Kristen Ostro and the business of holding things together

The call that helped Kristen Ostro expand her company was an accident. In 2020, she butt-dialed a former venture-capital colleague, Kelly O’Rourke. O’Rourke called back. A conversation followed, then help with the business, then an introduction to the person who would become Strut Consulting’s chief operating officer. For a founder who makes her living getting the details right, it is a pleasingly untidy turning point.

By then, Ostro had spent four years working for herself. She knew the administrative machinery of venture firms, the people who ran it, and the places where an ambitious new fund could get stuck. The question was whether that knowledge could travel beyond the number of clients one person could serve. Her answer became a firm. Alongside it, she built a community for people whose work usually happens behind the investment announcements.

A Craigslist beginning

Her first substantial opportunity came through Craigslist. In 2003, she became an executive assistant to DeVaughn Searson, the chief financial officer of Tower Records, at its West Sacramento headquarters. The company was in its final years. Her starting point was an established retailer’s finance department, with all the practical work that sits around the person responsible for the numbers.

Ostro had studied business administration at Towson University and played Division I women’s volleyball. She credits former coach Chris Lamb with helping her earn a college scholarship. In her account of the people who made her career possible, the coach appears before the venture capitalists. It is a useful reminder that a professional network often begins long before anybody calls it networking.

Work supporting the executive director of Baker & McKenzie in San Francisco and Palo Alto followed, along with a broad role at a licensed broker-dealer. Retail, law, finance: the settings changed, while the work kept bringing her close to the everyday running of an organization. The resulting résumé has the range of someone who learned the business by helping it get through the day.

Five years inside the machine

New Enterprise Associates brought Ostro into venture capital. She spent five years there as an executive assistant and West Coast marketing coordinator, working across administration and marketing. She names Dick Kramlich among the people who showed her how a venture firm should operate. The education was close enough to the decisions to include their practical consequences.

Homebrew offered a different scale. She helped Hunter Walk and Satya Patel build the seed-stage firm from its beginning, serving as director of operations. Later came the same title at Xfund, and operational work during Zetta’s formative years. Her career crossed both a large, established institution and funds still assembling the organization around their investing.

That distinction matters to the work she eventually chose. An investment partnership can start with a thesis and relationships. Running it introduces another set of relationships: staff, advisers, vendors, and the limited partners supplying the capital. Ostro’s professional territory grew around those connections. The quiet work accumulated into something she could offer other managers, without having to become an investment partner herself.

The business attached to the fund

When Ostro founded Strut in 2016, she was responding to managers arriving with investing ambitions and little guidance on building a firm. Some were leaving larger partnerships. Others were moving from operating or founding companies into running funds. She had watched knowledge circulate within small professional circles while newcomers worked things out for themselves.

Strut’s work developed around three areas: investor relations, finance, and operations. That means helping with the organization around a fund, from its launch to subsequent fundraising and ongoing reporting. The work can include selecting service providers, setting up systems, coordinating people, and giving limited partners a consistent account of what is happening.

In a 2023 conversation with Sophie Alcorn, Ostro and Nicole Fuller emphasized the importance of the right fund administration, tax, audit, legal, and banking support. These are separate specialists who still have to work together. A manager can hire each one and find that coordination remains a job of its own.

Ostro has described her work as “helping run the business as a living, breathing entity.” The phrase gives the partnership a pulse. It also puts the everyday tasks back into the picture. A fund has investments; the business around it has workflows, deadlines, employees, and people waiting for an answer.

A second set of hands

The solo practice lasted into 2020. Demand was exceeding what Ostro could handle on her own, and clients were growing into their next funds. Taking on more work meant changing the way she delivered it. O’Rourke’s return call arrived at that moment. She helped with the early expansion and urged another hire: Nicole Fuller.

Fuller became COO and a business partner in building the firm. Her responsibilities now cover Strut’s internal operations, finances, people strategy, and client service. Before Strut, she had helped scale Aduro Advisors, working on client onboarding and business development. Ostro’s own company now needed the kind of organizational attention she had been providing to other people’s firms.

In June 2026, Strut marked its tenth anniversary with more than 20 professionals serving more than 65 venture firms across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Its clients included first-time managers and firms already on their fourth, fifth, or sixth fund. The familiar label “emerging manager” can apparently survive quite a few birthdays.

Who helps the person who helps everyone?

There was another organizational problem, closer to home. In 2017, Ostro began gathering fellow venture operators. The early meetings took place at Silicon Valley Bank’s San Francisco WeWork location. She wanted to learn from peers and find resources for her own work. The group became Let’s Talk Ops.

It grew to include platform professionals, finance specialists, marketers, investor-relations leads, and talent professionals. These jobs have different titles, but their occupants share the experience of keeping an investment organization useful to its partners and portfolio companies. A peer group gives them somewhere to take a question without first explaining the entire occupation.

Today, the community offers educational sessions, mentorship, coaching, and practical resources. The annual summit has moved through cities including Boulder, Austin, Nashville, and New Orleans. Its 2026 gathering took place in Vancouver, September 29 through October 1, extending that traveling meeting room into Canada.

The usefulness of such a room is easy to picture. A colleague elsewhere may already have confronted the vendor, workflow, or career question occupying your afternoon. Sharing the answer makes a small piece of experience available to somebody outside the firm where it was acquired. Ostro’s consulting business and her community both make room for that exchange.

When “ops” no longer covered the room

In October 2025, Ostro announced the community’s new name: VIA, for Venture, Influence, Ambition. Members working in marketing, talent, and investor relations did not always see themselves in the word “operations.” A refresh of the old website had become a larger discussion about whom the organization represented.

For Ostro, the change included retiring a playful homepage photograph of herself doing the splits. A community’s visual identity has to accommodate its members as well as its founder’s sense of humor. There is something endearing about a rebrand with an actual flexibility problem.

Her stated ambition for members includes recognition and compensation that reflect their contribution. She argued that the economics of their roles should reflect their impact. The practical offerings of the community sit beside that career argument: the people responsible for making a firm work should be able to advance within it.

“You deserve the economics that match your impact.”

Kristen Ostro, announcing VIA

A name with something underneath it

Strut also refreshed its branding in 2025. Ostro explained the name’s double meaning: moving with confidence, and the structural support used in buildings, bridges, and vehicles. The peacock motif supplies the swagger. The engineering meaning supplies the reason the swagger can keep going.

Her public advice is more practical than ornamental. At the EA Ignite conference in Nashville in 2024, she encouraged administrative professionals to participate in more internal processes and learn how their firms operate. Discussing AI, she urged a curious approach and time spent experimenting. “Play with it like a child would,” was her suggestion.

In a 2025 conversation with Jacob Mullins, she returned to mission, vision, and values, connecting them to hiring, branding, decision-making, and succession planning. The concerns run through her work: what the firm wants to do, how people understand it, and what happens when responsibilities move from one person to several.

Outside work, Ostro’s interests include live music, animals, travel, and the Olympics. She grew up in Sonoma, with an affection for the region and its wines. She has since moved to Pensacola, Florida, and talks about the coast with the enthusiasm of someone who made a deliberate choice about where to live.

That leaves a career spanning a record retailer’s headquarters, Sand Hill Road, a solo practice, and two organizations built around operators. The accidental call makes a good opening anecdote. The return call is the part that fits the rest of the story: another person in the network, picking up, and helping the work move forward.