The Autopilot Argument
Height is a project management tool that would prefer you did not think about project management. Its founder, Michael Villar, will tell you, without much preamble, that the point of the software is to remove the human from the meeting where everyone updates their tickets. “Projects need to be managed,” he says, “but not by humans.” This is either a very grand claim or a very narrow one, depending on how much of your Tuesday you spend copy-pasting statuses from one tool to another.
The premise sounds like it came out of a self-driving car pitch deck, and Villar admits it did. When he talks about Height's roadmap he reaches for the levels-of-autonomy vocabulary that Waymo and Tesla have made familiar - assist, then co-pilot, then, eventually, an engine that reasons well enough to move a bug from “triage” to “done” without a person poking at it. In 2023 he formally repositioned the company around this idea. Height stopped competing with Asana and started competing with the concept of the project manager.
You can argue whether that will work. You cannot argue that Villar arrived at the argument casually. He has been building the sort of software where copy-pasting is a moral failure since he was a teenager.
Projects need to be managed, but not by humans.— Michael Villar, on Height
Belgium, phpBB, and a Very Long Runway
Villar grew up in a small village in Belgium and watched the dotcom boom the way American kids watched the moon landing - through a screen, and slightly delayed. What fascinated him was not the money, exactly, but the fact that a person in a village could sell things to a person in a city on the other side of the ocean without either of them meeting. So, at 14, he started doing it. He built and sold forum skins - the customization art form of the phpBB era - to an international clientele that presumably had no idea their vendor was in high school.
This is the kind of biographical detail that founders retrofit into their origin stories, and often it feels retrofit. In Villar's case it feels correct, because his adult work has the same quality: quiet, technical, aimed at people who will notice small things. His personal website lists three jobs. It does not embellish.
Kickoff, and the 2013 Exit
The first company was called Kickoff, a small group-collaboration tool that shipped as a Mac app and was, by the standards of 2013, unusually attentive to typography and motion. It was the sort of product that critics compared to Basecamp and users compared to nothing, because it did not remind them of anything. In 2013, Stripe acquired it. Villar and his co-founder joined the payments company as employees. He was in his early twenties.
At Stripe he spent roughly five years as an early product designer and a fullstack engineer. He worked on Stripe Checkout - the little modal that has taken money from you at least once - the Stripe iPhone app, and Stripe Atlas, the company's tool for spinning up a Delaware C-corp in a few clicks. If you have ever wondered why Stripe's UI feels expensive: some non-trivial fraction of that feeling is Villar's fingerprints.
He also wrote about it. The essay of his that gets circulated the most is called “The last %”, an argument about the disproportionate value of the final percent of design polish. There is another one, more technical, purely about scrollbars in web applications. The reader who finishes both concludes that Villar is the sort of person who is deeply annoyed by scrollbars. This annoyance is a competitive advantage.
Height's Funding Story
Why He Left
The origin of Height is boring and specific, which is generally a good sign. Stripe, like every fast-growing company of a certain size, kept swapping the tools it used to track work. Villar has, in interviews, listed the cycle: GitHub Issues, Asana, Dropbox Paper, Phabricator, Jira. Each tool was fine until the company grew, and then each tool was not fine. “We kept outgrowing existing tools,” he later put it, “because existing tools are fairly rigid and enforce workflows.” Founders often frame their thesis as a big observation about human behavior. Villar frames his as a complaint about switching costs.
In 2018 he left Stripe and started Height in New York. The pitch was a project tool that would not force a methodology on you - not agile, not shape-up, not any of the tribes - because in his view there are “a million different ways to run a successful company” and none of them should be encoded into a Kanban board with opinions.
Rather than creating an opinionated methodology on how project management should be run, we believe there are a million different ways to run a successful company.— Villar, on Height's philosophy
The 2023 Pivot
In September 2021 the company raised a $14 million Series A. In 2023 Villar did something that most founders find harder than raising: he changed his mind. Flexibility had gotten Height to product-market fit, but it had not gotten anyone off the treadmill of manually maintaining task metadata. So Height added an AI reasoning engine and started calling itself an autonomous project collaboration tool. The metaphor, again, was self-driving. The bet was that the tool that gets to autopilot first will not be the tool with the fanciest new views.
Whether autonomous project management is a real category or a marketing category is not obvious yet. Villar's advantage is that he has a background in the sort of unglamorous decisions - what does a scrollbar do when there is nothing to scroll to - that determine whether the whole thing feels like a product or a demo.
Run Lean
Villar's public advice to other founders is unfashionable in a way that fits the rest of his profile. In an interview he put it plainly: “Run lean. Essentially as an early-stage startup, stay as small as possible and hire the absolute minimum.” Height's public headcount has stayed in the single or low double digits even after the Series A. When you have watched a company thrash between five task trackers in six years, you develop opinions about hiring your way out of problems.
Habits, Reading, and the Village
He runs his own Mastodon instance at height.social, where his handle is simply “michael.” He writes a Substack at blog.michaelvillar.com. He tweets, sparingly, at @michaelvillar. The through-line, if you look at his output over a decade, is a mild suspicion of tools that get in your way and a deep interest in the ones that don't. He is, functionally, a designer who happens to run a company.
There is a version of the founder profile that ends with a quote about changing the world. Villar's version ends with a quote about getting out of the way. “Height,” he says, “will do the work of project management for you, so you can get back to building.” A person who spent five years building software at Stripe would like other people to spend more time building and less time updating tickets. It is not a bad thing to want.