Ramine Darabiha · Product and R&D Leader

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: 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, leading R&D and product on Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Fruit Ninja, three of the ten most-downloaded iOS games of all time. Across Storm8, Halfbrick, and Rovio, I worked in live-games portfolios of 50+ titles with billions of downloads.

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, Mashable, Pocket Gamer, ArcticStartup, GDC Vault, Tezos Commons, Messari
  • Patents: Event-based user rewards, Autonomously executed applications
  • Contributor at: Game Developer, ReadWrite, SiliconANGLE, ArcticStartup

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 built to run the whole business behind a page: catalog, checkout, shipping, fulfillment. A working MVP, ahead of the agent wave.
  • 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.
  • 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