SQ Collective, Singapore · The Stage — Co-work Fridays

Own the tools.

Importance of owning native tools for agent-native work

Philipp Hölke

Founder & CEO, Kamino Corporation

CEO, Mission Systems

Co-founder & CTO, Mission Group

Who

Philipp Hölke

Founder, operator and builder — Singapore

  • Kamino Corporation Founder & CEO · since 2025
  • Mission Systems CEO · since 2026
  • Mission Group Co-founder & CTO · since 2018
  • GS Goldman Sachs 2016 – 2018
  • UCL UCL Computer Science and Management · 2013 – 2016

The two companies

Mission Systems

Applied autonomy for real-world operating businesses.

Kamino Corporation

Open-source infrastructure for autonomous systems.

Why

What makes us human is the capacity to create.

A potter at the wheel
A chef plating a dish
Two engineers at a whiteboard
A welder at work
A child building with blocks
A musician in the studio
An architect over drawings
A painter in her studio

Kamino builds the infrastructure. Mission applies it.

Two gaps

01

Frontier ↔ workforce

We run agents and agent workflows daily and understand the technology from the inside. Most of the workforce still uses ChatGPT as a better Google.

02

Real work is messy

Covering one shift touches email, WhatsApp, a call, two sites and three systems. No single tool holds the job — ten of them hold a piece each.

The tool

SaaS is a tool.

One job, done well. A hammer.

A site needs 500 of them.

And a hammer doesn't hang the picture.

Mission Systems · Three product principles

Autonomous

Agents across the whole stack, doing the work end to end.

Generative

The pilot and the cabin crew don't see the same screen. The interface is generated per role, and it evolves with use.

Invisible

Most of it runs in the background. What surfaces is the exception.

The thesis

An agent can only do the job if it holds every tool the human holds.

Ten tools. Ten records of the same business.

Glue — forty-five joins between ten tools, each one custom, each one yours to keep alive. Nobody outside this room will wire this.

Native — ten applications, one record. Nothing between them to keep in sync, and the agent sees the whole situation.

Just get in and drive. That's why we rebuilt the entire stack.

For the engineers · one concrete case

One shift swap.

A chef swaps Friday with a colleague. The roster has to stay legal, payroll has to be right, and the GM has to approve it.

Glued — rostering → HR → payroll, over MCP and webhooks

  1. Three systems, three employee IDs. You own the mapping table. Forever.
  2. Three partial truths. Hours live in rostering, qualifications in HR, award rates in payroll. Three round trips before the agent can even decide.
  3. No transaction. Payroll updates; the roster write hits a rate limit and fails. Two systems now disagree and no single log shows the change.
  4. Their permissions, not yours. An MCP token carries the vendor's scopes. "The GM can approve, the sous chef can't" isn't expressible.
  5. Schema drift. A vendor renames a field. The join breaks at 2am, silently.

Native — one person record, one application

  1. One record. Shifts, qualifications and pay rules on the same person.
  2. One typed tool call. Duty hours, cost floor and approval limit are checked in the same transaction.
  3. Commit or reject. Never half-done.
  4. Your policy. One permission model, one audit log, one undo — the GM's.
  5. One situation. The agent reasons over the whole thing, not three fragments.

Mission Systems · The suite

A glimpse across the Mission ecosystem.

Launchpad

The agent layer. It senses a change on the record, decides within the limits you set for that capability, acts through the application that owns the work, and reports back — at the level of autonomy you chose.

Sense → Decide → Act → Report

One operational model

People · Shifts · Sites · Stock · Suppliers · Orders · Guests · Bookings · Recipes · Vehicles · Consignments · Crews

  • People

    • Workforce
    • OpenAir
    • OpenRail

  • Stock

    • Geddit
    • RecipeRep
    • Grapestack

  • Delivery

    • Supadriver

  • Site

    • Opsbase
    • SupaSchedule

  • Guest

    • Bearhug
    • Beacon
    • Brandbase

  • Cost

    • Financebase
    • Analytics

Thank you

Philipp Hölke

Founder & CEO, Kamino Corporation

CEO, Mission Systems

Co-founder & CTO, Mission Group

QR code linking to https://philippholke.com/presentations/own-the-tools
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Mission Systems · Live demo

Launchpad and the applications, live, with

David Faber

Forward-Deployed Engineer, Mission Systems

Own the tools.·The Stage — Co-work Fridays 1/–

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