Laurie is an impact-driven innovator, operator and advisor who specialises in hybrid ventures, alternative financing, and cross-sector ecosystem-building. She believes good design can make a great world, and who is at the design table matters. She has applied this lens across sectors and functions through politics, entrepreneurship and innovation, and impact-linked finance. Laurie regularly collaborates with funders, founders, and institutions worldwide to drive global impact through innovation and aligned capital structures.

 

Laurie currently works with a portfolio of clients. Notably, she has worked fractionally with global funds like Antler, Conscious Ventures, Techstars, and Village Capital to advise $40mm of capital deployment across asset classes, and support 800+ ventures across portfolios in the US, UK, and UAE. Through these partnerships, she helps founders and funders advance funds, portfolios, and ventures through 1:1 advising, workshops, and digital tools that demystify and unlock many facets of early stage venture growth.

 

Anchoring the breadth of her skills across sectors and functions, is her depth of experience in core strategy, LEAN experimentation, identifying target markets and go-to-market strategies, operationalizing growth, and financing and fundraising specifically for under-represented founders, use-cases, and tech-for-good ventures. 

 

Also of note, along with Aunnie Patton Power and the innovation team at Village Capital, she co-developed “Capital Explorer” a diagnostic tool for founders to discover which of up to 16 different financing instruments might be right for their models.
 

Her work as a “tech-for-good” advisor comes from direct experience as a startup founder and operator across diverse sectors such as consumer, hardware, healthtech, maritime, marketplaces, robotics, software, and social ventures. Additionally, the foundation of her drive to use markets as a lever for good is rooted in her first career and fundamental training as a community and political organizer, campaigner and fundraiser for Annie’s List, Gloria Steinem’s PAC, MoveOn.org, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, and Planned Parenthood. 

 

Her work electing 40+ women in Texas and advancing historically excluded founders and use cases in the startup ecosystem has been recognized through two government appointments, and by SXSW, The Chicago Tribune, IDEO.org, and others. Laurie holds a BA in Government and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, a MSc in Social Business and Entrepreneurship from the London School of Economics, and is a graduate of the Oxford Impact Finance Innovations Programme at the Saïd Business School. 

 

She maintains the right to work and live in the UK via issuance of the UK Global Talent Visa for Exceptional Talent in Digital Technology. As a global citizen and former live-aboard sailor, she is now based in London where she nurtures her garden and shares a home with her husband, two children, and beloved pets.