Our Team
Olivia Tomaeno, CEO
Olivia received her M.S. in Learning Design and Technology from Stanford University, where she built the first version of Knowalla as her Capstone project. Prior to going back to school, Olivia built and ran an independent executive functioning (EF) coaching practice for middle, high school, and college-aged students. In this role, she worked 1-1 with students to help them identify their academic strengths and weaknesses, and to facilitate a skill-building plan to overcome EF challenges.
Connor Haugh, CTO
Prior to joining Knowalla, Connor Haugh worked as a senior software engineer at online education giant edX, where he gained deep experience building learning and authoring tools for scale. Connor cut his teeth in the industry building and owning learning tools for edX’s millions of learners. More importantly, he built edX’s openAI ChatGPT plugin and paved the way for Xpert, its AI learning assistant. Connor has spoken at conferences around the world on topics in the intersection of open source software development and education.
Bobby Shogren, COO
Bobby has spent the most recent part of his career supporting Seed and Series A startups at Scrum Ventures, an early-stage VC firm. He works across Scrum’s investment team and Studio incubation program which focuses on fostering partnerships between startups and leading Japanese corporations. Prior to working at Scrum, Bobby worked at Simon-Kucher & Partners, a global strategy consulting firm, helping startups and enterprise companies develop monetization strategies and grow their revenue.
