Julie Hanna

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., 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 “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.

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 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.

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, 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 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, founded by Bill Nguyen, acquired for $850 million in 1999 by Phone.com (later part of Openwave). 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 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 an adviser and investor to several technology companies, including Lending Club, Lyft, Bonobos, MightyText, Idealab and Innovation Norway

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

In May 2009 Hanna joined the board of directors 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 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.

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

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

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 She spoke about her experience as a war survivor and immigrant and how this informs her work with Kiva.