Nadine Kavanaugh

Startup Writing

I've written a lot about startups

Venturewell Investor Interviews

The Impact of Angel Investing: Interview with Anne Maghas

VentureWell Reports

Strategies To Accelerate and Expand Access to the U.S. Innovation Economy
In 2024, The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) invited VentureWell to update our 2020 Day One Memo, which laid out recommendations for how the federal government could close critical gaps from lab to market. In this substantially revised paper, we look back over four years of successful innovation and describe strategies to further accelerate and expand the United States innovation economy. We recommend actions based on three core principles: inclusion, relevance, and sustainability.

A Decade of Aspire: Bridging the Funding Gap
Ten years ago, VentureWell launched Aspire to prepare startup founders to engage with investors and secure the seed funding needed to bring their climatetech and medtech innovations to market. Of the 177 Aspire alumni startups from 2015 to 2023, 81% are still active, 53% are women-led, and 33% are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color)-led. This report reflects on our learnings from the past decade.

Corporate Innovation

I wrote articles for Techstars—for their blog and for other publications, under various bylines—about how partnering with startups can help large corporations innovate.

The Line

I was Senior Editor of The Line, Techstars digital magazine, showcasing ideas & insights from the Techstars global network.

I planned The Line, built it in partnership with our engineering department, launched it, and was responsible for all content on the site. I wrote, edited, sourced images, made updates, and continued to liaise with engineering to improve and refine the user experience.

I published a minimum of three new stories every week; often more. Over 1.5 years as Senior Editor, I published over 700 articles on The Line, which received nearly 800,000 pageviews on over 250,000 sessions from more than 180,000 users.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility are deeply important to me, and showcasing diverse entrepreneurs was crucial to my leadership of The Line: 50 of these articles featured Black entrepreneurs and 145 featured women.

Penn Wharton entrepreneurship Website

I was responsible for the entire Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship website (2014-2018). This means that I:

  • created the website architecture

  • worked with a design team on the look of the main page and templates for the interior pages

  • wrote all the content--program descriptions, resource pages, stories, etc.

  • performed user testing and edited the site organization and content in response

Visual Stories

You know I love words, but sometimes a visual story conveys the excitement even better. I built these stories using Adobe Spark.