FOUNDER & CEO
BIOGRAPHY
Prior to founding Strut in 2016, Kristen Ostro served as the Director of Operations for Xfund, an early-stage venture capital firm dedicated to finding and supporting technically-gifted entrepreneurs with a liberal arts mindset. Xfund's strong ties to Harvard University, as well as MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, gave her first-hand exposure to the next generation of entrepreneurship and innovation currently being fostered at America's top-tier universities.
Before Xfund, she was the Director of Operations for Homebrew, a seed-stage venture capital firm in San Francisco that provides funding and operational expertise to entrepreneurs building the bottom-up economy. Kristen had the pleasure of helping Hunter and Satya build Homebrew from the beginning under their exceptional mentorship and guidance.
Prior to Homebrew, Kristen spent five years working as an Executive Assistant and West Coast Marketing Coordinator for New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the largest and most active venture capital firms in the world.
Before joining NEA, she was in a jack-of-all-trades role for a licensed broker-dealer in San Francisco and also supported the Executive Director of Baker & McKenzie, LLP, at their San Francisco and Palo Alto locations.
She remains forever grateful to Craigslist for connecting her with her first job at Tower Records headquarters in West Sacramento, CA. There she supported the Chief Financial Officer and his staff during the company’s final years.
In addition to Strut, Kristen is also the Founder & Managing Director of Let’s Talk Ops (LTO), a nationwide community of first-class operators powering some of the most successful venture capital firms in the world from behind the scenes.
Kristen played Division One Women’s Volleyball for Towson University, where she earned two torn ACLs and a B.S. in Business Administration.
THE B-SIDE
Outside of her passion for work, some of Kristen's personal interests include:
Photography by Portraits to the People.