Julie Hanna
| Julie Hanna | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
August 5, 1965 Sohag, Egypt |
| Residence | San Francisco, California |
| Occupation | Executive Chairwoman Kiva Board Member Mozilla Corporation Board Member Esalen Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship |
Julie Hanna (born August 5, 1965) 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 and an adviser to Innovation Norway, the Norwegian government's most important instrument for innovation.
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.
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.
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