User:Amsantarelli

Alex Santarelli

http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg

My passion is impacting others through tech, design, music, and fun.

UIF Fellow 2018/2019 @ Loyola University Maryland

About me:

I had an unconventional path for my college experience. My first year in college was at Loyola University Maryland where I served as a UIF fellow for my school. After my first year at Loyola, I wanted to work with my best friend Samir and be in a city. So I ended up transferring into New York University. Whenever I didn’t have classes I was working on projects with Samir. We ended up on a whim making Spotify wrapped but for Apple Music because we were feeling left out. An awesome by product of making that app was that TechCrunch, theVerge and Billboard ended up writing an article about it. Fast forward to the second semester at NYU (Spring 2019), classes weren’t very engaging and I didn’t feel like it was worth the tuition I had to pay as a transfer student.

Looking for something fun to do over the summer that wasn’t working for NYU (I had a job there as a Lead UX Designer, to help pay the bills). I reconnected with my friend Dylan who I met many years ago at Facebook’s F8 conference. Dylan and I met originally because we had both made apps for our high school and were able to attend the conference because we won a student scholarship with our apps. My school app was focused on utility features, his was focused on social features. He ended up raising a seed round and was looking for a founding engineer to help build out the company. Saturn is a social calendar for high schools.

Late Spring 2019 I joined Saturn and was the first engineer of the company. Saturn was going really well, I loved what I was doing, was learning more than I was in school, and I even convinced Samir to join and be the founding designer for the company. NYU let us take 1 year of absence without having to decide whether we were going to leave school or not. A year after I joined Saturn we were in the middle of Covid; paying full tuition for zoom classes and potentially missing out on Saturn wasn’t something I wanted to do. I dropped out. Saturn grew a lot while I was there. 3 years later when I left due to burn out, we had 50 people at the company and raised a large Series A! The engineering team itself had over 20 people on it. I built the core app experience at Saturn with the help of some incredible teammates over those 3 years. A lot of complex problems that we encountered at Saturn, used human centered design to solve.

The past year I was working at another start up called Fam, which was a houseparty video chat clone and sadly with the state of the market and the app not being a true business, I had to start thinking about what might be next. I learned so much from engineering from the ground up that I wanted to experience how engineering at a large company works. Now I’m at Robinhood as an iOS Engineer.

In my free time I work on various app + business ideas that I get really excited about. Education is something I’m starting to focus on again because I think it is one of the hardest places to institute change, but the most rewarding and necessary. I think the intersection between AI and Education will cause a lot of disruption in ways we can’t even imagine at the moment. I’m also super into music, still iterating on new music app concepts.