Morgan Beller Hecht
Morgan Beller Hecht
Morgan Beller Hecht is the head of stategy for Calibra, Facebook’s digital wallet. Beller is also a co-creator of the proposed Libra digital currency alongside vice presidents David Marcus and Kevin Weil.[4] She was previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and part of the corporate development team at Medium. [2] [7]
Education and early career
From 2010 to 2013 Beller attended Cornell University. She entered Cornell as a member of the Class of 2014, but graduated in 2013,[8] earning Bachelor of Science in statistical informatics.[7] On campus, she was involved in Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity and co-founded the PopShop, a student-run collaborative space for Cornell entrepreneurs.[8] She was also also a social media consultant and website contributor at eship.cornell.edu and eship.dyson.cornell.edu, the websites dedicated to sharing entrepreneurial wisdom and resources to the business student populations at Cornell University and Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, respectively.[2][7]
During her time at Cornell University she was one of the Cornell ambassadors.
Additionaly, during this period she was an analyst at Cornell Venture Capital Club and the technology chair of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.[7]
Beller said her passion for venture capital stemmed from her experience at the TechCrunch Disrupt — a technology conference in New York City she volunteered at after her freshman year.[8]
Beller said she believes that success often depends on being at the right place at the right time — and that meeting the right people is essential to forging ahead with one’s career.
In May 2011, at TechCrunch Disrupt New York she met a board partner from High Line Venture Partners. On the same day she received an email with the subject, ‘You’re hired.’ As a result, in May 2011 Beller joined High Line Venture Partners as an intern, working for them both directly at the fund and in-house at some of their portfolio companies.”[18]
Postgraduation career
After graduating from Cornell University in 2013, Beller worked for three months at eBay as a product manager and received an offer to join their corporate development team immediately after.[7][8] Though she planned to return to Cornell for a Masters in information science, the business relationship she made with the partner from High Line Venture Partners led to new career opportunities. In September 2013, Beller joined Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, as a partner of their deal team.[8][4]
Beller’s advice to current undergraduates is to study what they love.
If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life, Beller said. Do what you love. You’ll be happier. You’ll be better at it. And you won’t have any regrets. [8]
In April of 2016, Beller joined Medium, where she worked for thirteen months on their startegy and corporate development.[7] One of her accomplishments there was leading Medium’s acquisition of Embedly, a startup whose technology allows websites to easily embed rich media such as gifs.
Subsequently, in May of 2017, Beller joined Facebook, where she worked for the first nine months at their corporate development.
She then went on, and in January of 2018 joined their strategy team.
In the blockchain community, Beller is known as the original driving force behind Facebook’s push into cryptocurrency.
She succeeded in convincing the company to take blockchain technology seriously, and on May 8, 2018 the project was officially kicked off with Beller working on the project alongside David Marcus.
Over the next few months, Marcus and Beller succeeded in recruiting other top Facebook talents, as Kevin Weil, onto their blockchain group, putting together the team that is developing Libra and Calibra -- Facebook's digital wallet that will be used to store Libra (Facebook's digital currency).[4][7]
She is one of the co-creators of Libra, alongside David Marcus and Kevin Weil.[4]
Subsequently, in June of 2019, Beller was promoted and since then she has been the head of strategy for Calibra.[7]
Investments
Beller invests in startup companies both as an angel investor and at the later stages. In January 2017, she participated in the angel round of Stedi, a project that aims at automation of electronic data interchange transactions.[19][20] In the same month, Beller participated in the seed round for the startup Cue.[19] Cue is a web and mobile app that pulls information from the users’ online accounts to present an overview of their day.[21][19]
Media appearances
Beller was listed in the Venture Capital section of Forbes 30 Under 30, a set of thirty lists of altogether six hundred brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents in twenty different sectors.[9][10]