He spent twenty years on the losing side of this. Then he fixed it.

Jon Alain Guzik spent more than two decades building and operating companies that ran on grants, incentives, public programs and regulatory approvals. He hired the right people — attorneys, consultants, grant writers and public-affairs teams — and learned the hard way that talent was never the problem. The problem was that no one could see the whole decision, while the operator stayed responsible for spending the money and living with the result.

The first version of Skumu was a tracker he built to answer one question before the next filing or consultant invoice: are we actually ready? It became a company when the answer proved too important to keep in a spreadsheet — and when the technology finally existed to answer it completely.