About Us
Woman Capital Connect – Founder's Story
The founders connected immediately on first meeting in 1998 - both quickly identified the opportunity to become respected colleagues, collaborators and friends. Their synergy sparked and over time strengthened from what each brought to the equation with their different personalities and backgrounds. One of them New York City born and raised: the other from a small river city in Iowa.
As career-focused Moms of young sons, they shared the challenges of combining successful careers with the desire to enjoy a personal life. Each came into that balancing act when well along their career paths. Each knew she could count on the other to “watch her back”.
The two Company founders wanted for ten years to build a business focused on executive women. They talked about it, dreamed about it and kicked a million ideas around and eventually to the curb.
Woman Capital Connect – Linking Executive Women to Opportunity
In 2009, they felt that they identified the right model: a combination of faster and nimbler executive search; a supportive web community for executive women to share and support each other in their daily challenges as well as career development; and some aspects of a talent agency – services to help those women polish and present themselves; assistance in assessing and negotiating competitive compensation and counseling around the impact of various decisions when considering and weighing career moves.
The Company founders know well and take very personally the challenges women face to make it to the C-level and to access opportunity to serve on corporate boards. This understanding stems from their experiences working in the retained executive search world as well as from their personal experiences managing their own career challenges with rapid career advancement as young women.
They know that the things they both strongly believe in - qualities they shared growing up in NYC and Iowa – hard work, honesty, directness, and a frequent dose of humor – unite them and serve them well in their mission to advance women’s careers via Woman Capital Connect.
Lori Christiansen
Lori Christiansen is Co-Founder and President of Woman Capital Connect LLC. Previously, she spent ten years in retained executive search placing senior executives in life science companies. She led and completed successful searches for numerous positions at the VP and C-level. Her client and candidate network span startup to mature private and public companies in molecular diagnostics, personalized medicine, biopharma, medical devices, platform technologies and venture capital. Lori’s expertise includes compensation, management team development and organizational development related to stage of funding and commercialization.
Prior to that she held executive marketing and business development positions with life science companies including Pharmacia Biotech (now GE Healthcare), Bio-Rad Laboratories and Kodak (BioImage). Lori’s corporate leadership and management experience includes: emerging and growth stage companies; multinational public companies; post M&A integration strategy and implementation; and global commercialization of novel life science technologies. Having grown up around the energy industry, she has a keen interest in next generation bio-fuels and smart/clean energy technologies.
Lori holds a BS in Biological Sciences from South Dakota State University, completed graduate work in Microbiology at the University of Minnesota and attended the Executive Development program at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. She has served on several boards where she typically contributes in organizational growth and strategic initiatives.
In addition to her professional activities, Lori is co-founder and the recent chair of a women's philanthropic fund that supports efforts to improve women's health. Her personal philanthropic interests broadly focus on improving the lives of women and children.
Personal Story
Lori considers it her great fortune to have spent the first seventeen years of her career doing global marketing and business development while living mostly in airplanes and hotels around the world. After a couple years working in a research lab out of college, she joined a biotech company, got on an airplane to Tokyo in 1985 and never looked back. She enjoyed every minute of it, learned from making mistakes and got good at working effectively doing business in different cultures.
She has learned from many talented and gracious colleagues, managers and business leaders during her career. She also learned a lot from those who weren’t so talented or gracious. She especially appreciates those who passed her the ball and let her run with it… and gave fair warning if they saw that she was about to commit a foul.
She is grateful to TZ Chu who brought her on his team to help execute a company turnaround and subsequent M&A. He gave her excellent counsel about combining a high visibility, challenging leadership role while navigating pregnancy and the demands of becoming a new parent.
Lori knows how fortunate she is to also have parents who taught her life skills also useful in business.
From her father, the late Russell Christiansen, former Chairman and CEO of a Fortune1000 energy company, she learned the power of belief in self and the dedicated pursuit of goals. He also taught her how successful men build and tap networks.
From her mother, Marilyn (aka The Bargain Queen), she learned how far you could stretch a dollar and the power of intuition - both highly valuable business skills.
Lori lives in San Francisco CA with her teenage son. He reminds her often how much she doesn’t already know…