Victor Zhang

Currently

I’m building Kennan, an AI financial analyst. It does the work I spent ten years doing by hand — reading filings, building models, finding what’s off — for M&A boutiques, search funds, and fractional CFOs.

On the side, I advise a few teams putting AI into their financial workflows, and I write about software, strategy, and AI at The Knowledge Worker.

Selected work

Markdown

A small Mac app for reading, editing and annotating Markdown, built for the round trip with AI agents: an agent writes a plan, you mark it up and hand it back, and nothing you do damages its half. Free software, also where I take my notes.

2026·product·free download
Safata

A local command-line agent for knowledge work — research, analysis, documents — running entirely on your machine, on your own API keys, with whichever model you choose. Parallelism is as simple as opening another terminal.

2026·product·in build
PDF extraction benchmark

A structure-aware benchmark of eight extraction approaches — vision LLMs, hosted parsers, local OCR — across 599 pages of financial documents, scored on information capture rather than string similarity.

2026·research + code
Long-context degradation study

455 runs across frontier models, measuring how reasoning quality decays as context grows. About $1,860 of API spend to replace an intuition with a curve. See Fig. 1; harness and data in the repository.

2026·research
Frame inertia

An experiment on anchoring in language models: once a model adopts a frame, what does it take to dislodge it?

2026·research·write-up in progress
strategy-map

A browser-based interactive strategy-mapping tool, Excalidraw-inspired. TypeScript, React, Canvas.

2025·tool
Alliance Plaisance

Co-founded the first LodgeBoats in the Mediterranean — a floating hotel moored in the marina at Gruissan. Still afloat.

2021·venture

Fig. 1 — Long-context study: mean score under context-window stress (noise cells, fill ≥ 25%), five frontier models × eight dimensions, 455 runs. Color = rank within column, darker is better; ★ = best. Clean-input baseline and the full matrix in the repository.

History

Born in the north of China; studied computer science in the south, in Suzhou. Immigrated to France in my early twenties and stayed ten years — then four in the Czech Republic, and four, so far, in Spain. Most of that was M&A and buyside finance, most recently leading new business at Pdftools, a Swiss document-SDK company, through its acquisition by Apryse.

Somewhere in the middle, co-founded a floating hotel on the French Mediterranean. Came back to building software when AI made a one-person lab viable. Mandarin, French, English, Italian — picked up in roughly that order.