I’m Gian (as in “january”), short for Gianluca.
I’ve been at Replit for the last couple of years, where I’ve been building many things -- these days mostly contributing to our AI research team, after having led our growth engineering efforts between 2022 and 2023.
Before Replit, I founded Uniwhere, a mobile app that uses data to help college students make better decision for their career. It automatically parsed students’ academic records through distributed data scraping, and matched them with an ontology of the job market to suggest users the best career paths. It grew to over 600k users organically, a third of the market where we were active, with 0 marketing budget. After raising two venture rounds, in late 2021 we sold it.
I love to learn and I love to tell the world about what I learn. You can find me fairly often as a speaker at meetups and conferences. In 2019, one of my talks was showcased by Google as one of their top 40 tech talks of the year worldwide.
In 2017, I was awarded Italian of the Year by the Italian Embassy in Germany. During my college years, I founded the biggest student-led theatre company in Italy.
I’m also publishing a private newsletter, that I send only when I feel like I have something to add to the conversation. I read every reply. You can join it here:
Talks
- Droidcon APAC 2020: Remote is here. Now what? video
- Deutsche Bildung Frankfurt 2020: Hyperproductivity in the age of defocus
- Google Developer Festival Italy 2020: Remote is here. Now what? • slides
- University of Padua - Economics and Management 2019: Startup: A Very Peculiar Company (italian) • slides
- Google DevFest Venice 2019: Don’t do native if you want VC money! • slides • video
- University of Münster 2018: Hacking growth: 0 to 100k with science and creativity to get to product-market fit • slides
- Google DevFest Venice 2018: Reverse Engineering of Mobile APIs
- Startup Italia Open Summit 2018: Robotics and The Future of Employability
- Microsoft Azure Meetup Berlin 2017: Deploy your AI model in production with Azure
- App Promotion Summit Berlin 2017: From 0 to 100K users with 0 marketing budget • slides
- University of Padua 2017: What is a startup? • slides • event page
- University of Trento 2017: How should you raise VC money? • slides
- Google DevFest Venice 2017: Simple Introduction to Machine Learning • slides
- Google DevFest Berlin 2016: Improve Your App Ratings Using Machine Learning • slides • event page
- La Repubblica - 2022
- Minister of Labor - 2019
- StartupItalia - 2019
- Punto Informatico - 2018
- Il Mattino di Padova - 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 (print)
- Radio24, I Funamboli - 2018
- Rai Radio 1 - 2018 (radio)
- Rai Radio 3 - 2017 (radio)
- Il Fatto Quotidiano - 2017
- SkyNews 24 - 2017 (TV)
- The Huffington Post - 2017
- Il Corriere della Sera - 2015, 2016, 2017 (print)