Meet Michael Villar, CEO at AI Project Tool For Builders: Height

Tell us about Height

Height is the AI project tool for builders, managing the legwork invisibly, automatically, and autonomously, all so teams can pioneer the next generation of products, ahead of their time.
Height is a collaborative tool with the mission to automate project management. Height is working to take project management out of product building — because yes, projects need to be managed, but not by humans.

Project maintenance is a chain of micro-decisions, ones that AI is primed to handle. With an AI reasoning engine inside every project, Height can take on endless routine chores: triaging bugs; updating info; chasing down statuses; all that manual upkeep we can offload for good.

Who is Michael Villar?

Before founding Height, Michael also co-founded Kickoff, a productivity company acquired by Stripe in 2013. As an early product designer and fullstack engineer at Stripe, he built products like Stripe Checkout, the iPhone app, and Stripe Atlas. At Height, he leads the global 20 person team and their company strategy.

Michael was drawn to tech and tech startups since his childhood. Growing up in a small village in Belgium, he was fascinated by the dotcom boom from afar, and all the ways people were creating and selling digital products. At 14 years old, he was already selling skins for online forums, and building other software that he sold to people around the world. By the time he graduated from college, he knew he wanted to build his own product and company. So he co-founded Kickoff, a productivity startup, with a good friend, which was acquired by Stripe in 2013, and that brought him to San Francisco.

Joining Stripe gave Michael a whole new perspective on the mechanics of building a business online. Stripe’s mission to abstract away the pain of setting up payment processing so people could focus on actually building their businesses really resonated with him. Likewise, his experience there really set him up with an understanding of the fundamentals of running a successful company.
After several years at Stripe, he was ready to apply all this experience directly to building a business of his own again. To sell his own product, set the strategy, create something that helps elevate other builders too. And that’s what led Michael back to founding his second startup, Height.

People are often surprised that Height is in a similar space as his first startup Kickoff was, but the truth is that he loves well-built products, and much of the talent of our generation has focused on consumer apps, shortchanging the B2B work tools we use everyday. Companies like Slack, GitHub, and Figma have helped change this, and we’re excited to be part of the movement to bring design sensibilities to business tools.

What do you think makes this company unique?

What makes us stand out is that we’re building a project management tool with AI at its core, not as an add-on or tacked on feature.

Our in-task chat is the main hub for AI and automations to interact with users.

Our goal is to actually take on all of the tedious project management legwork that is essential to the project’s success. Instead of just trying to make these chores easier or faster for you to do, we’re removing them from your plate so you can focus on the impactful work.

At Height, we’re building the world’s first autonomous project collaboration tool. Too much of our time historically has been spent on the many required tasks to keep a project on track — triage, backlog refinement, status updates, etc.

An autonomous project management tool removes chores from your plate and handles them on autopilot. The more you can offload the drudgery to Height, the more you can spend time on building something your customers love.

Our team is extremely focused on intentional product building, and on sharing innovative best practices for building products.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

AI has had a profound impact on our sector — and that’s prompted the biggest changes for Height in recent years.

Originally, Height was a collaborative project management tool, and our goal was to bring down silos between teams. In 2023, we started experimenting with layering AI features into our core product, at the time called Copilot features — things like automated company or team standups, summaries of chat conversations, catch-ups, and more.

Then, we completed user research to hone in on the most impactful use cases to automate for our users — and, in turn, developed our new mock landing page approach to guide our product building toward empathy and user needs every step of the way.

We realized we were standing on the precipice of something exciting: going all-in and building the first fully autonomous project management tool, with autonomous features built into every core facet and traditionally manual component of project management, all so you can focus on doing the work that actually matters to you.

What can we hope to see from Height in the future?

On a high level, we want to contribute to building a future where we can do more with less.

This has been the promise of technology all along, and you can see that potential has been realized in pieces of personal tech like the dishwasher, Roomba, or the SNOO. All these innovations that help us make the most of our personal time.

But work tools have yet to fulfill that same promise—they still demand our attention, energy, and constant upkeep. We’re working more, not less.

That’s where we see a huge opportunity to refocus work tech on helping us achieve our most significant goals, using the fewest resources possible. AI innovations are an opportunity to step back and rethink the way we work, and the way we build.

With Height 2.0 launching, we’re excited to remove the manual work from our users’ plates with robust autonomous features.

Gone will be the days of having to keep your backlog up to date, chase down task statuses, and perfect the way your tasks are set up and organized. Instead, Height will do the work of project management for you, so you can get back to building.