Robb Chen-Ware

I came up in an unusual way: music school, then product design, planning to go into industrial design, then straight into software at Broadcastr in the skeuomorphic early days of mobile. When the team there faced cuts, we had three months to pivot and shipped SPUN, a city news aggregator that curated the best content from hundreds of RSS feeds using social monitoring and old-fashioned editorial taste. It was my first taste of startup life, working with users, even slinging some code. Not long after launch we got an App Store Editor's Pick nod. I was hooked on building.

From there I joined HappyFunCorp, a New York dev shop where a wide range of clients gave me room to grow. Most engagements put me alongside a founder or leader inside a larger org, figuring out how to make a new idea work. Bookshop.org, the indie-bookstore answer to Amazon, was the biggest success, alongside work with Nike, Twitter, Samsung Health, Restoration Hardware, NYC's Department of Social Services, Breakthrough Energy, and others. Over time I moved from building product to helping run the agency itself, and after a sale to Tiny Capital, left as COO to go deep on LLMs.

I spent a year building Dispatch AI with HFC's former CTO Jon Evans. It didn't find its market, but I came away knowing a lot more about building with LLMs, and about how much depends on clean data, clear governance, org design, and incentives.

Project Healthy Minds checked many boxes for what I wanted in my next phase: a worthwhile mission, a grand challenge, in-office culture, and uncommonly talented people. I started in September 2024, weeks before our 2.0 launch. Becoming a parent sharpened how I think about tech and my role in it. I want to improve the world my kids are growing up in: build things that are good for people, put the best tools we have on the hardest problems, and never lose sight of real human connection IRL.