Bartek Kunowski

Who they are

Bartek Kunowski is Co-founder & CEO of Itera — a Mathematics and Computer Science grad from Waterloo who previously founded Joey, a shut-down AI-powered safe messaging app for pre-adolescents, and ara, a shut-down collaboration tool platform.

Person

Bartek studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 2003 — a technical foundation that shaped everything that followed. He started as a Software Development Engineer, then co-founded Baroo Software in 2006, a bootstrapped, profitable software outsourcing company built to scale development teams. That experience led him into operator roles: Group Product Manager and then Chief Product Officer, including stints at Tuenti and Glovo — the latter where he served as CTO and spoke publicly about innovation management. Since Glovo he's been in rapid-fire founder mode: Joey (2024, shut down) was an AI-powered safe messaging app for pre-adolescents; ara (2025, shut down) was a collaboration platform for product teams spanning arameet.co and polir.io; now Itera (January 2026, active), his current bet on AI-native product development. He writes on LinkedIn and at kunowski.medium.com about AI coding agents, product velocity, and the bottlenecks baked into traditional PM workflows — practical, operator-perspective stuff. He spoke at South Summit in June 2026 and appeared on the Entrevistas a Product Leaders podcast in 2025 discussing Glovo's early days and ara. The through-line is a technical founder who keeps moving closer to eliminating the handoff layer between product thinking and shipped code.

Network

Bartek's most visible collaborator right now is Jordi Pellat Massó, a co-developer at Itera who built a planning agent that reportedly increased coverage from 25% to 90% of the team's needs. He publicly amplifies Marc Andreessen's frameworks — notably the OODA loop — and frequently references Anthropic's PM practices and Claude Code, suggesting those communities are part of his operating reference network. Christopher Grant has vouched for him publicly, citing intelligence, pragmatism, and leadership.

How they likely show up

  • Three consecutive founding attempts in three years (Joey 2024, ara 2025, Itera 2026), two of which were shut down quickly → high willingness to kill things that aren't working and move fast to the next thesis.
  • Career arc from Software Development Engineer → CPO → serial founder → CEO suggests someone who needs to own the full stack of a problem, not just a function.
  • Active LinkedIn poster on AI coding agents, product velocity, and PM workflow bottlenecks → comfortable being publicly opinionated and likely responds well to substantive pushback on ideas.
  • Bootstrapped Baroo Software to profitability before taking operator roles → understands unit economics and is probably not reflexively VC-dependent in his thinking.
  • Frequently references Anthropic PM practices and Marc Andreessen's OODA loop → draws from a small set of intellectual frameworks he applies consistently, not a framework-hopper.
  • Speaks English, Polish, and Spanish professionally and is based in Barcelona → comfortable operating across cultural contexts, likely useful in European and LatAm sales conversations.

Conversation tips

  • → Ask about the arc from ara to Itera — he shut down a collaboration tool and immediately built a product development platform; the pivot logic is the thesis.
  • → Reference a specific LinkedIn post or his Medium writing — he publishes real opinions, not platitudes, and will notice if you've read them.
  • → He went from CTO at Glovo (a scaled operator) to founder mode three times in three years — he'll have strong views on what big-company product process gets wrong; invite that.
  • → Don't treat him as a pure PM thinker — he has a CS degree and started as an engineer; he'll engage more deeply on the technical architecture of AI-native workflows than on process frameworks alone.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on the Itera planning agent milestone — Jordi Pellat Massó built an agent that moved coverage from 25% to 90% of the team's needs in roughly six weeks; that's a specific, live data point from inside their own product.
  • Reference the ara → Itera pivot: he shut down a meeting and collaboration tool (arameet.co, polir.io) and immediately rebuilt around eliminating tickets and handoffs entirely — the failure is part of the current thesis.
  • Mention his Anthropic PM practices post — he's publicly argued that Anthropic PMs don't write PRDs, they use different artifacts; it's a stated conviction about where product management is going and a clean entry into Itera's positioning.

Discovery questions

  1. Joey and ara both shut down within a year — what did those failures clarify about the specific problem Itera is trying to solve?
  2. You've described Itera as letting teams go from idea to shipped change the same day without tickets or handoffs — what's the hardest existing codebase behaviour to work around when you try to make that real?
  3. You went from CTO at Glovo to building three consecutive startups — what does a product org at Glovo's scale do that you're explicitly trying to undo with Itera?

Avoid

Don't frame AI-native development as a productivity or efficiency story — his public writing is specifically about eliminating structural workflow problems (tickets, handoffs, Figma translations), and a generic 'ship faster with AI' pitch will land flat.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on July 26, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →