fzwang (u/fzwang) - Readit News

fzwang commented on Ask HN: Fundraising compensation · Posted by u/ebitda_ai

fzwang · 2 months ago

IMO, the proposed 5/5 compensation is a bit high. If I understand correctly, he's essentially asking for approx $1.2M total comp package for raising $4M. I'd suggest 2.5% and 2.5%, or some combination of.

There are terms other than valuation which are very important (board rep, liquidity pref, etc). Have you talked about what are the must haves and deal breakers for you and your team?

IME, the bigger issue in the long run with this situation is that you, the founders, do not have a direct relationship with the investors. These investors will most likely be "his" investors, which positions him as a key intermediary. This will be a problem in the future when you need to manage them and must go through a middle man.

The CEO should ideally lead the pitch and an advisor can help with coaching, networking, and strategy (and be well compensated for it). I think any competent VC will want to see that at least one of the founders can do sales.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: Unemployed almost a year after graduating MIT – a rant · Posted by u/TimGubth

fzwang · 2 months ago

Sorry to hear that you're going through this. I work with other students/recent grads going through the same thing. A few suggestions:

1) To echo some of the other comments here, getting a regular routine will help you get into better habits. Good sleep, regular exercise, and limited social media etc will help with your mood.

2) The setbacks are situational, not dispositional. It really is a shit job market and you likely don't know how to properly signal yet (ie. sell yourself to others). And to make things even worse, brute force ATS grinding is now even less effective since everyone can now game the systems and generate a plausibly good-looking coherent resume using AI.

3) IMO, one mistake I see often is that students think jobs are the only way to gain experience. This is not true. You really have to be constantly learning new things on your own. Your university education is not enough. This means working on projects specifically for learning purposes. I'd suggest you alternate between learning-mode and applying-mode, where you spend 2-3 months just working on shipping a complete project, then focusing on applying to jobs for another 2-3 months, get feedback and rinse and repeat. You can use the learn-mode time to adapt to feedback. I think this will yield better results than applying over and over again hoping for different results.

Anyways, feel free to reach out. As others have said, you're beating yourself up too much. You'll figure it out and find a way through these setbacks. The important thing atm is not to spiral into a vicious cycle. I applaud you even airing this on HN, as it's much much better than sulking alone.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: My university wants all my IP (PhD Student) is there anything I can do? · Posted by u/thrownaway98723

fzwang · 4 months ago

I used to work in VC and have dealth with university commercialization/IP offices.

1) If it's serious, you need to lawyer up. It might not be now but if you can get some investors involved they could help with getting legal resources. If it's medical devices, you'll need investors anyways. One issue is this gives investors a lot of leverage to negotiate their interests against you.

2) The university office absolutely does not care about how "little" they gave you. Their perspective will be they've given you plenty, as office/lab space and anything else were not part of the deal (unless you have it in writing), and they've subsidized your funding. It's not "fair" but it is what it is.

3) This scenario is quite common, and one of reasons I tell grad students to negotiate this stuff first and pick your school wisely. Some schools are way better than others in allowing their academic staff commercial freedom.

4) You can make it a PR issue for them, to push the narrative of "university stifles innovation via obscure bureaucracy" but it's a risky strategy.

There are usually always room to negotiate/maneuvre, but you need the right contacts and political support within the university to pull it off.

Good luck!

fzwang commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

fzwang · 4 months ago

Location: Toronto, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: N/A

Website: www.divepod.to

Email: frank@divepod.to

I'm building out a new comp sci education program based on an advisory model. It is intended to complement instructor-lead models (like traditional schools/universities), with more emphasis on self-direction and real-world exposure. Part of the motivation is to address talent development problems in startups when I worked in VC and in hiring for projects for my own company. These issues are exacerbated nowadays with AI.

I'm the lead advisor and currently looking to recruit students to work with personally, ideally those who are in HS or university but is bored and/or feel like they are not learning useful/interesting things. Bonus if they have an interest in exploring entrepreneurship. I have a background in data engineering, VC, and ML R&D.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: How do you *actually* recover from deep technical/founder burnout? · Posted by u/sherinjosephroy

fzwang · 4 months ago

From my experience and talking to other founders/engineers ...

1) It's good to analyze what's the source of the burn-out. In many instances, it's not exactly exhaustion per se, but lack of meaning in what they are doing beyond the money. There are acute stressors, like coming out of an intense sprint, and chronic stressors, like not knowing why you're even doing this. If you had fuck-you money, what would you be doing long-term instead? beyond take a vacation, buy a house, etc.

2) Learning to say no to things. Let go of "hero" mode. Good enough for now is good enough for now. Cut down on complexity to reduce cognitive load. Really assess which things you do are real and which are performative.

3) Better understand how work fits in your long term goals. Having worked in VC, a lot of advice for founders are very investor-centric. The core of the thinking is that some sort of exit will solve all your problems, and is worth grinding for. I see many founders become entrepreneurs to "work for themselves" and not be a corp wage-slave, just to become a VC grind-slave. Their health falters, their personal life implodes (divorce/breakups), and they've no genuine friendships (just business acquaintances). When they do get to a good financial exit, they're still miserable. Do try to make the company/product building process enjoyable too. Sometimes it means slowing down, smell the roses, think things through to avoid problems.

Overall, the right advice is very situational. The most important part may be talking out loud to someone you trust about it. Sometimes just verbalizing it helps.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: How should new programmers learn in the AI era? · Posted by u/loa_observer

fzwang · 4 months ago

I work with students and junior engs.

Personally, I'd avoid using AI tools for learning atm.

1) As a learning path planning tool, I find LLM tools are very good at creating learning plans and next steps for popular concepts. However, the convenience of the tool also skips over a lot of accidental discovery/exposure, which IMO is useful in the long run in building out broader contextual awareness. The students following an AI plan only knows about the things in immediate vincitiy. Whereas more traditional methods, like a web search (use someting like Kagi, not Google) reveals more advanced stuff which they don't know yet, but plants a seed in their brains.

With the right prompting system, you can probably mitigate some of these issues, but atm I find the general trend is people want short fast answers.

2) For actual coding I'd discourage it. For people to learn quickly they have to build stuff from scratch so they develop the right mental models. Writing code manually is a good check on their understanding. When the work becomes boring/tedious they can offload it to AI tools.

Overall, my experience has been that the AI tools are useful in the short term, but too much reliance amputates a lot of the valuable, but hard to measure, learning experiences. If the goal is to form the right mental model of concepts in the human who is learning, then bypassing some of the "work" and frustration by letting AI do most of the planning and "thinking" actually harms the learning process.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next? · Posted by u/silvercymbals

silvercymbals · 5 months ago

This is a fantastic analysis.

I didn't want to go here, but I do have direct knowledge from two final rounds I was passed over for that h1b visa holders were selected instead of me and paid less. (I knew employees at these startups)

Part of why I'm just considering doing something else is the fact that so much of this work is going to be outsourced. Most of my friends who are actively running startups don't even bother hiring inside the US and just use latam contractors.

Unfortunately, I need money. I have effectively a net zero income for 2025, this after years of entrepreneurship just isn't good enough. I find it ironic how on HN anyone advocating to push themselves into a position where they have more options (more income) is met with accusations of being "entitled" or outlandish.

Let's say my skillset isn't as "senior" as I think, how on earth do I escape the tar-pit of being a semi-junior senior (to quote DHH)? This problem is what's been tearing me apart... I genuinely don't know what to do.

I also have some medical stuff I need taken care of and I can't afford to liquidate more of my retirement. So "bootstrapping" another company is just something I'm not interested in.

fzwang · 5 months ago

It seems like the cashflow situation will rule out some options, at least for the moment, like boostrapping etc. Contracting could be a temporary option, esp for US companies that need in-person support with good language skills. This would blunt some of the competition from abroad.

Regarding learning "out of the tar-pit", it's hard to give out specifics without knowing more details about your experiences. But it might be worthwhile to reach out to other senior engineers in your network, not to ask for a job, but to ask for advice about switching from entrepreneur/founder to employee. It could be a good way to build rapport and identify what you should be learning next.

Your health obviously takes priorty over everything else. Medical problems can really push you into despair if left unaddressed. Money you can always make back later.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next? · Posted by u/silvercymbals

fzwang · 5 months ago

From your comments, it seems like there's a lot of internal and external issues you're dealing with. Internally, your sense of self worth is very much tied to your compensation/wealth. The recent rejections have triggered anxiety / negative self-reflection. The lack of a job/income is really straining your confidence.

Externally ...

1) It's actually a shit job market.

2) Your startup experiences don't really help signal your skillset as an employee. There's a sorta "founder tax" you're paying.

3) COVID, remote work, and new supplies of CS grads have changed the labour dynamics to depress wages. The top 20% may be doing ok, but the bottom 80% are getting diluted.

If I were you I'd consider a few things:

- Really think about what's a good/meaningful life to you. Volunteer/do something useful for other people (ex. a non-profit) to build up confidence again.

- Recognize your technical skillset may not be as "senior" as you think, since you had to expend valuable time learning other skills as an entrepreneur. It might mean more learning, building, leetcode grinding, interview prep, etc, before you can land the role. Concurrently, you can think about how to better communicate all the other useful things you've learned at a startup.

- If you enjoyed the startup experience, but concerned about the grind, then you don't have to build high growth businesses that require the 996 mentality. Boostrapping and organically growing a niche product may be more aligned with your skillset/goals.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? · Posted by u/commodorepet

instagraham · 5 months ago

Not a contribution but a question - how do one-person SaaS founders find customers in 2025?

It feels like between most subreddits banning self promotion and LinkedIn being flooded by AI post and inboxes by AI cold calls, it should be harder to make yourself stand out to a stranger.

Do you have be a content creator to grow an audience, make it work and get your first clients?

fzwang · 5 months ago

Often solo-founders build very niche apps/SaaS which they already have a personal network for or can target smaller platforms and business networks for marketing/distribution. You can stay small and do very well.

The larger platforms are usually too saturated to be effective. In my experience, generally not a good return on $/time.

fzwang commented on Ask HN: Are there any non-SPA front end developers left? · Posted by u/karolinepauls

fzwang · 5 months ago

If you haven't already, check out the HTMX community [1].

I think there's some recognition that a lot of SPAs didn't need to be SPAs in the first place. At the end of the day, you're just submitting a form for a CRUD app. Good ol' HTML + a sprinkle of JS was enough for most use cases. CSS has evolved to take away some of the stuff that required JS before.

At the moment, I don't think there's really any strong incentives to cut down the complexity of apps by moving away from SPAs. There's real job security in creating complexity. And in some big orgs it's unavoidable. It can change when developers are more aligned with long term outcomes (ex. a product that they own), which usually means smaller projects.

[1] https://htmx.org/