923 Lindsay Guzowski: Inside the Crucible

Innovative Ways to Assess Founders and Teams for Success—and Investment

There’s a lot of unconscious—and conscious—bias in the venture capital world, which goes a long way to explaining why women and diverse founders get less than 2% of the available investment dollars.

So, what does it take to eliminate bias in the assessments of executive talent?

Lindsay Guzowski has cracked the code with her innovative and scientifically validated executive evaluation tool, The Crucible. Her award-winning company challenges biases and identifies the right founding teams for peak performance—the results often surprising VC and PE firms and leading them to rethink their decisions.

Today Lindsay shares what really makes founders succeed—from cognitive horsepower, and emotional leverage to resilience and simply put, the “refusal to lose”—and how her more inclusive and equitable assessments are changing the dynamics of venture capital and private equity, helping to align team goals, reducing turnover, and even assuring successful mergers and acquisitions.

We’ll also learn about Lindsay’s unexpected entrepreneurial journey—from growing a plumbing company with a modest $40,000 investment to a $20 million exit, to the world of private equity where she uncovered a gap in executive assessments that was costing PE and venture capital firms alike potentially billions in lost opportunity. Since its founding in 2020, the data-driven Crucible has won multiple awards, including two from Wealth & Finance International, the Best PE-Backed Mid-Market Performance Enhancement Research Tool 2024, and the Award for Excellence in Human Capital Development 2024. Listen on because Lindsay shares vital insights on what predicts success in any founder.

More about Lindsay Guzowski at thecrucible.com

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More about Lindsay at The Crucible

Lindsay Guzowski is the CEO and founder of The Crucible, a company transforming how private equity and venture firms assess and develop leadership at their portfolio companies using scientifically validated, bias-tested tools. A visionary entrepreneur, she co-founded a plumbing company that grew from a $40,000 investment into a multi-million-dollar enterprise acquired for over $20 million. With degrees from Dartmouth College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Lindsay blends expertise in sociology, finance, and management. Since founding The Crucible in 2020, she has earned multiple industry awards, all while being a devoted mother to her competitive go-kart-racing son.

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