Ellen is a Partner at boldstart. She joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – investing and supporting founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies.

Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked in a variety of early stage product roles: at Lola on travel tooling, at Kickstarter on backer-facing projects, and at Microsoft on the first versions of cross-platform Office Mobile. The common thread is building tools that enable people to do creative work.

Ellen has an a M.B.A from Harvard Business School, and a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. She grew up in Rochester Hills, MI, but now lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and her cat, Gutenberg.

On her first ever call with Eliot, her husband locked himself out of their house and left his phone inside. He rang the doorbell repeatedly while she continued texting his phone “PLEASE ANSWER THE DOOR I AM TALKING TO AN INVESTOR AND IT WON’T STOP RINGING.”

Favorite food: All of them.
Favorite arcade game: Tetris!
Favorite cartoon character: Pinky & The Brain from the Animaniacs
Favorite music: Taylor Swift (sorry) 
Favorite emoji: My favorite Emoji is the llama 🦙 because it made it possible to type the entire llama llama duck song in emojis as long as you’re willing to pretend the broom is a rake. 💊 🧱 🥔