I love watching tech click for someone who's been wanting in.
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.
What I'm actually trying to do
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 have nobody to hand it to.
It turned out the answer was a role: a technical coach and partner. What I'm great at is the technical side. What I love is the human side of it, coaching people through something new and watching it click for someone who thought this stuff wasn't for them.
The useful part isn't the tech or the code. It's 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. Not the building itself.
The moment what I've built reaches a real person.
What I believe about building
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. In the repo, shipping real software, 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.
Where the judgment came from
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.
Flow Foundation
Head of Developer Growth
Ran the developer ecosystem and grew monthly active developers from 250 to 600+ during a bear market, and grew DeFi ecosystem TVL from near-zero to a $119M all-time high. Drove 3000+ participants in the Flow Forte Hackathon.
"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."
Dieter Shirley Chief Architect, Flow Foundation · Creator of ERC-721
Dapper Labs
Senior Engineering Manager
Built the repeatable expansion pattern behind NBA Top Shot and owned the wallet and payments platform underneath it, serving millions of users and processing $1B+ in volume.
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"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."
Roham Gharegozlou CEO, Dapper Labs · Creator of NBA Top Shot & CryptoKitties
Mastercard
Director of Software Engineering
Drove the architecture behind the Next Edge initiative, reimagining card processing for the cloud and shipping working prototypes.
"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."
Matt Ramella Vice President of Software Engineering, Mastercard
Sparo Labs
Senior Engineer
Owned the integration layer (SDKs, APIs, auth) for a major pharma partnership, shipping what the team needed to make external collaboration work.
"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."
Andrew Brimer CEO, Sparo Labs · Forbes 30 Under 30
What I'm really building
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.