Entrepreneur CTO Co-founder Professional Worrier About Milliseconds
Javi Santana is a Spanish engineer who has spent 20+ years convincing himself and others that the difference between 16ms and 17ms response time is absolutely worth losing sleep over.
(Narrator: It was not.)
Born in Spain, raised by the internet, shaped by reading the Quake source code at an impressionable age. He once sold GPS software to farmers door-to-door and somehow parlayed that into raising $70 million from American VCs. If that's not the most chaotic career trajectory you've ever heard, you haven't been paying attention.
Currently co-founding Tinybird, where he processes data at scale while writing Substack posts about how everyone else is doing it wrong. Previously CTO at CARTO, where he turned maps into a $100M business and then left to do something even more stressful.
(His hobbies include: telling people frameworks are bad, quoting John Carmack, and having opinions about Spain's startup ecosystem.)
Built GPS software for farmers. Went literally door-to-door selling to agricultural workers. Imagine explaining coordinate systems to someone who's been navigating by gut feeling for 40 years. Company stayed profitable for 12 years. Sold it. Normal people would've retired. Not Javi.
Became CTO when the company was 6 people. Left when it was worth ~$100M. Spent 6 years explaining to investors that geospatial visualization is the future. Spoiler: he was right, which only made him more insufferable.
Co-founded a company whose entire pitch is "we make data go brrr in under 100ms." Raised $70M to prove that yes, you do need sub-second query response times, even if your users are just refreshing a dashboard nobody reads.
Currently in the "maybe I should rest more" phase of his career, which for Javi means only writing 2 blog posts per month instead of 4 and merely thinking about latency during dinner instead of actively optimizing queries.
Click the squares when you spot them in his writing. Get 4 in a row and win absolutely nothing.
Type any normal tech statement and translate it into how Javi would say it.