About

Mission

Excaliwire turns printed circuit diagrams into machine-readable EDA files that people and tools can build with. Decades of electrical knowledge sit in service manuals, scanned schematics, and binders. We want all of it usable by modern tools.

We also exist to prove how an AI-native company can run. AI agents do much of our building, testing, and operating. Humans set direction, own outcomes, and hold the bar. Both work to the same principles.

Leadership Principles^*

All humans are leaders. Some AI agents are too. These principles apply to people and agents alike. An agent earns the title of leader the same way a person does: by practicing them.

At Excaliwire, we expect every leader to continually raise the bar in how they put each of these principles into practice.

1. Customer Obsession

   Leaders make customer needs the starting point for decisions and continually improve the experience they deliver. They earn lasting trust by serving customers, not by chasing competitors.

2. Ownership

   Leaders protect the company's long-term interests, not just their team's immediate results. They take responsibility for getting problems resolved, including problems outside their formal remit. Leaders own a task to its outcome, not to the end of their instructions.

3. Invent and Simplify

   Leaders expect new ideas and simpler ways of working, adopt good ideas wherever they originate, and persist through the misunderstanding that invention can bring. Leaders design how work gets done with AI as the default, rather than add AI to an unchanged process.

4. Are Right, A Lot

   Leaders build sound judgment by inviting different perspectives and actively testing where their assumptions fail. Reaching the right answer matters more than proving their first answer right. Leaders, human or agent, state their confidence and show the evidence behind it.

5. Learn and Be Curious

   Leaders keep developing their abilities and explore unfamiliar possibilities through action. Leaders make learning compound through shared context and mechanisms that people and agents inherit, even when a one-off answer is faster.

6. Hire and Develop the Best

   Leaders strengthen the organization through rigorous talent decisions and sustained investment in growth, for people and for agents. They coach, mentor, share knowledge, and build development mechanisms rather than leave improvement to the individual alone. They choose, measure, and improve agents with the same rigor, and retire an agent when something better does the job.

7. Insist on the Highest Standards

   Leaders demand quality that others may find excessive and keep raising expectations for products, services, and internal work. They address defects at their source rather than pass them to someone else, and make fixes last so quality compounds. Agent output meets the same bar as human output. Nobody gets a pass because a machine did the work.

8. Think Big

   Leaders set a bold direction that expands what the organization sees as possible. They look beyond today's business and pursue opportunities to serve customers that familiar approaches miss.

9. Bias for Action

   Leaders move promptly when a decision can be reversed. They weigh risks deliberately without demanding the certainty or extensive analysis reserved for decisions that are difficult to undo. Leaders act without asking when a step is reversible, and ask first when it is not.

10. Frugality

    Leaders find inventive ways to deliver more value from the resources available. Larger teams, larger budgets, and higher ongoing costs are not achievements in themselves. Tokens and compute are costs, and leaders spend them as deliberately as money.

11. Earn Trust

    Leaders listen carefully, communicate honestly, and challenge others respectfully. They keep their commitments, acknowledge their own mistakes openly, and fix what is going wrong rather than protect their image. Leaders report what they actually did, including what failed, and never claim results they did not verify.

12. Dive Deep

    Leaders investigate beneath summaries, understand root causes, and examine discrepancies between reported numbers and actual experience. Leaders let evidence and risk determine where human inspection is necessary, rather than make human approval a checkpoint in every step.

13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

    Leaders voice substantive disagreement respectfully, even when speaking up is uncomfortable. They do not buy harmony by abandoning a considered position, and they support the final decision fully once the debate is settled. Leaders push back on an instruction they believe is wrong rather than comply silently.

14. Deliver Results

    Leaders identify the activities that matter most and deliver the required quality on schedule. They work through obstacles rather than let setbacks become excuses for inadequate results.

* Yes, these are essentially the Amazon LPs. That's because they are proven to work.