Taproots: 10 Female-Founded Unicorns in 10 Years

Meet Kathryn O'Day of Atlanta Ventures

Front Porch Venture Partners is launching something new called Taproots — an in-depth conversation with the most impactful and connected people in startup ecosystems throughout the Southeast. These discussions dig deep with the people that everybody knows locally and anybody new to town approaches to get connected. These leaders could make their impact anywhere, but are choosing to make it in a place they call home.

Our first guest on Taproots is Kathryn O’Day of Atlanta Ventures.

Kathryn and I first met on a 6am run at Venture Atlanta where most of us were huffing through our 3-4 miles, but she was effortlessly bouncing back and forth from the front of the line to the back, chatting with just about everyone, taking pictures, and probably logging twice as many steps as the rest of us (one of her selfies is below and you’ll find me looking gassed in the back in a white Nike hat).

Kathryn seemingly channels this kind of energy into EVERYTHING that she does — from writing The O’Daily, to coaching founders at the venture studio, to seven Ironmans, and her prior adventures leading and scaling Atlanta software success stories like Pardot (exited to ExactTarget/Salesforce) and Rigor (exited to Splunk).

(If you stick to podcast audio, you’ll miss the important fact that she is walking on a treadmill at her desk during our catch-up, living up to her reputation for perpetual positive motion.)

Growing up in Atlanta, Kathryn’s parents started a business together building homes in Brookhaven, and although business talk was limited around the dinner table, she grew up hearing the value of customers, and the trade-offs of running your own business, and the complicated balancing act of entrepreneurship and family through late nights and weekends and vacations. Her first job came in the form of the required number of hours that she and her two younger brothers (both entrepreneurs as well, as a chef and a farmer) spent cleaning construction sites each week for her parents, and although she doesn’t quite remember if they told her this or just modeled it, she can easily rattles off a mantra that I may just print out and put on my kid’s bedroom walls: “You always work hard. You do your best. You finish what you start. You treat people well… These are the things that I hear in my head.”

Like many of us, Kathryn once-upon-a-time made a choice to leave home, deciding to head up to New England for college. But then “got to a point where I was like: I’m cold. It’s dark,” she says as she sets a familiar scene. “And then I had this AHA moment that, my gosh, Atlanta! … I came back to Atlanta with a perspective that Atlanta was cool… And I stumbled into my first tech job, and Atlanta is cool, but the tech scene is even cooler. And so that made it a no-brainer to stay [here].”

Fast forward through a lot of years living these values back in Atlanta and Kathryn has her eyes set on a big next goal — she believes that we can build 10 female-founded unicorns in the Southeast in the next 10 years. (We agree at Front Porch!)

“The reaction that I have from women when I share the goal is that people who never thought they could build a billion dollar company, but who were very ambitious, they have an AHA moment,” she says, and I feel like I’m in a dugout pep talk from her days as a college softball player. “They raise their hand. They’re like, ‘I want to be one of your companies.’ … And it shifts something in their brain… So the very interesting thing that I learned is that just by stating the goal, it helps to manifest the goal.”

Much like she does in her races, or as an early employee at some of Atlanta’s best startup success stories, or as a Partner at the wildly ambitious, metro-tectonic-plate-shifting Atlanta Ventures, Kathryn and the people around her have always started by stating the goal, even if it is a wild one like creating one of the largest tech spaces in the U.S. (Atlanta Tech Village) or revitalizing 16 historic city blocks into an even bigger entrepreneurial and cultural center (South Downtown), in a bold, long-term effort to make Atlanta one of the best places to build a tech company in the world.

And once they state the goal, their track record delivering against it has been pretty remarkable. Kathryn is focused but also confident on the path ahead: “This reminds me of when you’re training, right?” she explains. “And I’m like, how can I go faster? And there’s nothing you can do. There is no way but through. You just have to let time go and all the leading indicators are correct. We’ve got the tech mayor, we have the tech czar, we have South Downtown, we have people moving to Atlanta to build companies because they know about our engineering talent and our Fortune 500 companies… All the pieces are in place, and it’s just a matter of time.”

BIG THANKS to Kathryn for being our very first Taproots guest. Check out more in the podcast. We agreed that it is rated 1980s PG because it only has two f-bombs.