Ronald Mannak
Co-founder And CEO at Starling Protocol
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRonald Mannak is a serial founder and technical CEO with 15+ years building multidisciplinary teams and award-winning connected hardware and software products, from the V-Beat motion-sensing toys that sold 100,000 units in three months to privacy-first LLM and encryption tooling for iOS and macOS. He combines product leadership and hands-on engineering across Swift, Objective‑C, C#, Solidity and embedded Bluetooth LE, shipping fast prototypes and polished commercial releases. Ronald’s PhD research on trust in peer-to-peer networks informs his work on decentralized identity and blockchain tooling, including open-source Swift libraries for Ethereum and privacy-first email using self-sovereign keys. Comfortable at the junction of research, product and manufacturing, he has run global teams and managed contract manufacturers in China. Based in San Francisco and fluent in English, German and Dutch, he pairs startup grit with academic rigor and a proven knack for turning novel concepts into top-selling consumer products. An underappreciated thread in his career is a consistent focus on developer ergonomics—building SDKs and tools (like Swifthereum and Pico MLX frameworks) that make emerging tech accessible to native app developers.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Entrepreneurship Development Program 2008, Entrepreneurship Development Program 2008 at MIT Sloan School of ManagementArchitecture, Architecture at Technische Universität BraunschweigIndustrial Design Engineering Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering, Industrial Design Engineering Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology
Stackoverflow
446reputation
21kreached
4answers
5questions
Github Skills (158)
realm10
cmark10
non-blocking10
apple-silicon10
cryptoswift10
infura10
ai10
web3swift10
swift10
aes10
erc2010
swift-package10
coredata10
json-rpc10
objective-c10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
ronaldmannak/ConnectedDrive
Dec 2015 - Sep 2018
Contributions:2 releases, 44 commits, 3 PRs in 2 years 8 months
PicoMLX/PicoDocs
Jan 2025 - Jul 2026
import documents for LLMs
Contributions:2 releases, 13 reviews, 8 PRs in 1 year 5 months
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