After flying Apaches, she needed a new challenge  

Lindsey Chrismon wasn’t satisfied just getting into West Point, the country’s top military college, for her undergraduate degree. She would go on to be selected as the First Captain, the top cadet, in her graduating class of 2014, only the fourth woman to hold the position in the academy’s more than 200-year history.

After graduation, she wasn’t going to hold just any military position — she would fly the top attack helicopter, the Apache, as part of the most elite force in the sky. And when it came time to move on from her military career, she wouldn’t go to just any business school for her MBA. She would go to Harvard.

“I actually wrote in my West Point yearbook that I wanted to go to Harvard Business School 10 years ago,” Chrismon said.

Chrismon is the type to set a goal and make it come true. Becoming a helicopter pilot, for example, was a goal she set in her first year at the academy.

“I remember sitting in my room and an Apache helicopter came down and landed on the parade field, right outside,” she said. “I was like, I want to fly that … it was just a dream from the first moment I saw it.”

She got the grades, scored well on the necessary tests, and after graduation became the first woman in Army history to fly the AH-6 Little Bird helicopter for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

“It’s the same unit that flew the SEALs into the Osama bin Laden raid,” Chrismon said. “It’s the most elite helicopter force on the planet, honestly.”

After flying Little Birds, and then her dream Apaches for almost 10 years, Chrismon started to get, for lack of a better word, bored. It was time for a new venture.

“Every single day was actually pretty great. It didn’t feel like work in that regard, but I did feel at a certain point intellectually capped,” she said. “I also saw where I would be in, say, three years, and I didn’t really want to have my future completely laid out for me. I wanted to experiment and get out in the world and do other things and face different challenges.”

Her husband, Gabe Chrismon, said his wife, who was his West Point classmate, “has never chosen the easy route.”

“HBS was where she was going to go no matter what.”

He added, “If Linds has an idea of what she wants to do, she’s pretty much going to find a way to make sure that happens. And then she’s going to find a way to succeed and be one of the better ones at it — from West Point being the First Captain, to flying Apaches, to flying Little Birds, to going to HBS, to being a female founder and raising money.”

The Chrismons are not just life partners, they’re business partners. They co-founded Oply — an AI-powered tool to help homeowners manage their home systems and maintenance.

Chrismon has spent much of the last year at Harvard raising capital for the company, and many of the last year’s weekends flying to her home city of Nashville to get the business up and running.

“I’ve cold-called her to present her business to very-high-profile investors in my classroom without her knowing it was coming,” said Reza Satchu, senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurship Management Unit at the Business School. “Everyone from senior decision-makers at venture capital firms, to the CEO of Delta, to Kevin O’Leary, to all sorts of people.”

Classes that Chrismon took with Satchu, “Founder Mindset” and “Founder Launch,” both specialize in getting student enterprises up and running.

“She has an ability to just stand up and deliver a compelling value proposition with real conviction around her business,” Satchu added. “Sometimes she’d get beaten up, and she would just continue fighting back. This is a real mark of a founder, which is, yes, you take the advice, but you’ve thought about this problem a lot more than the person you’re talking to and so you don’t wither, you fight back.”

While Chrismon is excited to get back to her life in Nashville, she’s sorry to be leaving the Business School.

“It went really, really fast,” she said. “It’s bittersweet that it’s over. It’s wonderful because then I can focus solely on our venture, but not waking up every day and going to class with my friends — that’s going to be sad to leave behind.”