Michael Rosenbaum

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT MICHAEL ROSENBAUM

I have spent my career working on one problem: ensuring that everyone has a pathway to dignity. That belief has taken me to some unexpected places: academic economics, public policy work, years of mission-driven entrepreneurship in Baltimore and beyond, and a brief and instructive run for office. But the through line has never changed.I grew up understanding, at a very personal level, what happens when societies fail their people. That early awareness sent me toward international relations, then academia, then public policy, and ultimately toward entrepreneurship, when I became convinced that in many ways the private sector was better positioned than government to move the needle on this problem at scale.My first company, Catalyte, started in Baltimore, a post-industrial city where manufacturing jobs had largely disappeared, and pathways into growing industries like tech were effectively closed to the people who needed them most. We used machine learning to identify raw talent regardless of background and move people into software engineering careers. Over nearly two decades, it helped thousands of people move into technology jobs and careers. It was a meaningful start, but not the destination.Arena emerged from that work, and it operates on an entirely different scale. The core problem we aremre solving is one of information: organizations do not know who will truly thrive in a role, and people do not know where they will be happy and successful before they get there. Arena knows what happened to people at a very detailed, direct level, and uses that outcome data to predict where people will succeed in the future. That, combined with the fact that Arena has and grows that information on millions of people. That is a fundamentally different approach to anything else in out there.When Arena succeeds in its mission, employers will have more dynamic, productive workforces that transition with the needs of those enterprises, and workers will end up happy, thriving, and secure. It is a virtuous cycle that not only makes individuals and enterprises better off- it makes communities more stable and safe.I love this work because the problems are not all solved yet. The path from A to B is not always mapped. And when we figure it out, the impact on people and organizations and economies and communities is real.