Kat Manalac

Kat Mañalac is a Partner at Convective Capital, where she leads platform and community. Convective says she builds resources and programs connecting founders, investors, fire-service leaders, utilities, and governments around resilience technology, and also drives the firm’s storytelling around how technology can help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.

Before Convective, Mañalac spent more than a decade at Y Combinator. She joined YC in 2013 as its first Director of Outreach, a role she described as focused on expanding YC beyond the founders who already knew the program through Paul Graham’s essays, Jessica Livingston’s book, or Hacker News. Her work included international founder outreach, Female Founders Conference, Startup School, and helping YC companies prepare for their first press launches.

Earlier in her career, she worked with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian as Chief of Staff, including work connected to his fund, nonprofit activity, and SOPA/PIPA political organizing. Prior to that, she spent four years at WIRED Magazine in brand and strategy. She attended Northwestern University; LinkedIn lists her education period as 2003-2007, and conference bios note she was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• Convective’s stated thesis: “We invest in systems that keep the world running,” connecting capital, people, and technology to protect communities from disasters.
• Convective invests in hardware, software, and financial services that manage risk in the physical world, with portfolio categories spanning wildfire detection, grid monitoring, robotic fuels management, firefighting drones, resilient home insurance, permitting/infrastructure software, vegetation intelligence, and climate-risk modeling.
• The firm started in 2022 as a $35M pre-seed and seed fund dedicated to wildfire technology; TechCrunch reported that Fund I planned roughly 15 investments with seven-figure checks.
• In 2026, Convective announced an $85M Fund II and broadened from wildfire into disaster resilience and “risk management in the physical world.”
• Mañalac’s own founder advice is strongly launch- and customer-feedback oriented: she tells founders that a major mistake is “not talking to customers” and encourages getting an “embarrassingly basic version” in front of users quickly.
• For founders seeking attention, she advises launching repeatedly through different channels instead of treating launch as a one-time press moment; in her YC Startup School talk, her takeaway was to “launch again and again.”
• Convective’s support model is network-driven: its Updraft network includes 10,000+ utility executives, agency leaders, insurers, operators, and frontline responders, and the firm says the network has generated $100M+ in revenue for portfolio companies.