About Me

I'm Tony. I watch Arsenal Football Club, drink Guinness, and compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at 10th Planet in Oakland. Most of my working life has been spent around marketplaces, startups, crypto, and AI.

I studied political science and became fascinated by questions of agency and power: who gets to act, what institutions make possible, and how systems shape individual choices. I didn't expect those questions to follow me into technology, but they did.

At Uber, I saw a marketplace change what people could do with their time and assets. At Setter, I learned that distribution and partnerships can reshape a company's product strategy. At Underdog, the question became how to make blockchain infrastructure easier for developers to use. At Griffain, it became whether software itself could act on a person's behalf.

Now I'm at MoonPay, where I work on bringing agentic products and financial infrastructure to a much larger platform. The question I keep coming back to is no longer just how to make powerful technology accessible. It's how to build the products, organizations, and institutions around that technology responsibly.

> in_the_wild: talking products, markets, and what comes next

Philosophy still shapes how I think. I've spent time with Foucault, Nietzsche, Arendt, Agamben, and others who ask uncomfortable questions about power, responsibility, and human action. Building companies has made those questions less abstract and more practical.

Outside of work I'm usually training, reading about history and markets, or watching Bluey with my chihuahua Zoey. She's the real one.

Feel free to find me @tonyplasencia on Telegram.