About Sunbrd

Sunbrd is a small company with a specific bet: that a lot of the quiet obligations in modern life — the birthdays, the thank-yous, the follow-ups, the things you mean to do but don't — aren't failures of character. They're failures of infrastructure.

We build the infrastructure.

The first time, I apologized. The second time, I realized the apology was going to keep happening, on a roughly annual cadence, for the rest of my life, unless something changed.

The thing I noticed was that I hadn't forgotten because I didn't care. I cared enormously. My mother-in-law is great. I had forgotten because I was running my work life on a calendar, my money on auto-pay, my health on an Apple Watch, and my gifts on vibes. The vibes were losing.

Every other domain of my life had tools. Gifting had a Google Calendar reminder that I swiped away, and an Amazon search bar I opened at 10 PM when the panic set in. The tools available for gifting were all one-third of a real solution: reminders that told me when, shopping sites that could sell me something if I already knew what, but nothing that did what a thoughtful friend would actually do, which is pay attention on your behalf and make the right thing happen on time.

So I started building it. Sunbrd Gifts remembers the people you care about, asks them what they want, uses AI to suggest options based on their real interests, gets your approval, and ships the gift with a personal note — fifteen business days early, on the day, every time.

It's currently invite-only. We're onboarding in batches while we make sure it works well for everyone who's already in.

Gifts is the first one because it's the one I needed most, and because the infrastructure to do it well didn't exist yet. There are a handful of others on our list — the kinds of recurring life-admin tasks you'd absolutely pay a thoughtful assistant to handle, if thoughtful assistants were a thing most people could afford.

They're not products yet. We'll announce them when they are. If you want to be the first to hear, join the Sunbrd Gifts waitlist — anyone on the Gifts list hears about the next thing first.

I'm Phillip Brooks. I'm one of two co-founders at Sunbrd. I live in Connecticut with my wife and our ongoing disagreements about thermostat settings. My day job is SVP and Head of Enablement Services at Neuberger Berman, where I've spent the last six years figuring out how to make a large, complicated organization run more smoothly. Before that, I spent a decade at AllianceBernstein in similar roles, with a three-year stint running technology for the Japan office. I built the first version of Sunbrd Gifts myself, in evenings and weekends, because the product I wanted didn't exist and I got tired of waiting for someone else to build it.

My co-founder is Andrew Brooks. Andrew has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Emory and spent the first part of his career building predictive models of decision-making — including research on how brain activity predicts financial markets, and a stint on a DARPA-funded project applying fMRI to canine cognition (long story, ask him). He's currently Head of AI at Ford Credit. He joined Sunbrd to take what I'd prototyped and make it something real people could actually rely on. He's the reason the product doesn't fall over when more than one person uses it at a time, and the reason I can write this page instead of fixing a bug.

We're brothers. This is either an asset or a liability depending on the week. So far, mostly asset.

You can reach either of us at phillip@sunbrd.com or andrew@sunbrd.com. We read every email. We try to respond to every one that isn't selling us SEO services.