ABOUT LORI
The strategic partner you bring in when the stakes are too high for guesswork.
Her clients don't find her by accident. They find her when they're finally ready. Lori Dunn is an executive advisor, fractional executive, and speaker who has run teams, operations, revenue, and partnerships from inside early stage companies. Now she does that work for technical founders at early-stage companies who need it before they can hire for it.
THE PATH
Early-stage technical companies hit a predictable wall: the product works and the operations underneath it do not. Investors start asking for repeatability, a revenue engine that runs without the founder in every deal, and a leadership team that can carry the next stage.
But most founders have never built these systems before, and generic startup advice doesn't account for hardware constraints, technical complexity, or enterprise sales cycles.
Lori has seen this, from the inside. As a full-time COO, she secured a Series A, tripled headcount, and drove 435% revenue growth across alternative fuels, buildings, transportation, and IoT. She knows what it takes because she's built it.
Today she does that work as an advisor and fractionally, building teams, designing operations, and growing revenue, that makes it repeatable for companies in social good, hardware, AI, and climate. The wall is in the same place every time, and the fix is operations sized for the stage the company is actually in.
She spots the gaps that sink early companies and the missteps that stall scaling ones, says them plainly, and then does the work to close them.
CORE EXPERTISE
Lori has run all of these from the inside, which is why she can see what's coming in before it lands.
01
Teams and leadership
Building teams from the founding group up and growing the people inside them into leaders who make decisions once and say the hard things out loud.
03
Revenue and go-to-market
Turning founder-led selling into a motion the company can repeat with the pricing, the pipeline, and the people to run it.
02
Operations​
Turning the coordination that lives in a founder's head into a cadence the company can run without them in the middle of it.
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04
Investor readiness
Getting the operations, the numbers, and the reporting into the shape a room full of investors expects well before the race starts.
MENTORSHIP & ADVISORY
Accelerators, incubators, university groups and more
Lori mentors founders and reviews applications at accelerators and incubators including Plug & Play, Greenhouse Women, and Funding Breakthrough Lab.
Lori writes about how companies actually operate in her newsletter for founders in the stretch between raising money and having the thing work: theloridunn.substack.com
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
“Lori has an incredible talent for building and sustaining relationships....What is more, Lori is fervently committed to exceeding her goals and seeing that her fellow colleagues do the same."
- Krista A.
“Lori is an excellent customer advocate and internally builds culture across a remote team. Her ability to develop and leverage a network is second to none.”
- Todd H.