I'm Gabriel 👋

I've always loved building.

When I was 9, I started a magazine for my classmates, eventually recruited 10 friends of mine as writers and started producing monthly 50-page editions.

That same year, I started programming. I started with simple games and apps — one fun moment was when I wrote a fully functioning snake game from scratch, in just 4 minutes and 42 seconds.

When I was 12, I started writing blog posts about coding — in a couple years I had 250K+ readers, reaching the front pages of HackerNews and the DEV community multiple times, with 10K+ followers.

I started in industry when I was 15, working as a engineer at a blockchain company, then working at Speechify, a text-to-speech company leading payments there as a senior engineer. I then became an engineering manager there, leading engineering for their API product with 200M+ montly impressions, and finally led engineering for growth and monetization for their web products. In just a year, I went from high school intern to engineering manager, heading engineering teams for products with millions of users.

As I was working as an engineer, one my side projects took off — Diremo: a decentralized marketplace built with crypto. We grew the team to 8 people, built the largest decentralized commerce marketplace in the world, with 60K+ products all sold with decentralized currency.

We grew the product to over $3M in estimated annualized payment volume, but as the 2023 crypto winter hit, I found a larger opportunity focusing on enabling global financial infrastructure for all. We built Thirdbuy, the first and only product that allows anyone, anywhere to invest. It's Robinhood, but global. We're backed by some of the top web3 founders, and advised by former executives from Meta, Wayfair, and more.

I'm motivated primarily by impact and stories. What attracts me most to code is the ability to build something on a weekend in a small bedroom and distribute it to millions of people, instantly — the ability to make a large impact with code is incredible. With Speechify, I was excited to remove reading as a barrier to learning for millions of people with ADHD, dyslexia, learning disabilities, and more. With Thirdbuy, I'm motivated to democratize financial infrastructure that people in developed countries take for granted daily.

Today, I'm focused on growing Thirdbuy and making our mission a reality. I'm always exploring side projects on the side though, as well, and I still spend some time at school. And so now, I have a lot to learn, a lot to build, and hopefully a lot to achieve in the near future.

— Gabriel Romualdo