ABOUT & Experience
Kim Lane is an entrepreneur, speaker and business executive with experience working with Fortune 100 companies, Silicon Valley-based startups and the nation’s leading foundations. She is deeply passionate about diversity and inclusion, changing the world through entrepreneurship and leveling the playing field to empower everyone to succeed.
Lane is currently the Career Connections Local Relationship Lead for Facebook, where she supports the Arkansas operations of Facebook Career Connections, an initiative that connects innovative, Facebook-trained collegiate talent with local businesses to bolster the local economy and strengthen the state’s tech-talent pipeline. She is also the Southwest Regional Representative for the Kauffman Foundation’s 1 Million Cups program, where she manages over 200 organizers running the entrepreneurial education program in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas. She is a Senior Advisor for the Global Entrepreneurship Network, where she has mentored entrepreneurial ecosystem builders in Nepal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and St. Lucia.
Lane is a frequently invited speaker, and speaks on entrepreneurship, empowerment, vulnerability and inclusion; she has spoken in Istanbul, Turkey; Manama, Bahrain; Johannesburg, South Africa; and across the United States from Virginia to Texas and throughout the heartland.
Lane was previously the CEO of the Conductor, an entrepreneurial support organization that helps start and scale businesses in Arkansas. At the Conductor, Lane provided vision and strategy for the organization and managed a budget of more than $1 million annually. She saw a 190% revenue growth during her tenure at the Conductor, and won over $1 million in new contracts and grants from the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Kauffman Foundation. In less than three years, she grew the team from two to 12 people, expanded the Conductor’s reach to an 11-county footprint that supported underserved rural Arkansans, and developed a data-tracking mechanism to determine the Conductor’s impact and Net Promoter Score in real-time.
Lane was an early adopter of digital strategy and was the first-ever Digital Director and Online Editor at Arkansas Money & Politics magazine where she built the magazine’s digital footprint; she recruited and managed more than 40 influential online contributors and saw a 250% increase in web traffic under her leadership. She also served as an editor for Brit + Co, a Silicon Valley startup, where she covered the VMA’s, New York Fashion Week, the Emmys and trending topics. The first article she wrote was one of the site’s most-read pieces, garnering over 250,000 pageviews within the first week it was published.
Lane has been named “Arkansan of the Year” by Arkansas Life magazine, “40 Under 40” by Arkansas Business magazine, “Women to Watch” by Soiree magazine, an “Arkansas Times Visionary” for her work inspiring others to “think bigger,” the City of Conway’s “Young Business Leader of the Year,” and one of the world’s top “Startup Champions” by the Global Entrepreneurship Network.
She is passionate about giving back to her community, and serves on the boards of the Women's Foundation of Arkansas, Global Ties to Arkansas, Junior Achievement of Arkansas, Deliver Hope, the Arkansas Fellowship and the City of Conway’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board.