Team

LISA MORALES-HELLEBO

Founder & Managing General Partner

Lisa Morales-Hellebo has spent more than 30 years obsessed with how things are made — and how they can be made better. Her career spans technology, design, systems thinking, entrepreneurship, community building, and venture capital. She has established a proven track record of helping startups through Fortune 500 companies maximize ROI on innovation through first principles and design thinking.

Lisa is a Founder and Managing General Partner at REFASHIOND Ventures: The Industrial Transformation Fund, a New York–based early-stage fund backing startups transforming industrial value chains to work better for people, planet, and profits.

Lisa began her career in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom, pioneering mass customization and on-demand micromanufacturing for P&G at Reflect.com. She founded a contextual search engine for fashion called Shopsy which she bootstrapped to 5k users before raising Venture capital and participating in Techstars Boston in 2012. After shutting down Shopsy, Lisa founded the New York Fashion Tech Lab with leading global brands and Springboard Enterprises, becoming among the most renowned and longest lasting accelerators serving fashion tech innovation.

Born in the Bronx, NYC and a Carnegie Mellon University graduate with University Honors, Lisa has built accelerators, mentored founders globally, served on accelerator boards including Parallel18, and earned multiple recognitions, including Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s Top Woman in Supply Chain and WWD’s Most Influential ESG Leaders. Lisa’s research interests include: Value Chain Design; Supply Chain Proximity & Localization; Innovation Ecosystems; Systems Design, and; Business Model Innovation & Transformation.

A lifelong innovator and fluent Norwegian speaker after living abroad, she now lives in the NYC suburbs with her husband, two sons, and their lovable mutt, Rocky — still endlessly curious about how the world works and how to redesign it for the outcomes we need to thrive on this blue orb we call Earth.

BRIAN LAUNG AOAEH, CFA

Founder & Managing General Partner

Prior to REFASHIOND, Brian acquired 10 years of experience in investment research and management, with 8 of those years spent building KEC Ventures from scratch. KEC Ventures is an early-stage technology venture capital firm with $98M of AUM across 2 funds, and 51 investments.

Before KEC Ventures he joined KEC Holdings - a single family office, as the first member of its investing team. He joined KEC Holdings after serving as the statistical research and strategy analyst in Global Diversity and Inclusion at Lehman Brothers in New York, NY. Before his tenure at Lehman, he worked at UBS AG in Stamford, CT as the statistical research analyst in Group Diversity. Prior to UBS, he was a pension actuarial analyst at Watson Wyatt Worldwide (now Willis Towers Watson). He was a junior auditor at Issifu Ali & Co. Chartered Accountants, in Accra, Ghana between completing his secondary school education and commencing undergraduate study in the United States in 1997.

Brian holds a BA with a double major in Mathematics and Physics from Connecticut College in New London, CT. During his undergraduate study he spent three years as a research assistant in the Tunable Diode Laser Spectroscopy Laboratory at the Connecticut College Physics Department - including multiple collaborative investigations at NASA Langley Research Center; He is a co-author of five articles that have been published in peer reviewed journals.

He earned an MBA, with a specialization in Financial Instruments and Markets, from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University in New York, NY. He is a CFA Institute charterholder.

He is also an adjunct professor of supply chain and operations management in the Department of Technology Management and Innovation at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University.

Brian and Lisa teamed up to start The New York Supply Chain Meetup in August 2017. It has become the largest and fastest growing supply chain meetup in the United States. The New York Supply Chain Meetup is the founding chapter of The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation, the world’s first global network of collaborative supply chain meetups.

Brian was born in Ghana but raised in Nigeria, is always learning, and is obsessed with cool mechanical pencils, strong coffee, and reggae.