Meet California’s 101 Top Partners in the Business Development Space

Julie Hanna

Venture Partner of Obvious Ventures

Julie is an entrepreneur, board director, investor and advisor to companies and public institutions globally. She has been founder, CEO and founding executive of five successful technology companies in Silicon Valley, giving her a deep understanding of b2b and b2c businesses from startup to scale-up. In recognition of her groundbreaking work and leadership as an entrepreneur and innovator, President Obama appointed Julie Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015. Since 2009, she has served as Executive Chair of the Board at Kiva, the first and largest crowdlending marketplace for entrepreneurs. During her tenure, Kiva has scaled its reach to 190+ countries and facilitated over $700 million loans to 1.6 million entrepreneurs. Julie is also an active investor and advisor to high-growth technology companies, including sharing economy pioneer Lyft, Lending Club (NASDAQ: LC), the world’s largest online marketplace connecting borrowers and investors, online retail innovator Bonobos, and technology incubator Idealab, creator of over 125 companies with 40 IPO’s and acquisitions. She was special advisor to Plum, the first private social network, from its founding to the acquisition by Nokia and she served on the board of directors of enterprise social networking pioneer Socialtext, until its acquisition by PeopleFluent. Previously, Julie was the founder and CEO of Scalix, a leading open source and pioneering freemium email/collaboration platform for businesses that quickly established a global footprint in 55 countries. Julie founded Scalix while an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield Fund, where she advised the firm on technology investments. Earlier in her career, Julie was the founding Vice President of Products & Marketing serving until the company’s $850M acquisition by phone.com (NASDAQ: UPIP). At Onebox, she led the design and development of the first mass scale consumer VoIP platform, and launched the fastest growing dot com era communications service, reaching 5 million users in its first year of operation. Julie was also founding Vice President of Products & Marketing at 2Bridge Software, naming and establishing the “enterprise portal” category, and she was founding Vice President of Products & Marketing at Portola Systems, where she was instrumental in the successful sale of the company to Netscape. Portola’s product went on to become Netscape Mail and subsequently the SunOne Mail platform. In 1995, Julie was recruited as part of the founding team to help Jim Clark build the first healthtech company, Healtheon now WebMD (NASDAQ: WBMD), the largest healthcare portal in the world. She started her career in technical and product roles at IBM/Lotus and Silicon Graphics, where she conceived WebForce Intranet, a new business and product line that helped catapult the company to the forefront of the internet revolution in 1995. At IBM/Lotus, she played a prominent role in shaping the next generation product and marketing strategy for cc:Mail and Lotus Notes and authored the manifesto, “Groupware: Communication, Coordination & Collaboration”. Julie is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Response. She is a regular international keynote speaker and guest lecturer at Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford Universities on entrepreneurial leadership and innovation. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she has been honored as Distinguished Alumni of the Year and was Graduation Commencement Speaker. She lives on the top of a hill in San Francisco. —————————————- She is an advisor to Idealab and a number of startups and social businesses in the US and Europe. Having helped create products that have been adopted by tens of millions over the past two decades, Julie likes to work with products that have the potential to reach mass scale. Her focus areas include consumer internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, email and communications, e-commerce, e-tailing, social networking & gaming. Previously, Julie launched and helped build five consumer internet and software companies. As an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield, she founded and served as CEO of Scalix, developer of a commercial open source messaging platform and the industry’ss first AJAX rich mail & calendaring client. Scalix achieved global adoption, with two million accounts in 65 countries and garnered many industry awards, leading to it’s acquisition by Sebring. Stanford and Harvard Business Schools have published case studies on Scalix. Before Scalix, Julie was founding VP of Products & Marketing at several startups: onebox.com, ($850M acquisition by OpenWave Nasdaq; OPNWV) the fastest growing internet communications service in 1999; 2Bridge, where she coined the term ‘enterprise portal’ and successfully championed the creation of a new software category; and Portola, where she was instrumental to the acquisition by Netscape. Prior, she was the first product manager at Healtheon where she brought to market market the industry’s first secure web-mail service at Healtheon, now WebMD (Nasdaq: WBMD).

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About Bonobos, Lending Club, MightyText, Obvious Ventures, US Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administation: Obvious Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in the early and growth stages.

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