Rebecca Fannin

Rebecca A. Fannin is a leading expert on global innovation, a top-selling author and media entrepreneur. She began her journalistic career in New York City and later Silicon Valley, where she followed the venture capital trail to become one of the first American journalists to write about China’s entrepreneurial boom, reporting from Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.  Inspired by the entrepreneurs she met and interviewed in China, Rebecca formed Silicon Dragon Ventures , a news, events and thought leadership platform.
Rebecca’s career has taken her to the world’s leading hubs of tech innovation. She is a correspondent at CNBC.com, a Forbes columnist for 10 years, and her articles also have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, Techonomy, Inc. and Red Herring, where she was international news editor during the dotcom boom.

Rebecca’s first book, Silicon Dragon (McGraw-Hill 2008), profiled Jack Ma of Alibaba and Robin Li of Baidu, and she has followed these Chinese tech titans ever since. Her second book, Startup Asia (Wiley 2011), explored how India is the next up and comer, which again predicted a leading-edge trend. Her latest book, Tech Titans of China: was published by Hachette’s Nicholas Brealey in 2019. Her books have been favorably reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and translated for multiple markets internationally.   Additionally, she contributed to a textbook, Innovation in Emerging Markets (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

Rebecca is a frequent speaker at major business, tech and policy forums, and has spoken at the Brookings Institution, Harvard, MIT, World Economic Forum-China, World Affairs Forum, Asia Society, China Institute and many others. A media commentator, she has appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox Business News, BBC and Bloomberg TV, and been quoted by The Economist, Wired and BusinessWeek, among several outlets. In 2001, she provided testimony to a U.S. Congressional committee about China’s Internet. She is an advisory board member of the China-U.S. Business Alliance in New York.

Rebecca resides in Manhattan and San Francisco, and logs major frequent flier miles in her grassroots search to cover the next, new thing.