Hi person from Columbus, the United States* 🇺🇸, I'm Roba Olana.

* detected via your IP, don't worry I'm not tracking you

I was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. My main base for the past few years has been the UAE.

I believe increased productivity growth to be the economic (inequality) liberator we yearn, and tech to be at the frontier. I've tried to set course in that direction and often ask how I can be the reason we have nice things. I believe education (tech) to be one of the main meta problems and hope to (re)focus on building my opinionated solution soon.

These days I'm focused on VentureSouq and Works By Gini.

I lead data and investments at VentureSouq (320 portfolio companies, 6 countries), working with a wonderful team on everything you might imagine a VC firm does + a few frontier projects. We currently invest in FinTech and ClimateTech. Capital allocation is likely not my calling but I'll always be part of the orchestra, it's too much fun.

Works By Gini is a platform I'm using to build primitives and bet on dogfood maxxing as a way to win, especially in the AI world. We build (and use):

  • agentOS: opinionated agent framework, runtime, and API with composable tools and integrations, fine grained authorization, event-driven triggers, agent emails, collaborative threads, managed memory, built in meeting notetaker etc.
  • Sandbox: serverless code execution environment with persisted state (support for language specific notebooks) built on top of Firecracker.
  • Chat: agents but make it the most under appreciated modality.
  • fundOS: platform we use at VentureSouq for thesis, fund modelling, investor relations, portfolio health checks, CRM, sourcing etc. Powered by Gini.

Other general interests: making physical things (I used to be an associate at an advanced manufacturing workshop), armchair progress studies, and water sports.

I hope to write in public more and hope to delete this paragraph once my blog is up. Enjoy the placeholder Tetris game at the bottom in the meantime.

If you've been curious enough to read this far and think we'll have a good time chatting, let's.

You can reach me at:

first_name @ gini.works / venturesouq.com / nyu.edu

(I use our AI agents to filter out spam, so please, don't)

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