Bartek Kunowski

Who they are

Bartek Kunowski is Co-founder and CEO of ara — a University of Waterloo math grad who scaled Glovo as CPO and previously co-founded Joey, a safe messaging platform for adolescents.

Person

Bartek studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 2003 — a technical foundation that shaped everything after. He moved through Amazon and Tuenti before landing at Glovo, where he served as CPO and helped scale what became one of Europe's largest on-demand delivery companies; he's spoken publicly about Glovo's early days on the 'Entrevistas a Product Leaders' podcast. After Glovo he co-founded Joey, a safe messaging platform for adolescents, before turning his attention to the async-meetings problem. He co-founded two companies alongside his employed track: Baroo Software, an earlier software venture, and ara, the AI-enhanced asynchronous video meetings platform he's now running as CEO from Barcelona. The through-line is building products at the intersection of communication and scale — consumer social, logistics, and now distributed work. He writes actively on Medium at kunowski.medium.com on product leadership, AI, and startup building, and spoke at both Product Heroes and Panathenea 2025.

How they likely show up

  • Repeated pattern of founding companies (Baroo Software, Joey, ara) alongside senior operator roles → high agency; unlikely to wait for permission or process.
  • CPO track at Glovo (a high-velocity, operationally complex company) → comfortable with ambiguity and prioritisation under pressure.
  • Active Medium writer on product leadership and startup building → thinks out loud, likely values structured reasoning and written communication.
  • Built ara specifically as an async-first meetings tool → has a strong stated point of view on remote collaboration; probably runs his own team that way.
  • Possibly — mixed tenure shape across roles suggests he moves when the problem is solved or the next interesting challenge appears, not for titles.

Conversation tips

  • → Reference the Glovo early-days podcast episode specifically — he's talked publicly about that period and it signals you've done more than skim his LinkedIn.
  • → Engage him on the 'why async' thesis directly — he's built a product around it, so he'll have a sharp articulation ready and will appreciate a substantive question.
  • → Ask about the Joey chapter — a safe messaging product for teens is a very different problem from logistics or meetings; understanding that move tells you a lot about how he thinks.
  • → He writes on Medium, so if you've read something specific there, say so — generic flattery won't land but a concrete reaction to his writing will.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on ara's async-first premise — he co-founded a platform explicitly to replace traditional video calls, which is a pointed bet against the default (Zoom et al.) worth unpacking.
  • Reference the Glovo early days podcast on 'Entrevistas a Product Leaders' — he's on record talking about scaling Glovo as CPO, and opening there shows you know the backstory, not just the current chapter.
  • Bring up Joey — he spent time building safe messaging for adolescents before ara, a mission-driven detour from his logistics career that reveals what problems he's drawn to.

Discovery questions

  1. What was the specific moment at Glovo — or after — that convinced you async video was the right problem to bet a company on?
  2. Joey was a very different kind of product from Glovo or ara — what did building safe social for teens teach you that carried forward?
  3. You write on Medium about product leadership and AI: where does AI actually change the async meetings problem, versus where is it still mostly hype?

Avoid

Don't treat ara as a simple 'Loom competitor' or reduce it to a tool description — he has a thesis about how distributed teams should work, and flattening it to a category comparison will signal you haven't engaged with that thinking.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on July 10, 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 →