Engineer · Entrepreneur · Investor
Sam Wen
I co-founded Square. Now I build stuff because it's never been a better time to do it. Check out what I'm working on here.
What I'm working on
- Tax Map Every tax in every US state and county, adjusted for cost of living. Find out where your paycheck goes furthest.
- Paper Money Play a founder or early employee through SAFEs, priced rounds, a down round, and an exit, and see what your equity is really worth.
- Urth MUD A small, fast MUD server in Go with a ROM-style command set and live-editable scripted game rules. Playable in the browser.
- Trackstar A lightweight self-hosted project tracker in the spirit of Pivotal Tracker: icebox, backlog, iterations, points and velocity. One Go binary, one SQLite file, with a REST API and an MCP server for AI agents. It tracks the work on this site.
Writing
- Where the Money Went A decade of too much venture capital is being worked off into fewer funds, fewer companies and fewer places. What venture returned against the bar it has to clear, who set the prices in 2021, the seed on-ramp, where the money lands and who it finds.
- What a down round does to an early employee’s options 150,000 options through a SAFE, a bridge note, three priced rounds and a sale, from $1.4M on paper to what a sale actually pays.
- Public RSUs in Manhattan or a seed startup in Austin? Two engineering offers after federal, state and city tax and cost of living, and the odds the startup equity needs to win.