From Hard Hat to Startup

When Lindsey Elliott crawled into an industrial vessel wearing a full safety harness, fire-resistant uniform, and steel-toed boots, venture capital was the furthest thing from her mind. "We were working 6 AM to 6 PM, 7 days a week," she recalls of her time as an essential worker at an Exxon refinery. "During COVID, I worked 28 days in a row, 12 to 14 hours a day. It was exhausting."

"I was not in good shape after that," Lindsey admits. But those grueling shifts revealed something that would later become the foundation of her startup: inefficiency hidden in plain sight.

As a Digital Project Implementation Lead, Lindsey watched workers manually tighten thousands of bolts on industrial pipes—a tedious, time-consuming process that hadn't changed in decades.

"We just had thousands of these little piping projects," Lindsey explains. "It wasn't anything complicated or novel. It was basically just 'replace these bolts, swap out a gasket.' People don't even need to graduate high school to do it if they've had a little trades training."

The revelation hit her: "This is nothing crazy. Why is this taking us so long? This is insane."

That question lingered as Lindsey's career took her from the refinery to an AI and machine learning division in San Diego – a jarring transition from industrial grit to cutting-edge tech. "We have all this amazing technology," she wondered, "but how come we can't solve problems like people using wrenches on pipes? These two worlds don't talk to each other at all."

After several more career pivots through acquisitions and restructurings, Lindsey took the plunge into entrepreneurship. Her first prototype? Built with Amazon power drills. "We literally took the handles off and put them around a pipe," she laughs. "That was our first product."

The humble prototype struck a chord with industrial customers. "I feel like when I'm talking to customers, I get to use my oil and gas lingo and my engineering lingo. I speak their language," Lindsey says. "I've lived some of the crazy stories they have."

One potential customer looked at her robot and immediately saw possibilities beyond her original vision: "If you can do that circular pattern on a pipe, can you do a circular pattern on a tire?" Soon, another was asking about airplane maintenance applications she'd never considered.

"We're loosening and tightening bolts on pipes," Lindsey explains. But customers kept finding new problems her robot could solve: "They're like, 'We have just a constant stream of tires we have to maintain all day long.' I didn't even know that was a problem someone had."

"The willingness for people to throw themselves at these crazy goals is both inspiring and totally overwhelming."

Lindsey reflects on founder life. But her hands-on industrial experience gave her something many tech founders lack – an intimate understanding of the problem she's solving.

"A lot of the people in manufacturing work in extreme heat or cold, other crazy elements, long hours... but ultimately, the people are pretty down to earth," she says. "There's a lot of good people, very hardworking people in the industry."

For Lindsey, the path from refinery floors to startup founder wasn't planned, but it was perfect preparation. In an industry where many startups build solutions looking for problems, she lived the problem first, 12 hours a day, in steel-toed boots.

The difference between an inefficiency and an innovation? Sometimes it's just 28 straight days in a hard hat.