Phoebe Yao on Superpeer
22-yr-old Stanford dropout, Thiel Fellow, and CEO at Pareto
I’m a human-computer interaction researcher turned engineer turned founder. A gap year in 2018 inspired me to get off the institutional escalator and a pandemic in 2020 pushed me to drop out of Stanford. I’m passionate about democratizing access to meaningful work, developing empathetic computer-mediated interactions, and building workflows to enable diverse distributed teams. I’m building the founding team at Pareto, a human API for business operations. In previous lives, I performed with orchestras around the world as a classical violist, researched team status hierarchies at the Stanford HCI Lab, built chatbots to destigmatize mental illness at Microsoft Research in India, and published near-earth asteroid observations with SSP in New Mexico.