Rob Gillett.

Systems, incentives, accountability.

My achievements in the classroom and on the football field brought me to Brown University, where I earned degrees in Engineering and Economics, became an All-Ivy linebacker, and was part of an Ivy League championship team.

Engineering gave me a foundation for understanding systems. Economics helped me think about incentives, tradeoffs and what makes a business work. Football made preparation and accountability part of how I approached both.

A torn ACL, and a new question.

During my senior year, I tore my ACL. Facing surgery and a long rehabilitation, I began taking pre-med courses to better understand the body and recovery — and became interested in the potential role of cannabis, including CBD.

Working with my trainers, I developed a recovery plan that helped me get back on my feet without using opioids. That experience sparked an interest in how people learn about and access medical cannabis.

A dispensary at home. A language barrier abroad.

I recovered and earned the opportunity to play professional football in Italy. Before my contract began, I opened a medical cannabis dispensary in Compton to help patients understand their options and access the products they needed. Running it introduced me to the daily realities of serving customers, managing operations and working within a regulated industry.

In Italy, I played for the Bolzano Giants in a small northern city. As one of three American players on the team, I found that meeting people outside our circle was hard when we didn’t share a language — so I began imagining a platform that used photographs to help people connect with others nearby.

First place, and a first hard lesson.

Back home, I entered a pitch competition with that idea: Groupies, a social discovery app built around swiping through photographs. It won first place. My professors at Brown then gave me the opportunity to develop and teach a course in technology entrepreneurship, and with my students I researched the market, tested the product with its audience and refined it through feedback.

Groupies ultimately struggled to find product-market fit against better-funded competitors. It taught me to test demand early, narrow the scope and pay close attention to how people actually use a product. It also exposed a limit of my own: relying on outsourced development made it hard to turn what I was learning into the experience I envisioned.

Learning to build it myself.

I enrolled in the iOS development program at Turn To Tech, and learning to build native apps changed the way I worked. I could turn an idea into a prototype, put it in someone’s hands, understand what was wrong and make the next version myself.

It shortened the distance between identifying a problem and doing something about it.

The next problem was waiting at my own counter.

Back in a hands-on operating role at the dispensary, I often had to turn away patients who had lost or misplaced their medical paperwork. So I built a secure system for storing and retrieving patient documents, and tested it in the same store where I had met the problem. Being both the operator and the developer gave me direct access to the people using the software — and immediate feedback on whether it helped.

That work took me through the Canopy accelerator, where my company finished at the top of its graduating cohort, and onto Apple’s Planet of the Apps, where I pitched LoudCloud to the show’s panel of entrepreneurs. Both pushed me to explain the customer problem, the business opportunity and the product’s value clearly.

One platform for the whole business.

As California’s cannabis industry evolved, my work grew into CannaCtrl: a platform connecting point of sale, e-commerce, inventory, compliance, delivery and dispatch. I integrated the state’s track-and-trace system, connected printers and payment hardware, built mobile workflows that keep running offline, and invented a patented identity-verification workflow.

Solving those problems expanded my skills into data architecture, backend services, security, synchronization — and the operational tools a business depends on.

From dispatch maps to a cockpit.

Mapping, dispatch, hardware integration and offline reliability turned out to be central to Farcast, where I became the lead iOS engineer on an iPad navigation app used during midflight cargo delivery.

I owned the research, interface design and development, working directly with pilots and engineers. I interviewed pilots and flew weekly airdrops as copilot to learn how the app performed under real flight conditions. The product brought together route planning, weather, location telemetry, 3D guidance and custom avionics, supporting navigation with 99% delivery accuracy.

Farcast sharpened my judgment about clarity, performance and dependable behavior when a user’s attention is already divided.

Live events, end to end.

As CTO at SneakerWeek, I’ve brought that experience into live events — connecting ticket sales, payments, native iOS staff tools, check-in and operational dashboards. I’ve also built creative experiences, including a 3D sneaker design app for the Nike Design Combine.

The work draws on both sides of my background: understanding what organizers and attendees need, then designing and building the systems that support the experience.

The right tools for the product.

I choose technologies around the needs of the product. Design is part of how I build: I create and refine interfaces directly in SwiftUI, and use Sketch, Figma and the Adobe suite to develop and communicate ideas. Claude Code and Google Gemini help me move faster from idea to iteration.

Native iOS

UIKit · SwiftUI · Swift

Cross-platform

React Native · Expo

Web

React · Next.js · React Router

Data & cloud

PostgreSQL · Supabase · MongoDB · Firebase · Convex · Cloudflare

Design

SwiftUI · Figma · Sketch · Adobe

AI-assisted

Claude Code · Google Gemini