He met Katrina in Cambridge. Sixteen years later, they run a school there.
Allen Hao runs a company whose classrooms are Cambridge college halls. CL Global Academy, which he co-founded in 2009 and still leads as CEO, brings international students into the University's oldest buildings for short, intensive courses on everything from machine learning to entrepreneurship. The pitch is simple and stubborn: the best place to learn is a real Cambridge college, taught by people who actually teach there.
The numbers he reports are not small. More than 1,500 students arrive each year. The academy counts north of 24,000 alumni. It holds Memorandums of Understanding with Cambridge Enterprise and the University's Department of Engineering, runs courses in partnership with King's, St Catharine's, and Lucy Cavendish colleges, and carries British Accreditation Council accreditation plus UCAS recognition. None of it was bought with venture money.
Inside the company, Hao does not call himself CEO. The title on the wall reads Chief Student-Centered Officer. It is a small joke that doubles as a mission statement, and it tells you almost everything about how he wants the place to run.
Short, project-based courses in Cambridge built to spark curiosity and force collaboration, communication, and critical thinking - not just lectures, but real-world problems.
A two-week dive into machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and the ethics of it all - delivered with Cambridge Enterprise.
Idea generation, the global economy, and the messy craft of starting something - taught by a founder who started his own company at 16.
The company starts with two people in Cambridge who were not yet old enough to rent a car in some countries. Allen and Katrina met there at 20 and 18, found a shared appetite for education, travel, and culture, and decided to build something out of it. That something became CL Global Academy in 2009.
Fifteen-plus years later, the partnership still defines the org chart. Allen runs the company as CEO. Katrina holds an advisory role. Between them they have crossed borders constantly, building the connections that now let a teenager from Nanjing or Beijing spend a fortnight studying inside King's College.
Then there is the detail that undercuts every founder cliche about dropping out: in 2023, with the company well over a decade old, Hao enrolled at the University of Cambridge himself. He finished the Master's in 2025. The man who teaches Cambridge to others went and earned the degree.
Where the story starts, and where the company keeps an office.
The classroom, the campus, the entire business model.
An unlikely third anchor, half a world from the lecture halls.
The company has taught in Cambridge for 16 straight years, with no gaps in delivery.
Students wear “Global Programmes” lanyards while studying inside centuries-old college halls.
A reported 38% of students go on to G5 or Ivy League schools - Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Penn, Columbia.
Hao built the whole thing while splitting his life between Shanghai, Cambridge, and Madison, Wisconsin.