Sawyer Hall

Cofounder and Head of Product at Elsa, a live social map in NYC.

Hi, I’m Sawyer. I’m currently focused on building Elsa, a live social map platform with a small team in NYC. I’ve worked in tech since high school, when I joined a ridesharing startup in SF called Onward.

After it was acquired, I matriculated at Dartmouth, where I was on the rowing team and led the Magnuson Center entrepreneurship program and the hunting and fishing club. I also won some grants to conduct research and build small startups. Some of my work has been patented and published in research journals, listed below.

I grew up in Rochester, NY, where I fly fished in most of my spare time. I’m also an avid runner and cyclist.

Employment

2025–now Elsa (Head of Product). I cofounded a live social map platform incubated at Tumbleweed, then hired and led the product team. On the App Store.
2020–21 Onward (Early Employee). I built and operated the driver dispatch system for a rideshare startup that was later acquired by RoyalCare.

Internships

2025 R7 Partners (Product Intern). I built Python automations for the investment process, focused on consumer hardware startups.
2025 Greenhouse Capital Partners (VC Intern). I analyzed industrial robotics startups and built broader market maps with Python and some scraping.
2024 Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health (Product Intern). I led the Python analysis for a paper on healthcare providers’ energy use, published by Oxford University Press.
2024 Mushborn Labs (Product Intern). I automated the greenhouse and extraction bioprocesses for a mushroom superfoods startup in New Zealand.
2022 OffBeast (Intern #1). I built an ingredient emissions calculator for the first 3D-printed meat startup funded by Y Combinator.
2022 Future\Perfect Ventures (VC Intern). I analyzed crypto and NFT startups, traded crypto, and wrote the portfolio updates.
2020–21 The Cellular Agriculture Society (Fellow). I built simulations of cell-based meat manufacturing and edited the first textbook in the industry.

Recent projects

2026 Wattson, side project. Software for a decentralized electric grid: a home energy agent that connects solar, batteries and EVs and trades them into local markets through virtual power plants. In progress.
2026 Find the Perfect Role, concept demo. Drop a résumé and watch every open role at a16z and speedrun narrow to the ten that fit you. Astro, WebGL and Claude.
2026 Chip, side project. An agent that sits in an iMessage group thread and drops App Clip cards. The first one splits a bill: photograph the receipt, everyone taps what they had, Apple Pay collects it, nobody installs anything.
2026 Townhall Media, side project. A reading queue for a newsletter: ingests free sources, dedupes them into stories, scores them against standing interests, and prints a daily brief.

Patents & writing

2026 Sustainable Healthcare Activities of U.S. Professional Medical Societies, Academic Medicine
2025 The Hallway, essays on Substack
2023 Modern Meat: The Next Generation of Meat from Cells (editor), The Cellular Agriculture Society
2022 Method and system for fungi production in an aquaponics system, US patent 11,483,985