Hayley Barna is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Birchbox in 2009 while at Harvard Business School. In 2015, Barna "stepped away from her day-to-day role" at Birchbox, remaining a board member. In 2016 she became a partner of

First Round Capital First Round is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best ...

Early life and education

Hayley Bay Barna was born in 1983. Her parents, Eileen B. Maisel and Richard A. Barna of New York, both worked at RAB Lighting in New Jersey. In high school, she was published in an international science research journal. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and has an MBA at Harvard Business School.

Career

Barna began her career shortly after she graduated from Harvard University joining

Bain & Company Bain & Company is an American management consulting company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm provides advice to public, private, and non-profit organizations. One of the Big Three management consultancies, Bain & Company was fou ...

in New York. She moved to Christie's Hong Kong location where she worked in strategy and then in product management for

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...

Birchbox

While working towards her MBA at Harvard Business School, Barna met Katia Beauchamp and a friendship was born. So, too, was the idea of Birchbox which Barna founded with Beauchamp. What began as a business plan during B-School turned into a website where they began to acquire customers interested in "an ecommerce experience focused on new product discovery." They founded the company Birchbox together in 2010. In 2013, she and Beauchamp won the Leadership Award At Forbes Women's Summit. Barna and Beauchamp opened the first Birchbox store in 2014. As of 2015, Birchbox had received over $70 million in venture funding and had one million subscribers. In August 2015, Barna ceased co-leading the company as co-CEO. She spent the subsequent six months as an angel investor. Although she stepped down from her role as co-CEO of Birchbox in 2015, she remained a member of the board.

First round

After announcing it in February, she joined

as a venture partner in 2016. On February 16, 2016, Barna shared a post on publishing platform medium.com about her first day at First Round stating, "I can’t think of a better place to do this than First Round, which led the seed round in my company Birchbox, and has always put founders first through good times and bad." She was their first female partner. One of her first initial First Round investments was the travel startup Collective Hotels & Retreats, with her also joining the board. By late 2017, she largely focused on

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain managem ...

startups. She was on the boards of Madison Reed and RAB Lighting. By late 2017, she was organizing a working group of women in technology in New York with monthly meetings. Also in late 2017, she was promoted to general partner. At that point, she had invested in companies such as Collective Retreats, Keeps, CrowdJustice, and Mirror.

Personal life

Barna is based in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, New York. During her time at Harvard Business School she met her husband, Fredrik Vik Maroe. They wed in 2014 at a private estate located in Staatsburg, New York.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barna, Hayley Harvard Business School alumni Living people American women chief executives American venture capitalists Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women