Something's Afoot.
We can all feel it. Something is changing in how work gets done. Now that AI has made execution fast, the slow part is us. We spend more time than ever re-aligning, clarifying misunderstandings, chasing context and waiting for everyone to agree.
We started Afoot because we saw this coming. And because we believe the same technology accelerating our confusion can also fix it.
Coordination breaks down the same way in every team. And spotting patterns that repeat is exactly what AI is good at.
The best teams don't stay aligned through discipline; they set things up so staying aligned is the easy thing to do.
Founders
Vanessa Meyer
Co-founder, CEO
John Sjölander
Co-founder, CTO
We're building the system behind the 10x team.
We come from inside the problem.
We come from the leadership side: nearly twenty years leading teams through uncertainty, and experiencing firsthand what happens to great leaders pushed into middle management. Their days fill with low-value coordination work until the judgment that made them exceptional is no longer where their time goes.
We also come from the engineering side, designing the operational backbone of startups and the interfaces between teams the way developers design APIs between systems: simple, barebones and built to reduce ambiguity. When coordination is engineered well, small teams can move with extraordinary speed. It's just very hard to build, because most organizations treat coordination as a soft skill instead of something that can be intentionally designed.
Advisors
Johanna Lindquist
Director of Leadership Development at BTS. Global leader with 15+ years in the education industry, specializing in transformation, leadership development and facilitation.
Joel Kall
Software engineer and exited founder, now building his second AI-first business, Mimicate. 15+ years in AI research spanning swarm intelligence, deep clustering, and generative AI.
Åsa Norell
Certified program designer and facilitator. Neuroscience-informed leadership and collaboration advisor. 30 years in leadership, executive teams, and board roles.
What we believe
What we reject
We believe people can do extraordinary things together. We just don’t believe they become extraordinary by being controlled into behaving ideally.
Fake agreement
Silence is not alignment. Nodding is not commitment. Too many teams confuse the absence of conflict with clarity.
Passive compliance
Afoot works best with teams that want shared accountability and active ownership, not teams that wait to be managed.
Micromanagement
When coordination breaks down, most organizations add oversight, process, and management layers. That makes the system heavier, not better.
Productivity surveillance
Afoot does not track keystrokes, monitor activity, or score employees. We care about whether the team is on the same page, not about policing it.
Rigid process culture
Teams need clearer conversations and a way to carry decisions forward, not another framework.
Who Afoot is for
Afoot is for AI-native companies, and for every company on its way to becoming one. Teams that stay small on purpose, where agents do real work alongside people, and one person delivers what used to take a department. Because when the cost of building falls below the cost of coordinating, the org chart has to change.
Afoot will soon be live. Join the waitlist for early access.
Join the waitlist