About Me

I'm Monte Thakkar — curious, growth-minded, and driven. I'm a product engineer with expertise in early-stage full-stack product engineering, and I live in Los Angeles with my wife, Suvarcha. I was born and raised in Bangalore, India, and moved to San Francisco at 18 to study computer science at SF State — where I got hooked on building, attending 20+ hackathons in my junior and senior years.

My first job out of college was at Pillow, a short-term rental startup, where I led a team of four building our mobile app in React Native — until Expedia acquired us in 2018. I stayed on at Expedia Group as a Senior Software Engineer through 2022, leading development of the Vrbo Owner iOS app (300K+ monthly active users) and spearheading React Native adoption that boosted development velocity by 50%. A Twitter side project of mine (Flip McBot, an NFT sales bot) then pulled me into web3: I joined Curio, the NFT analytics startup, leading product and development of its Twitter and Discord bots.

Today I'm a founding engineer at Rosebud, the #1 AI-powered journal for mental health and personal growth, which I'm building alongside Chrys Bader and Sean Dadashi. I've helped scale the business from 0 to $1M ARR — architecting subscription infrastructure that processes $100K in monthly revenue across web and mobile, and building a notification system that delivers 20K+ personalized notifications a day. All told, I've shipped products to over a million users worldwide.

I've spent a lot of my career in the React Native ecosystem. I'm the lead maintainer of react-native-elements, the cross-platform UI toolkit (25.8k+ stars, 400K+ monthly downloads), and the author of react-native-ratings and other open-source components used in production by other people's apps.

These days my nights and weekends go to agentic engineering: building full apps end-to-end with AI agents, each one a different shape of app to learn the tools and scaffolding the workflow takes — a 3D museum of history stories, a trivia app graded by Claude, an autonomous research loop, and this site itself, which is built and maintained by an agent harness.

Key beliefs

Have strong opinions, weakly held
Have a high standard of success and a high tolerance for failure
Being aware of internal vs external validation is key to personal growth
Who you work with is more important than what you work on
Life is probabilistic, not deterministic

Travel

Away from the keyboard I'm outdoorsy, play whatever sport is on offer — table tennis, beach volleyball, pickleball, basketball — and love to travel. Some favorites so far: 🇮🇹 Italy, 🇫🇷 France, 🇯🇵 Japan, 🇭🇷 Croatia, 🇹🇿 Tanzania, 🇨🇷 Costa Rica, and 🇹🇷 Turkey.

Find me on GitHub, X, or LinkedIn — or email me at manthan.thakkar@gmail.com. You can also grab my resume.