Founder · Thousand Birds Inc · San Francisco
Colton
Pierson
Building the runtime layer for production AI agents.
Fourteen years shipping infrastructure people rely on — at Figma, Curative, and Assembly (YC S15). Now full-time on Thousand Birds, backed by HF0.
2023 - Now
Thousand Birds.
AI agents are going into production faster than the infrastructure to run them safely. Most teams are gluing together their own scaffolding — sandboxing, observability, retries, evals — instead of building the actual agent.
Thousand Birds is the runtime that makes that scaffolding disappear. We give engineering teams the substrate to ship agents they can actually trust in production — and the visibility to know when they shouldn't.
Selected work
36M COVID tests · over $1B revenue in year one · 7,000 people
Led engineering through the pandemic-era buildout. From a standing start to nationwide testing infrastructure, fast.
Multiplayer collaboration · editor and viewer performance
Worked on the systems that made Figma feel instant — the reason it became the tool every designer reaches for. Now FIG on the public markets.
Quality control software for modern manufacturing
Co-founded out of YC to rebuild how factories catch defects in real time. Built consoles, networks, and ingestion across factories in the US and China.
Writing
Elsewhere
“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”— Teller