Karen Mills

Karen Gordon Mills has been a member of our board of directors since 2014. She has served as a member of the Audit Committee and the Compensation Committee of the board of directors since 2015. Ms. Mills is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School and a leading authority on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation. She was a member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, serving as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013. 

Ms. Mills is President of MMP Group, which invests in financial services, consumer products and technology-enabled solutions. She is Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Private Capital Research Institute and serves as a co-Chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Main Street Finance Task Force, as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s highest governing board.

In Obama’s Cabinet, Ms. Mills served on the President’s National Economic Council and as a key member of the White House economic team. At SBA, she led a team of more than 3,000 employees and managed a loan guarantee portfolio of over $100 billion. Mills is credited with turning around the agency, streamlining loan programs, decreasing processing times and reducing paperwork, which led to record-breaking years for SBA lending and investments in growth capital. Additionally, Mills led efforts to help small businesses create regional economic clusters, gain access to early-stage capital, boost exports, and tap into government and commercial supply chains.

Prior to SBA, Mills held leadership positions in the private sector, including as a partner in several private equity firms, and served on the boards of Scotts Miracle-Gro and Arrow Electronics. In 2007, Maine Governor John Baldacci appointed Mills to Chair Maine’s Council on Competitiveness and the Economy, where she focused on regional development initiatives, including a regional economic cluster with Maine’s boatbuilding industry.

Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She is a recipient of the U.S. Department of the Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, their highest civilian honor, and is a frequent guest on news outlets and an opinion writer, with recent placements in Fortune, Forbes, The Hill, Harvard Business Review and American Banker.

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