Welcome Ellen Chisa! Announcing Boldstart’s First Founder in Residence

We play the long 🏈 at boldstart and focus on investing in people, not just a company. Over the past decade, our mission has been to engage with founders across the arc of their careers — from starting companies to partnering with them as advisors, angel investors, and key hires at existing portfolio companies. Some of our most successful investments were started by founders we have known over many phases of their journey, Rahul from Superhuman and Guy from Snyk being two of many examples.

Our mission for the next ten years is to double down on the 🔌 of our people, helping our founders go farther, faster. A startup’s trajectory is similar to a rocket’s, changing an inch on the launchpad becomes a mile difference in the atmosphere. And like a 🚀 bringing in the right person at the right time, especially in the early days, can not only accelerate the path to product market fit, but also change the trajectory to build a bigger company. So we are taking our own advice and doubling down on what’s working for the next decade.

Today, we are thrilled to announce Ellen Chisa is joining boldstart as a Founder-in-Residence. We first met Ellen when she co-founded Dark, our portfolio company making back end infrastructure super easy for front end developers. Before that, she led and shipped the early products at Lola (SaaS travel spend management), Kickstarter, and worked on the first versions of non-windows Office Mobile at Microsoft. In addition to Dark, we got to know Ellen as an angel investor and have subsequently joined forces on a few portfolio companies.

Ellen’s superpower is having the experience to know how to tactically help founders with things like user research and product development, messaging and marketing strategy. She brings a wealth of experience from shipping the first version of an application to interviewing open source users to better understanding the “ah ha” moment. So when we shared our vision to double down on helping our founders with the very beginning of starting a company, it was a meeting of the minds.

What is a founder in residence you might ask? It’s a lot of what Ellen is already doing, continuing to actively invest as an angel and working with the teams in our portfolio on product and strategy. Ellen is also 🏗 our knowledge base to help technical enterprise founders at the very beginning of their journey as they make their first hire, develop their first product messaging, build out their initial go-to-market strategy, launch their company for the first time, and more. Stay tuned for much more to come and you can read more in her post here.

Welcome to team boldstart Ellen!