My name is Sacha (McElligott) Schermerhorn—welcome to my website!

I was born in London to a musician and a photographer and moved to San Francisco when I was 6. As a kid I attended the Paul Green School of Rock, focused heavily on art and chess, skied, and made skateboarding videos with my friends. Exploring these diverse interests played a huge role in shaping me!

Work-wise, I did ~8 years in neuroscience before getting into startups. My time in neuroscience resulted in 2 major fellowships from the NSF (I won the NSF GRFP) and NIH (~$200k total), 2 publications—one highlighting a novel protein involved in Alzheimer’s disease (here) and another highlighting decision signals in a low-level sensory area of the rodent brain (published in Nature Neuroscience, here)—12 conference presentations, a departmental thesis award, and 6 university-wide grants. I worked on every model you can imagine (rodents, NHPs, fruit flies, humans, etc.) and in many different domains within neuroscience (computational, visual, neurogenetics, psychophysics, etc.).

After building 8 or so products during the initial COVID lockdown, I got into Pioneer, through which I met my cofounder for Lolly (more on us here.) I can’t tell you how much those experiences changed my life. I am so lucky.

I obsessively collect data on a lot of things in my life. Some examples include: places I’ve eaten, people I’ve seen, phone calls I’ve had, movies I’ve seen, times I wake up, Wikipedias I’ve read, dreams I’ve had, coffees I’ve had, etc. These lists have been going for >2 years and are not unique (I’ve been to Sweetgreen 68 times since October 16th, 2020.) I also wrote some code to track every keystroke, my mouse position (@ 40Hz!), as well as the apps I use at any given time (a la Wolfram). I hate my cell phone and always keep it off unless absolutely necessary.

I’m currently building a new company in stealth. If you’d like to know more about my work background, it’s all on my LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me!