Heidi Lorenzen

Heidi Lorenzen is a high-impact global marketing executive with 35+ years of worldwide experience and a passion for taking fresh approaches to address unprecedented demands and opportunities on businesses. Throughout her career she has helped companies successfully strengthen their position in the market — always with an eye to ensuring better outcomes for humanity. From building, coaching and mentoring legendary teams to being an advocate and leader in driving diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Heidi’s people-centric approach to leadership, marketing, and the application of technology creates impactful results beyond just business metrics, and has established her as a unique breed in the technology industry.

Heidi is currently Senior Vice President of Marketing for Accela, a market-leading cloud solutions company partnered with innovative state and local governments around the world. Heidi joined Accela to help state and local governments work better for their citizens. She believes that by improving everyday interactions between communities and their governments, we can improve society as a whole and produce better outcomes for all participants. Prior to Accela, she ran marketing at Singularity University, where she built and led a team responsible for educating, inspiring and empowering leaders to apply exponentially growing technologies (like biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience) to create a more abundant future and help address humanity’s biggest challenges. Previous to Singularity University, Heidi served as Chief Marketing Officer at startup CloudWords. She also previously held senior marketing executive roles at large enterprise software and technology leaders including Autonomy, Interwoven and Polycom. While at companies such as Polycom, Interwoven, and Bloomberg Businessweek, Heidi supported record revenue goals, garnered a disproportionate share of voice across competitive landscapes, and introduced these players into new markets. Heidi began her global career in publishing right out of college as editor of 5 global trade magazines in Taipei, Taiwan at United Pacific, followed by over 7 years at Business Week magazine in New York City.

Heidi is past co-chair of National League of Cities Corporate Partners Leadership Council, President of the Women Executives’ Channel Advisory Board, a member and mentor with the Women in Cloud Network, a Business Mentor at Bishop Ranch Intelligence Innovation Accelerator and CITRIS (UC Berkeley), a member of the Athena Alliance, and serves on the Board of Directors of Rising International (non-profit). Heidi has been honored as one of the Top 50 Women in Technology by the National Diversity Council in 2021, and on the 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50 list in 2014 and 2015.

She holds a B.A. summa cum laude from Middlebury College (where she also learned to speak Mandarin Chinese) and an MBA in International Management from New York University’s Stern School of Business.