# Phoebe Yao

> Phoebe Yao is the founder and CEO of Pareto.AI, a talent-first human data platform that recruits and trains the top sliver of expert labelers to produce high-quality training data for the world's leading AI labs. A Chinese-American immigrant, classical violist, 2020 Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build what began as a bootcamp training women as remote virtual assistants and pivoted in 2023 into the human-data backbone for AI research. Her companies have worked with the likes of Character.AI and Imbue and researchers at Stanford and UPenn, all anchored by a single conviction: the humans behind AI deserve to be treated as experts, not anonymous clickworkers.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Pareto.AI
- **Organizations:** Pareto.AI, Thiel Foundation (Thiel Fellow)
- **From:** Zhenjiang, China
- **Nationality:** Chinese-American
- **Education:** Computer Science / Human-Centered Design & Engineering (left during pandemic), Stanford University, Human-Computer Interaction / social computing (gap year), Oxford Internet Institute, Astrophysics (near-Earth asteroid observation), Summer Science Program
- **Known for:** Founder & CEO of Pareto.AI, raising roughly $5.1M from investors including MaC Venture Capital, Soma Capital and Thumbtack co-founder Jonathan Swanson, 2020 Thiel Fellow ($100,000 to build instead of finishing a degree), Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree

## Career timeline

- **2018** — Gap year: studied HCI at the Oxford Internet Institute and built technology for emerging markets, including mental-health chatbots, at Microsoft Research India
- **2020** — Named a Thiel Fellow; launched an online bootcamp training women and work-from-home mothers as remote virtual assistants; dropped out of Stanford as the pandemic hit
- **2020-2022** — Built Pareto as a human-in-the-loop 'human API' delivering lead generation, market research and operations for startups
- **2023** — Pivoted Pareto.AI into a talent-first human data platform matching AI researchers with deeply vetted expert labeling teams
- **2023** — Received a Positive Leadership Award; named to Forbes 30 Under 30
- **2024-2026** — Scaled Pareto.AI's expert-labeler network, partnering with AI labs and researchers including Character.AI, Imbue, Stanford and UPenn

## Achievements

- Founder & CEO of Pareto.AI, raising roughly $5.1M from investors including MaC Venture Capital, Soma Capital and Thumbtack co-founder Jonathan Swanson
- 2020 Thiel Fellow ($100,000 to build instead of finishing a degree)
- Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree
- 2023 Positive Leadership Award winner
- Performed internationally as a classical violist
- Published near-Earth asteroid observations through the Summer Science Program
- Built crowd-work and team-dynamics tools at Stanford's HCI Lab

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Continuing to lead Pareto.AI as it scales its expert-labeler network and human-data platform for frontier AI labs.
- **2023-11** — Announced Pareto.AI's pivot into AI data labeling, reframing the company around the top 0.01% of expert labelers.

## Links

- Website: https://phoebeyao.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phoebexyao/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/phoebexyao
- GitHub: https://github.com/phoebexy
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMFmjdcFjs

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/phoebe-yao
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21