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.

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.

Jeff’s career has been defined by his passion to develop technology that makes information more accessible and available to people in every community. He started at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA, where he spent seven years as an executive, leading technical teams, and advancing the fields of web search relevance and personalized content recommendation for the company and the industry at large. His team won Yahoo!’s super-star award (the highest award in the company) for its relentless innovations in search and recommendation algorithms. He later founded Yahoo! Labs in China, a science-driven product innovation group, which brought new cutting-edge mobile search and discovery technology and products to U.S. and global markets. But Jeff wanted to have an even greater impact, so he made the leap to the mobile entrepreneurial world where he founded and grew a unicorn start-up between 2012 and 2014. Gaining key insights into mobile entrepreneurship and emerging technology, Jeff saw a unique opportunity to reinvent how people access local news and information, so he moved back to the U.S. in 2015 and founded NewsBreak. Jeff’s mission in founding Newsbreak was simple: harness the power of artificial intelligence to enhance daily lives of locals, revive local journalism, and empower local businesses, altogether and all at once.

Jeff received his bachelor’s degree from the Electrical Engineering department of Tsinghua University, his M.S. from the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his Ph.D. from the Computer Science department of SUNY Buffalo. A technologist at heart, Jeff has authored dozens of academic publications in top AI and emerging technology conferences and journals, including NeurIPS, ACM SIGIR, WWW, and ACM/IEEE Transactions, and he holds dozens of U.S. patents in computer science and related fields.

Jeff lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife and daughter and their Shiba Inu.