Zvonimir Fras
Zvonimir Fras helps early-stage founders get from a working prototype to paying customers.
He has spent nine years at IBM's Canada Software Lab, first as a Staff Software Engineer and since 2020 as an Advisory Software Engineer. Two weeks into the job he moved onto the team building IBM's component library, before it became Carbon, and helped open-source it.
He went on to start and open-source Carbon UI Builder, and more recently IBM VIBE, a platform for testing whether AI agents actually do what they claim. He was a core maintainer on Carbon's Angular implementation, is a named inventor on an issued IBM patent, and won IBM Canada's Excellence in Programming award.
Before IBM he was a freelancer, a first engineer, a technical co-founder, and spent time in the public sector. About twenty years across the stack. He has also built audiences from nothing, including a cooking personality and a motivational site, both on Google+ before Google shut the platform down.
He is currently building Upschooler, a discovery network for families educating outside the default path, which means the zero-to-one problems he advises on are ones he is solving that week rather than recalling from a previous decade.
With ventureLAB founders he works on the seam where most early companies stall: technical decisions that hold up under growth, whether AI features can be demonstrated rather than merely claimed, and the positioning and investor-readiness work that turns a build into revenue.
Areas of expertise: Software architecture, AI agents and evaluation, design systems, open source, go-to-market, positioning, investor readiness
