Charlie Cheever

Charlie Cheever is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and longtime builder of the tools other developers rely on. He is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, the framework and cloud platform that lets teams build iOS, Android, and web apps from a single JavaScript and React Native codebase. Since starting Expo in 2015, he has pursued a single mission: opening up mobile software development to everyone, not just specialists with years of native experience. Charlie's career has placed him at the center of several technologies that millions of people now use every day. He was one of the earliest engineers at Facebook, joining in 2006 when the engineering team numbered barely a dozen people. There he worked on Facebook Connect, the developer platform, News Feed, and video, helping turn Facebook from a website into a platform other developers could build on. In 2009 he co-founded Quora with Adam D'Angelo, setting out to organize the world's knowledge and make it accessible through a single question and answer. With Expo, Charlie has spent the last decade on a problem he keeps returning to: the distance between having an idea and shipping it to real users. Expo compresses that distance, handling the builds, updates, and infrastructure that usually slow mobile teams down so developers can focus on their product. Under his leadership, Expo has become foundational infrastructure for the React Native ecosystem, used by indie developers and large enterprises alike. On stage, Charlie speaks to where software development is heading: the rise of AI-assisted building, the future of cross-platform development, and what it takes to make powerful tools feel simple. He is at his best connecting the long view of company and industry vision with the concrete craft of how software actually gets made, drawing on two decades of doing both. At the core of Charlie's work is a straightforward conviction: building software should be within reach of anyone with an idea. The best platforms do not just make experts faster. They let far more people become builders in the first place.