About

The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

Some of the best things in my life have come from writing: some of my best thinking, some of my best relationships, and some of my best decisions.

My best writing is motivated by sharing it with others.

This blog is a personal project to motivate me to do more writing and in the process think more clearly, build more relationships, and make better decisions by forcing me to put my best thoughts down on a public (digital) page.

In the past, most of my writing has been sent around in emails and internal documents. My goal here is to get more things into the world faster and iterate. Apologies in advance for typos, factual errors, or omissions - please let me know. I'm eager to learn from and fix them.

I'm in the process of exploring new things for the first time in a decade.

Something resonate? Reach out to the contact below.

Bio

Previously, I cofounded Condor Software, a venture-backed startup building the financial backbone for biotech R&D, and SVI, a software group helping int'l celebs, F500s, and 3-letter agencies simplify complex challenges with software.

As a mobile engineer, I built code on Twitter's fastest-growing platform pro-IPO and at a startup that grew so fast in the earlier days of Facebook that we had to slow down growth so that the servers could keep up.

During my graduate work, I served as a course assistant for several classes, including STVP's ETL, Balaji Srinivasan's CS184: Startup Engineering, and Sam Altman's CS183B: How to Start a Startup and CS183F: Startup School classes. I also contributed to research in virtual reality at the VHIL and ambient narratives at the Stanford HCI Group.

I completed my graduate and undergraduate degrees in computer science in human-computer interaction and operating systems at Stanford University where I led the largest student group on campus, BASES, served on the Stanford Board of Trustees Land and Buildings Committee, and was a Mayfield Fellow. I'm currently in the running to tie the record for the longest time to graduate from a certain business school on the other coast.

You can find me in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles (and occasionally Rome or Hong Kong), in that order. Or reached out in the contact below.

Contact

Twitter: @johnys
LinkedIn: in/johnys
GitHub: @JohnYangSam
Email: <Take my main handle and add cs dot stanford dot edu>