7 Tips To Get Into Catalyst
Every application cycle, we get the same question.
“What are you looking for?”
Most people assume the answer has something to do with startup ideas.
It doesn’t.
We’re evaluating founders.
Ideas matter eventually, but Catalyst exists because we believe founding teams matter more than ideas. That means our application isn’t really evaluating your idea or your resume. It’s our attempt to understand who you are as a founder.
We’re looking for the patterns behind the accomplishments: what drives your curiosity, how you approach difficult problems, how quickly you learn, the standards you hold yourself to, and whether other exceptional people choose to work with you.
Those qualities are much harder to manufacture than a polished application, and they are far more predictive of who will build a category-defining company.
Over time, here are the patterns we consistently see.
1. Have a history of building things
The strongest applicants have been building for years, long before they ever think of applying.
Sometimes it’s a startup, an open source project, a robotics project in their garage, research they’ve published, products they built in college, or businesses they started in high school.
We’re looking for people who don’t wait for permission to build.
If you’re wondering how to improve your application over the next year, the answer is to ship more things.
Every project teaches you something. More importantly, it creates evidence that building is part of who you are, not something you decided to try because AI is exciting.
2. Environments you choose shape the founder you become
The environments people choose often tell us as much as their accomplishments.
Many Catalyst applicants come from companies like OpenAI, Stripe, Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and Anthropic. But just as many come from less obvious companies with equally high talent bars, such as Applied Intuition, Neuralink, Verkada, Vanta, and Snorkel.
More importantly, the best founders optimize for growth over prestige.
One Catalyst founder turned down an offer from DeepMind to become a founding engineer at an early-stage startup. On paper, DeepMind looked like the obvious choice. Instead, they believed joining a small, ambitious team would accelerate their learning and better prepare them to become a founder themselves.
They were right. That startup went on to have a significant exit, but more importantly, the experience dramatically accelerated their growth.
Great founders rarely become great in isolation. They deliberately seek out exceptional people because excellence has a way of recalibrating your standards.
3. Develop unique insight
We’re much less interested in someone who has read every AI newsletter than someone who has spent years becoming obsessed with a single problem.
Great founders don’t just understand a market, they notice things other people overlook.
If you’re an infrastructure engineer, maybe you’ve watched every company struggle with inference costs. If you’re a scientist, maybe you’ve spent years frustrated by research software. If you’re in logistics, maybe you’ve experienced inefficiencies no outsider would ever notice.
Category-defining companies often begin with an observation that looks insignificant, or even wrong, to everyone else. Obsession is usually what gives founders the conviction to pursue it anyway.
4. Slope vs starting point
Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
One of the strongest signals is simply moving faster than everyone around you. That might mean shipping side projects, publishing technical research, earning rapid promotions, or taking on increasingly ambitious challenges throughout your career.
But the exact accomplishment matters less than the trajectory behind it.
Not everyone starts from the same place. Some founders have every advantage. Others start with very few. What matters isn’t where you begin, it’s how quickly you’re improving.
We’ve met founders who started behind their peers but learned so quickly that they eventually surpassed them. We’ve also met founders with every possible advantage who plateaued because they stopped pushing themselves.
That’s why we care so much about slope. A history of building despite setbacks, teaching yourself new skills, tackling harder problems, and consistently raising the bar tells us your ceiling is still moving upward.
5. Clarity of vision
The best founders can explain complicated ideas with remarkable simplicity. They know exactly what problem they’re solving, why it matters, and why now is the right time to solve it.
Clarity is often a reflection of thinking. If it takes three pages to explain your company, the thinking probably isn’t finished yet.
Great founders think and communicate clearly.
6. Build your reputation before you need it
Long before someone starts a company, they’ve usually built a reputation among the people around them. They’re the engineer everyone wants on their project. The colleague people recommend without hesitation. The person known for consistently doing exceptional work.
Those signals show up everywhere: thoughtful writing, meaningful open-source contributions, technical talks, mentoring, or simply having outstanding people eager to work with you again.
The goal isn’t to become well known.
It’s to become deeply respected by people whose judgment you trust.
7. Put yourself in a position to take big swings
Starting a company is one of the riskiest career decisions you’ll ever make.
Many of the founders we’ve studied reached a point where they had the freedom to take that risk, whether through a previous exit, years of savings, or simply having few personal obligations.
The point isn’t that you need money to become a founder. It’s that reducing personal downside often allows you to pursue opportunities with much larger upside.
If your goal is to start a company someday, think intentionally about putting yourself in a position to take an asymmetric bet. That might mean saving aggressively, joining a high-upside startup, keeping your personal burn low, or delaying expensive lifestyle commitments.
The best founders don’t avoid risk.
They spend years putting themselves in a position where they can afford to take it.
What doesn’t matter as much as you think
People often assume there’s a single accomplishment that gets someone into Catalyst.
There isn’t.
One side project, one promotion, one prestigious company, one glowing recommendation, or even one successful startup won’t get you accepted.
We’re looking for patterns over isolated accomplishments.
Five years of building. Multiple rapid promotions. Consistently hearing the same qualities from the people you’ve worked with. Those patterns reveal far more than any single achievement.
Every application is a collection of signals. Our job is to understand the person behind them.
That’s why there isn’t a checklist. We’re looking for consistent evidence of curiosity, execution, judgment, ambition, and the ability to earn the respect of exceptional people.
The best way to prepare
Ironically, the best way to improve your chances of getting into Catalyst starts years before you ever submit an application.
It begins with the standards you hold yourself to, the people you choose to learn from, the problems you become obsessed with, and your willingness to keep improving long after others have become comfortable.
Becoming a great founder isn’t something you turn on when you decide to start a company. It’s the cumulative result of thousands of small decisions made over many years.
The strongest Catalyst applicants rarely spend much time thinking about how to get into Catalyst.
They’re too busy pursuing excellence.
If you do that consistently enough, there’s a good chance our paths will cross.
