Hire Me, Yoni

New York City
Wants to report to Yoni Rechtman

Hi Yoni, I’m Johnny. I want to work for you. I think you’ll find me a sufficiently interesting and energetic person.

My family descends from Ming Dynasty pirates. My parents say we have a gene that has passed on that gives us a malediction towards sailing the high seas, in whatever era. My parents certainly were afflicted, they were both Chinese intelligence before defecting to the United States, where they now work at a Chinese takeout in rural NH.

In this era, instead of recruiting sailors to raid cities, my siblings and I seem to enjoy raising capital to attack industries. My older brother rallied rural dairy farmers together, just in time for the dairy boom in China. My older sister farms kelp in the East China Sea. My younger brother just graduated from college and is rolling up Chinese takeouts.

As for me, here’s my resume. But more particularly, my anti-resume. For all the things I did not get to experience.

Anti-Resume

I originally wanted to be an astronaut. Instead, New York City’s skyscrapers are the closest I’ll ever get to the stars, though the people who built them forgot to leave any in the sky. All my failures have led to where I am today. All these burnt bridges have lit my way.

Before College

August 2013 · Age 12

I started one of the first TF2 raffle groups. I had over 80,000 members. Valve banned raffling in 2015.

January 2016 · Age 14

I started a crypto YouTube channel. I was about to reach 10,000 subscribers. Then Nano and BitGrail blew up in 2018.

October 2016 · Age 15

I offered to develop a website for our local cinema; someone else won and produced this work.

December 2016 · Age 15

I worked on CS:GO hacked clients, I was good at distribution. So good that Valve accessed it and then proceeded to ban all of my users.

Spring 2018 · Age 16

I self-studied 8 additional AP courses in a year; I didn’t actually study. I still sat through them. A single teacher supervised all of them; I told her I’m sorry I wasted her time.

2018 · Age 17

I took the SAT once, I got a 1580. I missed two math questions. I’m a math major. I didn’t take the PSAT, apparently you get scholarship money from that. Forgot about applying to scholarships too (sorry mother).

2019 · Age 17

I never applied to MIT because the separate application was too much work. Yale was ok, Cornell physics seemed cool; they had an observatory. Dartmouth was too local. But then there was CMU; Carnegie Mellon had weebs.

College

2019–2020 · Age 18
Freshman year. I turned down biophysics membrane research for NASA JPL summer research which I bailed on for a Google internship which I left for a startup. The startup sucked. Wcyd.

During the school year I worked at Amazon. I moved their boxes around the warehouse. It didn’t pay that well. I developed an addiction to Monster Energy, mild insomnia, and the ability to code all night. After that stint, I was an overnight Rite Aid cashier. Not much better, tbh.

2020–2021 · Age 19
Sophomore year. I liked research, but I liked building things more. I applied to YCombinator. I’ve been rejected three times now. I planned to get rejected more.

My professor told me to apply to Jane Street. I did. I failed to pass the phone screen. I did so bad they may have blacklisted me. My best friend got in.

2020–2021 · Age 19

I wanted to study abroad, but COVID was a thing. I didn’t not study AP Japanese to not go to Japan. Alas. Global pandemics.

I applied to Citadel. They cut off my super day halfway through. My (now wife) got in. She ended up doing 5 internships there, good for her.

2022–2023 · Age 21
Junior year. I had dropped out for a total of three semesters. I wish I didn’t. I had to take a bunch of extra courses in things like Arabic History, the Constitution. That was fun though.

I had billions of page views on my manga piracy network. It was a good thing. Someone wanted to buy my thing for $9M. I said no. I shut it down for nothing in 2024.

2023–2024 · Age 22
Senior year. I got rejected by Intel, Voya, Walmart, Bank of America, and more! Optiver said I wasn’t good enough at popping balloons. Five Rings said I didn’t go to MIT. Carlyle said I can’t just roll-up every Chinese takeout in the US. I emailed the Expensify CEO to inquire about a take private (since I was watching Ramp fly and I literally could not help myself at their incompetence). He never responded. I pitched Valve on World Models, I interviewed, and was humbly rejected.

I said I would make more friends, but I didn’t. This is my biggest regret.

After College

2024 · Age 23

I accepted a job. This was a fatal mistake.

October 2024–March 2025 · Age 23

I decided I had larger ambitions. I wanted to start a startup. I had no network in VC, so I grew a Twitter account to 12k followers in 2 months (and none of that twitter meme growth content, thank you very much). I got funded by a16z speedrun as their only solo founder that batch. Apparently I had the most inbound on demo day. I raised $3.14M.

I built a fascinating product—I built Plaid for consumer platforms. My team and I reverse engineered consumer platforms (Uber, DoorDash, Spotify, Ebay, Netflix) to provide n of 1 access to their APIs for consumer AI companies. I had a data portability dream, but the regulatory nightmare absolutely meticulously slaughtered me. Which is a shame because it is so incredibly frustrating.

It turns out it is true “that there are vanishingly few use cases for consumer agents. People don’t do work in their personal lives. The only people who do are SF dorks using spreadsheets to plan trips to Tahoe.”

Inspired by BVP’s Anti-Portfolio. A catalog of the opportunities I missed, the offers I turned down, and the doors I forgot to knock on.

Now

Age 24

I’m opening a Pokemon card shop in Manhattan. I’m also also starting a YouTube channel for my shop, targeting the broad niche of unemployed CS majors.

I’d like to do that while learning the industry with you. I will host events at my shop, help Slow (and you) fulfill your goals, and make money for our LPs. After a couple years, I will depart to take what I’ve learnt at my shop and at Slow with me to build my grand vision of my card manufacturing company.

Until an asteroid,

Johnny Zeng
johnnyzengmain@gmail.com
603-229-8054

P.S. Ask me about the Russian mafia ping pong incident, the indie game devs I put on the front page of Reddit, or my CMU disciplinary hearing for meal plan arbitrage, etc.

New York only. No exceptions.