Mariano Rozanski is a software engineer and product leader based in Colorado, originally from Argentina. He founded String Authority, an independent research project focused on preserving the stories, ownership histories, and cultural memory of electric guitars. He is the primary author of the research and articles published on String Authority, and leads the design and development of its registry tools. He also writes Guitar Times, a weekly digest covering auctions, releases, and notable events from across the guitar world.
Mariano has been creating software since 2001. Over two decades, he has built systems for luxury brands, film studios, finance, art, and technology companies, including work with Fortune 100 clients. For the past ten years, he has focused on early-stage startups as a founding engineer, turning ambiguous problems into working products.
He has mentored and trained developers throughout his career, helping teams ship software that makes a difference. His recent technical work has centered on blockchain-based provenance systems, building verification infrastructure for digital art and collectibles.
That work revealed a pattern: high-value assets need durable, verifiable records to maintain trust across transactions. The technology to preserve and verify information at scale finally exists. The question became where to apply it.
Mariano has played guitar since 1991. What started as a teenage obsession never faded—it only deepened.
Over the past five years, that interest became more technical. He learned to upgrade, set up, and maintain instruments. He studied how wood, hardware, and electronics shape tone. Eventually, he built an electric guitar from scratch: a T-style that rivals boutique instruments in fit, finish, and playability.
Years of following the vintage market, tracking auction results, and researching serial number histories led to a question he couldn't shake: why is guitar provenance still handled with blurry photos and handshake stories?
Mariano has spent his entire career solving real-world problems with technology—finding the best solutions available for challenges that have persisted for decades. The tools now exist to verify and preserve information in ways that weren't possible before.
The world that's coming will depend on structured, reliable, human-anchored knowledge.
After years of building software tools, digital products, and verification infrastructure, he wanted to apply that work to something that wouldn't exist without the specific insight and expertise he brings. Something that felt right.
People ask: it's 2025, why aren't you building an AI product? The answer is that String Authority is built for the world AI is creating. As models flood the internet with synthetic content, attested cultural memory becomes scarce. Verified human lore, expert assessments, and archival media grow more valuable, not less. AI eats workflows, but it cannot eat ground truth.
String Authority is infrastructure more than it is an app. The goal is to become the source of record for instrument heritage—the place the world checks first when authenticity is questioned. Instrument stories slip away. This project exists so they don't.
This is his way of leaving the instrument world in better shape than he found it.
We're building infrastructure for how guitar knowledge survives.
That requires input from the people who live it: collectors, dealers, builders, luthiers, content creators, photographers, and historians.
We're conducting 20-minute conversations to understand your world.
No pitch. No spam. Just a conversation about guitars and the systems that should exist around them.
We're currently interviewing collectors, dealers, and experts to shape the registry. Tell us about your guitar story.
String Authority is a project by Mariano Rozanski, a software engineer and product leader building tools for guitar provenance, lore, and documentation. Guitar Times is the weekly news digest of String Authority, curating important stories, auctions, and releases from across the guitar world.
