Stepan Parunashvili
CTO at Instant
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolStepan Parunashvili is a pragmatic CTO and founder with 11 years of engineering leadership experience building product- and developer-facing systems from zero to one. He has led teams and launched tooling at Airbnb that materially improved engineering velocity and company-wide communication, and earlier helped scale Wit.ai through acquisition into Facebook. Currently steering Instant and JS Capital Ventures, he blends hands-on full‑stack development (notably contributing to the Instant real‑time DB and browser tooling) with strategic product execution across payments, infra, and developer experience. He thrives on hard technical transitions—migrations, multi-region reliability, and introducing new payment processors—and on creating communities that incubate bottom-up innovation. Colleagues describe him as someone who hires and collaborates with lifelong friends: optimistic, ambitious, and unafraid to learn the skills needed to get the job done. He also brings an uncommon mix of startup founder grit from time building businesses in China and large‑scale product delivery at global platforms.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Y Combinator
English, manadrin, Georgian, French
Stackoverflow
2,699reputation
244kreached
60answers
194questions
Github Skills (17)
javascript10
typescript10
typescript-types10
typescripts10
react10
database8
databases8
documentation6
ruby-on-rails6
webpack-hmr6
google-maps6
gulp6
jquery6
webpack-hot-middleware6
webpack6
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
instantdb/instant
Aug 2024 - Apr 2025
Instant is a modern Firebase. We make you productive by giving your frontend a real-time database.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:663 reviews, 637 PRs, 1124 pushes in 7 months
Contributions summary:Stepan contributed to the development of the "Instant" real-time database platform, focusing on both front-end and back-end aspects. Contributions included improvements to the example chat application, fixing grammar issues in the tutorial, and adding features like a browser-based code editor. The user's work also involved integrating features into a chrome extension for the platform.
stopachka/pg-essays
May 2017 - Jun 2022
Contributions:27 commits, 7 PRs, 4 pushes in 5 years 2 months
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