A little context
About
I’m Luca Piekarski, co-founder and COO of Double. My work spans AI software, company-building, and the practical details of getting a product into people’s hands.
What I’m building
I co-founded Double with Loup Wang and Vance Spears in late 2025. Our early work focused on an AI career agent: helping people find opportunities, navigate applications, and spend less time managing a job search. In summer 2026, we joined Founders Inc’s Off Season program in San Francisco.
Before Double, we built Ascendia. It started in 2024 with a problem we knew firsthand—the internship search—and became an AI platform to help college students find and apply to opportunities. We launched it to Boston University students in 2025.
Where I started
I grew up in Glenview, Illinois, and graduated from Glenbrook South High School in 2023. Soccer was a big part of those years: I played midfield for the varsity team and club soccer with Galaxy SC, including a team that won the 17U Boys Illinois State Cup. I also volunteered as a youth soccer coach through MyVarsityCoach.
I went on to study mathematics and computer science at Boston University. That’s where the work on Ascendia began, and where an interest in building software became the start of a company.
Research & early work
In 2021 and 2022, I took part in Argonne National Laboratory’s Educational Science Research Program through Glenbrook South. Our projects studied heavy metals and iron speciation in soils, then the effects of cycling on high-entropy oxide battery materials.
Along the way, I worked at Waterway Carwash and spent summer 2024 as a wealth management intern at Ameriprise Financial. My timeline includes the research, hardware projects, and software I’ve worked on; the timeline connects the dots.