For over 20 years, Alissa has built, positioned and promoted companies, people and ideas. Raised in Silicon Valley, and Pong’s first beta tester, she is no stranger to startups, entrepreneurs, or life-changing technologies; in fact, they are part of the juice in her life. Her experience includes in-house and agency marketing and communications roles within startups and Fortune 100 companies, enabling her to easily walk the line from idea creation to market leadership.

Alissa draws from her own entrepreneurial experiences when creating communication strategies, building communities, or discovering markets. Alissa co-founded Giveplace, an online marketplace for charitable donations. She was also a hired marketing communications gun for Abacus Wealth partners, a financial services firm, and Maker Faire, an O’Reilly Company.

Before her consulting gigs, she spent four years as VP of User Experience and Marketing at uWink, an entertainment and hospitality platform company, where she was instrumental in the creation, execution and promotion of its touch-screen ordering and entertainment system.

In 2004, Alissa was Director of Global Public Relations for PeopleSoft, where she oversaw all public relations activities, initiatives, and programs including: the global corporate program, three product families, four product pillars, 25 industries, and the takeover attempt by Oracle.

Alissa is the publicist for Nolan Bushnell: the founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese, and her dad.

A mother, wife, sister, daughter and design freak with a flea market addiction, Alissa loves to travel, especially if it involves family, friends, or a tropical beach.

Nolan Bushnell created an industry when he founded Atari in 1972 and gave the world Pong, the first blockbuster videogame. Today his design credo—that games should be “easy to learn and difficult to master”—is inspiring a new generation of developers. A prolific entrepreneur, he has started more than 20 companies, including Catalyst Technologies, the first Silicon Valley incubator, and Etak, the first in-car navigation system—not to mention Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater. In the process, he pioneered many of the workplace innovations that have long made Silicon Valley a magnet for creative talent. Bushnell was the first and only person ever to hire Steve Jobs, which he details in his 2013 book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs. With his latest startup, BrainRush, he is intent on fixing education with software that uses gamification principles to “addict” students to learning. A biopic, tentatively titled Atari and slated to star Leonardo DiCaprio as Bushnell, is currently in preproduction.