4/13/2026 Last edited: 4/18/2026

Joining Adapt

Headshot portrait of Dustin Schau

Dustin Schau

Product & Engineering Leader

I’ve decided to take a new job leading the Engineering, Product, and Design teams (hereafter EPD) at Adapt, a seed-stage startup building the AI-native operating system for teams. In this post, I’ll share why I’m joining, what excites me about the product and the team, and you know, what I’ll be doing day-to-day.

Why Adapt?

Lots of reasons, but in my experience I’ve relied on my instincts just as much or more than any particular framework or way of thinking. With Adapt, a few things genuinely excite me:

  1. The leadership team. In interviewing and getting to know the team, I built a strong degree of trust, conviction, and excitement about joining Jim (CEO), Sean (CTO), and Ash (CMO). Chatting with Jim and seeing his conviction for the product made me excited. Chatting with Ash (who I worked with before and loved working with at Gatsby) and seeing how she’s using the product, and then chatting with Sean and understanding his technical vision for the platform. The through line is a team that is talented, hungry, and building something they deeply believe in. I want to be a part of that.

  2. Autonomous execution. Working with a business-focused CEO enables me to do what I do best: build great products and great teams to build them. A good partnership is one where each person brings something unique, and I’m energized by the prospect of owning the product and engineering vision while Jim drives the business forward. I want to build.

  3. AI-native. Lots of companies talk the talk about being AI-native. But joining a seed-stage startup that clearly embraces the future of how teams, products, and processes will be built is a different thing entirely. Adapt isn’t bolting AI onto an existing product. It is the product. The opportunity to shape how teams work with AI from the ground floor is rare, and I don’t think the window stays open for long.

What is Adapt?

The simplest way I can describe it: Adapt is the integration layer for your business and is particularly useful and relevant for the entire team not just the engineering team. It connects to the tools your team already uses (Slack, Notion, GitHub, Linear, whatever) and gives you a single interface to ask questions, take action, and automate workflows across all of them.

Think of it less as a chatbot or a collection of tools and more as a colleague who has read every document, knows every process, and can actually do things on your behalf. Schedule a report that pulls data from three systems every Monday morning? Done. Summarize what happened across engineering and product this week? Done. Build a website so that summary is a sharable, reusable asset to review weekly? Done. Draft a response to a customer issue using context from your knowledge base, CRM, and support tickets? Also done.

What makes it different from other AI tools I’ve used is that it’s not just a point solution and it’s not only focused on the coding agent use case. It’s a platform. The vision is ambitious and the early product delivers on that ambition in a way that surprised me (and I’m pretty skeptical of most AI products) in that it worked well and particularly it worked well for such an early-stage product where the expectations are oftentimes a little more hype than substance.

What I’ll be doing

I’ll be leading EPD, which at a seed-stage company means a lot of things:

  • Building the team. Hiring great engineers and product thinkers who want to work on hard problems at the intersection of AI and productivity.
  • Shaping the product. Defining what Adapt becomes. What do we build next? What do we say no to? How do we make the product so good that teams can’t imagine working without it?
  • Writing code. At this stage, everyone builds. I’ve missed being close to the code, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty again.
  • Setting the bar. Building a culture of excellence from day one. The early team sets the standard, and I take that responsibility seriously.

This is the type of role I’ve been building toward for a long time. Leading both product and engineering is something I believe deeply in (the best products are built when these functions are tightly integrated, not siloed), and doing it at the earliest stage means the decisions we make now compound for years.

The bet

I won’t pretend this isn’t a risk. Seed-stage startups are inherently risky. Leaving a stable role at a great company to join a team of less than ten people is not the safe choice.

This being said, the best decisions I’ve made in my career have been the ones that felt a little scary and a lot exciting. This feels like that.

The AI space is moving fast, and I believe the teams that win will be the ones building tools that make teams better, not just individuals (and definitely not just engineers). Adapt is building for teams and specifically Adapt is building on a broader persona that include the engineer but is not only focused on the engineer and I think that’s the right bet.

What’s next

I start(ed) Monday, April 13th, and I couldn’t be more energized. If you’re a builder who’s excited about the future of AI-powered work, or if you’re just curious about what we’re building, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out.

Job’s not finished. Time to get to work.