Leadership shaped by operating companies, investing, finance, and software.

Engineering was part of Frank Song’s life long before finance or business. His father double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California before becoming a design engineer at Xerox, a senior design engineer at Silicon Graphics, Vice President of Engineering at a technology startup, and eventually a founder himself. Frank grew up watching him design circuit boards, solder electronics, write software, and build a functioning electronics operation in the back of the family home.

But Frank also saw something equally formative. His father was a brilliant engineer, yet technical ability alone could not eliminate the problems of owning and scaling a business: employee issues, hiring and delegation, mistakes that had to be caught, quality control, financial pressures, and the endless stream of decisions that ultimately flowed back to the owner. Frank saw firsthand how those problems affected not only the company, but his father’s time, finances, stress, and family life. Decades later, after building his own company, Frank experienced many of the same problems himself.

Frank initially pursued finance, teaching himself corporate finance, advanced accounting, and financial modeling using Stanford Business School curriculum at 19. At Stifel Nicolaus Weisel, he was ranked as a top investment banker, received the firm’s top bonus, and worked on more than $500 million of leveraged buyouts, M&A, and public offerings. He later joined technology-focused private equity firm Accel-KKR, evaluating $100–$500 million enterprise-value software and tech-enabled-services companies and investing in businesses including HighJump Software (acquired for $750 million), Zinc Ahead (acquired for $130 million), and PageUp. Across his finance career, Frank completed more than $1 billion of leveraged buyouts, take-privates, M&A, IPOs, and other transactions.

Frank then moved from analyzing companies to building one. He founded and bootstrapped Zenith Prep Academy into a technology-enabled service business with more than 100 employees, appearing on the Inc. 5000 four times, achieving 95%+ payment renewal rates, earning recognition as the #1 education company by USA Today, and ultimately receiving an acquisition offer implying a $600 million enterprise value.

Alongside operating the company, Frank has spent approximately 13 years programming and building software, with work spanning relational database and schema design, application architecture, CRUD systems, APIs, authentication, encryption, systems integration, server and hosting architecture, deployment, data architecture, private and local AI systems, context engineering, and AI orchestration.

Tech-Enabled Capital is the culmination of an idea Frank has been developing for nearly 20 years: using technology to give business owners greater visibility, memory, analytical capacity, monitoring, and execution than either he or his father had while building their companies. Modern AI finally brought technology close to the operating architecture he had envisioned for decades.

Frank also serves as a Senior Diplomatic Advisor to a United Nations Permanent Observer and has participated in the World Economic Forum as a C-Suite Executive Delegate and speaker. He was received by His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, with whom he discussed AI and youth education initiatives, and separately held a private audience with the Vatican Secretary of State. Frank has been featured by Bloomberg, USA Today, and Forbes, and his life and career are the subject of the forthcoming Bloomberg Originals documentary “Against All Odds: The Frank Song Story.”