Hi, I'm Ramine Darabiha

Founder · Product & R&D Leader

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 build products and product teams. 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: a cloud OS in 2008, IPFS in 2016, AI email agents in 2020, decentralized identity in 2021, agentic commerce in 2025.

I helped pioneer games as a service¹²³, leading R&D and product on Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Fruit Ninja, 3 of the 10 most-downloaded games of all time⁴⁵⁶. I worked in live-games portfolios of 50+ titles with billions of downloads.⁷⁵⁶

Sources

AI-native product development

An archivist that proposes sourced changes. A music tool that people and agents can play. A Mac that becomes a room’s sound system. I build these products with AI across design, engineering and operation, and make the decisions that connect the technology to the experience.

How the practice works

PartyParty: Public beta. Play audio from your Mac. Guests scan a QR code and listen on their own headphones. Native audio capture and LL-HLS streaming connect a Mac to iPhone browsers, over venue Wi-Fi or a cloud relay. No guest app or account. Public beta; mixed-path timing is still being resolved. Scope: Product strategy, interaction and visual design, native macOS app, Go streaming and relay architecture, guest web experience, Cloudflare infrastructure, testing, distribution, and operations
Visit product · Latest product decision · View source · Join the TestFlight beta
Darabiha: Live. Give a family archivist a document. Review the people, relationships and stories it finds. An agentic private family archive with multilingual evidence, deterministic reconciliation and audited proposals. Connected assistants suggest changes; family members decide. The public TreeTree sample uses invented records. My scope: Product strategy, archive reconstruction, data modeling, privacy and access design, interaction design, full-stack engineering, AI workflows, infrastructure, migration, testing, and operations
Try public sample · Latest product decision · View source
Retro Porting Toolkit: Live. Find the tools, native ports and people bringing older games to new hardware. A collaborative publishing system maps static recompilation across tools, runtimes, games and hardware. My work is the website, information architecture and editorial tooling; the community builds the recompilers and ports. My scope: Product, positioning, information architecture, design, web engineering, publishing system, and editorial workflow
Visit product · View source
Chiptunes.app: Live. Compose Game Boy music, edit every note, and share the song as a link or cartridge. A deterministic composer, register-level emulation and a cartridge compiler share one score. Browser-agent tools can compose, analyse and export through the same engine. Scope: Product, interaction design, audio systems, engineering, infrastructure, launch, and operations
Use it · Latest product decision · View source
ramine.net: AI-First Publishing: Live. Publish a body of work with its sources, working demonstrations and history intact. A typed content graph, deterministic two-site compilation and agent-operable editorial workflows produce this site. Citations, search, media and fully prerendered routes come from the same records. Scope: Research, product strategy, information architecture, design, engineering, infrastructure, QA, launch, and publishing operations
Visit product · Latest product decision
Spatial Gallery: Live. Walk through the work, open a project, and watch a talk inside the gallery. A dual-mode WebXR scene supports gaze and pinch on Apple Vision Pro, plus mouse and touch in a browser. Spatial interaction and the conventional portfolio share the same content. Scope: Product, spatial interaction design, WebXR engineering, performance, media delivery, and launch
Open project · Latest product decision

Selected past works

AI Store Manager: An AI agent built to run the whole business behind a page: catalog, checkout, shipping, fulfillment. A working MVP, ahead of the agent wave.
Spatial Gallery: A dual-mode WebXR scene supports gaze and pinch on Apple Vision Pro, plus mouse and touch in a browser. Spatial interaction and the conventional portfolio share the same content.
Chiptunes.app: A deterministic composer, register-level emulation and a cartridge compiler share one score. Browser-agent tools can compose, analyse and export through the same engine.
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.
ramine.net: AI-First Publishing: A typed content graph, deterministic two-site compilation and agent-operable editorial workflows produce this site. Citations, search, media and fully prerendered routes come from the same records.
Identity Systems: User-owned identity, social-login wallets, and a gasless social rollup that Tezos core developers called the first of its kind.
Retro Porting Toolkit: A collaborative publishing system maps static recompilation across tools, runtimes, games and hardware. My work is the website, information architecture and editorial tooling; the community builds the recompilers and ports.
AI Email Agents: Rules, scripts, and actions that let software act safely on your inbox. An agent product shipped before agents were the pitch.
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.
Decentralized Music & Social: DNS.xyz: one social login gave you a wallet you own, a portable identity, and a place to publish and sell directly to fans. Four surfaces, one platform on Tezos.
PartyParty: Native audio capture and LL-HLS streaming connect a Mac to iPhone browsers, over venue Wi-Fi or a cloud relay. No guest app or account. Public beta; mixed-path timing is still being resolved.
Darabiha: An agentic private family archive with multilingual evidence, deterministic reconciliation and audited proposals. Connected assistants suggest changes; family members decide. The public TreeTree sample uses invented records.
Experimental Technology: 50+ prototypes across AR, procedural generation, new inputs, and the open web. R&D pushed until the novelty became play.
Direct-to-Fan Music Platform: Artists publish, build community, and sell directly to fans. Some earned materially more here than streaming paid them.
Smart Wallets: Sign in with Google or Twitter and get a non-custodial wallet you genuinely own. Account abstraction hidden behind a normal signup.
Hyperminter: Drop in your art, edit metadata in bulk, mint the whole set in one click. The most-used batch minter on Tezos.
Soundmojis: Collectible characters with sound, designed like premium toys you want on a shelf, not assets you wait to flip.
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.
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.

How I think about products

An agent should give someone more control, not ask them to surrender it. In Darabiha, a connected assistant can propose a change, but the family decides what becomes part of its history.

The interesting technology has to survive an ordinary moment: a guest locking their phone, a musician changing one note, a relative reading a name in their own language. That is where craft becomes a product decision rather than decoration.

At Halfbrick, I built a product team around frequent releases and reviews of what players actually did. I bring that same expectation to AI: make room to try things, put the result in front of people, and turn what fails into a better next decision.

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.
Collaborate to Innovate (Queensland Government, Industry Briefing, 2015): 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

How the Shape of Tokyo Trains Can Dictate Your App's Success (Game Developer, 2016): Product design lessons from Japan on how daily context, commute length, device posture, and attention shape what people actually use.
Luxury Paid For in the Currency of Privacy (SiliconANGLE, 2010): A cloud-era privacy essay on the real cost of free products, user data, platform trust, and the tradeoffs behind connected services.
What Nokia Got Wrong About Platform Strategy (Arctic Startup, 2011): A widely read platform-strategy essay on Nokia that became one of ArcticStartup's most-read pieces and was picked up by Helsingin Sanomat.
How Rovio Builds a Brand to Last (ReadWrite, 2016): How Angry Birds became more than a hit game: brand systems, distribution, repetition, licensing, and long-term franchise strategy.
Design Tips from the Designer of Fruit Ninja (ReadWrite, 2012): How Fruit Ninja's feel, polish, collisions, bounce, and rhythm were deliberately engineered to make every action satisfying.
The Quiet Rise of the Hobbyists (Game Developer, 2012): How tools like GameMaker, RPG Maker, and Twine opened game creation to non-developers with ideas worth playing.
10 Lessons from Finland's Summer of Startups (ReadWrite, 2011): Lessons from serving as head coach for a summer program where student founders built real startups instead of taking summer jobs.
The Unsung Hero (Arctic Startup, 2010): A piece on the overlooked people who make startup ecosystems work before the spotlight reaches the companies they helped create.
The Accidental Cyberactivist (2009): Coverage in El País (2009): I posted working proxy addresses to Twitter so Iranians could route around state censorship during the Green Movement.
How Heavy Rain Delivers, and Fails in the Process (SiliconANGLE, 2010): A close reading of Heavy Rain: where its cinematic, choice-driven design pulls you in and where it breaks, on interaction, immersion, and managing player expectation.
The Brief History of Funrank, an Agile Startup from Finland (SiliconANGLE, 2011): A founder's postmortem of Funrank: validating a product, recognizing a market that would not scale, and the judgment to kill it and move on.
How I Became the Robert Scoble of Buzz (ReadWriteWeb, 2010): My first ReadWriteWeb piece (2010): a weekend spent figuring out how Google Buzz's discovery and follower mechanics worked, then publishing what I found.
Building Frontier Products with AI at One-Person Scale (2026): Building with agents, designing products that agents can operate, and deciding what is ready for people to use. Lessons from native audio, an agentic archive and a browser instrument.

Selected recognition

Speaking: GDC (4×), TEDx, Stanford, Finnish Parliament, Internet Archive, IPFS Camp
In the press: El País, TechCrunch, Mashable, PocketGamer.biz
Patents: Event-based user rewards, Autonomously executed applications
Contributor at: Game Developer, ReadWrite, SiliconANGLE, ArcticStartup

Availability

I’m interested in product and R&D leadership roles where I can build hands-on, shape the product, and help a team take emerging technology into people’s lives.

ramine@ramine.net