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 — Thirdbuy: a decentralized e-commerce marketplace built with crypto. We grew the team to 11 people, built the largest decentralized commerce marketplace in the world, with 60K+ products all sold with decentralized currency. We were backed by former executives from Meta, Wayfair, and more, and grew the product to over $3M in estimated annualized payment volume.

Now, I'm working on Challenger, a better alternative to normal banking. Our mission is simple: challenge the banks and win. And so I embark on yet another company; yet another story.

I'm always exploring, learning, creating, and meeting new people, and I hope it stays this way forever.

— Gabriel Romualdo