Bao Van

Bao Van is the co-founder and CTO of Alpaca Health, where he leads engineering and product design. At Alpaca, he's building the operating system that independent BCBAs use to run their practices — from intake and scheduling through insurance verification, session documentation, and billing.

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Before Alpaca, Bao spent years as a product engineer at Meta. He shipped features on Instagram Reels and helped launch the Threads app in July 2023, working across consumer product design, zero-to-one features, and the infrastructure behind billion-user experiences. That background shapes how he thinks about Alpaca: clinicians shouldn't have to fight their software, and every piece of the product should treat a BCBA's time as precious.

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Bao is a Duke alum and an active writer on Medium, where he's published on topics ranging from semiconductor supply chains to what pro gamers and surgeons can teach us about happiness. He's based in San Francisco.