RR Riccardo Rao
03
Projects

Things I've built.

What you'll find: what the problem was, what I actually built, and what came out of it. Research, a company, and the systems I use to make my own decisions. Where there's code, the repository is one click away.

Open Salute

[NEEDS YOUR INPUT] — the current build, and the one I'd put at the top of this page. I don't have the details written down anywhere I can reach, so this needs two or three sentences from you: what problem it solves, who it's for, and where it is now.

In progress 2026

Central bank digital currencies, and what they're actually for

Master's thesis at Politecnico di Milano: the effect of introducing a CBDC on monetary policy transmission and on tax evasion. The conclusion I still hold three years on — the monetary-policy case was always thin, and the enforcement case is the one nobody states out loud.

Research Politecnico di Milano

Uniongo

Co-founded a carpooling app for closed communities — university groups, workplaces, networks where trust and access control matter more than scale. I owned the financial side: unit economics, runway, the KPIs we prioritised against, and the materials that went in front of investors.

Co-founder Florence · 2019–21

An investment mandate that argues back

A written framework for my own portfolio — three permitted edges, five criteria, a reverse-DCF used to falsify rather than rank, and a mandatory written kill-switch per position. Wired into an AI workflow that pulls live holdings and refuses a verdict when no edge can be declared. Section 02 is its output.

Live system 2025–

This website

Hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no dependencies, no analytics. The allocation chart in section 02 is plain SVG. It loads in one request and will still work in ten years.

View code → HTML · CSS · JS

The code that doesn't warrant a card of its own still lives somewhere. Everything public is on GitHub.