Fabio Berger
Lessons learned and giving back
About me
Fallibilist, optimist, technologist, nomad. I value first principles thinking and those who work hard to deploy novel solutions to hard problems. Solving problems is the only way we move humanity forward.
I see startups as a high leverage way to deploy solutions to important problems at scale. Most recently, I was deploying borderless, inclusive exchange infrastructure at 0x, growing the team from 3 to 38, and exchange volume to over $1B. Before that I was working to empower non-programmers through accessible software creation tools as the 6th engineer at Airtable. While still in college I built a used textbook marketplace to help save students money (ShelfRelief), an investment education platform to help people make smarter investment decisions (WealthLift) and a cartoon creation mobile app to lower the barriers to cartoon creation (Dubbit).
I am currently exploring problems in the blockchain, privacy, tools for thought and remote work spaces. I hope to use my blog as a way to share some of those explorations with the world.
Posts
Structuring an employee-friendly stock option plan
Equity grants are usually the largest financial incentive team members receive when working at a startup. It ties the upside and success of the company to the teams compensation in a very direct way.
Declare your love on the blockchain
We all know your love is going to last forever, but your valentine cards are ephemeral. They don’t have to be! That’s why we’re introducing the Love Chain Project!
Intro to Programming
Welcome to the wonderful world of programming. In this intro, I want to help you get up to speed with some of the fundamentals to what ‘programming’ actually means and how you can get started with learning this very powerful tool.
How to dockerize a golang webapp with postgres DB
I've been playing around with Docker recently and have decided to use it in the deployment of a Golang Negroni + Postgres webapp I've been working on.
Building a coinbase app in Go
Coinbase is a terrific Bitcoin Hosted Wallet that continues to simplify the purchase and safe storage of Bitcoin. They have an extensive API that allows 3rd party developers to build apps on top of their platform. I noticed they didn't have an API wrapper written in Go, so I decided to write one.
Dubbit: the cartoon creator app
About a year ago I was watching South Park and realized how hilarious the show was despite the simplicity of the animations. I then started to think about how many more funny stories could be told if anyone could make an animation, not just the handful of people at South Park Studios.
How to unmarshal a JSON array of arrays in Go
I recently was dealing with a JSON object returned from an external API. I wanted to decode the JSON object into Golang structs so that I could then process and store its contents in my application.
Cryptocurrencies: turning random characters into financial accounts
For the past month I have been spending lots of time researching cryptocurrencies, most notably Bitcoin and Stellar. After having read multiple whitepapers, manually generating and executing bitcoin transactions on the blockchain and speaking with many of the thought leaders in the space...
Startup lessons from WealthLift.com
In august 2012, Soroush and I returned to school after having worked on WealthLift.com full-time for a year. One of our mentors told us to write down all the lessons we had learned from working on WealthLift. I am very thankful that I took the time to do it, and this is what I wrote.
Building the InMoov humanoid robot
Immediately after discovering Gael's InMoov Project, I decided my next 3D printing project would be to build an InMoov Humanoid Robot. It's been an extremely great learning experience and by far the largest hardware project I've ever undertaken.
Controlling LED brightness with a grove ultrasound sensor and Raspberry Pi
Back when I was a freshman at Duke, I took the leap of working on my first startup. It was hard and I quickly realized that I was swimming in the deep end. I decided to try and find other students who had started companies, so that I could learn as much from them without having to make all the mistakes myself.
Open-source Humanoid Robotics
Until this point in time, the development of humanoid robotics has taken place in the R&D centers of large organizations. The reason for this has been the extraordinary cost of the hardware, software and collaboration tools at their disposal.
The Cube: experiments in building a startup community
Back when I was a freshman at Duke, I took the leap of working on my first startup. It was hard and I quickly realized that I was swimming in the deep end. I decided to try and find other students who had started companies, so that I could learn as much from them without having to make all the mistakes myself.