Lunar Accel 2026 Closing Keynote: Barbara Peng (CEO, Business Insider)
Join the Asian American professional community at Lunar Accel's Spring 2026 Accelerator Closing Keynote!
Lunar Accel, the premier 501(c)(3) nonprofit leadership program for early-career East/Southeast Asian Americans, warmly invites you to join us for a conversation with Barbara Peng, CEO of Business Insider, moderated by Tracie Lee, Vice President of Product Design at The New York Times, on Saturday, April 18th 3-6pm in NYC!
Read more about Barbara’s background below!
🚀 Since becoming CEO in 2023, Barbara has sharpened Business Insider’s focus on business, tech, and innovation journalism, resulting in increased reader engagement across their hundreds of millions of annual visitors. She has led the appointment of a new Editor in Chief and launched innovations like BI’s AI-powered search tool.
🤝🏻 Prior to her role as CEO, Barbara was President of Business Insider. Before that, she was President of Insider Intelligence, the company’s paid research division, where she led the company’s merger with eMarketer, the renowned provider of digital intelligence and forecasts.
✨ In 2025, Barbara was honored on GoldHouse’s A100 List, which highlights the most impactful Asian Pacific leaders shaping culture and society today, naming her among trailblazers across business, media, entertainment, and beyond.
Agenda:
3 - 3:15: Guest Check-in
3:30 - 4:30 Speaker Event
4:30 - 6: Social Hour + Dim Sum Bites
Dress code: Smart casual
*2026 Accelerator Fellows - please refer to the email for obtaining your Closing Keynote ticket
By signing up for this event, you consent to receive future communications (monthly max) from Lunar Accel.
About Barbara Peng:
Barbara Peng is CEO of Business Insider, the popular and influential global news brand that focuses on business, technology, and innovation. Since becoming President of Business Insider in 2021, Peng has built a strong senior executive team and refined the brand’s strategy to refocus on the company’s ambitious, optimistic, and curious core audience. Peng was previously President of Insider Intelligence, the company’s paid research division, where she led the company’s merger with eMarketer, the renowned provider of digital intelligence and forecasts. Peng graduated from MIT and lives in New York City.
About Tracie Lee:
Tracie Lee is a Vice President of Design at The New York Times, leading the Growth and Platforms teams that are helping the company reach 15 million subscribers while modernizing its technical capabilities. She got into digital publishing two decades ago believing that technologies like blogging could give more people a voice and help distinctive perspectives emerge, and chose Design as the discipline through which she could shape that possibility. That same instinct drives how she leads: noticing when systems only recognize narrow definitions of value, then building the infrastructure to broaden what counts. At The Times, she's created career frameworks that celebrated diverse design expertise, founded a design team for internal platforms that had been locked out of user-centered thinking, and scaled from a team of one to 20+ people by making space for different shapes of talent. She also co-founded a hospitality business called Lonestar Taco, because the same principles apply whether you're designing digital experiences or physical ones: deeply understand your audience, and use your creativity to build something that truly resonates.