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Director Rebecca Eisenberg - Biography

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Rebecca Eisenberg was elected to the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board in 2022 and represents District 7 which includes the cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, the Town of Los Altos Hills, the Town of Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, and parts of South San Jose. She has served as an executive, entrepreneur, investor, and attorney in Silicon Valley for 30 years.

Rebecca operates a small positive impact investment fund called Netskink Positive Impact Investments, making angel and other investments primarily through a gender and environmental justice lens. Additionally, through her positive impact charitable fund, Rebecca supports nonprofit public interest organizations that further the UN’s 17 Global Goals of Sustainable Development.  Rebecca also operates a boutique law firm, Private Client Legal Services (PCLS), focusing on employment agreements and other transactions that involve private company stock.

Prior to Netskink and PCLS, Rebecca served as General Counsel or senior counsel of numerous notable technology companies. She joined PayPal in 2001 and assisted with its IPO, secondary offering, and consequent merger with eBay Inc.  Staying with the merged entity, Rebecca then led the commercial legal function, growing her team to 15 professionals, and helping grow PayPal’s enterprise revenues from the ground up to $1 billion annually. 

In addition to PayPal, Rebecca was the founding General Counsel of Reddit, Trulia, AdBrite, Vouch, and Flip Video.  At Reddit, Rebecca led the successful spin-off of the social networking startup from its prior parent company, Conde Nast.  At Trulia, she put in place the legal systems to prepare the company for its successful IPO.  At Flip Video, she handled the $650 merger with Cisco Systems, considered one of the most successful Mergers of year 2008.

Rebecca also served as a technology columnist and journalist, chronicling the early Internet boom of the mid-to-late 1990’s. Her bi-weekly Sunday San Francisco Chronicle column, Net Skink, reached 2 million readers.  Her weekly column in CBS MarketWatch, NoveauGeek, as well as other articles published in Wired, Upside, Fast Company, Entertainment Weekly, and Ms. Magazine, earned her the award of "Top 25 Women on the Web.” 

Rebecca earned her BA in Decision Science at Stanford, where she graduated with Departmental Honors and Phi Beta Kappa.  She earned her JD cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Rebecca lives in Palo Alto with her husband of almost 25 years, their two young-adult children, and their four rescue companion animals – two cats, two dogs.

Director Eisenberg may be contacted by e-mail at: [email protected].

Correspondence to the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board Members may also be sent via email to: [email protected].