Mike Rosenbaum
Founder, Chair and CEO, Arena
Mike founded and is the Founder and CEO of Arena, which applies AI to labor markets to improve career trajectories within and across industries. Arena’s platform’s largest industry is healthcare, where it is used by 3.8 million unique healthcare employees and job applicants, or about 19% of the US healthcare workforce, including over 49% of the nursing assistants and 6.5% of the registered nurses in the US.
Mike also founded and is the former CEO and Chair of Catalyte, a company that uses machine learning to build primarily tech workforces for large enterprises and governments. The average income of an exceptional professional identified by Catalyte prior to being identified is $25,000 per year, and 5 years later is $98,000 per year, with the average age when identified of 31. In 2019 Catalyte’s earliest investors had the opportunity to exit at 15x – 45x their money.
In 2021, Mike ran for the Democratic nomination to be the next Governor of Maryland, with the vision of restructuring the state’s economy to enable a pathway to dignity and economic security for everyone.
Prior to starting Catalyte and Arena, Mike received an Irving R. Kaufman Fellowship to support his work building the first version of what is now Catalyte and Arena’s respective analytics engines for talent selection. Earlier in his career Mike was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard Law School and a Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Economics Department, and he served at the White House as an economist. In addition to his academic work around what became Catalyte and Arena, Mike’s publications and research focused on the application of data to the most subjective areas of human endeavor. He has also served on a variety of civic and national boards related to economic mobility and education, including Johns Hopkins University and the Markle Foundation’s Rework America Task Force.
Mike lives in Baltimore with his wife and two daughters. He has a JD from Harvard Law School, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA from Harvard College, and from 1999-2000 he clerked for the Hon Diana Gribbon Motz on the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.