Why we're building Sapling

I've spent most of my career inside teams. I studied business and computer science at Michigan, spent four years building AI products at Relativity, led product at a couple of early-stage startups, and now I'm getting my MBA at Harvard Business School. Krishan, my co-founder and one of my closest friends since kindergarten, has spent the last five years as a software engineer in the Bay Area. We've taken different paths, but we kept landing on the same frustrations.

My first manager out of college was genuinely exceptional. She told me what I was doing well and what I was doing wrong, sometimes in the same week. I didn't realize how rare that was until she left. The managers I had after that weren't bad people. They were just stretched thin, working off incomplete information, trying to piece together months of context right before a review cycle that nobody had time for anyway. Krishan was living the same thing from the engineering side. Great at his job, but evaluated on metrics that missed the point entirely. PR counts, JIRA velocity, DORA metrics. Numbers that can be gamed, lack context, and tell you almost nothing about whether someone is actually doing good work or growing. The alternative was vibes, a manager's gut feeling assembled from hallway conversations that stopped happening once half your team went remote.

When we started talking to other engineers and managers about this, we kept hearing the same story. Feedback that only comes once a year. Hours spent reconstructing work that should have been captured in the moment. Talented people quietly checking out because nobody told them where they stood until it was too late. The tools that exist were built for HR administrators running annual cycles, not for the people actually doing the work. Nobody had built something that combined real, timely feedback with enough context to make it useful.

That's what we're trying to change. Engineering performance has been either over-simplified into numbers or left entirely to intuition, and people deserve better than both. Sapling is our answer to that, and building it together after a lifetime of knowing each other feels like exactly the right problem for us to be working on.