Danielle Knaster

Hello and welcome! A bit about me: I grew up in London but have been living in America for the past decade - between NYC, Philly, and Boston. I'm also fluent in Russian.

I earned my bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in Philosophy, minoring in English Literature, with coursework in Computer Science. I began my career in data analytics at Kantar, working on major accounts including Amazon and Reddit, and later joined Beauty Co-Lab (Omnicom) as an early data hire supporting L'Oréal's global media spend.

Wanting to transition toward strategy, I pursued an MBA at Harvard Business School, where I'm currently a second-year student graduating in May 2026. I spent last summer at Prosek Partners in NYC working on executive and financial crisis management. I'm now thinking through my longer-term direction.

If you know me well, you probably call me Ellie. I grew up in London but moved to New York City for the final years of high school. I've lived in the United States ever since - between Philly, NYC, and Boston.

I earned my bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where I majored in Philosophy, minored in English Literature, and completed coursework in Computer Science. Following graduation, I began my career in data analytics at Kantar, where I worked on the Amazon and Reddit accounts and became primarily responsible for the financial services vertical, leading a team of four analysts and playing a key role in securing an additional $5M investment from Amazon.

I then joined Beauty Co-Lab, a bespoke agency within Omnicom created to service L'Oréal's $4B media spend, where I was among the early data hires. I helped build measurement frameworks and insights used by senior stakeholders to guide significant marketing investment decisions across the Professional Products Division.

Over time, my interests shifted from pure analytics toward more strategic work, which led me to pursue an MBA. I am currently a second-year at Harvard Business School, graduating in May 2026.

During the summer between my RC and EC years, I worked at Prosek Partners, a global communications firm in NYC, on the Special Situations team. I supported executive and financial crisis management related to fraud, reputation, M&A, shareholder activism, proxy contests, and other high-stakes corporate situations.

Alongside business school, I've been working at a Series A consumer behavior AI startup, where I sit within the growth function and work closely with the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. I focus on product and growth strategy - essentially figuring out what customers want, what competitors are building, and how we bring new offerings to market.

In parallel, I'm also working on building my own startup, Alavisa (more on that in the next tab), which aims to automate and streamline the student visa application process.

Alavisa

I'm the co-founder and product lead of Alavisa, a startup simplifying the student visa application process through automation - essentially a TurboTax for student visas. The current application system is fragmented, outdated, and difficult to navigate, with workflows that haven't meaningfully changed in decades and are often built on unintuitive government websites.

We're building Alavisa to replace that experience with a guided, automated workflow that gives students and their families more confidence and time back when completing a high-stakes, time-sensitive process - something that has become especially important in recent years, as US immigration has grown more complex and closely scrutinized.

I've been building Alavisa since Spring 2025 with my classmate and best friend, Nikki Katthain. We're currently partnering with universities across the US on a B2B2C model, and are already used by students at UChicago, USC, and Harvard. We plan to expand into CPT, OPT, H-1B, and study-abroad visa workflows in the coming year.

During my final semester of my MBA, I'm focused on helping scale Alavisa and setting it up to become a full-time venture for my co-founder (who is very motivated not to return to consulting). I love building this company and will remain closely involved, but I'll be pursuing a full-time role post-graduation.

If someone in your world is headed to the US for school, point them to Alavisa - our waitlist is open at alavisa.global.

Partnerships Center for Alavisa

I built a lightweight personal CRM to manage and scale Alavisa's school partnership pipeline.

The platform is designed around how early-stage university partnerships actually evolve. It organizes universities into a clear pipeline, preserves the full context of outreach, demos, and pilots, and continuously surfaces the most important next actions. The system proactively reminds me when to follow up, share progress updates, and request feedback at key moments - ensuring partnerships continue moving forward even as conversations span weeks or months. By linking relationship history with execution, it enables more consistent engagement, clearer prioritization, and better insight into where partnerships gain or lose momentum.

The live CRM is staying behind the curtain for confidentiality reasons, so I'm not sure I will be sharing this with you just yet. Happy to explain how it works in further detail.

Provisions

Provisions is a small cooking platform I built that turns the cookbooks I reach for most into everyday inspiration. I uploaded PDFs of my favorite authors (especially Ottolenghi and Alison Roman) and paired them with a living pantry of staples I usually have on hand, plus a short list of groceries I buy regularly.

It scans my available ingredients and surfaces recipes where I already have most of what's needed, favoring flexibility and improvisation over perfection. Because I love cooking and hosting dinners, it's become an easy way to decide what to cook and how to make it my own.

The site also includes a small gallery of things I've cooked — dishes inspired by the platform and the authors I return to most. You can find Provisions here.

Danielle Knaster

Danielle Knaster

In Brief

In Detail

In Progress