Cory M Burnett

Twenty-five years designing and building software. 4+ years forward-deployed – with businesses, inside the systems they actually run, designing, building and shipping value.

Discovery, design, build, deploy, iterate. I own the whole stack. That means scoping against the systems a customer really has rather than the ones they wish they had, getting messy and underdocumented processes to align, and turning a one-off fix into something reusable.

Today that's Sutra.AI, where I lead Product + Design and we build AI applications for mid-market and enterprise businesses.

I finished high school early, so my senior year was spent at a tech school learning multimedia design. The final project was a piece of software that shipped on a CD-ROM. I designed it and I built it, but it never occurred to me that those were supposed to be two different jobs.

It was 1998 and I needed to start my career, so I went looking in the newspaper classifieds. That's where I found my first real design job.

The ad asked for someone who knew QuarkXPress. I told them I knew QuarkXPress. I was rounding up – I had never opened it. They gave me the interview anyway, then brought me back for a design exercise, and the exercise is what got me hired. Twenty-five years later there is still always a design exercise.

I started that January, in 1999, and stayed five years – I learned Quark in a week, which is how long it takes to learn anything when someone expects the work on Friday.

I was enrolled at Weber State for Visual Communications and Design at the same time, and I never finished it. The tech school had already gotten me into the trade. I was working, I was getting paid to design, and I made the call to keep going rather than go back.

What I was doing that whole time was building. Adobe GoLive, then Dreamweaver, then writing the HTML by hand because it was faster, then Flash and ActionScript once that's where the interesting problems lived. Nobody trained me on any of it, and it never occurred to me to wait for someone to.

Which brings me to a basement in Utah, ten years later.

I'd been gone a while by then. California, where the work was and the winters weren't. I came back and found out how much of me had never left these mountains.

I was standing in my parents' basement when I noticed a sticker on the furnace. Someone had put it there years earlier and forgotten about it, but nothing had faded. Still bright, still holding its shape – the way a place you grew up in holds its shape whether or not you've been back.

I'd been carrying an idea since a photography assignment at Weber: shoot the Wasatch Front, write a narrative to go with the pictures. The sticker gave it a shape.

I made it into a shirt. The shirt turned into a magazine.

It became a lifestyle brand, though it started as an online magazine about the Utah outdoors – adventure writing meant to get people off the couch, trail notes, trip reports, whatever contributors sent me. I ran a piece on the soccer history of Utah with the manuscript curator at the Marriott Library. I made a tee for the Ogden Dodgers, from back when Tommy Lasorda managed them to championships in the early sixties, and people around here loved it.

I printed the shirts myself, single-color press, at home, in runs of ten. Water-based inks – harder to work with, better for the environment, and they gave me the worn-in look I wanted. American Apparel blanks, because they were made domestically, vertically integrated, and I was particular about the fit.

That job turned into a career, and the two most useful years of it happened seven years apart.

In 2012 I joined Fieldlens, a construction software startup, and stayed through the acquisition. In 2015 I walked into Oracle. I didn't understand how lucky that sequence was until much later.

Most people get one of those educations. I got four years of each, back to back, in the same industry, close enough to watch the same problem solved two different ways and learn what each way costs.

I've been spending that ever since.

Avvir, Xeeva, Refersion, Uptime, and now Sutra.AI. Reality capture, procurement, affiliate infrastructure, monitoring, AI for mid-market.

Five companies in a row where the product was the data, and my job was to make an enormous amount of it mean something to a person who had four seconds to decide.

That's where I got specific about cognitive load. Not as a conference word – as the measurement. How much mental effort does this cost the person using it? Every unnecessary unit of that effort is a tax you charge someone for the privilege of your own product. Clarity, hierarchy, scannability aren't aesthetic preferences. They're how you lower the bill.

Every one of those products was a machine for turning noise into a decision. That's still the only kind of thing I build.

The line I spent twenty-plus years standing next to is gone. The distance between having an idea and having a working solution is days now, not months.

The hard part at Sutra isn't the model. It's getting a company's data enriched and ready, and giving them a layer they own rather than one they rent from someone else's servers. They keep control, and they get the benefit.

One of the most significant pieces I've worked on there is an agent that takes in a business's context and carries it across the whole process, so our team can rapidly build out the use cases where AI delivers real value. My commits on it land in the backend as often as the frontend, which is the point.

The rest of what I build is for people I know.

Jarvis is an operating system for family and friends' businesses, and I run it for them. TheDesignAgent puts design judgment into whatever tool you already build in, delivered over MCP. SchoolSlate exists because no parent should need five separate portals. Ninepocket identifies a trading card from your camera and tells you what it's worth. WindowSeat is a native iOS app for people who like knowing what they're flying over. There's a moving company's operations portal, a summer camp's registration system, and Sticky Signatures, which started as something to make with my kids and turned into a shop.

I didn't see it until recently, and then I couldn't stop seeing it.

A magazine that existed to argue for local business. Fifteen years later: a moving company, a summer camp, a school's parents, and an operating system I run for family and friends' businesses.

I thought I left terra45 behind in 2011. All I did was change the medium. The argument stayed the same, and I've been making it in TypeScript for years without noticing.

The method didn't change either. I still don't know how to do most of it when I start.

I grew up in those mountains and I've never really managed to leave them. Wherever I've landed since, some part of me is still looking for the Wasatch on the horizon — that row of obelisks standing over Ogden — and nothing else has ever quite stood in for it. I climbed Whitney once, years ago now, and I'd do it again tomorrow.

Once or twice a year we all go back. Hiking when it's warm, skiing and boarding when it isn't, family the rest of the time, and mostly just to stand near them again for a while.

The kids come with us, and they are the reason several of the projects on this page exist — they ask for things nobody has built yet, and then they wait to see whether I actually will.

Twenty-five years in, the work I want is the work I've always wanted. Find something confusing that matters to somebody, and make it clear.

Still building. Still figuring it out.