Lawrence Lenihan

Over the course of his 30-year career, Lawrence Lenihan, Chairman and Co-founder of Resonance, has started 10 technology companies and brands, invested in dozens of companies that have transformed or created new industries, built products and brands that have charted new paths for the fashion industry’s future, and has taught fashion innovation and entrepreneurship for more than a decade as an adjunct professor at NYU. Transforming retail and fashion has been a career-long journey starting in 1990 with the development of a distributed computing solution to automate retail store functionality while at IBM. He then designed and built one of the industry’s first in-store, digital transactional merchandising kiosks that enabled retailers to expand their product inventory available for sale virtually. In 1996, he founded Pequot Ventures, to invest in technology and healthcare and participated in the development of many early internet commerce and infrastructure companies. Seeing an opportunity to establish NYC as an alternative to Silicon Valley for early-stage technology innovation, he founded NYC venture pioneer, FirstMark Capital, as its CEO. FirstMark’s first $200MM fund launched in 2006, will have generated a 20x+ return to investors while investing in such companies as Shopify, a company that transformed ecommerce; Pinterest, a platform that has pioneered intent-based social commerce; Digital Currency Group, the center of the Blockchain and crypto-currency universe; Tommy John, a pioneering direct-to-consumer men’s apparel brand. Lawrence is also a founding team member and current Vice Chairman of Tracelink, a network-based supply chain technology infrastructure company focused on the pharmaceutical industry. In July 2015, Resonance launched with a goal of transforming the $1.7 trillion global fashion industry dominated by Zara/Inditex, H&M, and an ascendant Amazon by reimagining and rearchitecting every facet of it. The Resonance founding envisioned a global fashion industry led by tens of thousands creation-driven brands making sustainable clothing, profitably. The founding team summarized its goal of industry transformation in its battle cry: “Do something really fucking big!” Lawrence has been an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he has taught Entrepreneurship and The Future of Fashion. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

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