Lena Fischer

Lena Fischer runs Northwood’s platform team, the group that works with portfolio companies on everything outside the board meeting. Since joining in 2018 she has built the firm’s founder network, its programme of small peer dinners, and the shared playbooks on hiring, pricing and fundraising that companies use after the first cheque.

Lena was chief operating officer at a software company in London, which she helped grow from twenty people to three hundred. She is usually the first call when a founder needs an introduction to a customer, a lawyer or another founder who has dealt with the same problem. She keeps the playbooks short on purpose and rewrites them when they stop matching what founders actually run into.

Lena spends her holidays walking long-distance footpaths and is about two-thirds of the way along the South West Coast Path.