Summary
Frank Wang is a security engineer in San Francisco with 14 years of experience bridging academic research, venture investing, and hands-on security leadership at startups and scale-ups. He was the first security hire at dbt Labs and Headway and now secures systems at Surge AI, bringing a pragmatic blend of applied cryptography, distributed systems expertise, and product-focused threat modeling. Frank holds a PhD from MIT’s PDOS lab with multiple first-author papers and has deep startup investing experience at Dell Technologies Capital and Rough Draft Ventures, where he specialized in cybersecurity and infrastructure. He co-founded Cybersecurity Factory to mentor and accelerate early-stage security teams, a signal of his penchant for building ecosystems as well as products. Not immediately obvious: he alternates between rigorous research and investor-level strategic thinking, enabling him to both harden infrastructure and advise on security-driven go-to-market decisions.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Harker School
BS with Honors Computer Science, BS with Honors Computer Science at Stanford University
Chinese