Tony Holdstock-Brown

Tony Holdstock-Brown is co-founder and CEO of Inngest, which makes software for durable, observable backend and AI workflows. With co-founder Dan Farrelly he builds step-function primitives so engineers can write event-driven jobs in their existing codebase without managing queues, retries, and state machines by hand.

Debugging Queues at a Healthcare Company

On the Scaling DevTools podcast, Holdstock-Brown described how an earlier healthcare company forced him to deal with long waits, conditions, and obligations spread across queues and services. Those flows were slow to build and painful to debug. Inngest turns them into events and durable steps that can wait, resume, and leave an audit trail, which is also why the product shows up in AI agent stacks where model calls are slow and unpredictable.

Making the Case for Iterative Execution

Inngest's Series A announcement argues that once models are shared, the advantage is how fast teams improve reliable products. The company calls its approach iterative execution: durable by default, observable and replayable, asynchronous and event-driven, and abstracted enough that product engineers are not blocked on backend specialists.

Holdstock-Brown has argued that higher-level infrastructure becomes more valuable as coding agents write more of the application, since an agent can generate a few Inngest functions with durable steps without first provisioning Redis, workers, and Terraform. On Scaling DevTools he warned that impressive technology is a trap if it does not remove real friction for the user.