Charlene Chen
Charlene loves being an “extrapreneur” connecting, mentoring, advising, and investing in entrepreneurs, intrepreneurs, and social enterprises. She has nearly 20 years of private sector and social sector experience working with a variety of organizations ranging from tech startup/scaleups to international non-profits to Fortune 500 companies.
Charlene began her career as an IT consultant at Deloitte Consulting, but after earning an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, spent 4 years working for non-profits who improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in East Africa. For 8 years, she served as the COO of socially impactful venture-capital backed businesses, first at AZA Finance, a pan-African FX/Treasury platform, followed by Lantum, a B2B SaaS healthtech company in the UK. In 2020, Charlene co-founded a global community of COOs and operations professionals called Operations Nation. In April, Charlene will become the Executive Director of Ezrah Charitable Trust, a private family foundation focused on income and job creation across sub-Saharan Africa.
