Who We Are

Wynston grew up in Roseburg, Oregon and has always been passionate about service and safety. He started his career as a teacher, went on to serve in the US Army, and eventually found his way to the tech industry where he became one of YouTube’s founding Trust and Safety members in 2006, working with Engineering and Moderation teams in a fast-changing landscape. He has also served as Director of E-commerce for Adidas Japan, and for Amazon Alexa in a Sr. Business Development position, before returning to roles in Trust & Safety with TikTok and Kuaishou. 

He received his BS from West Virginia University, where he was an All-American cross-country athlete. Wynston finished 3^rd in the US national championship marathon in 2005, and speaks fluent Japanese. He relocated to the Seattle area after living in Tokyo and Singapore with his wife of 23 years, Minako and their dog-child, Luna.

Jim grew up in Branford, CT and wrote for The Branford Review in high school. After graduating from Harvard, he lived in Spain where he coached football, and launched a 30-year career at NBCUniversal working on the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. At NBC, Jim successfully led some of the most iconic brands in media, including the Today Show, Tonight Show, and the Olympics. He is a 24-time Emmy award winner and has a Peabody Award for coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Jim received his BA in Political Science & Government from Harvard University. He lives in Greenwich, CT with his wife Angelique and their three dogs, Apollo, Hercules, and Athena.

Yiyi has practiced law for more than 19 years and has comprehensive experience in corporate governance and transactions, intellectual property, commercial agreements, data compliance, and risk management. 

Yiyi studied at Tongji University in Shanghai, where she was the founder of the university’s piano association and a journalist for the university newspaper. She has taken business courses at ESCP Paris, Solvay Brussels School and Manchester Metropolitan University, and has had training in commercial litigation and arbitration in Hong Kong and Frankfurt.

She lives in Foster City, California, with her husband Raphael, their two kids, and their two cats, Lola and Remy. She also serves as a PTA committee member at her local elementary school and as a senior member of the IEEE Smart Village program.

Scott grew up in Connecticut in a family of marketers, so it was no surprise when he got into advertising. He began his media career bringing some of the first ads onto mobile phones, Virgin Mobile’s pre-smartphone flip phones to be precise. Since then, he’s helped some of the largest brands and agencies on the planet—Yahoo, AOL, Time Inc., and retail media pioneer eBay—solve their biggest business challenges.

Scott’s worked on both the supply and demand sides of advertising, participating in wide-ranging content partnerships, developing new audience- and data-targeting strategies and driving new experiences with all types of ad-tech. Scott’s been on several industry boards and is a frequent speaker at media industry events. Scott received his BA in Music from Bates College in Lewiston, ME, and currently lives in NJ with his wife Sarah, their two kids, and their cat, Gus.

Rongqing Lu was a founding member of the NewsBreak team, originally serving as engineering lead. He currently oversees the company’s technology advisory team, providing planning, evaluation, and technical support for critical projects. He previously worked at Inktomi as a software engineer and at Yahoo! as a principal software engineer for the web-search team.

Rongqing studied at Nanjing University and has an MS in Computer Science and Engineering from Penn State University. He lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife and two kids.

Xana’s passion for storytelling started early; in high school she was a beat reporter at a local paper in Flemington, NJ, and her reportorial aspirations took her to New York City to write for the Village Voice and the New York Daily News. 

She moved to the digital side of storytelling at NBC, where she covered national news and ran a network of local lifestyle creators. At ABC, she oversaw the non-broadcast side of news, pioneering new formats with tech like VR to take audiences inside war-torn Syria and unseen North Korea.​ Her ambition to drive next-gen storytelling took her to the start-up space, to Snapchat, where she oversaw news partnerships and editorial, and finally to NewsBreak. She’s received two Emmy awards, a Murrow award and a Newswomen's Award.

Xana received her BA in journalism from New York University. She currently lives in New York City with her partner Marc and her Maltese-Yorkie, Maaloof.

Kevin grew up in Toronto, Ontario and has always enjoyed building things. After beginning his career as an engineer at a couple of Silicon Valley startups, he transitioned to product management. Kevin held senior leadership roles at Ubisoft, Logitech, and LinkedIn, where he has been responsible for launching products that have benefited hundreds of millions of people. His teams have been charged with redesigning LinkedIn, growing the company internationally, and building LinkedIn Learning, amongst other objectives. Kevin joined NewsBreak to help local communities stay informed and connected at massive scale.

Kevin received his BCOM from McGill University and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He lives in San Carlos, CA with his wife Beti, his daughter Talia, along with their Lab Sandy, and many fresh and saltwater fish.

Junhua is a veteran engineering leader with a passion for creating state-of-the-art information platforms using big data and large-scale machine learning technologies. Before joining NewsBreak in 2021, Junhua spent 20 years at Microsoft, where he held the roles of Distinguished Engineer and Vice President for the Search and AI Platform organization. During his time there, he led a team that built some of the largest and most widely used platforms in the company, including search, object storage, and deep learning platforms.

Junhua holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from New York University. He and his wife Xun reside in Bellevue, Washington with their two children. In his leisure time, Junhua enjoys reading, jogging, skiing and watching various sports. He is a firm believer in the growth mindset and empathy.

Vincent joined NewsBreak in 2018 and has built the largest local-publisher network in the country, launched the very first local contributor network, and is actively scaling up a unique local SMB/advertising network for the platform.

Growing up as a massive fan of local newspapers and seeing firsthand how technology had begun disrupting traditional media in the early 2000s, Vincent began his career at Accenture & Mercer helping Fortune 500 content companies embrace digital. Later, he combined his business expertise with his love of content by joining AOL, eventually becoming business chief for HuffPost, Yahoo TV, and Yahoo News. 

During this period, Vincent became an industry pioneer of data-driven & social approaches to media, successfully growing HuffPost/Yahoo into the world’s largest digital news group, with the most engaging social-media audience, serving 300MM+.

Vincent received an MBA from Tuck/Dartmouth College. He lives with his family in Cupertino, CA.

Jeff’s career has been defined by his passion to develop technology that makes information more accessible. He started at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA, where he spent seven years as an executive, leading technical teams, advancing the fields of web search quality, relevance, and recommendation-science for the company and the industry at large. He founded Yahoo! Labs in China, a science-driven product innovation group, which brought new mobile search and discovery products to U.S. and global markets. But Jeff wanted to have a bigger impact, so he made the leap to the mobile entrepreneurial world in China where he founded and grew a unicorn start-up. With key learnings in hand, Jeff saw a unique opportunity to reinvent local news and information, and moved back to the US to found NewsBreak. 

Jeff received his Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, his M.S. from the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo. A technologist at heart, Jeff has authored many academic publications and holds U.S. patents in machine learning, information retrieval, personalized recommendation, and natural language processing.

Jeff lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter, Xuan and Bella and their Shiba Inu, Kubo.