Meet Our Team
Say hello to a globally distributed set of wicked smart & highly curious people. Our world-class applied research lab collaborates with a broad ecosystem to build a future Internet that is local-first, offline-first, resilient, and accessible.

Brooklyn Zelenka
CTO & Co-founder
expede#9455
Initially trained as a composer, Brooklyn fell into programming nearly by accident, and has never looked back. Her belief in open standards has lead to work spanning authorization, VMs, data privacy, databases, sync protocols, and others.

Boris Mann
CEO & Co-founder
borismann#5151
Boris Mann is a long time web tinkerer who got started with open source in the early 2000s, building worldwide developer communities and events when open source was still a radical act. Today you’ll find him continuing this with the DWeb, IPFS, and Filecoin communities. Boris lives in Vancouver, Canada where he likes to cook and eat.

Brian
Protocol Engineer
bgins#3455
Brian is protocol engineer on the Fission ODD SDK team. He loves frontend web development, teaching, audio programming, and cycling through the woods.

Philipp Krüger
Protocol Engineer
matheus23#1693
Working on the WNFS spec & implementation. Really into commons networks, user agency, programming languages and badminton.

Chad Kohalyk
Head of Operations
chadkoh#7744
Chad works with all Fissioneers on the challenges of a fully distributed, remote-first, asynchronous organization operating on five continents. When not turning principles into processes he is nomading with his camera, posting historical tidbits on various decentralized social media.

Ryan Betts
Head of Design
depatchedmode#5383
Helping Fission make nice looking things that behave very well for as many people as possible. My other computer is a drum kit.

Bruno Monteiro
Illustrator / Designer
brunomonts#7375
São Paulo-based designer experienced in designs of various flavors. You name it: illustration, graphic, web, printing, etc. Lover of movie nights and cooking for friends.

Chris Bentzen
Event Coordinator
bentzen#2038
Event Coordinator and other random ops for Fission. Living on the unceded land of the Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo, BC).

Becky Vazquez
Marketing Communications Producer
heybeckyv#3093
Becky leads Fission's marketing and communications efforts through content creation, video, email, and social media marketing. When she's not sharing Fission's story, you can find her studying folklore and learning ancient languages.

Zeeshan Lakhani
Staff Research Engineer
zeeshanlakhani
Zeeshan Lakhani is a Staff Researcher Engineer at Fission, working on local-first software, and leading efforts on Homestar, an open-world compute engine related to IPVM and Wasm execution. Additionally, he is co-founder and organizer of Papers We Love and PWLConf and a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, studying Programming Language Theory. Formerly, he was director of fraud engineering and strategic research at BlockFi, drove programmable networking at Comcast, worked on impactful distributed systems at Basho, co-wrote the Readability 2.0 iOS app while at Arc90, and helped drive interactive content at NYPL Labs.