Ramine Darabiha · Product and R&D Leader

Hi, I'm Ramine Darabiha

Founder · Product & R&D leadership

I've built consumer products downloaded billions of times.

I care about products that expand human agency, reward craftsmanship, and make difficult technology feel natural.

About me

I lead product, and my product sense runs from the system to the surface: I know architecture and UX from the inside, and I can do the work myself when needed. I get there early, often before there was a company to join: the cloud in 2006, IPFS in 2016, AI email agents in 2020, decentralized identity in 2021, agentic commerce in 2025.

In games, I helped pioneer mobile games as a service and led R&D and product on Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Fruit Ninja, three of the ten most-downloaded iOS games of all time, and another 45 App Store Top 200 titles.

I've been invited to speak about this work at four GDCs, TEDx, Stanford, the Finnish Parliament, IPFS Camp, and the Internet Archive's DWeb Camp.

Recognition

  • Speaking: GDC (4×), TEDx, Stanford, The Family, Finnish Parliament, Queensland Government, Internet Archive, IPFS Camp
  • In the press: El País, TechCrunch, Messari, the Tezos Foundation
  • Patents: Event-based user rewards, Autonomously executed applications
  • Contributor at: Game Developer, ReadWrite, SiliconANGLE

Philosophy

  • Good product work is respectful of the user.
  • Craftsmanship matters because people can feel when something was made with care.
  • Making users happy lifts every meaningful KPI.
  • Leadership should make others safer, stronger, and more able to contribute.
  • Failure should produce learning, not shame.

Projects

  • AI Store Manager: An AI agent that runs the whole business behind a page: catalog, checkout, shipping, fulfillment. Not another page builder.
  • Open-Web Identity and Infrastructure: User-owned identity, social-login wallets, and a gasless social rollup that Tezos core developers called the first of its kind.
  • Direct-to-Fan Music Platform: Artists publish, build community, and sell directly to fans. Some earned materially more here than streaming paid them.
  • Hyperminter: Drop in your art, edit metadata in bulk, mint the whole set in one click. The most-used batch minter on Tezos.
  • Smart Wallets: Sign in with Google or Twitter and get a non-custodial wallet you genuinely own. Account abstraction hidden behind a normal signup.
  • Soundmojis: Collectible characters with sound, designed like premium toys you want on a shelf, not assets you wait to flip.
  • Programmable Email Workflows: Rules, scripts, and actions that let software act safely on your inbox. An agent product shipped before agents were the pitch.
  • Games as a Service: Built Halfbrick's product function and turned Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and the whole catalog into live services. The flagship passed a billion downloads.
  • Product on Angry Birds: PM on the biggest mobile game in the world: platforms, ads, location, partnerships, and a toys-to-life unlock years before Amiibo.
  • Experimental Technology: 50+ prototypes across AR, procedural generation, new inputs, and the open web. R&D pushed until the novelty became play.
  • The Consuming Shadow: Produced Yahtzee Croshaw's first commercial game, a Lovecraftian procedural horror. Very Positive on Steam, with one shot to get it right.
  • Browser-Based OS: A web desktop with files, apps, publishing, and identity, used by roughly 72 million people before the browser-as-OS was a category.
  • A Change of Heart: A 48-hour jam win: an endless runner you steer with earphones in your pocket, used backwards as a motion sensor.
  • Game Design for Music Drops: Leaderboards, collector tiers, and unlockable perks on a Kane Mayfield drop. Game design pointed at fandom.

Talks

  • The Internet as an Extended Mind (TEDxHelsinki, 2014): Taking David Chalmers' extended mind seriously: memory, search, and recall already moved outside the skull. What that changes, and what to protect.
  • Beyond Spotify: Direct-to-Fan Music (Industry talk, 2022): It takes roughly 600,000 streams a month to earn minimum wage. The case for direct-to-fan, and the platform we built for it.
  • Design Patterns for the DWeb (DWeb Camp, 2019): Product and UX discipline for protocol-heavy systems: how the decentralized web starts feeling like software people choose.
  • Publishing on the Decentralized Web (IPFS Camp, 2019): What a creator-owned Substack could look like on content-addressed infrastructure: consumer publishing for the permaweb.
  • Design Deep Dive on IPFS apps (IPFS Camp, 2019): What an IPFS app needs before normal people can use it: hide the hashes, the peers, and the pinning behind a real product.
  • Building the Finnish Startup Ecosystem (Stanford GSB, 2015): How Finland built a startup ecosystem out of culture and student energy, and what other regions can copy from it.
  • Why Europe Needs a Sovereign Cloud (Finnish Parliament, Internet Forum, 2010): Cloud, privacy, and digital sovereignty are product and infrastructure decisions, not just policy. Argued in Parliament in 2010.
  • Rebooting a Four-Year-Old Game to the Top of the App Store (GDC, Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, 2015): How a four-year-old game most studios would sunset went back into the U.S. top 20, and the live-ops playbook it produced.
  • Platform Strategy Behind Global Games (Queensland Government, Industry Briefing, 2013): Briefing the Queensland Government on Halfbrick Academy: students placed inside real production on globally shipped games.
  • From Free-to-Play to Indie (GDC, Independent Games Summit, 2016): Which billion-download habits help an indie game, and which ones quietly kill it. Lessons from producing The Consuming Shadow.
  • Angry Birds on the Web (Assembly Summer, Helsinki, 2011): Bringing Angry Birds to the browser when a web game still meant a banner ad: the open web as a real games platform.
  • Building the Best Product Team in Mobile Games (The Family): Roles, cadence, and operating model: building the product function behind a mobile games portfolio. In French, at The Family.
  • Reaching the Top 10 of the App Store (The Family): The playbook that takes a game into the App Store's top charts, told for a room of founders. In French, at The Family.

Articles