Elizabeth Linder Joins Advisory Board of 52 Capital Partners, LLC

52 Capital Partners, LLC | March 4, 2019

Advisory Board of 52 Capital Partners, LLC Welcomes Elizabeth Linder, the Executive Director of Beautiful Destinations, Founder of The Conversational Century and Former Executive of Facebook, Inc. and Google

March 4, 2019 – San Mateo, California – 52 Capital Partners, LLC announced today that Elizabeth Linder has joined the firm’s Advisory Board.

“On behalf of 52 Capital Partners, I’m so delighted to welcome Elizabeth to our Advisory Board. Elizabeth brings a prolific understanding of the most consequential trends in international social media, digital diplomacy and civil society engagement. No one understands the intersection of these worlds better than Elizabeth. Elizabeth epitomizes integrity and an unwavering commitment to excellence,” commented David P. Willard, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of 52 Capital Partners, LLC. “In continuing to expand our firm’s operations and international strategy in service of our North American clients, 52 Capital Partners will benefit from Elizabeth’s wide-ranging international experience, versatility of perspective and deep understanding of the power of American entrepreneurship and innovation.”

Throughout her entire career, Elizabeth Linder has never held a position with an existing job description. Elizabeth is currently the Executive Director of Global Communications & External Affairs at Beautiful Destinations, where she is spearheading the company’s approach to digital diplomacy by bringing together the worlds of foreign policy and global tourism.

After graduating from Princeton University, Elizabeth joined Google’s Global Communications & Public Policy division, splitting her time between the Googleplex in Mountain View, California and YouTube’s original offices in San Bruno, California, where she specialized in political campaigning the year user-generated content first splashed onto the national political scene in the United States.

By 2008, Facebook recruited Elizabeth to join its two-person International Communications team. At the time, Facebook had no policy or communications representative outside of the United States. During these years, Elizabeth opened Facebook’s first office in India, on-boarded the policy and communication agencies the company deployed globally to help share its growth, advertising, and social good narratives,and served as one of Facebook’s representatives to meet with the foreign dignitaries and journalists who visited headquarters. From Facebook’s original offices in Palo Alto,California, Elizabeth moved in 2011 to London to create, found, and build Facebook’s Politics & Government division, which she expanded across the Europe, Middle East & Africa region.

As Facebook’s Politics & Government Specialist, Elizabeth served as Facebook’s first non-state actor diplomat and public spokeswoman dedicated to the government, political, diplomatic, and civil society use of Facebook to communicate with people. Elizabeth’s five- year tenure in this role spanned the most transformative years of Facebook’s adoption as a tool for social change, from the Arab Spring and the Scottish Referendum to the NATO Secretary General’s first Facebook Q&A and the first global report on soft power to include digital diplomacy metrics. Following Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and prior to hiring a dedicated team, Elizabeth represented Instagram, working with her government, political, and diplomatic constituents to understand the power of the image in getting their messages across to new audiences and citizenries with changing expectations.

Following her eight years at Facebook, Elizabeth founded The Conversational Century, which is dedicated to translating the most transformative issues our societies are grappling with between vastly different worlds: digital and analogue, tech hubs and national capitals, corporate and think tank, expert and amateur.

Elizabeth is focused on curating the conversations we need to address in order for our digital century to thrive and make the most of the connected world platform technologies have given us. Elizabeth has trained 42 parliaments on finding their voices online and worked with countless ministries, intergovernmental institutions, think tanks, diplomats, royal households, journalists, civil society leaders, NGOs, city mayors, and national museums, libraries, banks, police forces, and militaries to brief them on how digital engagement is changing people’s expectations of their institutions and leaders.

Elizabeth is Chatham House’s first Senior Consulting Fellow to report into the Director’s Office, where she is building out the Digital Society Initiative. She serves as Chair of the Kinross House Meetings, bringing together the best-placed minds to chart solutions for significant societal challenges, ranging from the philanthropic community’s approach to cyber security to the changing roles hard and soft power play in a digital world. Elizabeth has recently represented the tech sector on the BBC World / Intelligence Squared “tech giants” debate; keynoted the 2040 Vision summit hosted by the Sultanate of Oman; spoken at the World Government Summit in Dubai; and moderated the Chatham House London Conference. Elizabeth provides regular commentary for the BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In Spring 2019, Elizabeth will advise the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on its new policy to tackle disinformation online; Medicines for Malaria Ventures (a Gates-funded organization) on how best to navigate social media risks in launching a new and controversial drug to market; and senior leaders brought together by the British Foreign Policy Group, Strategy International, Ditchley Park, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Institute, and the London Stock Exchange on societal trends propelled and informed by connected citizenries.

Elizabeth holds a Distinction in the Wine & Spirits Education Trust Exam Levels II and III and leads dinner discussions for Berry Brothers & Rudd, London’s oldest wine merchant. A California native, she resides in London, where she holds an Exceptional Talent Visa for the tech sector granted by the British Government.