Mentors react to a student demo, Beijing 2026Presenting at demo day, Beijing 2026Pitching to the panel, Beijing 2026
About Arena
Why Arena exists now.
AI is changing what careers ask of young people. Our team designs programs that build the agency, taste, and craft students, educators, and families need for what comes next.
Where the people who design and teach Arena programs studied and worked.
Studied at
Worked at
A member of
Startup Program
Partner Network
Arena leadership
Our leadership.
Jing Jing Yang
Co-founder
Brown · Tsinghua · Schwarzman ScholarsApple · Deloitte · Kimi (Moonshot AI)
Jing Jing grew up in the international school system, attending WAB and ISB from early years to high school graduation. She studied Economics and Behavioral Decision Sciences at Brown, taking two years off in the middle to co-found a company, and conducted research with Microsoft AI during her time at Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. She later joined Kimi (Moonshot AI), one of China’s frontier AI labs, in their international growth team.
Education became her passion through her younger sister. Jing Jing helped map out her sister’s path through school and saw how much of it came down to knowing early what was possible. She has also seen firsthand, from inside hiring processes, how much employers now care about AI literacy. She is not an engineer, yet she makes websites and tools with AI. That is exactly what Arena helps students learn.
Phillip studied Computer Science at Caltech, worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, and earned an MBA and a master’s in engineering from Harvard. He co-founded Homebase, the first company from Vietnam backed by Y Combinator, was named to Forbes 30 Under 30, and was a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua. He leads Arena’s program design with Jing Jing.
His parents were Chinese immigrants who cleaned houses in South Africa before they could move the family to America, so he could go to the right schools. Their whole life was a bet on education, and it worked. Co-founding a Y Combinator company then showed him how people at the edge of technology learn: by trying the newest tools as soon as they appear. Arena grew out of a simple hope that the next generation finds a path that works for them as well as his did.
