Profile
Lauri invests across the enterprise stack. She is an economics nerd and product manager by training, which has made her particularly passionate about technology’s ability to shift the “production possibility frontier.” Currently she is focused on developer tools and the operating stack for the new world of hybrid work.
Before joining Foundation Capital, Lauri led product management across LinkedIn’s enterprise-jobs marketplace and founded a company (you haven’t heard of it 😉 ) in the video-interviewing space.
Lauri began her career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York through the peak of the financial crisis, imagining her next step would be life as an economics professor. When the world stabilized, however, she found herself missing the previously high-pressure, drinking-way-too-much-coffee, team-together work environment. At the same time she was fascinated by the application of marketplace theory and behavioral economics to technology businesses. She jumped off the econ Ph.D. train and joined a 12-person startup (Apture, acq. Google) as a data scientist and she quickly found herself — by some combination of need and personality — operating as the company’s first product manager. Lauri then worked on and eventually led data and mobile product for Vast (acq. Vroom).
Her undergraduate degree is from Columbia College, Columbia University, where she studied Mathematics, Economics and History. She also led Community Impact, the umbrella organization for all of Columbia’s service organizations, served as finance director of the Columbia Daily Spectator, and coached figure skating. She holds a MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where her extracurriculars included starting b-school with a six-month old and graduating (on-time) with a now two-year old, another newborn, and new company.
Lauri grew up in Champaign-Urbana, IL the daughter of an economist and an immigration lawyer. She was inspired to go to computer camp in elementary school by a blind family friend, who was then a computer science student at the University of Illinois. The experience left Lauri with an enduring passion for product accessibility and the potential for technology to foster inclusion.
She most especially loves being an ally and coach to entrepreneurs with whom she works and solving big, hairy problems. And Lauri lives in the Bay Area with her husband, three young kids, and their big, hairy dog.
