Serafina Lalany is the daughter of immigrants. As a child, she dreamed of being a lawyer, engineer and a doctor. After college, she attended medical school to become a doctor.
“I wanted to be a practicing physician, but it wasn’t the right fit,” she said.
Lalany applied for dozens of jobs. Eventually she was hired by a biotech startup near Boston. The company grew rapidly during the two years she worked there. She was at the New York Stock Exchange on the day it went public.
“It was the experience and education of a lifetime,” she said.
Her career path led her to Texas for a while, and then her husband founded a startup whose customers would primarily be in the mountain biking industry.
They did their research, and three years ago they moved to Northwest Arkansas. Lalany consulted with several startups and began making connections. Her goal was to help these companies scale their businesses and find investor capital.
“It was a summer of coffee meetings,” she added.
Through these connections and meetings, she started consulting with StartupNWA, the Northwest Arkansas Council’s entrepreneurship initiative. Northwest Arkansas is home to three Fortune 500 companies: Walmart, J.B. Hunt Transport Services and Tyson Foods. Thousands of businesses are connected to these large companies, including global suppliers.
About 90% of what StartupNWA does is raise investor capital for many of these startups, Lalany said. Because most investors are out of state, this work requires networking and cultivating trust and relationships, she added.
Lalany estimates she’s helped raise over $150 million for the startups she consulted.
“Investor capital exists,” she said. “You just have to go out and find it.”
Related