Inside the Arena: Building a Culture of Performance on the Front Lines
With Subject Matter Experts
Brian Ferguson, Founder, Arena Labs
Jackie Pen, Head of Clinician Performance, Arena Labs
Matt Sitter, CEO, AFN and Partner, Sixth Wing
Join us for a special Fireside Chat featuring Brian Ferguson, Founder of Arena Labs, and Jackie Pen, Head of Clinician Performance. Over the past nine years, Arena Labs has worked to help businesses across American society, especially frontline clinicians, manage stress and perform at their best with the help of a unique digital ecosystem. Brian will share Arena’s core philosophy and the journey to creating this digital platform for supporting high-performing teams. Jackie will offer practical insights on coaching executives and implementing digital, asynchronous coaching at scale.
The session features a 30-minute conversation followed by audience Q&A.
Brian Ferguson
Brian has spent his career working in high-performance organizations, learning from leaders and decision-makers in US national security, the military, and emerging technology. He has leveraged those experiences to build Arena Labs, a company pioneering the field of High Performance Medicine and working across healthcare, elite military, the performing arts, and professional sports.
Arena Labs partners with top surgical, trauma, ICU, and emergency department teams to utilize human performance data as a means of reducing medical errors. By providing frontline doctors and nurses with tools and frameworks used by the world’s top performers under pressure, Arena Labs is redefining healthcare and applying lessons learned from hospitals to best practices in sports, business, and the military.
In 2018, Brian also co-founded The Liminal Collective, a unique human performance company focused on “enabling humanity’s boldest endeavors” in space travel, deep sea exploration, and advancing the science of human creativity and expression.
Earlier in his career, Brian served as a Navy Officer, deploying to Afghanistan and various parts of the Middle East while being heavily involved in emerging technology and human performance efforts across special operations. Before joining the military, he worked in national security in both the Pentagon and the White House.
Brian is an advisor to the Brooklyn Nets and on faculty at Singularity University in Silicon Valley. He remains heavily involved in Veteran transition programs.
Founder, Arena Labs
Jackie Pen
Jackie Pen is the Head of Clinician Performance at Arena Labs, where she leads coaching strategy and operations. She began her career at EXOS, a global leader in human performance, and was an early team member at Future, a first-of-its-kind digital personal training platform. At Future, she helped develop and scale the digital coaching strategy, growing the team from 15 to over 300. Jackie is a leader in digital coaching, operating at the intersection of coaching, experience, and operations to drive impact at scale.
Head of Clinician Performance, Arena Labs
Matt Sitter
Matt Sitter is a partner at Sixth Wing, where he helps leaders and organizations create clarity, drive connection, and lead with intention. He brings a powerful mix of executive coaching, operational insight, and communication strategy to the firm’s work in burnout resilience, networked leadership, and human-centered performance.
Matt is also the CEO of Advantage Foundry Network (AFN), a global network of CEOs and Senior Executives committed to leveraging collective intelligence to find opportunity in change. His work spans industries and sectors—from private equity and healthcare to tech and defense—supporting leaders through inflection points, rapid growth, and transformational shifts.
He has held senior positions at The McChrystal Group and CrossLead and served in executive roles across the healthcare diagnostics and health tech industries. Whether advising a founder, coaching a CEO, or facilitating strategic alignment within a leadership team, Matt’s approach is grounded in the belief that:
“Leadership is the privilege of working through others.”
He is deeply committed to the idea that networks—not org charts—move the needle and that the right conversations can unlock breakthrough performance.
Matt holds an AB in Public Policy from Brown University and an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two sons.
CEO, AFN and Partner, Sixth Wing
