Founder · CEO
Kong Group LLC · YuCROWN Corporation · Earth LinC
Drawn to the work that has not yet been done.
Data engineering, a premium brand, a market with no map, an open protocol — Ellen's roles share nothing on the surface. The thread is not expertise in any of them. It is the crossing itself: walking into a domain she has never worked in, and building it into something real.
A Master's in Information Systems from Stevens Institute of Technology — one of the oldest technology universities in the United States — then eight years as a Data Engineer at Fitch Ratings, one of the three major global credit rating agencies, in New York. A deep foundation in systems where the data is the asset.
Then, China. At Apple, during the build-out of its retail presence: a role with no fixed function, where store openings, recruiting, operations, training, and leadership all sat inside the same work — because nothing was yet in place.
Then General Manager for Greater China at Disguise, a UK company — the whole China business built from zero, with no prior background in the field. A team of three, a category with no commercial footing in the market yet, a regional operation stood up and delivering from nothing. The point was never the technology. It was that she can walk into a field she has never worked in and make it real.
Founded Kong Group to build with AI and Web3, working with manufacturers such as Luxshare — one of Apple's largest supply-chain partners — on where AI should enter their business, as an NVIDIA Inception startup partner.
That work is not execution. It starts at design: where to begin, what to build first, where the real leverage is. Kong's AI layer reaches for the best available models rather than locking to one — models are changeable parts, not the product.
Founded YuCROWN, a US 501(c)(3) — a nonprofit that owns no product and builds no commercial tool. Its role is singular: to initiate and anchor what comes next.
This year, launched Earth LinC — an open protocol on Polygon, initiated by YuCROWN and owned by no company. It fuses three things almost never built as one: AI that composes what a person makes, Web3 identity that stays sovereignly their own, and the nonprofit form that anchors the whole — so nothing about a person's good can be extracted. That fusion, in a single open structure, is the rare part.
Launching it as a protocol, not a product, is the point: the commercial tooling on top is Kong's, but the ground underneath belongs to everyone and outlives any company. Its line is two words — LinC for good.
In the AI era
When everyone has the tools, running them stops being the scarce skill. What the moment rewards is the builder — the one who decides what is worth making, moves across design, product, and operations as a single person, and treats AI not as a tool to operate but as a way of thinking.
That is Ellen. Founder, operator, and builder at once — she has walked into a market, a company, and now an open protocol, each begun from nothing. Inside the team, not above it.