Kyna Fong liked to play close to the table. As a Harvard undergraduate, she attacked with both forehand and backhand, sending the ball back with heavy topspin. “I'm always taking aggressive shots,” she said in 2001. The description belongs to a table tennis player. It is also a useful place to begin looking at a career that would move through mathematics, economics, software, and the business she built with her brother.
The temptation is to turn every early achievement into a prediction. Win a tournament, acquire a doctorate, start a company: surely the plan was there all along. Fong’s own account is less tidy. She has described becoming an entrepreneur almost incidentally, pulled along by a problem she wanted to solve. The résumé looks orderly from a distance. Up close, there are detours, teammates, and a surprising amount of administrative work.
Close enough to read the spin
She learned table tennis at summer camp at nine, became Canada’s under-12 champion, and continued competing after her family moved to the United States. At Harvard, she captained the club. Her sport rewarded quick decisions, but the preparation was patient work: footwork, repeated strokes, and finding someone good enough to practice against.
The results record for the March 30-April 1, 2001 college championships puts Fong first in women’s singles. It also lists her and MIT’s Helen Huang first in women’s doubles. There is a pleasing economy to the evidence: two names, two institutions, one shared result. Even an individual sport offers opportunities to work with someone from the other side of the river.
She did some of the organizing, too. The National Collegiate Table Tennis Association lists her as treasurer from 2000 through 2003 and as a New England division director in the earlier part of that period. Those are jobs with less applause attached. Someone still has to help run the competition after the final point.
One of her regular opponents at Harvard was Enoch Kyerematen, a former member of Ghana’s national team. Their games brought different generations of the sport together. She respected his competition and generally won. It is a better university detail than another photograph of a person posed beside a bookshelf.
The work around the work
Her first experience of running an operation came in the family business. Born and raised in Edmonton, she later helped her father establish his practice in California. She handled reception, billing, and office management, including hiring and training staff. The work gave her an early view of the distance between an organization’s stated purpose and everything required to keep its doors open.
This was a teenager dealing with the parts of a business that customers rarely celebrate: a payment that needed pursuing, a new colleague who needed training, the next administrative task. A good idea could be important and still leave somebody responsible for the paperwork. Fong had been that somebody.
There is a modest organizational thread running through these years. Office manager, club captain, association treasurer: each role carries obligations beyond personal performance. It would be too neat to call them a founder training program. They do, however, show her taking responsibility for the conditions in which other people could do their work.
An economist with unfinished questions
At Harvard, she completed a bachelor’s in applied mathematics and economics and a master’s in computer science, graduating in 2003 at 19. She received the Hoopes Prize and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. The same student also played ultimate frisbee and JV women’s ice hockey and served as president of the Harvard Yearbook. Apparently a full course load still left some calendar to argue with.
Her explanation for continuing to graduate school was straightforward: “I feel like I have so much left to learn.” She went to Stanford for an economics doctorate and became an assistant professor there in 2008. The academic route gave her time to work on questions that resisted quick answers.
In a 2007 paper with Yuliy Sannikov, she studied cooperation in a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. The players had imperfect private information about one another and could not communicate. Under the paper’s assumptions, the authors showed how efficient cooperation could become attainable as the future mattered sufficiently to the players.
That is a formal result, with carefully specified conditions. Its central question is accessible enough: how can people keep cooperating when they cannot fully see what the other person is doing? A reader need not follow every equation to appreciate why the problem occupies economists. Much of a working life takes place with incomplete information.
Another paper, co-authored with Robin S. Lee and dated September 2013, examined bargaining and the formation of buyer-seller networks. Relationships could be made, maintained, or broken, with costs attached. Participants looked ahead to possible changes. The model treated a business relationship as something with a past and a future, rather than a transaction suspended in time.
These papers complicate the familiar account of an academic leaving theory behind for business. Fong had already been studying questions about cooperation, incentives, and durable relationships. Her later work changed the setting and the pace. The earlier questions remain an interesting part of her intellectual biography.
A company by way of a side project
Elation began with Kyna and her older brother Conan trying to build a better software tool for their father’s business. They founded the company in 2010. She took on engineering work in its early days, drawing on the coding she had learned at Harvard. A technical education had become useful in a very immediate way: there was something to build, and someone waiting to try it.
Fong has said the siblings started working in their spare time before committing themselves to the company. Their partnership rested on confidence in each other’s intentions, even when their views differed. Family familiarity can supply a substantial amount of context. It also leaves fewer opportunities to pretend you misunderstood the question.
Her academic appointment overlapped with a 2008-2010 research fellowship. During that period she encountered debates among researchers, administrators, and policymakers. She was also familiar with everyday operations in a small business. Seeing both settings gave her a way to compare ambitious proposals with the practical circumstances in which they would land.
A promising idea still has to survive someone else’s working day.
An editorial thread through Fong’s approach to building
The company’s name carried its own expectation. In an early essay, Fong explained that Elation described the feeling the team wanted its software to produce. They had listened to users describe frustration with existing tools. Choosing an emotion as a name gave the business an unusually plain question to keep answering: how did using the product actually feel?
The discipline of being corrected
In 2014, Fong described an onboarding practice that required every team member, including engineers, to spend a full day shadowing a customer at work. The complete day mattered. An isolated task could hide the interruptions and competing demands around it. A team could understand a feature and still misunderstand the day into which that feature had to fit.
She also described earning customers’ business month by month and taking responsibility for the overall experience. These were concrete management choices: how employees learned, what customers could expect, where responsibility sat when something went wrong. The early interviews are useful for their level of detail. Company philosophy becomes more revealing when it reaches the employment induction and the support arrangements.
The work surrounding a task belongs in the design brief.
By 2024, her writing had given this approach a name: creative humility. She described the experience of seeing apparently sensible design ideas turn out poorly in use. Listening required more than collecting requests. Her team needed to understand the underlying problem, try a solution, and remain willing to test it again.
There is an appealing inconvenience in that argument coming from someone with her technical training. A degree can equip you to reason carefully. The user can still show you something your reasoning missed. Fong’s public position gives observation a continuing place in the work, even after the company has accumulated experience of its own.
Still choosing the next shot
Outside work, the details become pleasantly ordinary. In a 2023 interview, she named Na Ya Dessert Cafe in San Francisco as a favorite, mentioning its Thai-inspired desserts. Mango sticky rice, crepes, and shaved ice make a welcome interruption in a professional biography. A life can contain demanding research and a firm opinion about dessert.
Her business story has continued. Inc. included her in its 2023 Female Founders list. In April 2026, EY named her a Bay Area Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist. That recognition came sixteen years after Elation’s founding, a span that puts some perspective around the apparent suddenness of an award announcement.
In June 2026, Elation announced its acquisition of Aster. Its co-founders, sisters Fifi Kara and Lailah Kara-Newton, joined with chief technology officer Nacho Vazquez. For a company founded by a brother and sister, bringing another sibling partnership into the organization adds a small human symmetry to a corporate transaction.
Fong has spoken about choosing a problem worth spending a decade on. Her own path gives that advice some weight. There have been years at the table, years in research, and years building with her brother. The useful question now is how to keep learning as the organization changes. Close observation remains part of her answer. There is always another person on the other side of the table.