Who’s behind Pando
Led by Alex Noboa and a small team of technical staff. We draw on real software engineering experience to solve problems, not just theory.
Where we started
Most good ideas never make it to market
I spent the first ten years of my career as a software engineer at a legacy IT company. Every project was judged by what it cost, while leadership wondered why their products didn’t perform like Big Tech’s. I built my career in the gap between those two expectations.
In 2018 I built Optum’s first prediction system for call-center analysis, using KNN and multivariate regression to head off support cases before they happened. It improved customer care by orders of magnitude. However, it ran on a graph database and needed data engineers and data scientists. The investment was hard to negotiate. As stakeholders changed, and the buy-in went with it.
In 2019 OpenAI released GPT-2, and I piloted Optum’s first use of it: semantic search across hundreds of internal documents. Same story. Frontier technology needed frontier skills, and the return was uncertain. In both scenarios, the opportunity cost of stopping was far more than continuing.
AI’s biggest opportunity isn’t automation - it’s how cheap experimenting has become. Outcomes that once took hundreds of thousands of dollars in machine learning, deep learning, and statistics can get off the ground with an LLM. Everyone should be experimenting, because it has never cost less.
But experimenting isn’t shipping. More than 80% of AI projects fail. Software is hard. Building takes engineering, delivering takes discipline, and going to market takes craft. Doing all three without someone who has done them before is a losing battle.
Pando exists so that good ideas don’t go to waste.
Alex NoboaOwner + Principal Engineer
Our principles
Our principles
Delight is the point.
Software that people enjoy using builds community. That's where the value is.
Outcomes before the bottom line.
Invest in solving users problems, and ROI will follow. Cutting toward a budget line is how good ideas die.
Small, decentralized product teams.
The people closest to the problem should own the decisions about it, not a committee three levels up.
Invest in experimenting.
AI has brought the cost of experimentation down to a level that everyone can afford. Turn it into a strength.
Our inspiration
One root system. Forty thousand trees.
Pando is the oldest living organism on Earth, and the way we think a company should work. In Utah grows a quaking aspen grove unlike any other. To the eye it appears to be thousands of individual trees, but beneath the surface, every trunk shares a single root system. One organism, 100 acres, 20,000 years old, weighing over ten million pounds. Scientists call it Pando, from the Latin I spread.
That’s the system we build. The best software disappears beneath the work it makes possible: quiet, steady, holding everything else up. A healthy ecosystem isn’t a parade of its parts; it’s an expertly orchestrated whole. We keep the technology below the surface so the things your customers actually touch (your product, your people, your business) can thrive. And when you scale, every team, tool, and system grows from the same root.
Like the Pando grove, we’re built to last. No single agent or person is a point of failure. The whole is more resilient than any part, and every part shares the same DNA.
That’s the kind of team we’ve built and the kind of AI-powered organization we help you become.