The longer version. For the short version, see About.
1996. Started programming at age 12. Visual Basic, early web development. The beginning of a lifelong habit of taking things apart to see how they work.
2009. Graduated from Bocconi University in Milan with an MSc in International Management (110/110, the maximum grade). CEMS MIM exchange at Aalto University in Helsinki. Graduate thesis: “Commercializing Radical Technologies.”
2010. Founded Discontinuity S.r.l., a software consultancy based in Northern Italy. Over the next eight years, the company worked with clients ranging from Honeywell (IoT projects) to Gucci (mobile experience), and developed machine learning tools for Italian insurance companies. The consultancy remained profitable for the entire period.
2011. Enrolled in Andrew Ng’s Stanford Machine Learning class (August 17, 2011). This was before Coursera existed as a platform and a year before AlexNet triggered the deep learning revolution. The class was one of three Stanford courses that launched the modern era of online education.
2012. Co-authored CocoaPods, which became the standard dependency manager for iOS development. Wrote the dependency resolver, the plugin system, and the CDN infrastructure. The project grew organically without marketing because it solved a real problem for iOS developers. It eventually outgrew its original authors and is now maintained by an active community of contributors.
CocoaPods today: over 3 million apps, 100,000+ libraries, over 100 million RubyGems downloads. Used by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, and Slack. Referenced in React Native’s iOS setup documentation. Google built developer content around it.
2014. Keynoted at a WWDC community event on CocoaPods and the iOS dependency management ecosystem.
2016. Published a blog series on technology and business, including:
- “Management by exception”: described automated workflows that only escalate to humans when something breaks the pattern. This is essentially the architecture that Intarsia uses today.
- An analysis of the economy of algorithms and how ML would reshape business operations.
- A piece on Apple’s likely shift from Intel to ARM. Apple announced the transition in 2020.
Described Discontinuity as “a startup whose core offerings are AI technologies” in a company blog post.
2016 (cont). Built a supervisory control system (SCADA) with a Siemens automation partner: it monitors and controls plastics manufacturing lines in real time across factories worldwide, replacing manual gauges and paper logs with a unified digital dashboard. Still in production today.
2017. Selected as an Intel Software Innovator for AI/ML. Through the program, presented “The Economic Implications of Machine Learning” at the Intel Nervana AI Academy meetup in Rome (November 30, 2017). The talk argued that:
- ML automation would evolve through four stages: basic automation, human amplification, autonomous execution with human supervision, and full autonomous execution.
- The true power of the technology was enabling the wider population, not replacing specialists.
- Software written by neural networks (what Karpathy called “Software 2.0”) would eventually be easier to produce than hand-written code.
2018. Joined Amazon in Vancouver, working at AWS on mobile developer build infrastructure: CI/CD tooling for iOS builds. Contributed key code to a cross-team effort that significantly reduced build times.
2019–2023. Amazon Shopping in Seattle, ultimately as Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead.
- Unified the Shopping app’s navigation architecture across iOS and Android.
- A next-generation experience-platform effort had been stalled for about a year, with only a basic prototype to show. I built the first rich working demo, then led a foundational tiger-team project that turned the effort into a production path. The technical unlock was a frontend approach for a capability that had been expected to require months of backend work. The work set requirements for partner teams and helped turn the effort into a ~150-person platform organization.
2024. Led the platform-side team supporting Buy for Me, Amazon’s agentic AI shopping feature, and helped drive its customer-experience build (a 100-day build). Completed MIT Sloan’s AI Business Strategy program.
2025. Buy for Me was publicly announced (aboutamazon.com; TechCrunch, The Verge). Left Amazon on May 31 after seven years. Started building Intarsia: AI automation for SMB back-office operations, designed for non-technical operators.
The thesis: the same workflows that large enterprises automate with expensive, complex systems can be made accessible to small and medium businesses through AI agents that operate with human supervision. Connects to the “management by exception” pattern in the 2016 post and the autonomous-execution stage from the 2017 Intel talk, now practical with current LLMs.
Education
- MSc in International Management, Bocconi University, Milan (110/110)
- CEMS MIM, Aalto University, Helsinki
- AI Business Strategy, MIT Sloan, 2024
- Stanford Machine Learning (Andrew Ng), 2011
Languages: English, Italian, Spanish.
Location: Seattle area.