Lisa Burton O’Toole
VICE PRESIDENT, HEARSTLAB
HEARSTLAB, AN INCUBATOR FOR female-founded startups, meets around 1,000 companies yearly. For vice president and investor Lisa Burton O’Toole, this means she’s an old hand at navigating the startup field.
“I love these types of events because you get to learn from people who are so passionate and really know their space,” said Burton O’Toole, referring to the “Founded in Texas” investor feedback session that took place in March 2024 to support Texas-based female founders. “We had one company that was building software for art museums, and another building computer vision-based software to look at embryo quality for cows. It’s an extremely different world.”
Before her work at HearstLab, Burton O’Toole was a mechanical engineering student and researcher at MIT and specialized in data science. “All of the experiences add up to help you, even though you might not realize it at the time,” Burton O’Toole said. “When I was co-president of our ASME chapter at Duke, we hosted events and invited speakers—all these things that were building soft skills I use now. I don’t think I realized at the time that those would be useful in my career.”
“Engineering teaches you how to solve problems. And that’s all startups really are—a series of problem solving and prioritizing and diagnosing.”
Lisa Burton O’Toole
From her own endeavors in founding a company to her current role having worked with dozens of startups to think through their businesses, Burton O’Toole explained that she knows all too well which challenges a founder faces: You do anything and everything—technical engineering work, managing people and investors, creating a deck, and even taking the trash out.
Despite her involvement in early-stage investing, Burton O’Toole described herself as being risk-averse. Something that empowered her to take the leap into entrepreneurship was knowing she had her engineering background to fall back on. “I could give a startup a try, and if it didn’t work out, I could go back to being a mechanical engineer, or a data scientist.”
While it’s easy to believe that being a mechanical engineer is completely different than being a startup founder, Burton O’Toole encouraged aspiring entrepreneurial engineers to reframe the mind to understand it is not a complete switch: “What you’re doing now can translate and be helpful into that future role.”
© 2024 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.