Gloria Lee is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led several successful education ventures. Currently, she serves as CEO of Educate78, a newly launched not-for-profit organization focused on ensuring that all students in Oakland, CA have access to a world-class public education. Previously, she was president & COO at New Schools Venture Fund, a not-for-profit venture philanthropy firm that supports entrepreneurs transforming K-12 public education, where she oversaw the organization’s annual grant-making and mission-related investing of ~$20M per year and shaped its investing strategies.

As an entrepreneur-in-residence at NewSchools, she launched Teaching Channel, a teacher professional development video platform. Gloria also co-founded and served as board chair for Yu Ming Charter School, a Mandarin immersion public school in Oakland, CA.

Earlier in her career, Gloria co-founded Aspire Public Schools, now one of the nation’s leading charter management organizations. At Aspire, she served as Aspire’s Chief Operating Officer, overseeing human resources, knowledge management, facilities, information technology, marketing, communications, and operations, and creating strategy, culture, and systems to grow successfully from one school to 17 schools. She also twice served as acting CFO, during which the organization closed $37M in ground-breaking long-term tax-exempt bonds for new facilities.

As Aspire’s Bay Area Superintendent of schools, Gloria was responsible for the “double bottom line” — both academic achievement and fiscal stability. Under her leadership, Aspire’s Bay Area schools grew 4.5x the state targets for growth, and received average parent satisfaction ratings of 90%. Aspire’s Bay Area schools also increased enrollment by nearly 40% to over 2700 students — making Aspire’s Bay Area region larger than 60% of the districts in California.

Gloria started her career as a strategy consultant with McKinsey and Company. She currently serves on the boards of two not-for-profit organizations: Great Oakland Public Schools Leadership Center and The National Equity Project. She received her BS in applied economics at Cornell University, and both a Master’s of business administration and Master’s in education at Stanford University.