Charlie Depman

About

I build things at the intersection of public-interest technology, health, civic life, and human connection. I co-founded Ridepanda, a climate-focused mobility company, and spent five and a half years as CTO helping build it into a platform serving major employers like Amazon, Google and OpenAI. I’m now in a strategic advisory role there while my work expands into a wider set of questions: how people make sense of the world around them, stay safe and healthy, find creative agency, and connect more meaningfully with each other. Current projects include The America I Want, a platform for civic understanding; OpenSubstance.org, a harm reduction project inspired in part by my late father, an emergency physician who worked in substance use; and Star17, a design studio with partners in Mexico City and Montreal. My background spans software engineering, entrepreneurship, teaching and curriculum design, environmental work, and nearly two decades of living across many of the world’s major cities, including Nairobi, Shanghai, Dhaka, Mexico City, New York, and Taipei. I care most about projects that are both technically ambitious and socially meaningful.

Experience

Education