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In graduate school, Allison Weil Lechnir co-founded Flag Analytics, a predictive analytics startup focused on public safety.
She ended up shutting the company down shortly after participating in an accelerator program, recognizing it lacked good product market and team fit.
Lechnir now uses that founding experience, coupled with her experience running business operations at a Series A-stage company, when evaluating startups as a partner at Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners.
"It gives me a lot of empathy for [founders]. Founding a company is really, really, really hard," Lechnir shared on The Cornfield Capitalists Podcast recently. "Pitching to VCs is really, really, really hard and emotionally draining.
"I try to remember for all of my meetings with founders that while for me, many times, this is sort of just another pitch meeting. For them, it's the most important meeting of their week. And so you have to have a lot of empathy for that."
Yet when big startup success stories can be few and far between, it's important for founders to recognize when whatever they're building might not work, Lechnir continued.
"I start every conversation that I have with a founder for the first time like, 'Who are you and why are you doing this?' and look for a really good answer to that. When I get a good answer to that, that tends to drive a lot of the rest of the conversation and a lot of my interest."
