Laura Easton

Client Operations Manager

2024

Managing client relationships, optimizing operational workflows, and driving platform adoption to support accelerated innovation cycles in life sciences and other regulated industries.

Strategy Consultant

2023 - 2024

Strategic partner to early-stage founders and investors, supporting fundraising and go-to-market planning.

Business Operations Manager

2022 - 2022

At Optiva, a seed-stage MedTech company focused on improving IVF success rates, I partnered closely with the CEO to drive operational efficiency, investor confidence, and strategic growth. I managed general business operations, supported capital raise planning, and helped position the company for long-term success—enhancing investor readiness, OKR alignment and achievement, recruitment scalability, and exploration of M&A pathways.

Investment Associate

2020 - 2022

Led investment in a women's health venture; Responsible for tracking performance, maintaining communications, and providing strategic advisory to pre-seed portfolio companies; Played a key role in recruiting, onboarding, and coaching two new investment associates, fostering talent development and value delivery.

Investment Analyst

2018 - 2020

Real Ventures is a founding investor in the Canadian startup ecosystem, with over 280 investments since 2007. As the Analyst for Real’s pre-seed fund, I sourced, evaluated, and conducted due diligence on more than 1,000 high-potential startups across diverse sectors and technology stacks. I managed the full investment process—from initial screening through deep diligence to final execution—and delivered insights through business, market, and financial analysis that directly informed over 50 accelerator, pre-seed, and seed-stage investment decisions.

Digital Business Analyst

2016 - 2018

FCB Chicago is Chicago's oldest advertising agency, leveraging transformative ideas and storytelling to drive change. Within 3 months, I established a quantitative framework to highlight and prioritize new business opportunities for clients across the Financial, CPG, and Life Science industries; contributing to new business wins. In collaboration with strategy, dev, and analytics teams, I helped deliver 4 digital projects; leading technical and business requirement gathering and documentation.

Senior Research Associate

2016 - 2016

Research Associate

2015 - 2016

Forrester connects the dots between diverse and dynamic issues, to help Fortune 500 companies navigate pressing challenges and effectively drive digital transformation. As a RA, I managed the research cycle for 24 reports across Management Consulting, Digital Services, Big Data and Connected Technologies topics; and established a framework to track and analyze consultancy M&A activity, informing advisory calls and market trend reports.

Senior IT Consultant

2012 - 2015

As a Senior Consultant, I implemented mentorship and recognition programs to address lack of motivation in the workplace - improving IT troubleshooting skills and employee morale.

Research Consultant

2014 - 2014

Fletcher Spaght provides growth-oriented strategy consulting to emerging healthcare and technology companies. As a summer consultant, I fulfilled market and competitor analysis work for 3 clients concurrently; Developed market valuation and visualized strategic use cases for a telecommunications client; and led primary research (N>200) and survey recruitment to assess the market growth of video remote interpretation services in the US healthcare industry.

Office Manager

2012 - 2012

Aquaback Technologies is solving the world's water crisis with an innovative distiller that uses vapor compression technology. As an Office Manager, I supported patent filing and lab testing, and optimized document management processes.

Business Analyst Contractor

2011 - 2011

Analyzed master customer database to identify and resolve duplications; Processed customer orders in SAP to ensure efficient, effective sales management