Riccardo Michelon

24 y/o software engineer, currently Lead at Datapizza.

Started programming at 12 on my dad's laptop, hacking together mini games and abandoning them the moment gravity and physics walked in. Always been into building things, and computer science felt like the most accessible craft of all: a PC and an idea, nothing else needed. What I came to value most was simplicity and the discipline of questioning the obvious answer ("Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Tanenbaum).

Joined Datapizza around employee #20, watched it grow to ~90 while crossing 500k → 1.5M → 5M ARR, fully bootstrapped. Built Datapizza Jobs (100k+ candidates, 1M+ ARR) - owned architecture and infra, tech-led 5 engineers. Now building an AI agent orchestration platform from the ground up - the kind of work that lets me learn and fail at the stage of my career where both matter most.

What I care about most is living life at its fullest - health, relationships, presence, genuine passions - and my goal is to use technology as a tool to unlock more of that. Most tech today nudges people into living passively, reacting instead of acting. I want to make technology transparent - built to serve the rest of life, not to compete with it - so people can take back control of their lives.

Started full-stack (TypeScript, Next.js, React, Django, AWS), now going deeper into systems (Go, C).

When I'm not programming, you can find me training calisthenics, running around the hills of Padova, losing fights with my guitar, or buried in a 19th-century novel.