Our two female founders met in 2018 while volunteering in Botswana.
We’ve both dedicated our careers to design. Through Smith Assembly, we want to share with you what we’ve learned about the magic of learning, working, and playing together — especially how hands-on building activities deepen human connection.
READ OUR ORIGIN STORYDRAG TO VIEW TIMELINE
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
❝I have an aerospace engineering degree, so sometimes joke that I’m a blonde rocket scientist.❞
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
I want to be an astronaut. Seriously. One of the people I admire most is Katherine Johnson, the mathematician and technologist whose calculations were integral to the success of NASA's Mercury, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs. She was one of the women featured in the film Hidden Figures. Brilliant, brave, and despite overwhelming obstacles became a hero. I’m sad to say I didn’t know about her while I was a student. I was almost always the only woman in the classroom, and frequently experienced bias and discrimination from my professors and classmates. It would have been so comforting and inspiring to have known about her sooner, but she serves a constant source of inspiration for me today. I’ve applied to NASA’s astronaut program twice, but until they get their act together and invite me to join, I’ll continue doing the work I love in engineering and design.
Space exploration requires courage, creativity, curiosity, and a deep and diverse skill set. As an entrepreneur, these are all things I bring to Smith Assembly. During my 25-year career, at startups and companies like Google and frog, I’ve grown amazing teams, delivered hundreds of cutting-edge web, desktop, mobile, and embedded solutions, released dozens of websites and mobile apps, and launched many products.
I always advocate for the best interests of our clients, our team, and the culture in which we work. Nature is something I also care deeply about, so I do what I can in our company to protect it.
READ LIZ'S Q&A❝I have an aerospace engineering degree, so sometimes joke that I’m a blonde rocket scientist.❞
Co-Founder & CPO
❝Creating is a way to extract and share the wonders of our humanity with others.❞
Co-Founder & CPO
Social innovation, movement, and rhythm. These are the tenants of my life, literally, emotionally, and spiritually.
I was raised in a household of feminist women, in my home of Heredia, Costa Rica. They fought, and continue to fight, for women’s rights, gender equality, and the rights of vulnerable peri-urban communities. My passion for social justice is fueled by that upbringing from those amazing women, especially my grandmother, Marta Campos Mendez, whose tireless work for the women and workers of my country is a constant source of inspiration for me and my desire to help build a better world.
Movement has been a cornerstone of my life. Initially taking me from Costa Rica to MIT for my education as a mechanical engineer and then around the world for the work I do. Movement has facilitated the great diversity of people with whom I’ve collaborated, the continuum of perspectives from which I’ve learned, and the various teams that I have organized and led, and the diversity of projects I’ve worked on. I’ve built pedal powered machines in indigenous communities without electricity or running water and developed patented catalysts in a state-of-the-art European research laboratory. This is some of the most valuable experience I bring to Smith Assembly.
I play with, practice, and teach Latin rhythms and dance. Expressing this side of myself fuels the creativity for everything else I do in life. The rhythms of my artistic dance movement allow for ease and flow into the vast amount of travel that I do and help keep me grounded in all my work, from sustainable technological innovation to justice work. I am never happier than when I am dancing.
READ TA'S Q&A❝Creating is a way to extract and share the wonders of our humanity with others.❞
Smith Assembly participates in 1% for the Planet and donates an additional 5% of our revenue to nonprofits selected by our global innovators in order to amplify the positive impact they have in their communities.
We’re committed to supporting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals with a focus on: GOAL 5: Gender Equality, GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, GOAL 10: Reduced Inequalities, and GOAL 13: Climate Action. The policies we enact and the metrics we measure ourselves against are aligned with B Lab’s SDG Action Manager.
Learn how we can help you build trust, strengthen relationships, and improve inclusion within your team. A regular cadence of team building and jedi training activities will increase engagement, decrease turnover, and lead to greater team and company performance.
To support the home-based, remote, and/or distributed ways you and your teams are now working, we’re creating a series of online workshops that you can do via video conference whenever works best for your schedule. We’ll resume hosting onsite workshops once pandemic-related safety protocols and restrictions on gatherings are no longer necessary.