Ellen Chisa

Since 2017, Chisa has been the co-founder and CEO of Dark -- a holistic programming language, editor, and hosted infrastructure.

Ellen Chisa was the Vice President of Product of Lola, a mobile app that provides on-demand, personal travel service for hotels, flights, and more. Chisa dedicates her work to developing products that facilitate more meaningful real-world interactions with a focus on user experience, for both web and mobile. Chisa has a lifelong passion for education and creativity and enjoys teaching and sharing her expertise with colleagues, peers, and clients alike.

Chisa is an educator in her field, most notably as an Instructor at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, where she is teaching Human Factors in Interface Design in Fall of 2016. She has also taught at General Assembly and Startup Institute on Product Management and Design.

Chisa joined Lola in May 2015, after working as a Product Manager at Kickstarter in New York City. While at Kickstarter, Chisa helped develop the company’s Discovery features, as well as leading a major redesign of the start page, providing resources to that encouraged creators to start new projects. Chisa started her career with Microsoft, working as program manager for the Office Hub on the Windows Phone 8, as well as Microsoft Apps for Symbian. Chisa worked on Microsoft Sundrop, an exploratory Windows Phone 7 application that encouraged new college graduates to get in the habit of “impulse saving”. As part of her duties on Sundrop, Chisa managed a team of eight students.

Chisa is the co-founder of Alight Learning, though no longer in operation, the company was a collaborative learning software platform for middle schools. Chisa led user research to determine the set of features, and led the product through alpha version, releasing it to three private schools in the Greater Boston area.

Chisa was also the Dean and Trustee of the Awesome Foundation in Seattle, the local chapter of an organization dedicated to giving micro-grants of $1000 to people and groups working on awesome projects in the arts, technology, and community development spaces.

Chisa is a graduate of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering with a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, and is currently on sabbatical from Harvard Business School, after completing her first year. Chisa currently resides in San Francisco, California.