Lisa Q. Fetterman is helping people cook smarter.

Lisa is the founder of Nomiku, a sous vide tool that cooks vacuum-sealed food in low temperature water. With Nomiku, you can control the temperature of your food and create perfectly cooked dishes without the effort.

Lisa successfully runs her own business by mastering the art of approaching challenges with a clear head. Her secrets include travel and regular exercise, although Lisa doesn’t believe in work-life balance. Lisa advocates for “doing what you want.”

In our interview, Lisa gives us a taste of a day in her life and describes a dream project. She also shares 5 guidelines for aspiring women founders, including what she considers to be a critical exercise for personal and professional growth.

Tell us about yourself.

I am a very extroverted person that loves food. Whenever I buy clothes or spend money on anything else other than food I realize I should have just spent the money on food.

Tell us about your experience founding Nomiku. What has been the greatest challenge and what has been most rewarding?

Everything about Nomiku has been a constant challenge and that’s great! I love to solve problems. But the greatest challenge we faced was definitely moving our manufacturing to the United States. The infrastructure is not here and we had to build from scratch. It’s so rewarding to figure out.

What are 5 tips for aspiring women founders?

These aren’t tips per se, but just guidelines I use in my own life.

1. Start today on your idea. Do anything, talk to a colleague, write a blog post, make a prototype out of cardboard.
2. Life/Work balance is stupid. You should just do whatever you want.
3. Exercise, sleep, and down time are an important part of work.
4. Giving back is the most rewarding and critical exercise for personal and professional growth.
5. Listen to people and don’t give advice hahahaa. In the end there’s no advice, just stories.

Describe a typical day in your life.

My toddler wakes me up and then I get ready in under 10 minutes while calling a Lyft to work. I immediately guzzle a cup of coffee when I’m in the office, start some work, and then walk around from desk to desk to check in with everybody. My husband and I work together thankfully so we don’t ask “how was your day” at dinner. We usually have something already sous vide in the fridge and then warm it up in our Nomiku. Then it’s running around with the large toddler friend… most times when we put him down to sleep we fall asleep too.

Describe a dream project.

My dream project outside of the Nomiku world is to build a magnetic nuclear fusion reactor. I’d do it with my husband who’s a PhD in Plasma Phyiscs/Astrophyics from Princeton. We’d work together for the rest of our lives on projects that matter to us. That’s my dream!

How do you stay motivated and inspired?

I want to be the best and most honest me. I don’t ever want to stagnate in my growth and ways of thinking. Exercise really helps with the stress and gets me back on track to be able to be motivated and inspired. I love talking to other people and hearing their stories to get in the zone myself. Once we ran out of money while making our prototype in China and I thought I should go back to the states and sell a kidney. Instead we went on vacation and we were able to overcome the wall we hit with a clear head! Vacations are the best.

What’s your experience been like using about.me? What do you like about our platform?

about.me is cool, it’s like super chill LinkedIn. I like that I get the bio of people from their own perspective— not necessarily a businessy perspective.

_