Vibeslist:Learning to Read a City

For years, I tried every way I knew to shorten the distance between visiting a city and feeling connected to it. I hired local experts, stayed with people who lived there, and chose hotels with exceptional concierges.

The landmarks were easy to find. But the small events, neighborhood traditions, and unique moments kept slipping out of reach. Cities change constantly, and even what speaks to a local may not speak to you.

The trips I remember are the ones where an experience connected the character of a neighborhood with what I cared about. That is when travel feels like discovery again.

This became the question behind Vibeslist:

How do we help the people who welcome us into a city create neighborhood experiences that speak to each guest?

I had been trying to answer a version of that question since I was nineteen. Before Google Street View reached Italy, I started Taranto 360 with two friends. We carried a homemade photography rig through my hometown and stitched the pictures into panoramas so people could explore its streets and local businesses online. It was my first attempt to make a city easier for someone else to see.

Years later, I started OpenTaste. We organized thousands of recipes and ingredients through search, ranking, and taxonomy. The hard part was taste: why is one dish authentic while another is merely familiar, or one place original while another is simply popular?

I found Luca Sessa through his food blog and wrote to him on Messenger. Luca was a food and wine critic who could see distinctions I could not. He would explain them, and I would try to represent them in software.

I also met Giovanni Puntil through a shared obsession with JavaScript. He later contributed to OpenTaste, beginning a working relationship that has lasted more than a decade.

At Plan, the product reached roughly 35,000 monthly users, but I remained too focused on technical architecture while customers were showing us a different direction. I learned that customer behavior must have authority inside the company.

At Coinbase, I turned complicated systems into infrastructure other teams could trust, from shared analytics to OnchainKit. I learned that information has no value until someone trusts it enough to act.

When I left Coinbase, I planned to take time off. Two days later, I decided to build Vibeslist.

Luca and I began with curated lists for consumers. His knowledge kept pushing us toward what was original and authentic, not simply popular. Customer behavior then changed our direction: travelers needed help occasionally, while hotel teams were asked to translate the city for guests every day.

Conversations with concierges made the opportunity clear. A great concierge can turn one request into a complete experience that reflects the city and connects with the guest. But that work takes judgment, research, and time, so even the best can offer it to only a few people. We believed Vibeslist could help them begin with the complete experience, then make it their own.

I asked Giovanni to become our CTO. He said yes within twenty-four hours. We had already been building together for more than a decade, and he knew how to make a complicated system feel simple to the person using it.

Jessica, my wife, joined a few days after Luca and I started the company. She felt connected to the problem before she knew her role and was ready to do whatever was useful. Her opera training became one of our advantages: she can hold the complete experience in her mind while detecting the detail that weakens it. Most people can maintain that attention for a few hours. She has done it all day, every day, for months.

That is how much of Vibeslist improves. Jessica finds weak data and edge cases. I trace them through the intelligence system. Giovanni improves how the solution reaches the user. Luca tests whether the result preserves what is original and authentic about the city.

For a long time, reading a city was my question. Vibeslist became a company when Luca, Giovanni, and Jessica made it ours.

Today, Vibeslist helps hotel teams turn one guest request into a complete neighborhood experience they can trust enough to share. A request for dinner can become a half-day itinerary connecting shopping, a gallery or show, aperitivo, and dinner. The hotel reviews it, adds its judgment, and puts its reputation behind the final experience.

Underneath the product, Vibeslist continuously discovers, connects, ranks, and refreshes city information. We are building one living graph that can power thousands of experiences across neighborhoods, occasions, hotels, and guests.

Hotels are where we begin because they already hold a trusted relationship with the guest. What only the best concierges can create for a few people today can eventually become available to every guest and every hotel. Our ambition is to become the PageRank for city experiences, powering hospitality applications and AI agents acting in the real world.

We do not want technology to send everyone to the same places. We want each person to experience a city through their own taste, whether the guide is human or artificial.

At nineteen, I tried to make my hometown easier to see. Today, the four of us are building Vibeslist so more people can find the part of a city that is right for them.