Julie Hanna

Julie Hanna
Born August 1965 (age 50)
Sohag, Egypt, US
Alma mater University of Alabama at Birmingham
Occupation Executive Chair of the Board Kiva

Julie Hanna (born August 5, 1965) is an Egyptian born technologist, entrepreneur, angel investor and board director. She serves as Executive Chair of the Board of Kiva.,[1] peer-peer lending pioneer and the world's largest crowdlending marketplace for global entrepreneurs. She is adviser to technology incubator Idealab and Innovation Norway.

In May 2015, President Barack Obama named Hanna Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship[2] “to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

In the past she has been a founding executive of five Silicon Valley technology companies and served as director of strategic technologies at Lotus Development Corporation.

Escaping civil war during Black September in Jordan in 1970, she grew up in America and studied computer science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Early life and education

Hanna was born in Sohag Egypt. She moved with her family to Irbid, Jordan, where they found themselves on the front lines of Black September, the Jordanian civil war. After fleeing a column of tanks firing on her school, the family escaped and made their way to Beirut, Lebanon. Shortly after arrival, the tensions that gave way to what would become the Lebanese civil war peaked. Hanna immigrated to the United States with her family in 1972, originally to New York, eventually settling in Springville, Alabama. She played Little League baseball in the wake of the passage of Title IX, becoming one of the first girls to break the gender barrier in sports.

Hanna graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) with a B.S. in Computer Science. In 2007, she was named Outstanding Alumni by the UAB School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and in 2008, she was named UAB Distinguished Alumni of the Year and was the Graduation Commencement speaker[3] speech republished here[4] where she implored graduates to "be the entrepreneurs of their own life" drawing many parallels between the lessons learned from failure by successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and a person's life and career.

Career

In 1992 Julie Hanna worked at Lotus Development in Mountain View, Calif., after their acquisition of cc:Mail where she worked on a next generation product strategy as part of the integration of the groupware firm with Lotus Notes. She joined Silicon Graphics to develop a web-oriented product line in 1995 and then was recruited the following year with a group of SGI employees to help Jim Clark build Healtheon,[5] where she was the first product manager. In 1997 she joined Portola Communications as founding VP of Product and Marketing, known for its expertise as developer of high performance messaging systems. Portola was acquired[6] and she was instrumental in the negotiations to successfully sell the company which would become Netscape Mail. Hanna was a founding executive at onebox.com,[7] founded by Bill Nguyen, acquired for $850 million in 1999 by Phone.com[8] (later part of Openwave). She became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence[9] at the Mayfield Fund venture firm in 2001 and then founded Scalix,[10] an early commercial open source electronic mail software company where she served as chief executive until 2004. She served on the board of directors of Socialtext[11] from 2008 to 2012.

She is an adviser and investor to several technology companies, including Lending Club, Lyft, Bonobos, MightyText, Idealab[12] and Innovation Norway [13]

Global Entrepreneurship and Impact

In May 2015, President Barack Obama named Julie Hanna Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship[14] “to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs.”[15]

In May 2009 Hanna joined the board of directors at Kiva, peer-to-peer micro lending pioneer, who’s "mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.” She was appointed Chair of the Board in October of the same year and in May 2014 became Executive Chair of the Board. Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded over $750M dollars reaching 1.7M micro-entrepreneurs in 86 countries, at a repayment rate of 98 percent. The Kiva platform has attracted a community of more than 1 million lenders from around the world.[16]

Hanna is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Response.[17]

Writing and Speaking

Hanna is a frequent speaker and advocate on the democratizing power of technology, the sharing economy and Technology-enabled Business Models for Underserved Entrepreneurs.[18][19]

Hanna has published a variety of posts as a “LinkedIn Influencer” on LinkedIn. She is co-author, with Reid Hoffman, of "The World's Bank: How Crowdfunding is Disrupting Old Banking", an essay proposing that citizen lending and crowdfunding are transforming traditional banking.

Hanna has been a speaker at TEDx[20] She spoke about her experience as a war survivor and immigrant and how this informs her work with Kiva.

References

  1. ↑ "Board of Directors". Kiva. Retrieved 28 April 2015.
  2. ↑ "Meet President Obama's Entrepreneurship Ambassadors". Wall Street Journal. 11 May 2015. Retrieved 15 May 2015.
  3. ↑ "UAB Celebrates First Green & Gold Commencement May 3 at Bartow Arena". 23 April 2008. Retrieved 12 May 2015.
  4. ↑ "Be the Entrepreneur of Your Life". LinkedIn. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  5. ↑ Creswell, Julie (February 21, 2000). "What the Heck is Healtheon? Jim Clark set out to build an Internet startup that would revolutionize health care. It took his brainchild, Healtheon/WebMD, four years just to reach infancy. Now even Wall Street thinks it's kinda cute.". Fortune Magazine. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  6. ↑ "Netscape goes on buying spree". CNET. 30 April 1997. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  7. ↑ "About Onebox / Team". Onebox.com. Archived from the original on October 6, 1999. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  8. ↑ "Phone.com buys Onebox.com for $850M". CNET. 14 Feb 2000. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  9. ↑ Santiago, William (12 January 2003). "Executive Life: On the Inside Track in Venture Capital". The New York Times (The New York Times). Retrieved 27 April 2015.
  10. ↑ Lohr, Steve (October 26, 2003). "As Silicon Valley Reboots, the Geeks Take Charge". The New York Times (The New York Times). Retrieved 27 April 2015.
  11. ↑ "Socialtext Elects 20 Year Technology Veteran Julie Hanna Farris to its Board of Directors". PR Newswire. May 15, 2008. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  12. ↑ "Idealab Advisors". Idealab. Idealab. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
  13. ↑ "Mentors and Advisors". Nordic Innovation House. Nordic Innovation House. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
  14. ↑ "Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship". Retrieved 15 May 2015.
  15. ↑ "Obama Plugs Entrepreneurs With Democratic Ties as Cuba Opens". 11 May 2015. Retrieved 15 May 2015.
  16. ↑ "Kiva gets $3M award from Google to reach the 'overlooked' poor with big ideas". Venture Beat. 12 Dec 2013. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  17. ↑ "Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Response 2014-2016". World Economic Forum. Retrieved 9 June 2015.
  18. ↑ "Wired Money Speakers". Wired.com. Wired Magazine. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  19. ↑ "AEO Leadership Forum". Microenterpriseworks.org. Association for Enterprise Opportunity. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  20. ↑ "Bringing Humanity to Business". TED. Retrieved 9 June 2015.
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