Sizhao Zao Yang is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in San Francisco. He is known for being the co-creator of FarmVille.^[undefined]

Yang is originally from Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he earned a B.S. in computer science. Yang dropped out of graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles where he researched recommendations engines to start MyMiniLife.^[1]

Early in his career, Yang was an IT Specialist at IBM. He launched Mocha Soft LLC in July 2006 but would change the name of the company to MyMiniLife in December 2007. Yang was responsible for all aspects of MyMiniLife including architecting/implementing the original product, product and user experience, technology direction, scaling, system administration, fundraising, legal work, recruiting, and merger & acquisition. At MyMiniLife, Yang developed the technology that would power FarmVille.^[1] The technology behind FarmVille would become the standard for Zynga and would power games such as CityVille and FrontierVille.^[undefined]

Yang is the co-creator Farmville and was in charge of full stack development and product execution.

Farmville was a joint project between Zynga Game Networks and MyMiniLife.

Zynga would acquire MyMiniLife in June 2009.

He also designed the Farmville iPhone application (top iPhone app), and worked on corporate development deals including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Zynga Japan, and Zynga corporate strategy.^[undefined] Farmville would gain hundreds of millions of users and win awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Crunchies, and Game Developers Conference.^[1]

In November 2010, Yang would become co-founder and COO of BetterWorks, a a perks platform for small and medium businesses.^{[1] [undefined]} In October 2012, Yang became CEO and co-founder of ZenMarketing, an applied predictive analysis platform that gauges the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Their past clients include Uber (company), Lyft, Spotify, NetEase, and Zynga.^[1] In September 2018, Yang became CEO of DAGlabs which is researching and developing directed-acyclic-graph-based infrastructure to scale blockchain systems.^[1]

Yang is an active investor with stakes in companies like Hipmunk, GroupMe, Facebook, Zynga (acquisition stock), and SV Angels.^[undefined] He has invested in Lever (Application tracking system designed for highly skilled labor), E La Carte (Tablet based ordering), Wish (Discover and share products with friends), Shelvspace (Veeva for CPGs), Produce pay (Next day loans for farmers), and TrendMD (Knowledge discovery for doctors).^[1] Some of Yang's successful acquisitions as an investor include Hipmunk (Acquired by Concur/SAP), GroupMe (Acquired by Skype), Kima Labs (Acquired by Groupon), Kingmaker (Acquired by Joyus), Ness (Acquired by Open Table), Calm Sea (Acquired by Coupang), Identified (Acquired by Workday), Red Hot Labs (Acquired by Google), Cucumbertown (Acquired by Cookpad), FutureAdvisor (Acquired by Blackrock), Curse Network (Acquired by Twitch/Amazon), and Treasure Data (Acquired by ARM/Softbank).^[1] He invested in Facebook through secondary markets.^[1]

Yang is an advisor to a number of companies including SV Angel (Early stage VC), AngelList (Platform for startups), Influitive (Advocate marketing platform), InMarket (Performance marketing for offline commerce), University of California, San Francisco technology advisory board, Caer, Fairwaves (Software defined mobile networks), Bebopbee (Creator of Snapimals). He is a mentor at Mucker Labs.^[1]