About Us
Our story, our values, and how we're building PokeBot with AI.
Why the name PokeBot?
PokeBot is short for Poke + Bot. "Poke" comes from the Japanese word poketto (meaning "pocket"), a reminder that great career support should feel portable, always-with-you, and ready on demand. It also carries the idea of a gentle "poke": a helpful nudge that keeps you moving forward.
"Bot" reflects our AI companion, powered by modern multimodal and agentic AI, to help you plan, practice, and progress. And yes, PokeBot also echoes the sound of a poke bowl: a mix where each part matters and the whole works better together. We build PokeBot the same way, with the main parts of career growth in one product.
Our Story
PokeBot was founded by two co-founders with over 20 years of combined experience across hedge funds, asset managers, and leading technology companies. With Ph.D. and EMBA training from top universities, they bring together deep expertise in both career development and AI systems.
Having navigated career transitions themselves, from academia to finance and tech, they know firsthand how fragmented and overwhelming job searching can be. Candidates often juggle separate tools for career planning, resume building, interview practice, and progress tracking, with no unified system to guide them end to end.
The founding team also includes recent graduates from top US and Canadian universities who have lived through job searching firsthand. They've felt the pain of tailoring resumes, preparing for interviews, and tracking applications across disconnected platforms.
That's why PokeBot is built by people who've been there, for people who are going through it. We're building one AI workflow to replace that stack of separate tools, so you spend less time managing tools and more time making progress.
Meet the Founder
Co-Founder & CEO
Dongbo brings over a decade of experience at the intersection of AI, quantitative finance, and product development. Before founding PokeBot, he built agentic AI systems and investment workflows at Millennium Management and led quantitative teams at BlackRock. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Georgetown University, with research in Econometrics and Artificial Intelligence, an M.S. in Policy Economics from UIUC, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Fudan University. Having navigated career transitions across academia, finance, and tech, he built PokeBot to give others the structured, AI-powered support he wished he had.
Our Mission
Our mission is to help people plan their careers, follow through, and make high-stakes career decisions with more clarity and less anxiety, with AI as an everyday collaborator they can trust.
Our Values
Every feature we build starts with understanding your career challenges, goals, and constraints.
Career growth is complex, so we show you the next step and how to take it.
You stay in control. PokeBot adapts its guidance to your goals and context.
We build on current AI models and keep improving the product based on user feedback.
Your career data is sensitive. We keep it private to your account, never sell it, act with integrity, and take ownership by fixing issues quickly and transparently.
We judge PokeBot by whether it helps you land interviews and offers and grow your career.
Our Principles
1. Combat-ready, Built to Win
- We hold ourselves to a "combat-ready" standard: every team member (product, engineering, business, and operations) stays ready to perform when needed.
- We will lose some battles. What matters is keeping the ability to fight the next one.
- We stay alert, adapt, and move fast, or we fall behind.
2. Adapt for the Team
- Working in a team is like going boating: if everyone rows in their own way, we go nowhere. When our strokes are aligned, we move faster with less effort; when some over-row and some barely row, everyone suffers and the boat underperforms.
- When we join the team, we bring our strengths, but we're also willing to adjust our own rhythm for the whole: on one hand, we help shape the team's pace where we can; on the other hand, we adapt ourselves to the team's rhythm. We don't just ask "what do I want", we first ask "what's best for the team".
- Knowledge should be shared, and credit should be given. Credit for a win goes to the whole team.
3. Disciplined in Conduct
- Compliance with laws and regulations is our bottom line; respect and integrity toward users, colleagues, and partners are our basic standard.
- Our systems are designed to operate under clear safeguards and procedures. We respect user privacy and put user safety first.
- We don't chase outsized leaps or gamble on luck. We accumulate small wins through fast iteration, and when conviction is high, we are willing to bet big on the right opportunities.