Chris Bruce
Product & Engineering Leader · Berlin ⇄ SF
Product and engineering leader. Five startups, two exits (Mattel, EA), four tech bubbles survived. Headquartered in Berlin, with deep San Francisco roots and regular time on the ground there.
Berlin ⇄ San Francisco
Chris Bruce
Product & Engineering Leader
Chris Bruce is a product and engineering leader: five startups, two acquisitions (Mattel and EA), and thirty years of shipping through four tech bubbles. He writes the code and owns the roadmap, which means product and engineering teams stop translating and start building.
His bet for the AI era: anyone can build software now. Getting people to care is the hard part. That takes product judgment, story, and brand, so he also runs Seceda Studios, a film studio in Berlin.
- 5startups founded
- 2exits · Mattel & EA
- 4bubbles survived
- 2patents held
Guided tours
Prefer a curated route? Each tour visits the timeline machine by machine. In the game they play as quests.
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The Founder's Path
Thirty years in eleven machines: from a beige box in the high desert to a Berlin film studio, with two acquisitions on the way.
- It starts here. An Apple II Plus and a nine-year-old who wouldn't leave it alone.
- First startup: the early team of Shawn Fanning's social network for gamers.
- The 2008 acquisition lands the team inside EA. Big lessons, bigger itch.
- First time founding. Hollywood money, Facebook games, fast education.
- The big one: co-founder and CEO. A baby monitor that learned and predicted.
- Selling to a Fortune 500, then shipping the product inside one.
- VP of Product & Technology for the people's wireless network. 425+ cities.
- Co-founding no-code computer vision.
- Founder and CEO again. Bare metal versus the cloud, written in Rust.
- The current chapter: a film studio with a compiler in the back room.
- The whole timeline leads here. Thanks for making the run.
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The Four Bubbles
Social gaming, consumer hardware, crypto, AI. The constraint moves every time. The lesson doesn't.
- Bubble one, social gaming: Facebook opens its platform, Zynga prints money, EA buys Rupture.
- Same bubble from the founder's seat. Platform risk, learned the hard way.
- Bubble two, consumer hardware: the Fitbit years. Story beat sensors, and Mattel bought ours.
- Bubble three, crypto: token incentives bootstrap a real network across 425+ cities.
- Crypto's second act: ignore the narrative, win on unit economics. Bare metal beats cloud.
- Bubble four, AI: code is free now. Attention isn't. Story and brand are the moat.
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The Rust Thread
One language, five machines: how everything since 2019 ended up compiled, fast, and self-hosted.
- Since 2019: “Rust'ing away.” The cheap path and the correct path, finally the same path.
- Maelstrom, an open-source Matrix homeserver built for serious scale.
- BlockVisor orchestrates bare-metal blockchain fleets. Rust all the way down.
- SlateHub: free, open-source infrastructure for filmmakers.
- Pavilion: one upload, infinite screens. The same stack serving this website.
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The Creative Cut
Into the break room: the studio, the channel, the ads, the films, and the podcast.
- Seceda Studios, Berlin. Cinematic video content that converts.
- The channel: camera shootouts, color technique, honest process.
- Commercial craft. Adidas and Rose Bikes specs, branded mini-docs.
- The deep end: narrative shorts out of Berlin, festival-bound.
- The Long Take: the break-room conversation, recorded weekly.
The timeline as text
Everything in the archive, grouped by bubble rather than by date: all the crypto work together, all the AI work together. The game keeps the strict timeline.
The AI bubble
The current bet, plus the vision-AI years at Lumeo that came before the wave had a name. Product, story, and brand on top of working code.
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Pavilion
One upload, infinite screens
Open-source film distribution and white-label streaming. Upload once, screen everywhere. Built with Rust, Axum, and SurrealDB.
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Story & Brand
The scarce skill in the AI bubble
Anyone can build an app now. Almost nobody can get one used. Story and brand are the moat when code is free.
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Lumeo
Co-founder & CTO
No-code computer vision. Lumeo turns any camera into an AI sensor with drag-and-drop pipelines. Co-founded with Devarshi Shah; I built the platform as CTO.
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AI & Semantic Search
Twenty years of shipping machine intelligence
From Sproutling's sleep prediction in 2013 to LLM screenplay tools today. In the AI bubble, the model is the easy part.
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SlateHub
The free home for filmmakers
An open-source, free-forever home for filmmakers, actors, and crew. Verified profiles, credits, crew search, a job board, and production tools. Built in Rust.
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Seceda Studios
Founder · Berlin video production studio
A Berlin film studio with a compiler in the back room. Where product, engineering, story, and brand finally run on the same machine.
Rust & open source
The workbench: Rust as the primary language, a Matrix homeserver, and the small tools that keep the hands honest.
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Maelstrom
Matrix homeserver in Rust
An open-source Matrix homeserver built for serious scale. Stateless clustering on Tokio, Axum, and SurrealDB. Listed on matrix.org.
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Rust
Primary language
GitHub bio: “Rust'ing away.” Everything I ship now is Rust: BlockVisor, SlateHub, Pavilion, Maelstrom, and this website, one binary with no cloud.
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Open Source Workbench
Small tools, sharp edges
The small-tools shelf: linkly (self-hosted URL shortener), film-finder (Berlin cinema listings), scrapling-rs (web scraping), and other Rust experiments.
The crypto bubble
Token incentives and bare metal: Helium's people-powered wireless network, then BlockJoy, built to outlive the narrative.
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BlockJoy
Founder & CEO
Blockchain nodes on bare metal for up to 80% less than cloud. Founded in the crypto bubble, built to outlive it. About $11M raised. Written in Rust.
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Helium
VP of Product & Technology
The people's wireless network, live in 425+ US cities while I ran product and technology. My front-row seat to the crypto bubble.
The hardware bubble
The Fitbit years: Sproutling's learning baby monitor, and shipping it inside Mattel after the acquisition.
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Mattel
Sr. Director, Product & Technology · GM, Sproutling
Running Sproutling inside a Fortune 500 as the hardware bubble cooled. Shipped the Fisher-Price Sproutling wearable in 2017.
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Sproutling
Co-founder & CEO
A baby monitor that learned your kid and predicted sleep. Built in the consumer hardware bubble, backed by First Round, acquired by Mattel in January 2016.
Origins & the through-line
Where it started, and how I work: the first machines, and leading from both sides of the product and engineering line.
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The First Machine
Apple II Plus · age nine
An Apple II Plus, a nine-year-old, and eventually a modem. Programming since 1982, a BBS sysop by grade six, Slackware 1.0 when Linux arrived on floppies.
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Product & Engineering Leadership
CEO · CTO · VP Product · VP Engineering · GM
Equally fluent in product and engineering. One person who speaks both languages saves a company from its most expensive meetings.
Filmmaking
Directing and shooting out of Berlin: narrative shorts, spec ads, the showreel, and the Seceda Studios channel. Where the story muscle gets trained daily.
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The Long Take Podcast
Weekly, from Seceda Studios
A weekly filmmaking podcast: production stories, gear talk, and the business of making films, hosted with Tom.
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Spec Ads & Branded Work
Cinematic video that converts
Commercial craft: an Adidas spec, a Rose Bikes spec shot on the Sony FX3, branded mini-docs, and event films.
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Short Films
Director & DP
Narrative work out of Berlin: 'The Backdoor' (festival-bound) and 'Christmas Gift' (2025), made with the studio's crews.
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Seceda Studios on YouTube
Filmmaking, cameras, craft
Cinema-camera shootouts (URSA Cine 12K vs. Alexa Mini LF), budget-versus-legend tests, DaVinci Resolve technique, and how small crews make big images.