Arena Ventures

Arena Ventures / Outlander VC is a U.S. seed-stage founder-focused venture capital firm with offices in Los Angeles, California and San Francisco, California (with an additional Atlanta / Southeast presence), founded in 2015 by Managing Partners Paige Craig (U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former intelligence operative; founder of Lincoln Group, a Pentagon / psychological-operations contractor sold in 2007; former CEO and co-founder of BetterWorks 2010-2012; prolific angel investor in 110+ startups 2008-2015 including Airbnb, Lyft, AngelList, Postmates, Klout, Wish, Scale AI, and Gusto) and Jeff Lo (co-founder and Managing Partner; previously Managing Director at Fortress Investment Group). Arena / Outlander invests at seed and early stages across technology, healthcare, software, consumer internet, food-tech, and adjacent thematic categories, typically writing initial check sizes in the USD 500,000 to USD 5 million range. The firm operates under its proprietary ''Founder Framework'' assessment rubric evaluating founders on vision, intelligence, character, and execution (''hero archetype thesis''). Team additionally includes Leura Craig (co-founder / Partner), Erica Stanley (Venture Partner, ex-Salesloft), Francis Shih, and Eric Peckham. The firm has raised multiple institutional funds with aggregate AUM in the USD low-hundreds of millions range.