Isa’s love of science and data was instilled in her at young age by her father, a computer engineer. An American Chemical Society Scholar while studying chemistry at Hampton University, Isa then worked at Pfizer both as a research chemist in the metabolic diseases group and a data scientist in the neuropathic pain group.
In the research group, she developed drug candidates for diabetes treatment and her work on glucokinase activators was published in Tetrahedron Letters. In the clinical group, she designed and executed statistical analyses to inform and support the global clinical strategies for Lyrica—one of Pfizer’s top selling drugs with a peak of $3B in annual sales—in over 15 countries. Isa also holds a Masters in Pharmacology from Cornell University.
Isa decided to go to business school to bring the technical and business together. After earning her MBA from MIT Sloan, Isa was a Vice President of Strategy at JPMorgan Chase in New York and Hong Kong. She worked closely with senior management and C-suite executives to build and execute various strategic initiatives across digital, product development, analytics, marketing and client services--resulting in over $1bn to the firm, annually.
While navigating her professional and personal life, Isa noticed one consistent commonality that all successful, happy humans had: the core need for genuine connection. Millennials and Gen-Z have the highest feelings of loneliness and crave better social experiences more than ever before. And she knew she had the strength—and determination—to make a difference. Sports was a great anchor to achieve this, and was a core experience to her upbringing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Isa left Wall Street to found Squad which is emerging as the app of choice for gen-z to integrate their sports fandom with their friendships. Backed by notable Silicon Valley VC firms, unicorn founders, top professional athletes, Squad has been scaling nonstop since its launch.
Much more than just a VC-backed founder, Isa heavily incorporates her core values and relevant culture into the product and the way in which Squad scales. Squad licenses its software directly to professional sports franchises. It started with NBA teams and quickly expanded to WNBA, NFL, NHL, and among others.
Just out of pure curiosity, Isa tried skydiving for the first time in Mauritius (small island about 1,000 east of Madagascar). Little did she know she’d fall completely in love with the skydiving experience, and the sport overall. More importantly, skydiving served as a hard mental health reset that she used to help her navigate and manage founder life.
Isa is now training on a 4-way formation team to compete in the 2024 US Nationals for Skydiving. She and her teammates are coached by the SDC Rhythm XP team who are national, and world, champions in the sport of skydiving.