Ellen Chisa
Chaos out of order, order out of chaos*
Hello! You can find me around the internet or in real life,
but this is my story.
Right now, I live in Brooklyn and I'm a product manager at Kickstarter. I moved to New York and started there in December 2012. Most recently, I worked on the new homepage and on the redesign of the starred projects page. You should try starring some projects out and let me know what you think! You could also check out some of the projects that I've backed. Most recently:
I'm also a trustee of the Awesome Foundation in NYC. Our most recent grant was to the Movies at Sundown. We support a bunch of cool projects. In fact, we give away $1000 something new every single month!
I'm never really sure what to say when people ask what my hobbies are. I read a ton, and I keep track of what I've read on Goodreads. I love getting recommendations for new things to check out. I also write. Occasionally I publish things I've written on my blog. I took up painting this year, so we'll see how that goes. I'm really good at the Twilight Zone pinball machine.
From July 2010 until November of 2012, I lived in Seattle. I did Awesome Foundation stuff there, too. If you're interested in learning more about that, I highly recommend you check out this talk that I gave with Nikki Lee at Creative Mornings. The talk itself is 17 minutes, and the rest is Q&A.
I used to be a Program Manager at Microsoft. I worked on Office for Windows Phone 8. If you haven't tried out a Windows Phone yet, I'll happily show you mine! I also worked on something that I still refer to as "The Oompa Loompas" and on PowerPoint Broadcast for Symbian.
In 2010, I graduated from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering with a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering. My senior capstone project at Olin was studying "transitioners" - people who were graduating from college and going to work for the first time. My team designed an application called Sundrop: Saving for a Sunny Day, meant to encourage impulse saving. One of my favorite parts of the application was the "Not Starbucks" feature.
From June 2008 to August 2009, I was on leave from Olin. While on leave I co-founded Alight Learning with five of my friends. Alight Learning was an attempt to design course management software from pedagogical principles, rather than automating the existing student-teacher workflow. I'd really like to work on education again someday.
I grew up in Michigan. I attended the International Academy for High School, which at the time was the only all-public all-International Baccalaurate school in North America. I'm still a huge fan of the IB curriculum. I was also a member of FIRST Robotics Team 469.
If you've bothered to read this far, I really like meeting new people! If you're in NYC, let me know, and we can grab coffee. If not, you can send me an email. If you're looking for something a little more official, I participate in /mentoring.