Why we built Atono

We built Atono because we got tired of watching good teams lose to their own process.

Every one of us has been on a team that shipped well and then watched it slow down for reasons nobody could name. The work didn't get harder. The understanding just stopped travelling with it. People moved on, decisions went unrecorded, and every change after that cost a little more than it should have.

We thought that was a coordination problem. It isn't. It's a memory problem, and building Atono is what taught us the difference.

Fifteen to twenty tools, a lot of meetings, a dozen people – and every handoff in that chain exists because the people on either side of it don't share what they know. We measured what it costs on our own work rather than assuming it. Turn the context off and the same story takes 60% more changes to get right.

Agents made it urgent rather than causing it. A faster agent makes more decisions per hour that nobody writes down.

To build the shortest path from intent to outcome, and let the chips fall where they may.

Our big, hairy, and very audacious goal is to become the most widely used platform to plan, build, run and improve software.

It's ok to snicker. We know what we're up against.

We also know that people build better software together. Not in a linear assembly line, not spread across fifteen tools, not in broken cultures with highly customized versions of on-premises Jira. We're setting out to build a platform for teams that want to work better together – and now for the agents working alongside them.

Today, we're a team of 20+ people – about 90% Canadian and 10% American – which makes us 100% North American. So technically, we're all "American" (my Canadian teammates won't see this, so it's fine). We closed our seed round in March 2024 – let's go!

We have several strategic principles that direct our actions and help us make good decisions:

1. We're developing our organization in the open. We are sharing what we know with anyone who needs it.
2. We're building a customer-first organization. We believe you should be able to buy the product the way you want, self-service, à la carte, with sustainable but low prices and a money-back satisfaction guarantee.
3. We'll spend hours to save you a minute. We're obsessed with saving you time.
4. We can make more money, but we can’t make more time. The same goes for you, so we hate waste. Find it, root it out. We're building our software to help you root out friction.
5. Start beside your stack. Nobody has to move to Atono to begin, and we'd rather earn the move than ask for it.

We have 17 principles or values that address how we act, how we treat others, and how we make decisions. 17 is 14 too many, but we’re still young and experimenting. The underlying theme is humility, and if we had to pick three, they would be:

• Be curious: Embrace experimentation and failure so we can learn and grow
• Be a team: We win and lose together (serving one another as we go)
• Be real: Every internal and external interaction is consistent with our principles

Read all 17 principles here