I'm Sean Robb. For fifteen years I've taken what's new and made it usable: cloud at Mastercard, crypto at Dapper and Flow. AI is the next one. I do it out of St. Louis.
For a long time I circled one question. How do I take what I'm good at and put it to work for the businesses that need it? Not the giants I came from. The ones that can feel AI coming, and maybe that's you. Your competitors are starting to move on it, there's nobody on your team to hand it to, and it can look like this whole thing is for bigger companies with tech departments. That's the gap I kept coming back to.
The answer turned out to be a role: a technical coach and partner. The technical side I've got. What I love is coaching someone through something new and watching it click.
The useful part is the translation into real understanding and value.
I can sit with something complicated, understand it deeply, and explain it simply enough that you want to lean in.
The part that keeps me going has always been the same. It's the moment the work lands. A stranger at the airport asking about NBA Top Shot. Someone walking up to a booth because what we built caught their eye.
The moment what I've built reaches a real person.
I came to this the hard way. Two kinds of burnout got me here, and the full story is on the blog. During my sabbatical I found the people who'd already figured it out: 37signals, Paul Jarvis, Rob Walling. Founders building real businesses without outside capital. They showed me another way existed.
So I build the way they do. Hands on the actual software, shipping it, not just advising on it. I'd rather be the missing technical brain inside a handful of companies I work with closely than a vendor with a hundred logos.
AI is what makes that realistic now. And not just for me. It's collapsing the cost of serious technical work, so the businesses that were told they were too small to compete no longer are. I want to help put that within reach of as many of them as I can.
None of this matters to a five-person shop unless I can translate it into something useful for them, which is the whole point. But it's the work that taught me what good looks like, and the people I worked with saw it up close.
Sean led our Next Edge initiative - reimagining Mastercard's card processing for the cloud. He brought innovation velocity to an enterprise R&D environment, delivered working prototypes, and drove architecture decisions. Technical depth, business communication, and navigated enterprise complexity seamlessly.
Mastercard Director of Software Engineering Drove the architecture behind the Next Edge initiative, reimagining card processing for the cloud and shipping working prototypes.
Sean scaled Dapper Wallet from 8 to 40 engineers and transformed it into an ecosystem platform processing over $1B. Enabled dozens of businesses in the Flow ecosystem through open standards. Real impact.
Dapper Labs Senior Engineering Manager Built and owned the wallet and payments for all Dapper Labs apps, serving millions of users.
Sean was able to 2x the dev count on Flow during the Crescendo upgrade: A huge update that broke nearly every smart contract deployed on the network! He was able to reactivate a bunch of churned devs and turned a massive upheaval into a big win. I was really glad for his leadership through that maelstrom.
Flow Foundation Head of Developer Growth Grew monthly active developers on Flow from 250 to 600+ and drove 3000+ participants into a hackathon during a bear market.
Sean joined while we were supporting a major pharma partnership. He ramped up fast, owned the integration layer (SDKs, APIs, auth), and shipped what we needed to make external collaboration work. High-quality output, real impact. Would work with him again in a heartbeat.
Sparo Labs Senior Engineer Owned the integration work that connected their product to a major pharma partner, shipping what the team needed to make the collaboration work.
Earlier still, I was writing test software for the flight and engine controls on F-15 and F-18 fighter jets and Black Hawk helicopters at BAE Systems, and rebuilt the billing systems CenturyLink ran its revenue through.
I'm raising my daughters in St. Louis, and I want them growing up around people who build real things, and build them well. That's the community I want to help grow. My piece of it is a small portfolio of my own businesses, the kind I'd be proud to show them. Not one big venture, a few good ones, built alongside people who care as much as I do. So wherever you are, if you're building something that matters, I'd love to help you build it.