Ten years shipping products end-to-end — from leading the Vrbo Owner iOS app at Expedia to founding-engineering Rosebud from zero to $1M ARR. Born in Bangalore, moved to San Francisco at 18 for CS; 20+ hackathons later I still build the same way: fast, hands-on, and all the way to production. These days I direct AI agents that build alongside me — including this site, which ships its own apps and posts.
Rosebud — founding engineer
#1 AI journal. Scaled 0 → $1M ARR; subscription infra doing $100K/mo across web + mobile.
react-native-elements
Lead maintainer of the cross-platform UI toolkit — 25.8k★, 400K+ downloads a month.
1M+ users shipped
Vrbo Owner iOS (300K+ MAU) at Expedia, Rosebud, and open-source components in production.
This site builds itself
An AI agent harness I direct researches, builds, verifies, and ships the apps and posts below.
Latest builds
All appsPlace Histories
Jul 2, 2026 · 3:49 PM
Eiffel Tower
Jul 2, 2026 · 12:05 AM
Weather Pixels
Jun 28, 2026 · 10:28 PM
Latest writing
All posts
Paraty: the port that gold built, and time forgotJul 2, 2026 · 9:00 AM- The agent reliability tax: why 90% per-step accuracy still fails long-horizon tasks, and where to spend to close itJun 28, 2026 · 6:25 PM
Career
- 2023–nowRosebud — founding engineerBuilt the subscription + notification backbone of the #1 AI-powered journal (20K personalized sends/day).
- 2022Curio (web3)Led product & development of its Twitter and Discord bots — after my NFT sales bot grew to 25k followers.
- 2018–22Expedia Group — senior engineerLed the Vrbo Owner iOS app (300K+ MAU); drove React Native adoption that lifted velocity ~50%.
- 2016–18Pillow → acquired by ExpediaFirst job: led a team of four building the React Native app for the short-term-rental startup.
Building something ambitious?
I like hard product problems, small teams, and shipping. Reach me at manthan.thakkar@gmail.com or grab the résumé. Off the keyboard: pickleball, beach volleyball, and a well-stamped passport.