Francisco Salinas
San Francisco, CA
I learned to code during the 2020 pandemic, and by my freshman year of college I was running a software business for gamers out of my dorm room. Over the next few years, it grew to 12,000+ paying customers across 103 countries and more than $800K in revenue, all before I turned 22. People I'd never met, all over the world, relied on something I built.
I've since stayed with entrepreneurship, largely inspired by that feeling, while exploring the parts of product building beyond just the code. That's what led me to Diskify, a disk space visualizer for Windows. I built it after noticing that DaisyDisk, a popular Mac app, had no real equivalent on Windows, and figured it'd be a fun engineering challenge to take on. I spent months building the rendering engine by hand and became obsessed with the small engineering decisions that quietly shaped how the product felt to use. Somewhere in that process, I realized I cared as much about the experience of software as the engineering underneath it.
I'm now building Ida, native macOS software that turns voice commands into actions across desktop apps through a single keyboard interaction. We're challenging the chatbox as the default interface for AI, with the belief that using a computer should feel less like navigating software and more like expressing intent.
B.S. in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University with a focus on Web Design. Shortly after graduating, I was selected for the 7th cohort of SCU's Bronco Venture Startup Accelerator.
Here are some of the things I've worked on.
Hold one key, speak, and your desktop acts. Ida is a native macOS assistant built around a single interaction primitive — one key that does everything. Backed by a transcription and command routing engine that handles the complexity so the interface never has to.
Objective-C++ · AppKit · Qt6 · ASR
Qt has no native Liquid Glass support, so I built this library for the first version of Ida — bridging Apple's private AppKit glass effects into Qt6 via Objective-C++. Starred by a Qt platform architect. #4 all-time on r/QtFramework.
Objective-C++ · Qt6
Launched iOS app for sourcing car parts. Snap a photo of any unfamiliar part, a vision model identifies it, and the app surfaces matching listings so you can buy a replacement without leaving the screen.
React Native · TypeScript · Vision Models
Voice AI agent that automates SOP information retrieval to help manufacturing teams resolve floor issues faster. First place at a hackathon held at AWS.
TypeScript · Weaviate · RAG
Concept for a daily social app where everyone gets the same prompt and a limited window to respond. Instead of sharing what you're doing right now, you're answering a challenge — and seeing how differently your social circle interprets it.
Swift · Figma · React
Disk space visualizer for Windows — built after noticing no DaisyDisk equivalent existed. The biggest engineering challenges were keeping memory footprint low while caching enough filesystem data to render it densely in a sunburst format.
C++ · Qt6
Fetches and stitches real-time INRIX traffic tiles, then uses OpenCV to extract contours into mappable coordinates for high-quality traffic visualization.
C++ · OpenCV · ImGui