Hayley Barna is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Birchbox in 2009 while at Harvard Business School.^[1] In 2015, Barna "stepped away from her day-to-day role" at Birchbox,^[2] remaining a board member. In 2016 she became a partner First Round,^[3] a venture capital firm specializing in seed-stage funding.^[4]

Hayley Bay Barna was born in 1983.^[5] Her parents, Eileen B. Maisel and Richard A. Barna of New York, both worked at RAB Lighting in New Jersey.^[5] In high school, she was published in an international science research journal.^[6] She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard^[5] and has an MBA at Harvard Business School.^[7]

Barna began her career shortly after she graduated from Harvard University joining Bain & Company in New York.^[8] She moved to Christie's Hong Kong location where she worked in strategy and then in product management for Amazon.com.^[9]

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.^[7] 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."^[10] They founded the company Birchbox together in 2010.^[2] In 2013, she and Beauchamp won the Leadership Award At Forbes Women's Summit.^[11] Barna and Beauchamp opened the first Birchbox store in 2014.^[12]

As of 2015, Birchbox had received over $70 million in venture funding and had one million subscribers.^[13] In August 2015,^[14] Barna ceased co-leading the company as co-CEO.^[2] She spent the subsequent six months as an angel investor.^[14]

Although she stepped down from her role as co-CEO of Birchbox in 2015,^[15][16] she remained a member of the board.^[17]

After announcing it in February,^[18] she joined First Round Capital as a venture partner in 2016.^[14] 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."^[19] She was their first female partner.^[20][3] One of her first initial First Round investments was the travel startup Collective Hotels & Retreats, with her also joining the board.^[21] By late 2017, she largely focused on e-commerce startups.^[17] She was on the boards of Madison Reed and RAB Lighting.^[17]

By late 2017, she was organizing a working group of women in technology in New York with monthly meetings.^[22] 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.^[14]

Barna is currently based in Manhattan,^[23] New York.^[17] 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.^[5]