September 2020, San Francisco.  ELSA Corp is excited to announce the latest additions to our team, Alan Shang (Senior Vice President of Engineering) and Shiho Watabe  (Vice President and Head of Global Marketing). 

These appointments show ELSA’s commitment to delivering the superb English learning experience for the global community of 1.5 billion English learners.

Alan Shang (Senior Vice President of Engineering)

Alan Shang has joined as Senior Vice President of Engineering. He will be leading all of ELSA’s global software development efforts and growing the engineering team.

Alan comes with over two decades of experience in social media technologies, mobile app and software development, which he will now be leveraging to facilitate product evolution and drive user growth.

Prior to ELSA, Alan held key positions in a number of tech companies. Alan served as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Advisor for Smule, expanding the global engineering team and growing MAU and revenue by more than two times. Prior to Smule, Alan held director positions at Texture by Next Issue (acquired by Apple), Model N (IPO in 2013), and RockYou. He has also co-founded various social media start-ups. Outside of his engineering career, he is passionate about education and serves on the board of Bowman School in Palo Alto.

Shiho Watabe (Vice President and Head of Global Marketing)

Shiho Watabe has joined as Vice President and Head of Global Marketing.  She will be leading all of ELSA’s global marketing efforts and reporting to CEO/Founder Vu Van. 

Shiho comes with over a decade of experience in consumer tech marketing and business, which she will now be leveraging to drive growth in ELSA’s user-base and market presence around the world. 

Prior to ELSA, Shiho served in key roles in innovative companies in Silicon Valley, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and Africa. Shiho was a Senior Director of Marketing for Mercari US (IPO in 2018) from 2017 – 2019.  Prior to Mercari, Shiho was at Google for nearly a decade, including as Head of Social in Asia-Pacific Region, Head of Mobile Marketing for Emerging Markets, and Lead for the Global Online learning platform for advertisers. During her time at Google, Shiho has received a number of awards including the Cannes Lion award and Telecom Asia Awards for the impact of her work. Outside of her marketing career, she has been an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and has held a position as an investor and advisor in Asia and Silicon Valley.  

She holds a Master’s degree from Stanford University and a BA from ICU in Tokyo.  

About ELSA Corp. 

ELSA Speak is an AI-powered English learning platform for pronunciation training and accent reduction. Based in San Francisco, CA, Elsa has been helping over ten million English learners across 100+ countries around the world.