Diego Villarreal

Diego’s the CEO of Banter!, a mobile app that lets you see all the happy hours, live music, food trucks and other activities going on nearby, so you can decide what to do without having to walk around or visit a bunch of websites. Banter! streamlines the "night out with friends" by using technology to transform annoying to-do's, like finding where to meet up, into enjoyable habits.

Diego was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico. As a teenager, he learned German, learned to play the guitar and enjoyed swimming and boxing. He also became strangely addicted to popcorn, eating a bag a day for almost three years. In High School, he was elected as the Student Council Vice President as well as the Secretary General for his school’s Model United Nations simulation, which hosted over 700 students from all over Latin America.

After graduating from High School in 2006, Diego moved to the Bay Area to get his Bachelor of Science degree in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. He also joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

After graduating in 2010, Diego joined Prophet, a marketing and branding consultancy in San Francisco. While at Prophet, he consulted for a dozen clients across various industries including telecommunications, luxury products and healthcare.

Diego started working on Banter! as a side project in 2013. He had lived in San Francisco for three years, and would regularly eat out or have drinks with friends. He realized there was no easy way to know how busy various bars would be any given night, or what happy hours and events they might have.

After talking to business owners as well as dozens of his friends, he began designing a solution. Throughout the following months, Diego kept conducting user research and working with a development shop to iterate on different versions of a mobile app.

In June 2014, Diego left Prophet and got a team together to fuel the development of Banter!, set to launch in San Francisco in October 2014.

In his personal life, Diego travels back to Monterrey multiple times a year, mostly to visit his family and attend his friends’ weddings. While in San Francisco, Diego enjoys a wide variety of outdoor activities. He’s a licensed sailor and will often take his friends to Sam’s Café for brunch on Sundays. He also skiis, golfs, and does P90X3 workouts in his living room every morning. He loves sushi, and will order Uni at any chance he gets.