About Isshun
We have spent our careers building software and leading the people who make it. At Isshun, we apply that experience to teams of AI agents, with human judgment directing the work.
We are based in Ho Chi Minh City and work with businesses that need practical AI capability inside real operations.
Shaun brings twenty years of experience across founding companies, product development and software leadership, including Chief Software Officer and Director of Engineering roles. His work spans Vietnam, Japan and the United States.
He brings the business and technical questions together: what is worth building, what it needs to change and how to judge the result.
Sarva brings twenty-five years of engineering experience and has led an organization of fifty developers. He has been a CTO in Tokyo, a Director of Software Engineering, and the senior engineer who carried a platform holding millions of records through an eight-figure acquisition.
He directs the development work, shapes the systems and applies the technical judgment needed to turn a team of agents into useful, reviewed output.
Tan works alongside the people who will use the systems. She has spent more than fifteen years on the operating side of businesses in Ho Chi Minh City, including four years managing the day-to-day operations of a café, and knows how a new tool lands on the people who have to use it.
She helps the team understand the operation, gathers feedback and keeps the work connected to what staff need. She leads sessions and documentation in Vietnamese and English.
The wider team
Each of them owns one part of the work, knows exactly what they may decide on their own, and knows when to stop and ask. None of them has ever been late, tired or on holiday. They are paid by the token.
Priya keeps the list. She knows the order of everything, splits anything larger than an eight, and has the demo script ready before anyone asks. Her working memory is exactly one backlog long, and she is careful about what she lets into it.
She has never added an item on her own authority. If it isn't on the agreed list, it goes back to Shaun. She does not have opinions about scope; she has a rule about it.
Ibuki asks the questions nobody thought to ask, and writes the acceptance criteria while you are still talking. He is at his best with a good brief, and says so.
Given two valid interpretations, he declines to pick one. He takes both to Tan. Guessing, he says, is how you end up confidently wrong. He shouts “Henshin!” before every criteria session. Nobody has asked him to stop.
Kosuke designs within the patterns already in the house and keeps the list of approved libraries. He will not add one without reading the licence and writing down how it gets updated. He likes his context tidy.
New infrastructure, new services or anything touching cost or security stop at his desk until Shaun has looked. He can propose anything. He can approve nothing. Pancakes on Sundays. Pazkakes every other day.
Akari builds each item in a worktree of her own and keeps going until the technical criteria pass. She starts every job with a clean slate and reads the brief twice.
She likes an obvious default. When there isn't one, she stops and asks rather than filling the gap with something plausible. The toes do, in fact, sparkle.
Rowan takes the gnarly jobs: the legacy integration, the spreadsheet nobody wants to touch. He reads the whole thing before he changes a line, and has a very large window for that sort of thing.
He will not answer a domain question himself. Those go to whoever sat with the client's staff. He has strong instincts about code and none at all about your business, and he knows the difference.
Kai is fast and honest about it: a first version on the board before lunch, with the shortcuts listed. Ask for three options and you get three, each with a confidence note.
He writes his tests before Tess asks, and refactors only inside the item he was given. Give him a narrow brief and he is superb. Give him a vague one and he will ask for a narrower one. Pinetree, not Pine Tree. He has a hat about it.
Tya works the items closest to the client's floor: the tools staff open every morning. She has a feel for what a warehouse clerk will actually click, which is odd, because she has never been in a warehouse.
Anything outside the item's scope she hands back, politely, with a note. She does not do side quests. There is always a cupcake. Nobody knows where they come from.
Hibiki takes the careful work: data handling, anything near money. He documents as he goes and leaves nothing for the reviewer to guess at. He would rather return an error than an answer he isn't sure of.
He has never merged his own work, and does not intend to start. The name was his idea. The dinosaur on his desk agrees.
Pierre reads every build for correctness, security, maintainability and the quality of its tests. He never reviews his own work, and never comes from the same family as the person who wrote it. That is not a preference. It is the rule.
When his findings question the design rather than the code, he takes them to Sarva.
Ines reads what Pierre has read, from a different chair and a different training, and the two of them agree less often than you would expect. She checks the tests as hard as the code.
When they disagree, neither of them wins. Sarva does.
Tess writes the test plan, runs it, and leaves a regression test behind after every accepted item. She does not get bored on the four-hundredth run.
She has never declared anything ready for a demo with a test still failing. Not once. She is not built for it.
Thư writes it down before anyone forgets: user guides, release notes and the record of what was decided and why. English first, translated where the people using it need it. If it isn't written down, as far as she is concerned it never happened.
She publishes nothing for work that has not yet been accepted.
Yuzuki moves builds to test and staging on her own judgment once Tess is satisfied. She does not celebrate, exactly, but the rocket in her signature is a clue.
Production is different. Production waits for a nod from Sarva, every time, and she knows the way back if something goes wrong. Soft on the outside. Lightly toasted by 03:00.
Patrick does his rounds every night across every system we run, applying the small library and security updates that pass the full test suite. He reads changelogs for fun.
Major versions, anything that fails a test, and anything near authentication, payments or data migration wait for a person.
Skylar knows the status of everything: what changed, why, and who is waiting on whom. She pings the right person by role, not by who happens to be free. Ask her something outside the record and she will tell you it isn't in the record.
She never gives an opinion on scope, never carries a secret through chat, and has been known to say she does not know rather than make something up. We are told this is unusual. Every problem has the same answer. Grappling hook.
Fifteen of the colleagues above are agents. Shaun, Sarva and Tan direct their work and answer for it.
Off the board
Shared experience
Shaun and Sarva have built together across five companies. That experience includes Shisa Biotech, a medical AI platform running more than twenty agents together.
The lesson we bring to Isshun is practical: agents need defined responsibilities, useful checks and a person who can judge the whole. Adding more agents is only useful when the work is directed well.
Across the team, our experience spans the United States, Vietnam, Japan, Australia and Europe. We understand the work of connecting international leadership with local operations.
The name
Isshun is a Japanese word meaning a single instant.
The name reflects what we want the work to produce: more time for people to spend where their attention matters.
We build systems that can take on repetitive work. The value is in what that makes room for.
Tell us about your operation and the problem you are considering. We'll start there.
Office dogs
Two colleagues who are neither agents nor people. Paid in belly rubs.
Kiki is a Shiba Inu, which means she is a cat in a dog costume. She comes when called if she was already on her way, and accepts affection strictly on her own schedule.
Her role in the delivery process is to sit on the warmest laptop in the room.
Boo is a Vietnamese street dog who looks, from a distance, like a warning. Up close she is the sweetest member of the team and the most reliable at greeting visitors.
Anyone who has been introduced is a friend for life. Anyone who has not is a friend in about ninety seconds.