Outcast Ventures Launches Fund and Catalyst, Redefining How Companies Get Founded
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Today, Outcast Ventures announced its inaugural fund, establishing a new category of early-stage venture firm built around how founding teams form.
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 has already invested in founders who have taken companies through multiple IPOs and exits and connected them with their next founding teams.
Outcast is led by co-founders and General Partners Andy Chen and Amy Lin. Andy previously co-led Coatue’s 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. We built Outcast to bring that density together and invest when the right teams 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. Outcast’s Founder DNA Study analyzed nearly 400 U.S. tech exits over 20 years and found that co-founders who did not previously work or go to school together drove higher exit valuations.
Outcast is launching at a moment when starting a company has never been easier, but building the right team has never been harder. There is a paradox in the industry: the more successful a potential founder becomes, the harder it is to access the right co-founder. Success reshapes networks: they fill with people who work for you, not peers who would build with you as equals.
Outcasts’ Catalyst is designed around this insight. 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. Catalyst is split between technical and non-technical leaders. Founders work together in person and decide deliberately whether to found a company together. Outcast invests selectively when alignment and conviction are strongest.
Powering Outcast’s approach is The Bridge, the firm’s proprietary AI system that compounds the firm’s judgment with every founder interaction. The Bridge builds on nearly a decade of work by Lin, who began building AI systems for venture at NFX in 2017, years before most early-stage firms were thinking about using AI themselves.
“The venture industry talks a lot about innovation, but rarely innovates itself,” said Amy Lin. “As a founder who’s built and sold a company, we are building Outcast to compound like software. We operate like the companies we back - compounding data, efficient workflows, and evolving systems. That’s how two GPs deliver for both founders and LPs.”
Andy and Amy embody the Outcast thesis themselves – the two didn’t work together or go to school together before their networks connected them. Outcast invests talent-first at pre-seed and seed.
Applications for the next Catalyst formation cycle are now open.
About Outcast Ventures
Outcast Ventures is an early-stage venture firm built on the belief that founding teams matter more than founding ideas. Through Catalyst, its founder formation engine, Outcast identifies exceptional operators and creates conditions for them to form founding teams, often before ideas are fully defined. Founded by Andy Chen and Amy Lin, Outcast invests talent-first at pre-seed and seed. For more information, visit www.outcastventures.com.
