Rebeca Hwang

Rebeca Hwang is a  Professor of Practice at Thunderbird and the Senior Director for Thunderbird's new Center for Global Entrepreneurship and Family Business.  Ms. Hwang is also a Managing Partner at Kalei Ventures.

Rebeca is a venture capital investor who has collected experiences as innovator and inventor, founder and entrepreneur, social entrepreneur, educator and ecosystem builder.  Most recently, Rebeca co-founded Kalei Ventures, which invests in early stage technology startups from Latin America. Prior to Kalei, Rebeca was co-founded and Managing Director at Rivet Ventures, which focuses in companies targeting women-led markets where female usage, decision-making, and purchasing are crucial to company growth. Rebeca is also co-founder of the San Francisco-based startup YouNoodle, which helps companies and governments engage with communities of entrepreneurs for open innovation and co-creation of products and services.

Ms. Hwang has been very active in creating and scaling ecosystems for innovators and entrepreneurs in several countries. Rebeca co-founded Cleantech Open, Startup Malaysia and Startup Nations Summit. She also serves on the Global Board of Kauffman's GEN, Imagine H2O, TEDx Rio de la Plata Accelerator (the largest TEDx event in the world), and was a member of the WEF's Global Council on the Future of Migrations, as well as co-lead the Access to Capital committee of the Mexico-U.S. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Council. Rebeca has worked closely several national startup programs, including initiatives in Malaysia, South Korea, Spain, Iceland, Chile, Peru and Mexico.


Rebeca was born in Seoul, raised in Argentina and educated at MIT and Stanford, and has been recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and as one of the top 35 under 35 Global Innovators by MIT Tech Review and was a TED speaker in Vancouver, in TED en Espanol in in NYC, as well as TEDx Cordoba in 2018.


Rebeca's career has been intimately linked to education. She has taught Technology Entrepreneurship at Stanford University for a decade and has been a member of the faculty at Tecnologico de Monterrey for half a decade, and serves in the Board of the preschool Little School.  She is an inventor holding 12 patents, with 9 more pending.


During her career Rebeca has worked extensively with family businesses and family offices who are interested in capitalizing in the opportunities brought by change. She enjoys working with the new generations of families who are passionate about technology, alternative asset investing and entrepreneurship.