Conrad Kramer

He is from Cherry Hill, New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry, grew up in the Philadelphia area, and attended Cherry Hill High School East, from which he graduated in the spring of 2014.⁠[1][2][3]

He recalled that his interest in computers began early: he built computers with his father in the basement, and became interested in programming at about 13, when he got a book, struggled with it at first and eventually worked it out. The student newspaper of Cherry Hill High School East writes that as a boy he helped his father repair broken computers bought on Craigslist, and that he then began writing programs on his phone, one of which texted him the weather every day, before there were weather apps.⁠[4][5]

He said: “I basically learned everything I know about programming from the internet and from Youtube”; he also put programming questions to friends on IRC, an older chat protocol.⁠[5]

On his personal website he writes that he built Graviboard and a few other iOS jailbreak tweaks. The speaker biographies on Realm’s pages for his talks say that he started developing for iOS through the jailbreak scene around 2010, his first tweak being Graviboard, then moved into mainstream iOS development and contributed to open-source Cocoa projects such as AFOAuth2Client and WFNotificationCenter.⁠[6][7][8]

He recalled that when he started at the school there was no computer science class; he was one of the first members of its robotics club, started a programming club, and petitioned the curriculum director for a computer science class, the first of which began the year after he left.⁠[4]

The student newspaper writes that at school he used his technical skills for several pranks, all meant to be funny, one of which made every Instagram photo on students’ phones show the same picture of a goat; it adds that he has since stopped using his skills for pranks.⁠[5]

In 2013 he was on the winning team at the PennApps hackathon.⁠[2]

In the summer of 2013 he worked at AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry, where he was the company’s youngest employee.⁠[1][2]

On his personal website he writes that he interned at Airbnb and helped build out “List Your Space,” linking to a TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry article of July 31, 2013 on Airbnb’s updated iOS and Android apps, with which hosts could list a space from within the app, upload listing photos from their phones and manage their listings.⁠[6][9]

In January 2014 he and his teammates won first place at MHacks, a 36-hour hackathon at the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry; the winning idea became Workflow.⁠[4][2]

On June 5, 2014, he was selected as one of that year’s 20 Thiel Fellows, each of whom received $100,000 over two years. The list of fellows gives him as 17 and from Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry, calls him a self-taught computer programmer, and says that he was working with another Thiel Fellow on software that would make it seamless to move websites, documents and photos from a desk to a mobile device and back again.⁠[10][1]

Technical.ly wrote in June 2014 that the 17-year-old software developer, just out of high school, was about to begin the two-year Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry founded by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry and would move to San Francisco for it; he would work on DeskConnect, an app for sending photos and other files between devices with one touch. His collaborator was Ari Weinstein, a fellow Philadelphian and Thiel Fellow on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had co-founded DeskConnect with Ben Feldman. The article added that Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry had named him one of 24 “incredibly impressive high school graduates.”⁠[1]

He recalled that he had been accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but chose the Thiel Fellowship. The student newspaper writes that fellows receive $100,000 and may not attend college during the two-year program.⁠[4][5]

DeskConnect launched in 2013; MacworldMacworldMacworld is an Apple-focused technology publication launched in 1984, offering news, reviews and practical advice as part of Foundry.Open the full entry wrote in 2016 that its developers had then turned their attention to Workflow, leaving the app without updates until version 1.2 in May 2016.⁠[11]

He recalled that the team invited Nick and Verol to join and that the four of them worked on it through September; he and his team moved to San Francisco and worked on Workflow full time from the summer of 2014; the app was held up in App Store review for about three months and launched that December.⁠[4]

Technical.ly described the $2.99 iOS app on December 17, 2014: users could chain actions and apps together into their own automations; the article called it a more versatile IFTTT and noted the praise it had drawn on Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry and in the App Store. It gave his age as 18 and described him as a current Thiel Fellow.⁠[2]

A passage from The Verge quoted by 9to5Mac on November 30, 2023 calls him Workflow’s co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO).⁠[12]

In 2015 Workflow received an Apple Design Award. Apple said in a 2017 statement that the app had been selected because of its outstanding use of iOS accessibility features, in particular its implementation of VoiceOver, with clearly labeled items, thoughtful hints and drag-and-drop announcements that made it usable and quickly accessible to people who are blind or have low vision.⁠[13][14][15]

His personal website lists four talks: “Reverse-Engineering iOS Apps: Hacking on Lyft” (August 20, 2015), “Memory Use in Extensions” (September 10, 2015), “How (Not) to Write an iOS SDK” (June 15, 2016) and “Visualizing Graphs in Swift” (October 22, 2016).⁠[6]

In the Lyft talk he showed how to analyse Lyft’s iOS app without its source code, using tools such as Charles, Cycript, dumpdecrypted and IDA, and located the deep-link URL scheme for requesting rides, which he planned to use in Workflow.⁠[8]

The SDK talk was given at AltConf 2016; drawing on his own WFOAuth2 library, he discussed lessons and common mistakes in building and open-sourcing iOS SDKs. The speaker biography on the talk page says that his work at Workflow ranged from the server backend to complex drag-and-drop interactions, and that “Conrad now spends all of his waking hours on Workflow.”⁠[7]

South Jersey Biz published an interview with him in its April 2016 issue, which gives his age as 19, describes him as an alumnus of Cherry Hill High School East and says that Workflow was “named Apple's most innovative app of 2015.” He said that he had not gone to business school and had learned the business side as the company grew; one new hire had started in March and another would start in May; the company had a roadmap for making Workflow easier to use and more powerful for everyday users.⁠[4]

His advice to entrepreneurs was “Just do it”: build a prototype, test it and keep working on it until you have to choose between what you are currently doing and your side project.⁠[4]

On March 22, 2017 Apple finalized a deal to acquire Workflow, buying the app itself together with its team: Ari Weinstein, Conrad Kramer, Ayaka Nonaka and Nick Frey. Apple confirmed the deal; financial terms were not disclosed. Unlike Apple’s usual practice, Workflow stayed in the App Store and became a free download later that day.⁠[15][13][14]

TechCrunch wrote that Workflow had earlier raised an unannounced seed round of a couple of million dollars from Lowercase, Eniac and General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry, and that some team members were past WWDC student scholarship recipients; in a statement, Ari Weinstein said that the team had worked with Apple from the very beginning, from starting the company as students attending WWDC.⁠[15]

In its article on the acquisition, Technical.ly called the Workflow team “Philly-heavy.”⁠[3]

The student newspaper writes that he and his friends ran the company in San Francisco for about three and a half years, and names two teammates, Ari Weinstein and Nick Frey, as joining Apple with him.⁠[5]

In 2018 Apple released Shortcuts, built on Workflow, with iOS 12; as Apple’s own app it was freed of the limits that Workflow had faced as a third-party app and became more powerful.⁠[16][5]

On October 4, 2021 he announced on social media that “last Friday was my last day at Apple,” ending about four years on the Shortcuts team. Matthew Cassinelli wrote that he had worked on the app from Workflow’s creation, through the acquisition, up to the forthcoming Shortcuts for Mac. He said that he would take some time off: “I'll be taking some time to relax and figure things out.”⁠[17]

The student newspaper writes that he left a role as a software engineering manager at Apple. MacRumors wrote in 2025 that he left Apple in 2019, which differs from the 2021 announcement above.⁠[5][18]

On May 9, 2022 the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School announced its 2022–2023 class of Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) Fellows, of whom he was one. It was the third class of TAPP Fellows: five people from technology, public policy, biotechnology and other fields, spending nine months in residence at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[19][20]

The Belfer Center’s biography says that he “builds open source software for the betterment of society” and that he previously helped lead the development of the Shortcuts app; it gives 2014 as the year in which Apple acquired Workflow, unlike the reports of the acquisition in 2017.⁠[19]

The student newspaper wrote in February 2023 that in the fellowship he was researching how to make solar energy more affordable, and that he planned to start a new technology company afterward.⁠[5]

On February 2, 2023 Eastside, the student newspaper of Cherry Hill High School East, published a profile of him. Speaking of large companies, he said: “Everyone thinks Apple does this or Apple does that, but Apple doesn't do anything.”⁠[5]

His advice to students included valuing mentorship, knowing what you want from your work and thinking hard about morals in the tech industry; he said: “If there's anything you want to learn, you can at least get started on the internet.”⁠[5]

In August 2023 he co-founded Software Applications Incorporated with Ari Weinstein and Kim Beverett; Ari Weinstein became chief executive and Kim Beverett, who had spent nearly ten years at Apple as a senior program and product manager on Safari, WebKit, Messages, Mail, FaceTime and other products, chief operating officer.⁠[21]

On November 29, 2023 the company became public: it aimed to bring generative AI to the desktop in a way that pushes operating systems forward; it had no product yet and was prototyping with models including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama 2. The company’s website was an emulated Mac OS 8 running in the browser.⁠[22][12][23]

Matthew Cassinelli wrote that Ari Weinstein, Kramer and Kim Beverett had a new office in downtown San Francisco, a few minutes from the former Workflow offices; his post carries a photograph captioned “Co-founders Conrad Kramer and Ari Weinstein in the new office.”⁠[23]

On October 23, 2025 OpenAI announced that it had acquired Software Applications Incorporated and planned to bring Sky’s macOS integration and product design into ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry, with the Sky team joining OpenAI. OpenAI disclosed that an investment fund associated with Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry held a passive investment in the company, and that the acquisition was led by Nick Turley and Fidji SimoFidji SimoOpenAI advisor and Nscale director.Open the full entry and approved by the independent Transaction and Audit Committees of OpenAI’s board.⁠[24]

The terms were not disclosed, and Sky had not yet been released to the public. MacRumors wrote that the whole Sky team, including him and Ari Weinstein, would join OpenAI.⁠[21][18]

As of November 2026 his X profile reads “computers @openai, previously co-founder @SkyBySoftware, shortcuts @Apple @WorkflowHQ,” gives his location as “West Hollywood ↔ SF” and shows that the account was created in June 2009.⁠[25]

Software Applications Incorporated states on its website that it raised $6.5 million in seed funding to grow the team, from Dylan FieldDylan FieldDylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and an angel investor. He studied computer science and mathematics at Brown University, explored browser-based design tools with Evan Wallace, and founded Figma in 2012 with support from the Thiel Fellowship. His personal history also includes collecting digital art and investing in companies such as Mercury and Socket.Open the full entry (Figma), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and others; its team members had worked at startups and at Apple, and they work together in person in San Francisco. TechCrunch also lists Context Ventures and Stellation Capital among the investors.⁠[26][21]

The company describes Sky as a Mac app that understands what is on the screen and helps users take action in their apps: built-in tools can schedule meetings, send messages and search email, and users can build their own tools with natural-language prompts, AppleScripts, shell scripts, shortcuts and MCPs.⁠[27]

On his personal website he writes that he helped create iCepa, a system-wide Tor proxy for iOS. The iCepa Project on GitHub describes itself as “Building better Tor for iOS,” and its main repository is a system-wide, VPN-based Tor client for iOS.⁠[6][28]

He also writes that he helped register people to vote with VotePlz, a nonpartisan nonprofit co-founded by Erika Reinhardt, Sam Altman, Fouad Matin and Ari Weinstein to make voter registration easier for young people.⁠[6][29]

Airbnb: Official website: https://www.airbnb.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

Workflow: Official website: https://workflow.is/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

Apple: Official website: https://www.apple.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs: Official website: https://www.belfercenter.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]

Software Applications Incorporated: Official website: https://software.inc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

OpenAI: Official website: https://openai.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

Personal website: https://conradkramer.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6][25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/conradev (opens in a new window).⁠[25][6]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/conradev (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

MastodonMastodonMastodon is free and open-source decentralized social networking software created by Eugen Rochko in 2016; based on the ActivityPub protocol, it forms a federated network of independently run servers. Its user base grew sharply in 2022, and Rochko stepped down as CEO in November 2025.Open the full entry: Public account: https://mastodon.social/@conradev (opens in a new window).⁠[6]