Isabel Casillas Guzman

Isabel Casillas Guzman is an entrepreneur, government innovation leader, and economic policy expert who has made small business and entrepreneurial development her life’s work. Isabel is currently a Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and a Visiting Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB).

She served as the 27th Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, earning global recognition for her visionary leadership and stewardship of the agency through the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recovery, and subsequent small business boom. As SBA Administrator, Guzman oversaw a $500 billion portfolio of government-backed financial products and acted as the voice of America’s 34 million small businesses in President Biden’s Cabinet. Immediately after her bipartisan Senate confirmation, Guzman took responsibility for leading the SBA through COVID, helming critical pandemic relief programs that had previously been plagued by fraud, operational issues, and inaccessibility. She overhauled the agency’s delivery mechanisms to ensure speed, simplicity, and certainty through organizational realignments, policy and process improvements, new partnerships, and technology investments. Under her leadership, the agency delivered more than $450 billion to more than 7 million small businesses to help them survive the pandemic and speed the U.S. economic recovery. Guzman leveraged the agency’s unprecedented post-pandemic scale to usher in generational changes at the SBA, overseeing the most significant regulatory reforms in over four decades and creating operational efficiencies and technological advancements across the agency’s flagship capital and contracting programs. Her reforms catalyzed record SBA financings to small businesses, a marked increase in private lending and investment partners, and a strengthened federal government contracting base for the government’s record $255 billion in annual small business spending.

Prior to leading the SBA, Guzman served as California Governor Newsom’s top official on small businesses, helping coordinate the state’s economic response and recovery during the initial outbreak of the COVID pandemic. She also served as SBA’s Deputy Chief of Staff during the Obama-Biden Administration where she led all program and policy priorities during the economic recovery from the Great Recession.

Throughout her decades in the private sector, Guzman started and exited multiple businesses. Her business ventures included her family’s chain of veterinary hospitals, a commercial print production studio, a fine art picture framing studio, and strategic advisory services for small business federal procurement, government R&D, and tech commercialization. She also served on various nonprofit boards of directors and advised founders in financial services, professional services, manufacturing, and real estate.

Guzman graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and a concentration in Marketing. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.