Robb Chen-Ware

I came up in an unusual way: music school, then product design with intentions to pursue 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. We even got an App Store Editor's pick nod not long after launching. I was hooked on building.

From there I joined HappyFunCorp, a New York dev shop that allowed me to learn and grow working with a diverse portfolio of clients. 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 for book sales, 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. Though it didn't find its market, I came away having learned a great deal about building with LLMs, including the necessity of clean data, clear governance, thoughtful org design, and aligned incentives to make best-in-class teams.

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. It's been an incredible experience, and I'm excited for what we are building. Becoming a parent sharpened how I think about tech and how I see my role in it. In short, I want to improve the world my kids are growing up in: building to generate value for society, leveraging the best tools we have towards the hardest problems, and never losing sight of the value of real human connection IRL.