Catch her mid-stride
Start with the resume that should not work. A Bachelor of Science from Cornell. A Juris Doctor from St. John's University School of Law. Admission to the New York Bar. Every box checked for a quiet, lucrative life of contracts and corner offices. Then she walked away from practicing law to do something stranger: explain technology companies to the press.
In 1999 she founded ExcitePR, a hi-tech PR agency with offices in New York and San Francisco. It grew to roughly $2 million in revenue, working with the kind of fast-growth firms and pre-IPO names that needed someone to translate engineering into English. In 2001 she folded ExcitePR into a larger independent technology PR firm and joined the executive team as Vice President. Most people would have called that a career. She called it a warm-up.
By 2007 she had launched MyPRGenie, a cloud-based platform that handed small businesses the same reach an agency would charge a fortune for. It was a SaaS pitch before half the market knew what SaaS stood for - press releases and media outreach turned into self-serve software.
The Shanghai chapter
Then came the jump that separates the operators from the dabblers. In 2015 she co-founded Robin8 and based it in Shanghai, running a company on the other side of the planet from a New York living room. Robin8 was an influencer and KOL marketing platform - a way for brands to find the right voices in the vast, opaque Chinese social economy and actually measure whether a campaign moved anything.
Robin8 is a next generation social and content marketing platform powered by artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning.- Miranda Tan, on Robin8
She did not stop at matchmaking brands and creators. Robin8 leaned into blockchain, building a token (PUT) and the infrastructure to turn ordinary social activity into something verifiable and tradeable. An English-language version launched in February 2018. That same year she took the project on an Asia roadshow, sitting on a Money20/20 Asia panel in Singapore titled "Intelligent Data about Data Intelligence," debating GDPR, digital identity, and where artificial intelligence meets distributed ledgers - years before either phrase became a boardroom reflex. She also spoke at blockchain events in Taipei, fluent in the room whether it was bankers or crypto crowds.
Banking, NFTs, and a llama
Around 2020 she co-founded Paybby and took the CMO seat, building a digital bank aimed squarely at underserved communities - the people traditional finance tends to forget. She lent her voice to TOKAU, a celebrity NFT platform, as a spokesperson. And then she circled back to the United States and to a problem older than any of these technologies: the cost and frustration of protecting your car.
Onellama frames itself in the language she has always spoken best - community, transparency, shared risk - now wired with AI damage assessment, automated claims, and the keyword soup of a 2020s startup: mutual aid, shared protection funds, transparent claims evaluation, community-driven coverage. It is insurance reimagined as a neighborhood, and a lawyer who knows exactly how the old contracts trap people is the right person to redraw them.
What ties ExcitePR to Robin8 to Paybby to Onellama is not an industry. It is a posture. Find the wave just before it crests. Build the thing that hands ordinary people - small businesses, creators, the underbanked, car owners - a little more leverage than they had yesterday. Then move.