“The mountains are calling and I must go.” —John Muir
Kalee Gardella is deeply passionate about supporting company builders and job creators. After a decade-long tech career in the heart of Silicon Valley, she has found her professional niche in venture capital and her forever home at 10,500 feet in the Colorado Rockies.
Born and raised in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Kalee has always been an entrepreneur at heart. As a child, she hustled the neighborhood with her latest crafted wares and logged profits in KidBiz software (on a purple floppy disk). As a teen, she had at least three part-time jobs for local small businesses at any given time and won multiple state-wide entrepreneurship competitions as president of her high school’s Marketing club. College took her to Northeastern University in Boston, where she studied marketing, communications, and social entrepreneurship and worked for General Electric, EMC, and VMware — all before graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree.
After graduation, Kalee made the full-time move to Silicon Valley to work for VMware, rising through the ranks in multiple marketing and communications roles. When she caught the itch to jump into the startup scene, she took a full time Head of Marketing position with early stage VC firm Trinity Ventures.
The mountains finally called Kalee and her husband Joe to move from California to Colorado in 2020. To maintain ties to the industry she loved, Kalee founded a consulting firm serving VCs called KMG Collective, taking on Founders Circle as one of her very first clients. As our Head of Community & Programming, we’ve been lucky to have Kalee’s extensive experience mixed with her killer ambition. She has been a key player in scaling our private leadership community, The Circle. She emanates our “give to get” ethos and inspires change and innovation. We could not be happier to have her as a part of the Founders Circle family, and we’re excited to watch her flourish.
Outside of work, Kalee can be found enjoying her four-season, high-altitude lifestyle – touring the backcountry on a splitboard, climbing trails on a mountain bike, fly-fishing in an alpine lake, or chasing 14er summits with Joe and their dog Kaya.
by Preet Kaur