Katie Stanton

The Woman Who Moves Before the Room Knows There's a Fire

Two weeks into her job at the State Department, a 7.0 earthquake flattened Haiti. Most new hires would spend their first month figuring out where the printer is. Katie Stanton walked into Secretary Clinton's office with a proposal: let anyone donate $10 to Haiti relief by texting a shortcode. Internal resistance was substantial. Clinton said yes anyway. The platform raised over $40 million. That's not a footnote in Stanton's story - that's the entire thesis in a single anecdote.

Stanton is now the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, a San Francisco seed fund with $95M under management and a tagline that doubles as a screening question: "If you think your idea is bonkers - you're in the right place." She has backed over 70 companies including early bets on Coinbase, Carta, Airtable, and Cameo. She sits on the Vivendi supervisory board. She co-founded #Angels, a collective of six women from Twitter who decided - without fanfare or press releases - to fix the gender gap on startup cap tables one check at a time. That project now has 120+ portfolio companies behind it.

The career biography reads like someone shuffled three different lives together. Government technologist. Global media executive. Venture capitalist. International operator. Each chapter makes logical sense as a sequel to the one before it, but nobody would have predicted the full arc from the first chapter. She has lived in eight countries. She helped launch Yahoo Finance across 18 markets. She built Twitter's entire international business from a base in Paris while walking her kids to French school. She moved her family to Bangalore for four months because that's what Google Finance required and she wasn't going to phone it in from San Francisco.

Forbes put her at #60 on the World's 100 Most Powerful Women list in 2015. People Magazine named her one of the 25 Most Intriguing People. She has been profiled in Vogue, Fortune, and roughly every technology publication that existed between 2010 and 2016. None of that explains her better than the Haiti story, which is really about knowing which door to knock on and being willing to knock on it while everyone else is still processing the situation.

The Chapters Before the Fund

Stanton grew up in New York, did Air Force ROTC in college with genuine ambitions to fly, studied political science at Rhodes College in Memphis, then earned a Master of International Affairs at Columbia SIPA. Before anyone handed her a corporate business card, she taught English in Japan, volunteered with a nonprofit in Kenya, and spent time absorbing how the world actually moves outside American time zones. This was not a gap year as a status symbol. It was formative in the literal sense - it formed the operating system she has run ever since.

JP Morgan Chase was first. Then Yahoo, where she spent six years helping launch Yahoo Finance across 18 countries - a job that required understanding how financial news resonates differently in Seoul versus São Paulo versus Sydney. Then Google, where she worked on Google Moderator, Google Finance, and the OpenSocial initiative. The Bangalore chapter happened here: her team was piloting Google Finance in India, and she concluded that remote oversight wasn't good enough. She moved her family. For four months. This is a recurring data point in understanding how she operates.

Twitter came in July 2010 with a title that understated the actual job: VP of International Market Development. At that point, Twitter had 48.5 million monthly active users and zero international offices. She built 14. Based in Paris - because of course she was based in Paris - she oversaw partnerships in Kenya during a terrorist siege (learning hard lessons about crisis information in real time), in Australia where they built the platform's first abuse reporting system, and in Germany where she tried, unsuccessfully, to get Angela Merkel on Twitter. In 2014, she was promoted to VP of Global Media, consolidating the international and North American media divisions and running partnerships across TV, sports, music, news, and government worldwide.

After Twitter, Color Genomics: a startup offering affordable genetic testing for cancer risk. The personal resonance was real - she had family members who had lost their lives to cancer. As CMO, she helped launch a program offering testing at $50 for families after a mutation was detected, versus the standard $249. The mission mattered. So did the product discipline required to bring it to a population that needed it most.

The Fund Built for the Bonkers Founders

Moxxie Ventures launched in 2019 with $25 million and a clear mandate: back outlier founders at the pre-seed and seed stage, particularly those others might dismiss as eccentric or premature. The name is deliberate. Moxie - nerve, guts, audacity. The extra x is a flag to the founders she wants: the ones who aren't waiting for permission.

Fund III closed in July 2024 at $95 million, clearing the $85 million target. The LP roster includes Marc Andreessen, Susan Wojcicki, Anne Wojcicki, Katie Haun, Aileen Lee, Bain Capital Ventures, Foundry Group, and a dozen other names that constitute a who's-who of institutional and individual capital. Getting those checks is not a given. The fact that she raised a third fund, and raised it to a larger size in a more constrained venture environment, is meaningful data.

The portfolio includes August Health, Calm, Certn, Heirloom Carbon, Lime, Luminai, Opendoor, Overstory, Spellbook, Tipalti, and Veho, among 70+ total companies. The diversity numbers - 50% BIPOC founders, 33% female founders - aren't marketing. They're what happens when you actively build the deal flow rather than waiting for it to arrive.

#Angels: Six Women, One Very Specific Problem

In 2014, while still at Twitter, Stanton co-founded #Angels with five colleagues: Chloe Sladden, Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Vijaya Gadde, and Jana Messerschmidt. The organization had a single, unadorned mission: get more women onto startup cap tables. Not as a grand statement. As a practical intervention.

#Angels has since invested in over 120 companies, including Coinbase, Carta, Gusto, and dozens of others. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential angel collectives to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past decade. It exists because a group of women with capital, networks, and conviction decided to use all three simultaneously.

The Career Arc, Annotated

Five Stories Worth Knowing

Things That Don't Fit Into the Career Bio

What She Actually Says

What's Happening Now