CL

Catherine Lu

Founder & CEO at Essential

San Francisco Bay Area

Invests in

Work Experience

2024

  • Founder & CEO

    2024

    For over a decade, I saw how hard my parents worked as they grew their fire protection business. The business provided me and my younger brother with an upbringing that lacked nothing. While my dad secretly hoped that one of us would take over the family business, my parents also wanted us to follow our own paths. After a decade of working in the tech sector, I began to see all of the challenges at my parents' business in a new light. Now, I've come full circle to helping my parents and those like them take their businesses to the next level - all while reducing stress and headaches. At Essential, we are motivated every day by this mission and by our amazing customers, who are among the hardest-working people we know.

2017 - 2023

  • Managing Partner at Basecamp Fund (Seed Fund)

    2017 - 2023

    With > $1 billion in assets under management, Alumni Ventures (av.vc) provides individual accredited investors with professional-grade, diversified venture portfolios. I managed pre-seed and seed investments at Alumni Ventures through the Basecamp Fund (Seed Fund).

2016 - 2017

  • Director of Product

    2016 - 2017

    First Product Manager hire for NEA-backed fraud detection startup utilizing proprietary unsupervised machine learning tech. Promoted to Product Line Manager and became lead PM for the AI Platform and Frontend engineering teams. Then promoted to Director of Product, reporting to the CEO and managing a cross functional team across product and marketing. Company revenue increased 8x during my tenure.

2015 - 2016

  • Product Lead, Forward Deployed Product Development

    2015 - 2016

    On the small, elite team that brainstormed, built out, and scaled Monocle. Co-authored 3 patents.

2014 - 2015

  • Co-Founder

    2014 - 2015

    Fancy That: A retail AI company with a bidding platform for consumers and a pricing strategist for retailers.

2013 - 2013

  • Associate Product Manager Intern

    2013 - 2013

    On the Google Wallet mobile team. Was assigned ownership over multiple features as the internship progressed (was initially expected to handle just one). Received positive recognition from all levels up through the Director (3 levels above) by the end of the internship.

2012 - 2012

  • Software Engineering Intern

    2012 - 2012

    On the infrastructure team. Deployed multi-threaded, scalable programs to efficiently analyze and summarize 10s of millions of important metrics created daily.

Latest Articles