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Dear LebNeters:
The posture has changed among the volunteers that make up the LebNet board of directors and its executive committee. In the early years, the mood used to be “best effort” with a lot of goodwill and plenty of Inshallah’s. Lately, the burden of responsibility for a 450+ member organization, transformed the team into a beehive focusing on tangible activities that add value to the members’ experience. In our meetings, robust dialogue has replaced social niceties and we cannot be more pleased, so we have a big “ask” of you: keep the constructive feedback coming and sometimes be ready for “you call it, you own it” 🙂
Our membership is growing organically by 20% y/y and we’re also actively expanding our reach to cover more US geographies to address the demand hoping to reach the 1000 member mark in 2 years.
With this goal in mind, we are pleased to announce that Habib Kairouz, Managing Partner of Rho Capital, accepted to join our board of directors and with Edgar Masri, we now have 2 directors based on the East Coast. This quickly materialized in an upcoming LebNet event in NYC on September 26th to which we hope some of you would make a special trip to be part of that unique event.
With growth, we need more checks and balances and tighter governance so we elected George Kadifa as Chairman of the board and Elie Habib was appointed as Vice Chairman. Additionally, we created a Senior Advisory Board to advise us on overall LebNet strategy and direction while acting as “ambassadors” and role models for Lebanese American professionals in the tech sector. Magid Abraham, Executive Chairman of Comscore and Nora Denzel, board director at Ericsson, AMD, and Outerwall have honored us by accepting to join as advisors on that new board and stay tuned for more announcements on that front.
We hope you will enjoy perusing our newsletter to get a better feel of what is happening around our community and how you can put your mentorship skills to good use by joining our vibrant pool of mentors. I am personally looking forward to the 3rd cohort of Lebanese entrepreneurs attending the LebNet Ignite 2-week acceleration program in August, and look forward to their “pitch day” on August 26th.
Finally, allow me to plug our fund raising campaign committee chaired by Khaled Nasr who is halfway through raising our target that allows us to execute on our goals in the next 18 months. Thank you for your generosity and your trust in the LebNet community.
George Akiki
LebNet, President and co-founder
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