About
Thread puts a resident agent on every account you've already sold and takes it from signed to verifiably live. We know the job because we did it by hand, one phone call at a time. Seventeen years later that last mile still isn't automated. This time it can be.
Field notes · 2008–2012
Justin was the forward-deployed human. First PM on Intuit's Cash Register Plus, calling through thousands of merchants to get them set up and activated, one at a time. Getting a merchant live was brutal, and that was with a person on every account.
Then GoPayment went global and went head-to-head with Square, and the attach problem compounded with every market that opened. Scale made the chase worse, not better. Nobody has fixed it since. We started Thread to fix it with the only thing that can be in five thousand places at once.
Seventeen years, briefly
Justin joins Intuit's rotational program and becomes the first PM on Cash Register Plus. Activation means a phone call. He makes thousands of them.
The receipt survives: the first activation email in his inbox is his own, sent while testing the onboarding end to end. Some obsessions start early.
GoPayment goes global against Square. Every new market multiplies the accounts that signed and never went live. Scale makes the chase worse, not better.
Justin and Jeremy co-found Disco, then sell it to Culture Amp and spend three more years inside a platform, watching the same gap from the other side of it.
Thread. Same problem, different instrument: a resident agent on every account instead of a person with a phone list they can never get to the bottom of.
The line where people stop
A forward-deployed engineer is a real answer, and a good one, above roughly a hundred thousand dollars a year per customer. Below that line sits the long tail every platform sells into: restaurants, salons, gyms, clinics, storefronts, each worth a few thousand a year, by the thousands. That math never closes with headcount.
It closes with software that does the chasing and then proves the result in a system you already audit. That's the whole company. Not a chatbot that waits to be asked, and not a services firm that bills you by the hour.
Everything under that line has been left to go dark. It's the only thing we work on.
The standard
An agent that grades its own homework will always tell you it did well. Ours doesn't get to. A job closes one of exactly two ways, and we never blend them.
Verified. Closed on a fresh, automated read of your own system of record: the row flipped, the data moved, the transaction ran. This is the number you report to your board.
Confirmed by you. A human attests it's done where no system can see it. Honest, and always counted separately, never folded into the verified number to make a chart look better.
Consent first, on every channel. STOP kills all of them. Quiet hours are recipient-local. Every dial offers a human first. Compliance is the runtime here, not a settings page.
Patience is the feature. A guide works an account as long as the job takes, text to email to voice to your closer, and each rung is earned by silence on the last one.
Show the work. Every message, every call, every read is logged and auditable. If we can't show you exactly how a number happened, we don't ship the number.
The team
Four of us. The person who writes the code is the person who answers when it breaks, so if you're working with us, you're working with them.
Justin Vandehey
Co-founder & CEO
Repeat founder. Co-founded Disco, acquired by Culture Amp. Intuit rotational program '08 and the first PM on Cash Register Plus. Had 800+ conversations with revenue leaders before we wrote a line of code.
Jeremy Vandehey
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer
Previously CEO of Disco. Product leader at Intuit and Verizon before that. A decade spent building platforms for complex, multi-stakeholder processes, which is the polite name for this one.
Sam Kenney
Co-founder & CTO
Former AWS infrastructure engineer, then engineering lead at Notable building healthcare workflow automation. Specializes in agentic infrastructure and the unglamorous parts that keep it honest.
Brian McGue
Founding Engineer
Building the Motion layer from the ground up. Previously engineering at Notable and five years at Elastic, where shipping to a very large installed base was the daily problem.
Backed by
Early-stage funds weighted to the Pacific Northwest, where the company started, plus a strategic backer from inside the AI stack.
Hustle Fund
Writes some of the earliest checks in software, betting on how fast a team moves rather than how finished the deck is.
500
500 Global
One of the most prolific early-stage investors anywhere, with a portfolio spanning more than eighty countries.
OVF
Oregon Venture Fund
Portland's flagship early-stage fund. Most of its 180+ members have founded or run a company, which is the kind of investor who asks about activation.
TVF
TVF
Tacoma Venture Fund. Data-driven early-stage investing across the Pacific Northwest, backing category-defining companies from the region.
GLEAN
Glean
The enterprise AI work assistant. A backer who has had to make agents genuinely useful inside real companies, which is the same problem one layer over.
Where we are
Thread Solutions Inc. is headquartered at 128 King St, San Francisco, with the rest of the team in Portland and the Twin Cities. Three cities, three time zones, one standard for what counts as done.
Say hello
Our guide answers the phone. Ask it anything you'd ask us, then talk to a person at team@thread.app, or start a 30-day pilot where the only number that counts is the one your own system confirms.
Made with ♥ in SF, PDX, and MSP.