We build spaces for people & agents

Language is what made human civilization possible: it let us transmit what was inside one mind to another, coordinate beyond ourselves, and build things no individual could build alone.

Now machines can participate in language too. That’s a strange and exciting inflection point. For the first time, the systems we use to coordinate aren’t just connecting humans; they’re becoming participants themselves. We want agents to help organizations work better together: carrying context, moving work forward, and taking on more of the coordination overhead that consumes human attention. The point isn’t to automate the human out of the loop though. We want to harness what machines are good at so humans have more room for the things we’re uniquely good at.

Ando exists to expand what humans are capable of as machines become more capable too. We’re starting with how teams coordinate.

We’re inspired by linguists, philosophers, and architects. Each gives us a different way of thinking about the same problem: how humans and machines might coexist and coordinate. Wittgenstein wrote about the limits of language; Nagel about the limits of knowing what it is like to be something else. Questions about understanding, subjectivity, and what one mind can know about another used to feel mostly philosophical. When you’re building software where humans and agents work alongside each other, they start to feel like product questions.

Architecture is about designing environments for people to inhabit, which is part of why we’re named after Tadao Ando.

An architect creates the conditions for what can happen inside a space without prescribing exactly what will. We think about software similarly. Teams may spend years inside the systems we build, and increasingly, agents will inhabit them too. We want to build that environment with the same care.

We’re building Ando to last, so we’re patient about the decisions that compound (technical architecture, product primitives, and our team) and impatient about almost everything else.