About Elisa
Elisa’s perspective as an advisor and coach draws from her 30 year career as a successful CEO, investor and industry leader. Elisa has built thriving companies in software, hardware and services. Elisa has bought companies, sold them, merged them, build companies from scratch, come in as a turnaround CEO, executed roll ups, and has had the privilege of shepherding hundreds of companies through new product innovation and across the chasm.
As an investor she has deeply enjoyed diverse roles in venture, project finance and growth PE, as well as running an LBO shop. She is a generalist in regards to sector (with notably extra experience in B2B SaaS, ClimateTech and transportation), but has deep strategy expertise in go-to-market, new product innovation and experience design.
Elisa believes that she did all of that to earn the right to become an Executive Coach for high impact leaders.
The Full Story
Elisa is an internationally recognized leader at the intersection of technology innovation and behavior design. Most recently as Managing Director at Wildcat Venture Partners, Elisa focused on climate SaaS / AI investments and supported climate-tech CEOs through their entrepreneurial journeys. Elisa joined Wildcat after a decade as CEO of FutureBrand Speck, where she pioneered Experience Engineering, a 'next generation design thinking’ methodology credited with infusing reliability and behavior science into the innovation process. Both Fortune 500s and startups as diverse as Google, Apple, Samsung, Cisco, Tesla, P&G, Ford, Medtronic, and PayPal turned to Elisa and her teams of brand, product, environment and service designers in order to ‘future proof’ growth with new innovations. Speck’s innovations generated billions in revenue, and now sit inside our pockets, bodies, homes, hospitals, cars, and data centers. Elisa sold Speck Design to FutureBrand (NYSE: IPG), where she served on the global leadership team through 2019. Elisa lectures at Stanford University and speaks regularly at innovation summits such as CES, SXSW, DENT and TNW, to advance more rigorous paradigms for innovation and growth.
EARLY CAREER
Earlier in her career as Founder and CEO of SAAS company PartsRiver, Elisa innovated early intelligent data management (IDM) in the transportation industry. There she acquired $150M in assets from Saqqara and CDC (a Boeing subsidiary), growing PartsRiver into the leading provider of IDM within 4 years, and then selling it to Rush Industries. Following her success at PartsRiver, Elisa ran Bay Laurel Capital, a micro-cap LBO firm affiliated with AI LLC, a $4B PE fund.
Elisa began her finance career in global emerging markets, making investments at New York-based private equity firm Zephyr Management and Harare-based Zimbabwe Progress Fund. Her project development experience began on Capitol Hill as Director of Economic Development for Enterprise Foundation, the largest affordable housing finance intermediary, and then at HousingWorks, raising and deploying over $100M in project finance for hundreds of new affordable homes.
SERVICE
Elisa has maintained an unrelenting commitment to impact work, and to always serve on (at least) three nonprofit boards supporting efforts internationally, nationally and locally - she is currently focused on human rights, nonpartisan democracy infrastructure and affordable housing. Elisa is on the boards of MidPen - a $2B AUM Bay Area affordable housing developer, Represent.Us - the leader in nonpartisan democracy reform, and (advisory) Equality Now - a global legal infrastructure firm advancing women’s equality. Past roles include the board of Remedy Interactive (healthcare SaaS, sold to Battery), Pailor (SMB Neobank), Skylyte (enterprise culture design), QuakeFinder (AI earthquake prediction, now Google), Brava Home (smart kitchen, sold to Middleby), and Young Presidents Organization (YPO) Pacific Regional Board.
EDUCATION
Elisa holds an MBA from the Wharton School and graduated cum laude from Princeton University, where she was a national champion rower and named All Ivy.
Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Elisa lives there now with her husband and three children.