LMC17 was founded by Laraine McKinnon in 2017 to bring increased focus, independent perspective and a new approaches to create true solutions.

The firm currently focuses on the retirement industry, diversity & inclusion and talent development and works with a series of strategic partners on a wide range of related projects.

Laraine McKinnon is founder of LMC17, a strategic consulting firm that blends behavioral science, big data and practical implementation ideas to address hard to solve problems. The firm focuses on diversity & inclusion, talent development and retirement readiness.

As an Advisor and talent & culture strategist with Emtrain, a CultureTech firm, Laraine works with a wide variety of tech and media companies to support their employee engagement and corporate culture initiatives. She manages Emtrain’s unconscious bias program, strategizes with companies to help prevent sexual harassment and uses analytics to help raise awareness and strengthen workplace cultures.

Laraine also works directly with companies to craft diversity & inclusion programs that engage the full range of employees, with top down strategies for executives, and bottom up strategies for ERGs, and employee cohorts. Her work is also applied at the individual level, as she helps women clarify their professional goals and overcome roadblocks that may be preventing them from reaching their full potential. She is the President of The CLUB Silicon Valley and founder of their women’s leadership Incubator serving diverse talented women from Apple, Facebook, Intuit, Invesco, LinkedIn, Morgan Stanley, NASA, PayPal, PwC, Salesforce, Tesla, Uber, etc, as well as women from law firms, venture capital, academia, non-profits and entrepreneurs with their own ventures.

With a career background in retirement readiness, Laraine is also known for her work optimizing participant directed savings plans to deliver better outcomes in retirement. Throughout her career at BlackRock, Barclays Global Investors, and Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors, Laraine worked with some of the largest employers globally. As a Managing Director and Retirement Readiness Strategist at BlackRock, Laraine created thought leadership for optimizing 401(k) plans through sophisticated data analytics and removing behavioral roadblocks, employee engagement through financial wellness, and workforce strategy through forecasting retirement readiness. She is author of “Known: How to Create a Great 401k” (2018) and serves as an Advisor to Betterment for Business.

Laraine earned a BA degree, cum laude, in political science and women’s studies from Wellesley College and holds a Diversity and Inclusion for HR Certificate from Cornell. She was honored at the Silicon Valley Business Times “Women of Influence” awards in 2018. Her hobbies include hiking, sailboat racing and creative writing. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Silicon Valley.