Santino Buttazzoni

building RememberUS || prev Bytespace.ai

I grew up in Córdoba, Argentina. Started studying economics because it felt adjacent to what I actually cared about — business, ideas, how things get built. Not because I had a plan.

At 18, I was offered a scholarship at the best university in Argentina — for the second time. I said no. There was a more interesting option: San Francisco, a radical change of direction, and the chance to be around people ambitious enough to build things that don't exist yet. That felt more valuable than any degree.

I found Bytespace.ai before I landed. Joined as first employee — no pay, no experience. The project was ambitious: web automation, browser orchestration, thousands of actions per second. I started in sales because no one else was doing it. Connecting with people, understanding what they actually need, making them feel heard — that came naturally. Then moved to product, working directly with our CTO to build and refine the core orchestrator. Two years in, the lesson that still sticks: understanding what someone needs is harder than building anything, and shipping without that is just noise.

I'm back in Córdoba for now. Studying AI engineering — not to become an engineer, but to understand technology deeply enough to build what I imagine without needing someone else to translate it. Sales and people come naturally. The tech side is what I'm building deliberately.

RememberUS is what I'm working on now. A way for people to keep a living, interactive memory of someone they've lost. It came from something personal.

SF is still the destination. I believe what I believed at 18: that's where impossible things get built, where the environment doesn't put a ceiling on you.

This site is where I document what I'm thinking while I build. No filter.

→curriculum vitae

On the record.

Essays on building, thinking, and what I keep getting wrong.

Why I write

Mar 2025//1 min read

“Writing forces you to finish one idea before starting the next. It's harder but more honest.”

What I learned from bytespace

Feb 2025//1 min read

“The most valuable thing isn't the product you ship — it's the mental model you build while failing.”

Worth reading.

Books and articles that shaped how I think. Organized by theme.

Zero to One— Peter Thiel

On building something genuinely new — monopolies, not competition.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things— Ben Horowitz

The stuff nobody tells you about running a company.

The Lean Startup— Eric Ries

Build, measure, learn — still the sharpest mental model for early stage.

The Mom Test— Rob Fitzpatrick

How to talk to users without them lying to you. Every founder needs this.

Rework— Jason Fried

Build differently. No excuses, no business plan, no fluff.

Antifragile— Nassim Taleb

Systems that get stronger from chaos. Changes how you see risk.

High Output Management— Andy Grove

The definitive book on how to actually run things.

Almanack of Naval Ravikant— Eric Jorgenson

Wealth, leverage, and how to think clearly about life.

Thinking, Fast and Slow— Daniel Kahneman

Why your intuition is often wrong — and when to trust it.

The War of Art— Steven Pressfield

On the resistance that shows up when you're building something that matters.

Meditations— Marcus Aurelius

Pure stoicism. Discipline, control, action. Written for himself, not for us.

The Score Takes Care of Itself— Bill Walsh

Process over results. The most underrated leadership book I've read.

Steve Jobs— Walter Isaacson

Not a role model, but a lesson in obsession and vision.

Shoe Dog— Phil Knight

Building Nike from nothing. Honest, raw, unglamorous.

The Aviator — Howard Hughes— Charles Higham

Obsession, genius, and the cost of doing things no one else would attempt.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life— Walter Isaacson

Inventor, diplomat, builder. The original self-made man.

Einstein: His Life and Universe— Walter Isaacson

What it looks like to think differently — and refuse to stop.

Made in America— Sam Walton

Built Walmart from a single store. The most underestimated founder story.

Do Things That Don't Scale— Paul Graham

Why the things that feel wrong early on are exactly what you should be doing.

Founder Mode— Paul Graham

Stop managing like a professional — start running it like you built it.

Default Alive or Default Dead?— Paul Graham

The one question every early-stage founder should be able to answer.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me— Sam Altman

Short. Punchy. Re-read it every few months.

Situational Awareness— Leopold Aschenbrenner

Ex-OpenAI researcher on where AI is actually heading. The most serious long-form piece on AI trajectory written so far.

The Bitter Lesson— Rich Sutton

One page. The most important thing AI researchers keep forgetting: general methods that leverage computation always win in the long run.

LLM Powered Autonomous Agents— Lilian Weng

The definitive technical map of how agents work — memory, planning, tool use. Written by OpenAI's head of safety. Most people outside ML have never read it.

Building Effective Agents— Anthropic Engineering

Not Dario's manifesto. The actual engineering team on what patterns work in practice and where agents still break.

What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs— Eugene Yan, Hamel Husain et al.

Practitioners writing honestly about what actually works in production — not benchmarks, not papers. The gap between theory and shipping.

Your AI Product Needs Evals— Hamel Husain

The most underrated post in AI engineering. You can't improve what you can't measure — and most people building agents aren't measuring anything.

The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems— BAIR Blog — Ion Stoica et al.

How production AI is moving from single models to orchestrated pipelines. Changed how I think about what we're building.