He built China's answer to AngelList and Crunchbase, grew it to 50 people, then walked away to start something harder: fixing the way America hires its hourly workforce.
Max Wang runs engineering at Workstream, the HR and payroll platform that has quietly become the operating system for America's deskless workforce. Restaurants, franchise chains, healthcare staffers, delivery operations - if the workers clock in with their thumbs rather than laptops, Workstream is probably somewhere in the hiring loop.
Wang's day job is building the technology that makes this work. The stack reads like a modern infrastructure checklist: React, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform - and now LangChain, Anthropic Claude, and Pinecone, as Workstream folds AI into the core product. He assembled the engineering org across four time zones, writing the cultural playbook as the company scaled from three co-founders to 280 people.
The company was built on a premise that sounds obvious in retrospect: hiring a line cook or a delivery driver should not require the same process as hiring a software engineer. The deskless workforce is 80 million people. Most of the software built for them treats them as an afterthought. Workstream built specifically for them - mobile-first, SMS-native, fast.
Keep talking to your customers and users. This is the only way to keep on the right path and find useful solutions.
- Max Wang, Co-Founder & CTO, WorkstreamWang's engineering philosophy is direct: build for the person holding the phone, not the person sitting at the desk reviewing applications. That means VoiceAI that screens candidates at 2 AM, onboarding flows in Spanish and French, geofenced clock-ins, and payroll reconciliation tools that flag overtime before it becomes a compliance problem. Not features for feature sheets - tools that actually get used.
In 2017, Wang and co-founder Desmond Lim were building a global outsourcing platform - a reasonable idea with a market they understood. Then they started doing customer discovery the hard way: face-to-face conversations with HR leaders at Starbucks, GE, executives at Uber Hong Kong, GoGoVan, and Coup Cafe.
After more than 100 interviews, the signal was loud enough to act on. Hiring hourly workers was broken - not a minor inconvenience but a daily drain on every manager who ran a shift-based operation. The outsourcing platform got shelved. Workstream replaced it.
The founding team then did something very few well-funded startups do: they knocked on doors in Silicon Valley to find their first customers. Jamba Juice and Subway franchise owners became Workstream's proof-of-concept. By October 2020, the company crossed $1 million in annualized revenue. Fourteen months later, they closed a $48 million Series B.
Mobile-first ATS designed for hourly roles. VoiceAI screens applicants, schedules interviews, and answers questions around the clock in English and Spanish. Average time-to-hire drops by 70%.
Core PlatformDigital I-9 verification, e-signatures, document collection, and audit-ready records. Onboarding flows in Spanish and French. Built to stay ahead of labor law requirements that shift constantly.
Compliance LayerGeofenced clock-ins, overtime flagging, shift scheduling, tax filing automation, and payroll reconciliation. Designed for multi-location operators running dozens of sites.
Workforce Ops"Keep talking to your customers and users. It is the only way to keep on the right path."
Max Wang — On building at Workstream"Repeating best practices is the best way to make progress."
Max Wang — On engineering cultureBS in Electrical, Electronics & Communications Engineering. Built the technical foundation that would run through every subsequent role.
Launched China's equivalent of AngelList and Crunchbase. Built a 50+ person team from scratch and raised Series A+ funding over five years.
Software Engineer at Kai-Fu Lee's VC firm. Built production web systems in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and MySQL.
Master of Engineering in Computer Science. The credential that closed the loop between Chinese startup experience and Silicon Valley access.
Partnered with Desmond Lim (CEO) and Lei Xu (CPO) in San Francisco. A third co-founding bet - this time in the US, this time for the long game.
Led engineering through $118M in fundraising, growth to 280 employees, and the launch of Workstream AI - including VoiceAI for automated candidate screening.
Before Workstream existed, Wang and Desmond Lim spent months on a global outsourcing platform. A perfectly reasonable business. Then they ran 100+ discovery interviews with HR leaders at Starbucks, GE, and operators across Uber Hong Kong and GoGoVan. The outsourcing idea died in those conversations. Hourly hiring - understaffed, underserved, universally painful - replaced it.
Wang co-founded VC.CN in 2011 - a platform that did the job of both AngelList and Crunchbase for China's startup ecosystem simultaneously. He built a 50+ person team and raised Series A+ funding. Then at 25 or so, he walked away from it, enrolled at Cornell Tech, and essentially restarted his career on a different continent. Not many people do that voluntarily.
Workstream's earliest deals came from door-to-door prospecting. The co-founders knocked on doors across Silicon Valley targeting franchise owners - Jamba Juice and Subway became their first proof points. No warm intros, no press coverage, no product-led growth. Just founders and a product that solved a real problem.
Wang built Workstream's engineering team across four time zones. He didn't just manage the technical challenge - he wrote the cultural operating procedures and hiring principles that kept the org functional as it scaled. His first SaaS product, his first distributed team. He documented what worked as he figured it out.
Wang moves between San Francisco, Beijing, and Wuhan - straddling both startup ecosystems by design. The cross-Pacific network he built at VC.CN still shows up in Workstream's Asia-aware engineering culture.
His GitHub handle is helloworld1812 - the classic programmer greeting, paired with a year that predates Silicon Valley's founding by a century. The combination is either deeply ironic or very specific to Chinese history. Possibly both.
Workstream's tech stack now includes Anthropic Claude and LangChain - the AI layer that powers VoiceAI, which handles applicant screening 24/7 in English and Spanish. The 2 AM job seeker now gets a response.
The investors who backed Workstream's Series B included the CEOs of Zoom (Eric Yuan) and DoorDash (Tony Xu) as angels - two executives who understand deskless and gig workforce dynamics from the inside out.
Workstream's first design partners for enterprise discovery included HR leaders at Starbucks and GE - found through cold outreach during the 100-interview pivot sprint, not through investor introductions.