Who Is Carly Valancy?

Carly Valancy is a community builder, founder, and marketing strategist known for creating products and experiences that help people form meaningful, lasting connections. She is the founder of TETHER and Reach Out Party, and co-founder of Momentum, where she supports female founders with strategic growth and go-to-market guidance. With a background in musical theatre and a career spanning brand leadership, community architecture, and early-stage tech, Carly brings a storyteller’s intuition to everything she builds, championing connection as a long-term practice and positioning relationships as essential infrastructure for both personal and professional growth.

A Different Kind of Networking

Carly Valancy remembers exactly where she was when she received the email.

She had reached out, without expectation, to an off-Broadway playwright whose work had shifted something in her. Her message was simple: gratitude, curiosity, a brief note about how deeply the play had resonated. When he responded, thanking her and sharing that messages like hers were what carried him through harder days, Carly felt something click.

In that exchange between two strangers, she realized connection didn’t have to be transactional to be powerful. It could be human. Intentional. Long-lasting.

That moment didn’t just reshape how she thought about networking, it became the foundation of her life’s work.

Today, as the founder of TETHER and Reach Out Party, and co-founder of Momentum, Carly Valancy builds products, communities, and experiences designed to help people find their people. Her work sits at the intersection of creativity, intuition, and systems thinking, offering a counter-narrative to hustle culture and reframing connection as a long game worth playing well.

Creativity, Community, and the First Audience

Long before Carly entered the world of startups and strategy, she was on stage.

A graduate of the University of Northern Colorado with a Bachelor of Arts in Musical Theatre, Carly began her career as a Broadway performer, wedding singer, and sketch comedy writer. Those early years immersed her in creative communities, spaces where collaboration, vulnerability, and shared ambition weren’t optional, but essential.

It was in these environments that she first observed how niche communities function: how energy shifts when people feel seen, how momentum builds when creativity is shared, and how one introduction often leads to another. Performers rarely succeed alone; their careers are ecosystems of directors, writers, musicians, and peers. Carly absorbed this reality intuitively.

At the same time, she noticed the limits of the entertainment industry, particularly the lack of ownership performers have over what they build. While rich in experience, it offered few opportunities to create something enduring.

That tension planted a question that would later guide her pivot: What would it look like to apply an artist’s sensibility to building something tangible and lasting?

From Artist to Architect

Carly’s transition into early-stage tech and community-driven businesses was less of a pivot and more of a translation. The skills she’d honed, storytelling, audience awareness, emotional intelligence, proved invaluable in brand, marketing, and community leadership roles.

Her career evolved rapidly. She became a consultant, course creator, marketer, podcaster, and community architect, working across organizations such as INSCAPE, Ness Labs, NuMarket, and Primer, where she served as Head of Brand & Marketing during a formative growth period.

At Primer, her impact went beyond execution. As COO David Cavise noted:

“She’s a storyteller in every sense of the word… you can count on Carly to get close to the subject matter, to understand the customer, to get a ‘feel’ for what an audience cares about… and as a result, it levels up folks around her.”

Carly’s leadership style was defined by intuition paired with rigor. She pushed for quality not as perfectionism, but as respect for the audience. She knew when speed mattered, and when something deserved deeper intention.

“She talks to customers, she’s genuinely curious, and she’s aware of assumptions,” Cavise wrote. “This is what makes Carly an incredible asset on any brand-oriented team.”

Over time, Carly’s influence extended into company culture itself. Her ability to read people, advocate for mission alignment, and nurture trust made her a natural leader, one whose presence shaped not just outputs, but environments.

Building the Infrastructure for Belonging

In 2020, Carly founded Reach Out Party, a guided experience designed to help people reach out, thoughtfully and courageously, to those they admire. Later came TETHER, a product focused on helping people build and maintain meaningful professional relationships over time.

These weren’t networking tools in the traditional sense. They were systems for planting seeds.

Participants didn’t just land jobs or collaborations, though many did. They found partners. Mentors. Friends. Entirely new paths.

One story stands out for Carly: a participant who, in 2021, reached out to an author she admired who also taught at a university. They stayed in touch casually. Two years later, the participant followed up after graduating, sharing her dream of working there. A year after that, a role opened, and she got the job.

“We have no idea how the small act of sending a cold email could affect our lives three, five, or ten years from now,” Carly often reflects.

Her work reframes outreach as an act of generosity, curiosity, and future-oriented thinking. In an era obsessed with immediacy, Carly champions patience.

Connection, in her view, isn’t about extracting value, it’s about building infrastructure for who you’re becoming.

Intuition, Omens, and the Long Game

Today, Carly is also the co-founder of Momentum, where she develops strategic marketing and growth plans for female founders ready to start or scale. Across all her work, a consistent philosophy emerges.

She pays attention to what she calls “good omens”, the people, projects, and ideas that feel expansive rather than draining. Anchored by a disciplined morning routine, she uses intuition as a compass, asking not just Can I do this? but Does this feel aligned?

“When people get a glimpse of me,” she says, “I’d like for them to feel like it’s a good omen.”

It’s a quiet ambition, but a powerful one. Carly isn’t trying to build the biggest platform in the room, she’s building the most resonant. Her leadership is relational, her strategy human-centered, and her impact cumulative.

In a professional world increasingly shaped by algorithms and automation, Carly Valancy’s work reminds us of something enduring: that progress still moves at the speed of trust, and that finding your people might be the most strategic decision you ever make.

Editorial Note

Carly Valancy’s journey challenges conventional ideas of success, networking, and leadership. Her work invites us to slow down, reach out with intention, and invest in relationships without immediate payoff. As you reflect on her story, consider the seeds you’re planting today, and who might be waiting on the other side of a single, thoughtful message.

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