When Vu Van, founder of ELSA Corp, moved to the US, people struggled to understand her. So, she built an app to help others in the same difficulty. 5 million users later, she talked to us about her very personal mission. It was a very real experience that inspired tech entrepreneur and Ho Chi Minh City local Vu Van to found tech startup ELSA Corp., an acronym for the English Language Speaking Assistant. Growing up, she had been an A* student in English writing, reading and grammar. However, when it came to actually speaking, she struggled with the pronunciation of certain words, leaving her feeling misunderstood, and lacking in confidence. So, she decided to do something about it, combining voice recognition technology and artificial intelligence in an app launched in 2016, which is now used by over five million people around the world. Operating out of offices overseeing 1000 in-app lessons in the Bay Area, Vietnam and India, she talked through her very personal mission to help people struggling as she did. “When I first moved to the US from Vietnam, people had a really hard time understanding my English. Not because I didn’t know the language, but because I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly,” says Vu of the confidence-bashing experience she found moving country to the US in 2009 to pursue her MBA at Stanford. She remembers feeling regularly embarrassed and mortified when someone asked her to repeat her sentence, struggling to make herself understood. “I thought to myself, ‘How do we get technology to build a product solution that is both scalable and accessible worldwide? How do I build something similar to Siri and Alexa, but in a more meaningful way that can be used by all accents around the world,’” she explains of her hunt for a solution. Soon, she focused on combining artificial intelligence and voice recognition technology. And so, ELSA, the English speaking assistant was built.

• Drive market growth, lead sales and strategic partnerships to take full accountability of all financial, operational and customer satisfaction metrics
• Represent ELSA in India in all aspects, foster strategic relationships with partners and customers at the C-suite level, and facilitate PR & media relations
• Build a process to generate local user insights, champion product improvements and launching by collaborating with product, marketing and engineering teams
• Drive recruitment to build an A-team and oversee cross-functional operations to ensure all business aspects run smoothly

You are an Indian native having been recently living in India at least for a few years and deeply understand Indian social and business cultures.

• You are a true leader at heart who has proven achievements for 5-8 years in leveraging marketing and business development efforts to drive growth in a fast-pace market, preferably experience in startups.
• You can lead fruitful partnerships with agencies, government, partners and local press, and at the same time, you are customer obsessed and love being our customer advocate.
• You can own responsibilities in managing operations and budgets, and have connected with stellar people to build an A-team from scratch.
• You are excited about being part of technology-driven world. You are curious about entrepreneurship and global innovative ideas, but you can adapt the product for local usage. You must have vision and think far, but you are also willing to roll up your sleeve and get your hands dirty.
• Have MBA/higher graduate degree holder? Awesome. If not? Still great.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and attractive stock option.
• Experience in working at a unicorn Silicon Valley startup to scale up a business in your dear country.
• Opportunities to travel as we have global team in Palo Alto, Lisbon and Ho Chi Minh city
• Opportunities to grow professionally and play a critical role to shape the next stage of our company’s growth
• Opportunity to create impact on the lives of 1.5 billion language learners around the world