raif’s random rants…

raif barbaros

I am a serial entrepreneur, having worked at 4 start-ups, founded 2 and sold 1.

I am the CTO of Local Dirt, an online marketplace for local food. I am a husband, father of two and a soccer nut. You can also find me on linkedin, facebook, and twitter.

For an informal recap of how i ended up here, read on…

I was a 9-year-old boy in Turkey when I started programming in BASIC on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum (an early PC). In a shocking turn of events, about 12 years later I graduated from Queen’s University in Canada with a Computer Science & Math double degree.

I started my career at a start-up in Canada as a software designer where I built core components of their flagship product and helped the company grow from sub-ten to 120 and thru to a successful IPO (TSE:BWC) . I was responsible for a lot of their web development in Perl and (later) Java. I also helped them start their European operations and got to live in the UK for ~6 months.

I moved on to become a management consultant at Deloitte and built web properties for Fortune 500 such as Morgan Stanley, Kraft and Bell Canada as well as a few start-ups who could afford us.

Later on, I co-founded and sold a small online career services company – in a very busy span of 18 months. In the meantime I also did some work at AT&T Canada where we rebuilt their online invoicing.

I moved to the Bay Area in 2006 to do my MBA at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley which I finished in 2008. During my MBA, I interned at eBay Motors with a great group of people where I led a study of their global product strategy. During my second year, I was an associate at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a venture capital firm in San Francisco.

During my MBA, I started Carsala with a classmate. We raised a seed round of venture capital and launched the company in 2009.

I have recently moved on to Local Dirt – an online marketplace for local food funded by the NSF. We are a small team (for now) working to revolutionize our food system.