Claire Diaz-Ortiz is a venture capital investor and bestselling author who was an early employee at Twitter. Wired magazine called her “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter” and Claire was once named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company.
As a VC and angel, Claire has made 50+ investments in early stage startups, mostly in Latin America and the US. Most recently Claire was a partner at Magma Partners, where she started Brava, the first initiative of its kind to invest in women founders across Latin America. She angel invests in all geographies, sometimes through The Angel Collective.
Claire Diaz-Ortiz is the award-winning author of nine books that have been translated into 11 languages, including “Social Media Success for Every Brand”, “One Minute Mentoring: How to Find and Work with a Mentor – and How You’ll Benefit from Being One” (with her mentor legendary management guru Ken Blanchard), “Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time”, “Design Your Day: Be More Productive”, “Set Better Goals”, and “Live Life on Purpose, and Hope Runs: An American Tourist, a Kenyan Boy, a Journey of Redemption”.
Her next book, co-authored with investor, friend, and fellow Frida-Kahlo-art-aficionada Sophia Bendz, will focus on female founders and funders.
In Claire’s work, she has been called everything from “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter” (Wired) & “Twitter’s Pontiff Recruitment Chief” (The Washington Post) to a “Force for Good” (Forbes) & one of the “Ten Most Generous in Social Media” (Fast Company). In a quote not soon to be forgotten (LOL), TechCrunch recently called Claire “a globe-trotting, multi-hyphenate polymath“. Claire was one of the first users of Twitter in Kenya (a claim verified by no one), and is also known for the dubious honor of being the first person to live-tweet her own child’s birth, which was admittedly a bad idea.
Claire has been invited to speak around the world at organizations like The US State Department, The Rockefeller Foundation, South by Southwest, Toyota, and others.
She is a LinkedIn Influencer, one of several hundred global leaders chosen to provide original content on the LinkedIn platform, and was been trained as a Stakeholder-Centered Certified Executive Coach as a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches Project.
Claire has appeared widely in major television and print news sources like CNN, BBC, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, and many others.
As one of the digital world’s earliest social justice activists, Claire used Twitter to build awareness for AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the founding of Hope Runs, a small nonprofit organization in Kenya that operated from 2006-2019.
Claire holds an MBA from Oxford University, where she was a Skoll Foundation Scholar for Social Entrepreneurship, and has a BA in History and an MA in Anthropology from Stanford University.
