Alissa Orlando

Alissa Orlando is an entrepreneur, investor, and practitioner working to build the next generation of employee ownership. She is an Executive-in-Residence at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management, where she brings experience building worker-owned and governed companies and mobilizing capital for employee ownership.

Alissa co-founded The Drivers’ Cooperative, a worker-owned ride-hailing company, and served as its Managing Director. Through her work with the Francesco Collaborative, she has helped secure institutional investment in impact-first employee-ownership buyout funds. She has also worked with philanthropies and credit unions to scale investment in employee ownership and serves on the Board of Directors of Start.coop.

Alissa is also a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer and co-founder of You Should Smile More Productions, with credits including Maybe Happy Ending, Operation Mincemeat, Chess, and GRIM. Earlier in her career, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and led operations for Rocket Internet and Uber across East Africa. She holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University.