§ The studio
Five people, one
room, no bench.
Menlo Labs Studio opened in 2019 above a bicycle shop on Doyle Street. We stayed small on purpose: the studio is sized so that every person here can hold the whole of every project in their head, which is the only way we know to keep the work honest.
The people in the pitch do the work
There is no bench and no hand-off to a junior team after signature. If you met them, they are on it. This is the main reason we stay at five.
Measure after launch, publish the number
Every engagement ends with instrumentation and a follow-up read at ninety days. We report what we find, including the times a feature we argued for went unused.
Plan the exit in week one
Runbooks, recorded walkthroughs, and a named owner on your side are line items in the contract, not goodwill at the end. Retainers are available and rarely necessary.
Refuse the wrong engagement early
We turn down roughly half of what we are asked to quote — usually because a rewrite is being proposed where a repair would serve, or because the timeline only works if we lie about it.
The five
- TB
Tomás Beckwith
Fifteen years building instrumentation for utilities and ports. Started the studio after one too many six-figure dashboards nobody opened.
2019
- RO
Rosalind Okafor
Spent six years on trading terminals, where a hundred milliseconds is a real number. Writes the rendering code and most of the arguments against adding features.
2020
- IM
Ines Marchetti
Type and interface systems, formerly in editorial. Believes most component libraries are three components wearing a trench coat.
2021
- DR
Devendra Raman
Computer vision on factory floors and farm equipment. Prefers a four-megabyte model on the line to a large one in a datacenter.
2022
- JH
Junia Halloway
Keeps engagements honest about scope and dates. The reason the hand-off phase exists as a line item rather than an afterthought.
2022
- AInterface engineering
- BInstrumentation
- CApplied machine learning
- DData visualization
- ETechnical diligence
01 Survey
We sit where the work happens before we propose anything. Fixed fee, and it ends in a written document you own whether or not you hire us again.
02 Prototype
One narrow slice, built for real and put in front of the people who will use it. We are looking to be wrong early and cheaply.
03 Build
Two-week cycles, a working deploy at the end of each. Your engineers are in the repository from the first commit, not the last.
04 Hand-off
Runbooks, recorded walkthroughs, and a named owner on your side. We plan our own exit at the start of the engagement.
Doyle Street, above the bicycle shop. Coffee is genuinely good.