Founder · Thousand Birds Inc · San Francisco
Colton
Pierson
Building the runtime layer for production AI agents.
For fourteen years I've worked the same seam: the gap between what software promises and what actually holds up in the real world.
I started where bits hit atoms — building circuit boards in a browser, then the manufacturing and fulfillment to ship them at scale. That became Assembly, which I co-founded and took through Y Combinator, running a team across Redwood City and Shanghai. Engineering, security, ops, hiring — all of it, at once. That taught me range.
Figma taught me the opposite: depth. Real-time multiplayer and performance, where the bar is “the user never notices it was hard.”
In 2020 all of it got called up at once. I joined Curative at the start of the pandemic and became VP of Engineering — and we did over a billion in revenue the first year: 36 million COVID tests across 40-plus states. Then we turned around and built a health insurance company from scratch.
Now I'm building Thousand Birds. Closing the gap between what technology promises and what holds up in production isn't a new problem for me. It's the only one I've ever worked on.
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