Lindy Morris Fishburne
Managing Partner
Breakout Ventures
Education
Duke University
B.A., Cultural and Physical Anthropology
The University of Texas at Austin - Red McCombs School of Business
M.B.A.
Podcasts
0:31:2026: How the VC World is Taking Tech & Science To Market With Lindy Morris Fishburne, Breakout Ventures [Main T4C Episode]
Lindy Morris Fishburne is the Managing Partner of Breakout Ventures, a venture capital fund. Lindy focuses on getting budding science and tech companies out of the lab and into the market. She is also the Executive Director of Breakout Labs which allows independent researchers and early-stage companies to advance their..
Career Path
Interview Highlights
“The great part in what’s really changed in the last 10 years is the amount of infrastructure and opportunity that’s sitting on college campuses and incubators across the country.”
Best Career Advice
“It really comes down to focusing on what you’re interested in and passionate about. And so there really shouldn’t be a distinction between your job and your interest. For me, they’ve always morphed together. And I think fundamentally it’s about trying to ensure that you’re excited about the people that you’re working with and that you respect them and that you’re learning constantly.”
Career Challenge
As a junior consultant, Lindy had the opportunity to prepare a presentation for a client. She recalls the morning of the presentation:
“I met the managing partner of the firm in the morning, and we were going to drive down to this large Silicon Valley, Fortune 50 company. And I was driving and he was going to flip through the book to get comfortable with it before we went in to present and the entire way down, he starts screaming and ripping pages out of this book that I’ve spent all night putting 20 of these things together. And there were pieces that he did not like, did not approve, did not agree with, that I hadn’t done the way that apparently that was the expectation…But we went in with these slender books and pages littered all over the back of the car that had not made the cut and ended up having a great meeting and the right discussion happened on the client’s side.”
Skills
Start-ups, Venture Capital, Strategy, Business Development, Entrepreneurship, Investments, Biotechnology, Sales, Research, Program Management, Mergers & Acquisitions, Financial Modeling, Enterprise Software, Management, Leadership, Social Impact
Professional Interests
Dr. Dambisa Moyo, Steve Blank, Beth Comstock, Duke University, Lux Research, Clarium Capital Management, Protein Engineering – Advancing the Protein Revolution, SynBioBeta: Synthetic Biology Community, DukeGEN – The Duke Global Entrepreneurship Network – Main Group,The University of Texas at Austin – Red McCombs School of Business
