Kate McAndrew is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Baukunst, a $100M pre-seed venture fund backing companies at the intersection of technology and design from day one. With over a decade of investing experience across hardware, software, consumer, and AI-native systems, Kate is known for her high-conviction, founder-first approach and her ability to identify category-defining talent at the earliest stages.
Before launching Baukunst, she spent eight years at Bolt, where she helped shape one of the industry’s first dedicated pre-seed programs and worked hands-on with dozens of technical founding teams. Kate is also an active voice in the early-stage ecosystem, speaking frequently on founder readiness, product craft, and how to build enduring companies from zero to one. She holds degrees in Art History and Cultural Studies from McGill University and is a published author. Outside of Baukunst, Kate is a proud mom, an avid dancer, and is based in San Francisco.
To me, taste is similar to the difference between what’s fashionable and what’s stylish. Being fashionable is aligned with what everyone wants right now. What’s hot. To have style, or taste, is knowing what’s of quality independent of what’s trending.
In 2014 the “hot” theme of the year was the sharing economy. The most valuable company started that year? Notion. In 2021 Web 3 was hot, hot hot, but the most valuable company to get started was Anthropic.
In order to have good taste, you have to understand quality, have a sense of yourself, and insulate your ego from caring what other people think about you. The best founders, and the best investors, develop conviction around what will matter long term, not just what the market is excited about today.
I’d also venture to say that technologists have generally not been the bastion of taste. Artists, creatives, culture builders have. Both worlds need one another more than ever right now.
We invest the first $500k-$2M into brand new companies, often before they have a product or traction. I look for grit, but more specifically, intrinsic motivation. Every founder starts a company underestimating how hard it will be. That naivety is actually critical in taking the leap! The people who make it through to the other side are usually driven by something much deeper than status or external validation. They have an almost irrational desire to solve the problem.
What always surprises me is how differently intrinsic motivation can show up. I care much less about where someone went to school than how they’ve demonstrated excellence. That might look like a rapid career trajectory, playing violin at Carnegie Hall, or captaining a Division I sports team. Different paths, same signal: discipline, resilience and commitment to mastery.
Curating intimate conversations and dinners with exceptional women. Over the past year, I’ve been fortunate to help bring together incredible groups of founders, investors, creatives and operators. Those kinds of in-person conversations feel deeply energizing to me– they return far more energy than they take.
Joy.
My mom.
Dance!! I found dance in my early 30’s, and I was home. I dance 3-5 days per week, and recently performed in San Francisco’s Carnaval parade. It was humbling to dive into the art of samba, cha-cha-cha, and cuban salsa and then perform routines full out for three hours through my city. Dance is my highest ROI self care, and I will move mountains to get to class.
Honestly, I feel somewhat divorced from trends right now. This year has been much more about going deeper into the core pillars of my life– my business, parenting my five year old and my dance practice.
That said, I do love seeing the rise of knowledge creators. There’s an incredible amount of expertise being shared online outside of traditional institutions, and I have enormous respect for the businesses these creators are building while making information that was once gate kept more accessible to the world. I’m also actively investing in this space - most recently we led the pre-seed into YouPop, an AI infrastructure play for knowledge creators.
In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. It’s a short, beautiful book about Japanese aesthetics and design, and it came to me at a moment when I was craving more poetry and subtlety in my life. I was working 80+ hour weeks grinding it out as an associate in a VC firm, really steeped in the hardware investing ecosystem. It was a phenomenal experience, but not particularly poetic. The book invited me back into my love of art and design, and ultimately Baukunst, the firm I started in 2022 with three partners, is a culmination of embracing both the technology and design parts of myself. In German Baukunst means “The Art of Building,” and I don’t know if it would have existed without In Praise of Shadows.
