Andrew Bone and the problem with being a resource

Andrew Bone has a useful qualification for someone selling resource management software: he has been a resource. Before Dayshape, before the international customers and the chief executive’s title, he worked inside the accounting profession. He knew what it felt like to have his working life arranged by somebody else. The word itself does a small disappearing trick. Put a person in a planning spreadsheet and suddenly a career, a collection of skills and a set of preferences become a row.

“I experienced first-hand what it was like to be a resource,” he recalled in 2019. It is an unusually plain explanation for a software company’s existence. There is no need to manufacture a problem when you have already spent part of your career inside it. Bone wanted staff to have a better experience of being assigned to work, while helping the firm perform better. Those two interests would have to share a calendar.

His route to that problem was circuitous enough to be useful. He could understand the code, read the accounts and remember the person whose name appeared in the schedule. Dayshape grew where those experiences met.

“I experienced first-hand what it was like to be a resource.”

Andrew Bone · 2019

Two careers, one awkward introduction

Bone graduated from the University of St Andrews with a first-class degree in computer science, then began working as a software engineer. In that first job he met Alastair Andrew, the colleague who would eventually become his co-founder. Their careers subsequently forked. Bone trained as a Chartered Accountant and worked at PwC and Royal Bank of Scotland. Andrew pursued a PhD in combinatorial optimisation, the mathematics of finding workable answers among large numbers of possible arrangements.

The friendship survived the change of direction. By 2013, they were discussing how to bring optimisation research out of academia and into a product businesses could use. Bone brought familiarity with professional services. Andrew brought the research expertise. Neither half of the partnership would have been quite as useful without the other.

The introduction had included a less technical exercise. On a communication course called Kissing with Confidence, the two young colleagues were instructed to look into each other’s eyes for an uncomfortably long time. Bone later retold the episode with obvious amusement. A company with a future in matching people to work had begun with two engineers being matched for an awkward stare.

Poland makes the problem concrete

The business was founded in 2013. Its early names were Airts, for the company, and Braid, for the product. By 2016, the founders had focused the business on accounting and professional services. PwC Poland became the breakthrough customer.

A six-figure agreement with PwC’s Poland-based Service Delivery Centre was publicly reported in April 2017. The scale explains the attraction: the centre had more than 1,000 colleagues working on 8,000 engagements each month. A schedule at that size is a moving argument between availability, eligibility, skills, preferences and deadlines. Change one assignment and the consequences travel.

The product was designed to keep adjusting as circumstances changed. Richard Cassidy had joined as commercial director, and the young company was building its commercial team alongside its engineers. It had also raised £300,000 in seed investment in the second quarter of 2016.

There is something pleasingly unglamorous about this first test. The founders were asking whether sophisticated mathematics could help a busy operation decide who should do what next. For the people arranging thousands of pieces of work, a more manageable Tuesday was a substantial proposition.

A name for the working day

In September 2020, Airts and Braid became Dayshape. A company name and a product name were folded into one. The announcement described a business with more than 15,000 users across ten countries and two Big Four accounting firms among its customers.

The new name gave a fairly direct account of the ambition. A working day has a shape, whether anyone deliberately designs it or leaves it to accumulated requests. Who receives the interesting project? Who is available when a client changes the brief? Who has a skill that another office needs? The calendar records the answers, even when nobody has considered the questions together.

The rebrand also arrived after external recognition of the company’s growth. Airts had placed nineteenth overall in the 2019 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 and first in Scotland. Bone’s concern, expressed around that period, was to develop the professional services business before chasing too many other industries. There was already plenty of work inside the market he understood.

The kitchen becomes a design problem

By 2020, Dayshape’s own staffing arrangements were changing. Its team had grown to 45, and recruitment was opening to people elsewhere in the UK. Bone and Andrew now faced a version of their customers’ question: how do people work together when they are spread out?

Some of the answers were deliberately small. New starters received a buddy, with the role formalised around regular conversations. A Slack initiative called Virtual Donut randomly paired colleagues for a half-hour coffee. The aim was to recreate the accidental encounter in the office kitchen. Even an AI company had to make arrangements for a chat.

These details give Bone’s approach some texture. The company was selling better coordination while learning how to coordinate itself. A system could allocate a meeting; colleagues still needed a reason to talk. Building a distributed business meant attending to both.

Growth follows the existing customer

In 2021, Dayshape became Scotland’s regional winner in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 for a third consecutive year. The programme recorded growth of 1,251%. That figure described the company’s revenue growth measure in the awards, rather than a personal accolade or a prediction.

Bone explained that much of the expansion came from existing clients. Start in one country, demonstrate the product, then extend to more territories and departments. It is a patient route to an international business: the next introduction can come from inside the customer already using the software.

Dayshape had 60 staff by then, and everybody had share options. Bone also described trying to offer pay rises before colleagues had to ask. Meanwhile, a mid-sized US firm had selected Dayshape through a deal completed entirely remotely. He was looking forward to seeing what a team based in that market could do. The customer geography was widening; the practical questions about trust and working relationships kept returning.

A different chair at the same company

Cow Corner invested in Dayshape in 2023. That year also brought a Workday partnership, with plans to connect resource management to the finance, people and project information firms already held. Bone linked the partnership to his experience as a Big Four accountant and to a shared interest in people’s experience of work.

Then, in March 2024, Matt Cockett joined as chief executive. Bone remained involved, moving into the chairmanship and directing his daily attention towards product as VP Product. His stated mission was to work more deeply with customers, prospects and the team, and push the technology further.

It was a change in the work of being a founder. Running the organisation and deciding what its software should become are related jobs, but they compete for the same hours. The handover gave the company a new executive leader and gave Bone a more concentrated product brief. By the announcement, Dayshape was live in more than 55 countries.

A suggestion needs an explanation

In a 2025 conversation with resource management specialist Christine Robinson, Bone returned to a problem that experience with algorithms alone cannot settle: whether people will trust the answer. A recommendation arrives inside an organisation full of relationships, habits and competing requests. Its usefulness depends partly on whether a resource manager can understand its reasoning.

He described an exchange in which the software proposes a plan and the manager can accept, reject and refine it. The human stays involved. The product has to make its reasoning legible enough for that exchange to work. “Transparency is key,” he said.

Bone also argued for clearer ownership of resource management inside firms, including executive sponsorship and established processes. Buying software leaves those organisational decisions to be made. His ambition is for the function to influence decisions about clients, hiring and cooperation across the firm. The product can help make room for that work, provided the organisation gives somebody the responsibility to do it.

Back to the question that started it

Bone’s writing in December 2025 set out the next product direction: natural-language insight summaries, conversational access to company data, and earlier identification of risks. He argued that AI should sit within the planning system and work on its underlying decisions. The language was about what the software should enable a firm to do, with attention to the commercial consequences of its plans.

By May 2026, he was discussing an international business operating across more than 55 countries on six continents. Partnerships with Workday and Microsoft sat alongside the engineering effort. He also credited introductions from Scottish Enterprise’s international team and GlobalScot with helping Dayshape navigate large companies. The next useful conversation still sometimes required another person to open a door.

Looking back at Dayshape’s tenth birthday in 2023, Bone had compared growing a company with raising a child: gradually letting other people make decisions, and recognising how much depended on the community around it. The analogy fits the later handover without requiring a grand farewell. He stayed to work on the thing they had made.

The job has changed several times: engineer, accountant, founder, chief executive, product leader. Across those changes, the original question has remained practical and personal. When a business decides how to use somebody’s time, what would make that decision better? Bone has built a career around asking it from both sides of the spreadsheet.