Financing Transformation

Today, Lebec harnesses this same courage and intercultural competence to drive change worldwide as a visionary entrepreneur and finance executive passionate about creating real value. Her latest venture, the advisory firm LEBEC, brings financial and philanthropic innovation to the mainstream and helps grow companies focused on climate resilience and economic equity. This work reflects Lebec’s and the LEBEC team’s creative, compassionate approach to building innovative global solutions.

Lebec’s international perspective began early, as her German mother and French father moved the family from France to South Korea for business. Attending British and American schools in South Korea and China and traveling widely, she noticed cultural contrasts among Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Vietnam, as well as stark resource disparities. “I saw communities deprived of infrastructure; I remember driving through Hanoi, where there were houses with no roofs and broken water pipes.”

After high school in Beijing and Dallas and starting college at the University of Georgia, Lebec moved to Paris to attend AUP—a welcome homecoming. “I felt lost from an identity perspective. Studying finance, economics, French cinema and dance in my home city helped me find myself.”

Lebec identifies as equal parts business executive and creative, and both sides flourished in Paris. “The arts anchor a sense of self and empathy,” she says. Dance—particularly hip-hop and house music—remains a vital outlet. “It fuels everything I want to do as an entrepreneur.”

Lebec’s instincts for finance, business development, problem solving and value creation surfaced quickly in her first job at a Paris documentary firm focused on sustainable development. She explored how to “help the firm unlock more capital for their efforts—not having any idea what that meant.” She also met a documentary film producer working on a film focused on the Darfur conflict, which broadened her understanding of international aid and development in Africa.

Lebec then joined the World Bank where she led communications, education, and community engagement programs with local communities in Southeast Asia, focusing on those often excluded from decision-making in development. Here, Lebec had a flash of insight: “I was 26 in an air-conditioned Jeep in my suit, thinking, why am I going to visit a community and telling them how to live their lives? I’m a privileged French woman. I don’t know if this is the transformational change I believe in.”

Driven to find better solutions, Lebec studied water crises, microfinance, and corporate sustainability at the London School of Economics. She then joined the Clinton Global Initiative and later Water.org, where she worked closely with co-founders Matt Damon and CEO Gary White, and a global leadership team, to demonstrate how microfinance and investing in women could accelerate solutions to the global water crisis. Lebec was instrumental in building the business case, mobilizing $200 million in philanthropy, and unlocking $5 billion in commercial capital for water and sanitation.

Building on this progress, Lebec again joined forces with Gary White and Matt Damon to launch WaterEquity, one of the first asset managers focused on women and water, with the aim to prove that water is an investable asset class. As a founding team member and Chief Investor Relations Officer—or “Chief Rejection Officer,” as she jokingly called herself—Lebec overcame skepticism from investors, including private equity firms, financial institutions, and corporations. She and the team mobilized more than $200 million in blended capital from investors including the IKEA Foundation, Skoll Foundation, the International Development Finance Corporation, and Bank of America.

Seeing the potential of financial innovation in fueling a global entrepreneurship ecosystem, Lebec felt inspired to bring these insights to the mainstream. In 2020, she founded LEBEC, a women-owned-and-led advisory firm that supports visionary founders, funders, and investors to maximize value for underserved populations.

Throughout her career, Lebec has thrived on “building things that matter and stepping into spaces where you have to figure it out.” She believes that entrepreneurship and finance have the power to reshape the economy. “The greatest entrepreneurs are driven by solving a problem and being creative thinkers,” she says. “The more we fuel them with the financing that helps bring those ideas to life, the better.”

Reflecting on her AUP education and looking to the future, Lebec is encouraged by the next generation of entrepreneurs and excited by what current AUP students might bring to the table. “AUP is a critical, global ecosystem of phenomenal thinkers and doers who can be part of this change,” she says. “It represents the young minds we want to shape around this kind of thinking. We're building a world that we believe in.”