Hi I’m Nicolas Raga

I am passionate about working with awesome people on meaningful problems that are hard to solve.

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A little bit about me

I was raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela, also known as the “Beloved Land of the Sun”. I grew up participating in Math Olympics and Model UN conferences, earning national medals and participating in international competitions. That helped me come to the United States to study EECS at UC Berkeley. During my time at Berkeley I lived in the Berkeley International House, directed Cal Hacks for two years, did computer vision research, became a developer for Blockchain at Berkeley, and became a fellow at Kairos Society. After graduating in 2019, I moved to Seattle, Washington where I worked as a Software Engineer at Amazon. There I helped build Kinesis Data Analytics and found some bugs in theApache Flink library. Then I went back to my roots and helped build the largest GPU cluster at Amazon and their Large Language Model.

In Summer of 2023 I quit when I got into YCombinator to start Mano Health. I’ve been living in New York for the past year and absolutely love it.

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Beliefs

People

I get most of my energy and inspiration from people. I really emphasize building strong relationships, growing with friends, and working through problems as a team. Reliance, trust, and grit are values I focus on and cherish.

Meaningful and Hard Problems

I find a lot of meaning and fullfillment dedicating myself to issues I want to see solved. At work, I specialize in solving back-end problems, specifically within Distributed Systems and Machine Learning.

Passion and Intensity

Growing up in South America, I learned to thrive in diverse, intense, and passionate environments. I am an obsessive learner and continuously question what I think is possible. I am passionate about skiing, sailing, muay-thai, espresso, watches, and cooking.

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Work

For info about my work, look at my resume and linkedIn.

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