Author

Ryan Handby

I'm the founder of Sumn. I've been writing software for a couple of decades: fintech, banking, booking systems, five businesses of my own, and twenty-odd startups where I was the engineer and often the CEO or CTO as well.

What most of that work had in common is that it had to be reliable. Money moves, seats get booked, and somebody notices within minutes when it doesn't. You pick up a particular kind of caution doing that for long enough, and it's why I'm interested in agents doing real work inside real businesses rather than in demos.

Working and usable turned out to be different problems. I've seen plenty of software that ran exactly as designed and still failed, because the only person who could operate it was the one who built it. So I'll take the boring answer a team can run over the clever one nearly every time.

Agents are the sharpest version of that I've come across. They can do real work now, and the teams I talk to still have someone sitting there babysitting them through it. Sumn is our attempt at the missing part: a budget the run can't outrun, and gates it has to pass before anything lands.

If you've read this far I'd rather hear about you. Tell me which process you'd hand to an agent first and I'll tell you whether Sumn is any good for it. I'm at hello@sumn.run, or on LinkedIn.