Kurt Schrader

Kurt Schrader runs Shortcut, the New York software company whose project management platform tries to do something quietly difficult: stay out of the way. He is its co-founder and chief executive, and after more than a decade at the helm he is now pushing the company into artificial intelligence with Korey, a tool he calls the first AI product manager built for engineering workflows.

The pitch for Korey is a compact version of everything Schrader believes about software. Describe an idea in plain language, and the agent turns it into a structured, build-ready plan in seconds, complete with specifications and acceptance criteria. It plugs into Shortcut and GitHub Issues and, in his words, "centers on how a company's team operates and what work is in progress, then uses that context to inform its actions." Announced on September 30, 2025, Korey is Schrader's bet that the planning layer of software - the part nobody enjoys - can finally fade into the background.

That instinct did not appear overnight. Schrader spent years building and running engineering organizations before he built a company around the experience. As CTO of Intent Media, he grew the engineering team from a single person to more than 40 over roughly five years, the kind of stretch where a team either invents process or drowns in the lack of it. He also co-founded and organized CTO School, a New York community for technology leaders, and passed through names like ThoughtWorks along the way. He holds a BSE from the University of Michigan, earned in 2001.

A tool shaped by scar tissue

Ask Schrader why Shortcut exists and he returns to a pattern he watched repeat. "I've been building engineering teams for many years now, and I've seen the same problems again and again as teams grow," he has said. The trap, as he describes it, is a fork in the road: "You either have very little structure and it's hard to tell what's going on, or things are way too structured and it slows everything down."

Shortcut is his attempt to refuse that trade-off. The goal, as he frames it, is a tool that stays intuitive for the people using it every day while giving leaders real visibility into what is happening and where things are heading - accessible enough for a handful of engineers, sturdy enough to carry a team past 50 or 100 people without the weight of a heavyweight enterprise system. He co-founded the company in 2014 with Andrew Childs, launched the product in 2016 after a year in beta, and has been iterating on that same premise ever since.

The name it had to give up

For its first seven years, the company was called Clubhouse. Then, in 2020, a wildly popular invitation-only audio app launched with the same name and swallowed the brand whole. Android users began review-bombing the software company's app while hunting for the chat platform. Schrader chose not to fight a battle he could not win. "The Clubhouse audio app became so big so fast that we couldn't possibly hope to forever maintain our own brand standing in the face of their popularity," he said. In September 2021 the company became Shortcut - a clean break, and a telling one for a founder who tends to route around problems rather than plant a flag in them.

The rebrand did not slow the company down. Shortcut had already raised a $10 million Series A led by Battery Ventures in 2017 and a $25 million Series B led by Greylock Partners in early 2020, on top of earlier seed money from backers including Lerer Hippeau, RRE Ventures and BoxGroup. By 2022 the company had earned Great Place to Work certification with a 97% employee rating, roughly 40 points above the US average - a number Schrader clearly values, given how much of his philosophy is about making tools people actually want to use.

Still close to the code

For all the executive weight, Schrader has not fully left the workbench. He describes his job as handling "everything nobody else wants to do," and he still writes Clojure. His GitHub handle is a plain kschrader; his handle on X is the single, hard-won word @kurt. It is the profile of someone who never treated engineering as a phase to grow out of.

His read on AI fits that same builder's temperament. Rather than framing it as a way to remove engineers, he argues it will raise the bar for what teams are expected to do - a tool to move faster, not a substitute for judgment. "The best tools disappear into the background, letting teams focus on what matters most," he has said of Korey. "By making AI a natural part of the way work gets planned and delivered, Korey is redefining what is possible and helping fast-moving teams move even faster."

That is the through-line of his career: a stubborn belief that the machinery of building software should be felt as little as possible. "Korey is the next step in our mission to help teams build without the drag of unnecessary complexity and overhead," he said at launch. More than ten years in, Schrader is still chasing the same simple, stubborn idea - and now he has an AI agent helping him chase it.