now open and due by April 6, 2026.
About Outcast Ventures
Outcast Ventures is an early-stage venture firm built on the belief that founding teams matter more than founding ideas. The firm writes $500K to $1M checks at pre-seed and seed, backing exceptional founding teams, often formed through Catalyst, their founder formation engine. The firm invests across AI, enterprise, consumer, vertical SaaS, healthtech, hardtech, and fintech, and has already invested in founders who previously took their companies through IPOs and M&A exits.
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