About LFJ

The Skinny: As founder and Managing Director of Modern Tender, Laurie "LFJ" Felker Jones most often works as a fractional Operating Partner with global funds and their portfolios to drive investment and impact alpa at scale. She has worked with 800+ founders and numerous global funders to advise $40mm+ of funding across asset classes.

As a Fellow at Newton Venture Programme, she is currently incubating an alternative fund model focused on financial inclusion.

She's always thrilled to join forces with existing funds to further drive impact alpha.

The Whole Enchilada: Laurie is an impact-driven innovator, operator and advisor who specialises in hybrid ventures, alternative financing, and cross-sector ecosystem-building. She believes good design can make a great world, and who is at the design table matters. She has applied this lens across sectors and functions through politics, entrepreneurship and innovation, and impact-linked finance. Laurie regularly collaborates with funders, founders, and institutions worldwide to drive global impact through innovation and aligned capital structures.

Laurie currently works with a portfolio of clients. Notably, she has partnered with global funds like Antler, Techstars, and Village Capital to advise $40mm of capital deployment across asset classes, support 800+ ventures across portfolios in the US, UK, and UAE, and execute high-trust special projects. Through these partnerships, she helps founders and funders advance funds, portfolios, and ventures through 1:1 advising, workshops, and digital tools that demystify and unlock many facets of early stage venture growth. She is known for her ability to help leaders rapidly identify and close key gaps between their vision and execution, saying the quiet part out loud, and putting the "fun" in fundraising.

Anchoring the breadth of her skills across sectors and functions, is her depth of experience in core strategy, LEAN experimentation, identifying target markets and go-to-market strategies, operationalizing growth, and financing and fundraising specifically for under-represented founders, use-cases, and tech-for-good ventures. 

Also of note, along with Aunnie Patton Power and the innovation team at Village Capital, she co-developed “Capital Explorer" a diagnostic tool for founders to discover which of up to 16 different financing instruments might be right for their models.  

Her work as a “tech-for-good” advisor comes from direct experience as a startup founder and operator across diverse sectors such as consumer, hardware, healthtech, maritime, marketplaces, robotics, software, and social ventures. Additionally, the foundation of her drive to use markets as a lever for good is rooted in her first career and fundamental training as a community and political organizer, campaigner and fundraiser for Annie’s List, Gloria Steinem’s PAC, MoveOn.org, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, and Planned Parenthood. 

Her work electing 40+ women in Texas and advancing historically excluded founders and use cases in the startup ecosystem has been recognized through two government appointments, and by SXSW, The Chicago Tribune, IDEO.org, and others. Laurie holds a BA in Government and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, a MSc in Social Business and Entrepreneurship from the London School of Economics, and is a graduate of the Oxford Impact Finance Innovations Programme at the Saïd Business School.

She maintains the right to work and live in the UK via issuance of the UK Global Talent Visa for Exceptional Talent in Digital Technology. As a global citizen and former live-aboard sailor, she is now based in Bristol where she nurtures her garden and shares a home with her husband, two children, and the best pets ever.

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