Ciprian Rarau
Ciprian (Chip) Rarau · Founder

I run a portfolio of products.

Across my own ventures and the companies I build with, the same problems keep showing up. Three instances of the same problem becomes a product.

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Ciprian (Chip) Rarau
What I'm building now

Products in motion

Each one started as a pattern I kept hitting across multiple companies. Three instances of the same problem becomes a product. Live from the IdeaPlaces catalog — adding a product to ideaplaces.com adds it here.

Live

Style Guide

Describe your brand, get a complete design system.

Building a design system from scratch takes weeks of picking colors, pairing fonts, and testing combinations. Style Guide turns a plain-language description of your brand into complete design systems — colors, typography, shadows, and spacing — ready to use in minutes. Refine through conversation, branch in a visual tree, and export to any platform.

  • •Describe your brand, get complete systems — Describe your product in a few sentences and get full design systems back, with color psychology and WCAG contrast ratios already applied.
  • •Refine by talking, not tweaking — Say "make it warmer" or "more contrast" in plain language. Every change updates 45+ components live, no hex values to edit.
  • •Branch without losing work — Every variation is a node in a visual tree. Try new directions from any point and jump back in one click.
  • •Preview on real components — See your system on buttons, cards, inputs, alerts, and more. Know exactly how it looks before you ship.
Free $0 · Starter $5/mo · Pro $15/moVisit →
Live

WealthPlan

Should you pay off your mortgage faster or invest the difference? Find out in 60 seconds.

WealthPlan is a Canadian mortgage vs. investment simulator for homeowners. Plug in your mortgage, your extra cash, and your province. See whether accelerating your mortgage, loading up your TFSA, or maxing your RRSP leaves you with the most wealth — with 2025 tax brackets, TFSA and RRSP rules, and year-by-year projections.

  • •Answer the question every homeowner asks — Should I pay off the mortgage faster or invest the difference? Get a personalized answer grounded in your province, income, and mortgage.
  • •Built for Canadians — 2025 federal and provincial tax brackets. TFSA and RRSP contribution rules. Refund reinvestment logic. Accurate where generic calculators guess.
  • •Four strategies compared side-by-side — Mortgage acceleration plus TFSA, mortgage plus RRSP, pure TFSA, pure RRSP. See how each plays out over the life of your mortgage.
  • •Year-by-year wealth visualization — A four-line chart shows how each strategy grows your wealth over time, plus a yearly breakdown table for the detail-oriented.
Free $0Visit →
Live

monday2github

Your Monday.com board updates itself as code ships.

monday2github connects your Monday.com board to GitHub so statuses update themselves as pull requests open, merge, and deploy. Define your own pipeline stages, connect up to 20 repos per board, and stop dragging cards across columns during standup. Webhook-driven, real-time, bidirectional.

  • •Your pipeline, your rules — Define deployment stages that match how your team ships — dev, staging, QA, production, or whatever you call them. monday2github follows your workflow, not the reverse.
  • •Statuses update when code moves — Open a PR and the task moves to Code Review. Merge it and it moves to Deployed. No one has to remember to update the board.
  • •Changes flow both ways — GitHub and Monday.com stay in sync automatically. Update one, the other follows. Both tools always reflect reality.
  • •One board, up to 20 repos — Connect multiple repositories to a single Monday.com board. Your whole engineering effort, visible in one place.
Free $0 · Pro $6/mo · Business $49/moVisit →
Live

C3

An open-source AI agent that runs on your dev machine and does your work while you sleep.

C3 turns your always-on dev machine into an autonomous agent platform. Slack alerts and Discord messages trigger headless Claude Code sessions that investigate errors, trace code, create PRs, and report back. Watch the agent work live from your browser, or continue the conversation from your phone. Open source (Apache 2.0), bring your own machine, your own tunnel, your own channels.

  • •Runs on YOUR machine — Not a sandboxed cloud agent. It has your repos, your secrets, your CLI tools, your database access. Same permissions as you.
  • •Channel-triggered sessions — Slack alerts and Discord messages start headless Claude Code sessions. The agent investigates and reports back in the same thread.
  • •Watch it work, resume anytime — Every session is streamed to a web UI and fully resumable. Agent ran at 3am? Open it on your phone at 9am and keep going.
  • •Encode your expertise as prompts — Prompt templates turn your internal playbooks into agent instructions. A 200-line prompt tells the agent exactly how you investigate an outage.
Self-hosted $0Visit →
Beta

HireScout

Pull your ATS pipeline, enrich every candidate, and rank them against the job you actually posted.

HireScout connects to your ATS (Ashby first, more coming), enriches each candidate with Apollo and GitHub, and uses RAG plus GPT-4.1 to score them against the criteria you care about. You describe the role in YAML, HireScout returns a ranked, filterable dashboard with strengths, concerns, and tailored interview questions for every applicant. Built for hiring managers who are drowning in hundreds of applications and need a faster way to find the signal.

  • •Plugs into your ATS — Ashby first, with Greenhouse and Lever on the roadmap. Pulls candidates, applications, and resumes directly through the API so nothing has to be copied by hand.
  • •Enriches every candidate — Apollo.io verifies contact info and company details. GitHub surfaces real code, languages, and contribution history. Enrichment runs in parallel and is cached with sensible TTLs.
  • •Scores against your criteria — RAG over candidate context plus Azure OpenAI GPT-4.1 grades every applicant on the categories and weights you define. Swap criteria and re-rank without re-pulling data.
  • •Configurable per job — Each role is a YAML file: required skills, preferred skills, seniority, location, scoring weights, custom prompt. Version it with your team and keep evaluations consistent.
FreeVisit →
Live

OneOps

A manifesto for founders running scale-ups.

We are no longer writing code. We are summoning it. OneOps is the practice that makes the summoning reliable. Declare the company in code. Let AI flow into every space the structure reveals. Humans return to the work only humans can do.

  • •Predictable first — Deterministic code as the default. Infrastructure, identity, secrets, source control all declared.
  • •AI second, in fixed roles — AI deployed only where the specification declares it.
  • •Agents for the outliers — Triggered by unpredictable events the deterministic system cannot handle.
  • •Four method layers — Foundation, Delivery, Orchestration, Intelligence.
FreeVisit →
More on the company page at ideaplaces.com.
Companies I'm building with

Parallel builds

In any given week I'm shipping with several teams. The lens is wider than any one industry. The pattern is what carries.

Mentorly

CTO / CPO

AI mentorship platform. LLM-powered mentor matching at scale. Building the technical and product side end to end.

Eli Health

Technical Advisor

Digital health: telehealth and AI clinical decision support. Cross-region BigQuery, GA4 streaming, Datastream CDC, regulated data flows.

CatalyzeUP

Founder

Startup infrastructure services. Making startups go farther, faster: production-grade infra, CI/CD, monitoring from day one.

WeHappers

Co-Founder

Non-profit. Wealth redistribution and global happiness through technology.

Full portfolio

Hover across the work

Past and present in one ribbon. Hover any tile to expand it. The top of the list is what I'm shipping now; the bottom is the track record that funds the present.

IdeaPlaces

IdeaPlaces

Product portfolio

Mentorly

Mentorly

AI-powered mentorship

Eli Health

Eli Health

Hormone health tech

CatalyzeUP

CatalyzeUP

Startup infrastructure

WeHappers

WeHappers

Wealth redistribution

WISK.ai

WISK.ai

Food & beverage intelligence

OMsignal

OMsignal

Bio-sensing wearables

XpertSea

XpertSea

Aquaculture platform

Eastern Bank

Eastern Bank

Mobile banking

oneops

oneops

Cloud-ops side project

Latest from the blog

Notes from the work

Production stories, not theory. The blog is where the patterns get written down before they become products.

Building7 min read

Sentry Is a Source, Not Where I Live: Config as Code, AI-Summarized Alerts

I do not configure Sentry through the UI. Alerts, inbound filters, scrubbing rules, members, all defined in YAML and applied through a Python CLI. The events themselves get forwarded into GCP, summarized by Claude, and posted to Slack. Sentry becomes a source. The investigation happens elsewhere.

Read post
Building7 min read

I Open Sourced My Voice Twin: A Year of Wispr Flow as a Graph I Can Wander

1.66 million dictated words become a searchable corpus, a topical map, a graph of nearest semantic neighbors, and a writer that drafts in my own voice. Local-first. The architecture is hybrid retrieval: vectors for precision, a kNN graph for wandering, topic clusters to keep me oriented. GraphRAG, on a year of my own voice. Now public on GitHub.

Read post
Workflow6 min read

Voice Analytics Revolution: When Machines Finally Understand Human Speech

For the first time, machines can truly understand human language—not through brute force transcription, but because AI predicts what I'm going to say. This changes everything about how I interact with technology.

Read post
Building7 min read

Release on Autopilot: From Code Push to Forced App Update, Zero Human Steps

Six services talk to each other so I don't have to. Apple tells my system a build shipped. The system tells Slack, waits 30 minutes for global propagation, then forces every user to update. The entire iOS release pipeline runs without a single human step.

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All posts
Track record

25 years, one instinct

Find a real problem. Build the system that solves it. Scale it until it runs without you. The product changes. The instinct doesn't.

2016–2025

WISK.ai

CTO / CPO, Co-Founder

1,000+ restaurant clients. Multi-million dollar revenue. Nearly 9 years of full-time building, hiring, fundraising, scaling. The company is still serving paying customers today.

2012–2014

OMsignal

VP Engineering, 1st employee

Bio-sensing wearables. Raised over $10M. Acquired by Honeywell. Built the engineering org from one person.

2015–2016

Eastern Bank

Head of Mobile

Mobile banking. PWC-approved security audit. Enterprise-grade compliance.

2021–2024

Advisor stretch

CTO Advisor

XpertSea (aquaculture), Alveole (urban beekeeping), and others. Architecture, React Native, AWS, Python. Each engagement widened the lens that powers IdeaPlaces today.

Newsletter

One short note when something ships.

No marketing. No drip sequences. A short note when a product ships, a blog post lands, or I notice a pattern worth sharing.