Here and Now 🧘
Howdy, Im Dragos - a Canadian-Romanian immigrant, polymath, software engineer, entrepreneur and investor. I spent the last 10 years with high growth bay area startups, cofounding a waterloo startup, launching hardware/software products and growing our family run accounting/tech firm in the Waterloo-Toronto-Montreal corridor.
My life philosophy is centered around lifelong experiential learning and long term investment into people. Ive lived in 7+ countries and countless cities to build relationships and gain insight into markets abroad. Now I am doubling down on Canada by building my own companies and helping others to do the same mostly here at home.
If youre an entrepreneur, I want to help you get funding, find your team, build your product and leverage international opportunities. I am super happy to meet with people who are passionate about their work and look out for opportunities to support their vision.
I cast a very wide net when it comes to my interests – my current obsessions include international tax, psychedelic medicine, AI/ML, housing and the future of work. When Im not writing code, reading or looking at spreadsheets I like to highline, climb, and ski. You can find me at burning man, on the road in my converted school bus or solo long distance fast-packing around the world. My software engineer resume can be found here.
last update on May 2023
Experience Spotlight 🔦
Below is a selection of my past jobs, clients and side projects.
Additionally you can find my projects on Github.
PAL Programming Language
PAL is a long term Human-AI pair programming languge / IDE research project, involving Neurosymbolic AI, HCI, programming language design and knowledge representation. It began with a study of the history of computing, an analysis of prior work like Smalltalk Squeak, Lambda Calculus, and the works of great thinkers like Ted Nelson and Alan Kay. There are a number of related repos on my github.
Anytype
end to end encrypted, offline first and open source, Anytype is the best privacy focused knowledge management tool you will find. As a senior software engineer I helped achieve our public launch objective, developing a number of awesome features, fixing bugs and engaging with users on the community forums.
Qualio
In the first half of my tenure, I helped upgrade our core monolith with a high availability containerized architecture and ci/cd pipeline on AWS, laying the groundwork for microservices. During the second half, I helped develop an application to automate customer onboarding, greatly reducing manual work across the company.
Emrys Analytics
I led the development of our underwriting engine and application, facilitating insurance policies for 84 healthcare institutions. We transformed preliminary spreadsheet models into a comprehensive underwriting engine. We also laid out the technical requirements to launch an autonomous vehicle insurance program at Ford. I contributed to a white paper design of an insurance platform supplied by telemetry data from vehicles.
School Bus Camper
I took some time off to convert a school bus camper. I learned a ton of hands-on skills to prepare for the impending apocalypse, including welding, metalwork, carpentry, electrical/solar, CAD, automotive repair, biodiesel production, sewing, plumbing and more. I wrote a handbook (work in progress) and collected data on everything. I also built a custom CNC machine, took a wilderness first responder course and skied across north america.
COVID PPE
Early in the pandemic I produced hundreds of 3d printed face shields for social workers in my area. I launched PPEForFree.org, an open source initiative with 47 contributors in order to improve information sharing and collaboration between small scale PPE producers.
D E L T A F I
I started deltafi at age 17 as a way to combine my passion for music and technology. I received a grant to design and build hardware tools. I built an embedded linux PureData patch system, an AVR8 based midi controller and a number of analog synthesizer modules.
Law Dataset
I productized the most comprehensive database of legal professionals in Canada and sold it to dozens of customers. I built out a CASL compliant sales outreach dataset enriched with public info useful for lead qualification, compiled from over a dozen different sources.
RCO Ventures
I helped dozens of customers solve business problems as a consultant. I built a customer base large enough to sustain one full time employee and 3 part time contractors. I developed a number of applications, websites and software solutions. Some of my past clients include Toggl, MUTEK, O2 Canada, ONE Wellness Group, Legalline, Enercents, Cyberium and Absolute Coaching.
Atlas Property Group
Atlas managed thousands of rental units in Ontario. I overhauled their IT infrastructure, from sales funnels and online presence to backend systems and security controls. I established process-focused digitization initiatives across all departments and performed an IT asset audit during the acquisition of tech startup Dormr.
ConstructionHub
ConstructionHub is a sub-contractor bid management platform in British Columbia. I led a team of 5 developers, rewriting and launching V2 of the platform after it had achieved some initial success.
MowGoSnowGo
MowGoSnowGo is a mobile app that provides on-demand house care services. I designed, developed and continue to maintain the application.
3DStream
3DStream is an industrial additive manufacturing (3D Printing) management solution which streamlines the workflow of commercial 3D fabrication. I advised the founders on their tech and strategy, helping design their architecture.
Hexigent Consulting
I performed a variety of data sanitization and statistical analysis tasks for a forensics team working on a cybercrime class action lawsuit.
ALR Accounting
Before my software career I worked part time at an accounting firm for 5 years, fulfilling IT Admin and bookkeeping duties.