Julie Hanna


Julie Hanna is an Egyptian-born technologist, entrepreneur, investor and board director. She serves as Executive Chair of the Board of Kiva., peer-peer lending pioneer and the world's largest crowdlending marketplace for global entrepreneurs. She is a board member of Mozilla Corporation and Esalen Institute and an adviser to X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory. She is a Venture Partner at Obvious Ventures.
In May 2015, President Barack Obama named Hanna Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship “to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
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 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 and was the Graduation Commencement speaker speech republished here 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 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 the first web-oriented product line for businesses in 1995 and then was recruited the following year with a group of SGI employees to help James Clark build Healtheon, where she was the founding 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 and she was instrumental in the negotiations to successfully sell the company which would become Netscape Mail. Hanna was founding VP Products and Marketing at onebox.com, founded by Bill Nguyen, acquired for $850 million in 1999 by Phone.com. She became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Mayfield Fund venture firm in 2001 and then founded Scalix, an early commercial open source electronic mail and calendaring software company where she served as chief executive until 2004. She served on the board of directors of Socialtext from 2008 to 2012.
She is a member of the board of Mozilla Corporation and the Esalen Institute and is an adviser and investor to several technology companies, including Lyft, Lending Club, Bonobos, and X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory. Hanna is currently a Venture Partner at Obvious Ventures.

Global entrepreneurship and impact

In May 2015, President Barack Obama named “to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs in the U.S. and abroad.”
In May 2009 Hanna joined the at Kiva, peer-to-peer micro-lending pioneer, whose "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 crowdfunded over $1 billion dollars reaching 3M micro-entrepreneurs in 82 countries, at a repayment rate of 97 percent. The Kiva platform has attracted a global community of citizen lenders across 190 countries.
In October 2017 Hanna became Digital Advisory Board Chair for the Girl Effect, a Nike founded social business that utilizes technology and media to help give voice and agency to girls on a mass global scale.
In recognition of her vision and global impact on economic and social progress, Hanna was named the United States Woman Icon of APEC and is a recipient of the 2016 Global Empowerment Award.
Hanna served as a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Response.

Writing and speaking

Hanna is a frequent speaker and advocate for global entrepreneurship on purpose-driven profit and the democratizing potential of technology to solve some of humanity's greatest challenges.
Hanna has published a variety of posts as a “LinkedIn Influencer” on LinkedIn. She is co-author, with Reid Hoffman, of "", an essay proposing that citizen lending and crowdfunding are transforming traditional banking.
Hanna has been a speaker at TEDx where she spoke candidly about her experience as a war survivor, refugee and immigrant and how this has shaped her life's work.