Spring AI Studio is a small, senior team that does the strategy and the build in the same room — because the judgment about what to make comes from having had to live with what you made last time.
Spring AI Studio is led by Michael "Mash" Ashley — a Silicon Valley founder and operator with 25 years of bringing products to market. He has co-founded and scaled four startups to successful exits, advised three companies to billion-dollar outcomes, launched a startup incubator at San José State University, and taught thousands of business students as an adjunct professor. He's the author of What Holds Up the Roof.
That background is the reason the strategy work and the build work sit together here. Judgment about which bets are worth making comes from having made them — and from having had to live with the systems afterward.
It also sets the tone of the engagement. You'll get a direct answer about what something takes, an honest read on whether AI is even the right tool, and a willingness to talk you out of the expensive version when the cheap one works.
Spring AI Studio is a venture of Custany — the studio behind Radi8, Foclarity, and Hugongo.
Which means the practices we bring to your business are ones we already run on. Every recommendation has had to survive contact with our own production systems first.
The person who scopes your work is the person who builds it. Nothing gets handed down a chain, and nothing gets padded to keep a bench busy.
Not because it's the current word, but because it's where the leverage moved. We'd rather be narrow and provable than broad and vague about what we're good at.
Code, prompts, infrastructure, documentation, and the training to run it. The aim is a capability that stays in your building after we've left it.
The fastest way to find out whether we're a fit is a half-hour about your actual problem. No deck, no pitch.