We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Katie Doherty. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Katie below.

Katie, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

We want to make it possible for anyone who has the vision and determination, to start a successful and soul-filling outdoor business. We believe that advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion across industries starts with founding teams!

Entrepreneurs need specific skill sets, industry knowledge, and professional connections to drive business growth. Historically, however, access to these resources has been limited and unequal based on demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic factors.

We’re building support – programming, community, mentorship – to make it possible for entrepreneurs from all different backgrounds to build successful companies.

Because today’s entrepreneurs are tomorrow’s industry leaders. When leadership is more representative of humanity, a broader group of people will feel seen, heard, and welcomed in the industry and in the outdoors.

Katie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been working with founders for about 10 years, and first became interested in entrepreneurship in college. I was studying government, but disillusioned by polarization and inaction in Congress, and became curious about entrepreneurship as a bottoms-up approach to driving social change by providing people with the tools to solve the problems they see in their communities.

I spent about 7 years working primarily with tech entrepreneurs, but was seeking more alignment with my passions outside of work and decided to start Founded Outdoors with my business partner, Enhao Li. Being in the outdoor industry is deeply fulfilling because it is collaborative and community-oriented. I also believe it is an industry that has the ability to bring together folks from all different political affiliations around a love for nature and passion for preserving outside spaces.

What sets my Co-Founder, Enhao, and I apart is our ability to listen to entrepreneurs and understand their needs, in addition to being able to empathize with the ups and downs of the journey as founders ourselves.

What gets me psyched is when a founder participating in our programs or in our community gains confidence in an area where they had less experience (finance, pitching, social media etc.), when they hit a major milestone in growing their business, or when we all get together in person at a trade show or meetup and celebrate each other and this wild path of entrepreneurship we’ve all decided to embark on!

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

In college, I decided I needed to add something finance related to my resume to broaden by job prospects. I joined this finance club, and very much regretted doing so, because we had an overwhelming amount of homework and projects. Come to find out a few years later, that the “CEO” of that club was Enhao Li, my now business partner. We reconnected over trivia in San Francisco. Enhao was the MVP of the team, who knew seemingly all of the answers. I quickly realized that my strengths were more suited to the role of hype girl. That dynamic has continued through to today.

Our first company, Founderkind, provides programming and resources to early-stage women entrepreneurs. We founded it with the mission to get more of our talented women friends and colleagues to start companies by providing the support needed to build confidence and get early market validation.

3.5 years ago, we started Founded Outdoors to provide resources and programming to outdoor entrepreneurs.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I grew up with this fiery motivation to achieve excellence, in every aspect of my education and my sport. Being an entrepreneur requires unlearning that instinct in the day-to-day work. You have to be okay with putting unpolished work and ideas out into the world on a regular basis. It’s the most efficient way to get feedback to figure out where the market opportunity is, but it sure can be uncomfortable.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.foundedoutdoors.com
• Instagram: @foundedoutdoors
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dohertykatie/

Image Credits
The photo of me in the blue shirt presenting and pink hat and blue shirt at a booth should be credited to Jonathan de la Fuente.