Vita

Hi. I'm Devin Hunt. I'm a designer & engineer and have spent most of my career working on startups. Because of this, I have a wide variety of skills, from typesetting to fundraising. I currently run my own practice, Hailpixel, where I work with companies to build great stuff and ultimately help them grow. Past clients include Pact Coffee, VICE, UCL, Oxford University, BERG, and Disney Imagineering.

Beyond my own practice, I have currently have the pleasure of working with a few great organizations who are supporting startups, including Seedcamp as an EiR and Downing Ventures as a venture partner.

Companies

Over the last 10 years I have had the fortune of founding three companies with some amazing people.

Founder Centric

Partner

Founder Centric was a full service consultancy that designed and delivered top-tier startup education across Europe. From our original free courses at Google Campus in 2013 to national ecosystem development projects, Founder Centric has been at the centre of Europe's startup transformation. Founder Centric was also an experiment in organisation design. We valued surplus time, choosing to keep our calendars empty as possible. It allowed us to react to micro oppurtunities we would otherwise have ignored. We also threw away our material every year, recreating our material from scratch. The following are samples of our major projects.

Startup Tribe

Startup Tribe (née Startup MBA) was a joint venture with Escape the City. Originally an intense weekend course, it has evolved into a three month immersion program that helps people quit their day job, decide on a business idea, and start it. Companies launched during Startup Tribe include BuyerDeck and Pip and Nut.

Microsoft Ventures

Founder Centric helped launch London's Microsoft Ventures cohort. We provided a turnkey curriculum and direct mentorship to every cohort since the program’s inception.

Digital Business Academy

DBA is an online school - created by Tech City UK - to teach anyone how to start their own business. Founder Centric was commissioned to create a series of courses to cover core topics including product development, digital marketing, and managing customers.

Lyst

Co-Founder

Lyst is a fashion marketplace that allows users to shop from several thousand brands in a single place. During my 2 year tenure, Chris, Seb, and I grew the business from a humble prototype to an international platform listing over 3 million products. As the company grew, I took on the role of Head of Product managing the roadmap and the team of engineers, designers, and interns. Lyst has gone from strength to strength, growing to 60 million shoppers annually from 200 countries. A few highlights include:

Lyst.com

Being involved in creating Lyst.com, and all its supporting technologies, is, to date, the greatest engineering achievement of my career. My duties ranged from design & coding to building the technology and product team. Go check it out, it’s great. You’ll probably find a decent pair of shoes as well.

Shop the Runway

Shop the Runway allowed Lyst customers to pre-order and save items as they were unveiled on the runway at fashion weeks across the globe. This internal project combined our world-class data aggregation technology with live photography to produce a seamless browsing experience.

Universal Shopping Cart

Not completed until well after my departure, Universal Shopping Cart was a core product component from the beginning. Lyst now controls the entire shopping experience, allowing a customer to purchase items from multiple retailers, all in the same flow. This project demanded a unique fusion of new technologies and business development. My contribution revolved around the original customer flows and payment processing.

Habit Industies (née Fuzzwich)

Co-Founder

Habit Industries was a YC S2007 company founded by Rob Fitzpatrick, Laurence Honderick, Ryan Seekely, and myself. It began life as a video game studio - focused on music games - and evolved into a animation technology company used by numerous studios including Sony Pictures, Aardman Animation, and WPP. We built some amazing technology at Habit. For example:

Fuzzwich Animator

Fuzzwich Animator was a feature rich tool for creating Flash animations online. Animator generated video by transposing motion sketches into fluid animations, halving traditional animation time. Check out the original demo video, made entirely with Animator.

Minivid

Minivid was the free version of Animator that was launched as a rich media add tool. It allowed fans of films, games, and so forth to create simple & fun animations using their favorite characters.

Habit Stream

Habit Stream was a user generated ad engine which republished social media into rich media blocks and other ad units. Stream was an end-to-end solution including data capture, curation, and rights management.

Other projects

The Mom Test is a collaboration with Rob Fitzpatrick to convert one of Founder Centric's most popular workshops into an online course and resource.
Colordot for iOS is a color app completely designed, developed, and launched by myself. It reached #30 in paid apps section and was well received on Product Hunt.
Colordot is a color picking utility app which I created to test how minimal an interface truly could be. It sparked some interesting discussion.
Typebase.css, like normalize.css which inspired it, is a jump off point for good type design on the web. It's used by numerous sites, Hailpixel.com included.
Dexio was a marketplace which matched domain experts and conferences in need of great speakers. It was an experiment in super lean business design, launched in just a few days. During it's 6 month run, we matched more than 30 experts with speaking gigs, including events hosted by General Assembly and Startup Weekend.
Paper Pets was an application built for Little Printer which printed out weekly origami projects with instructions and patterned paper. It was designed, coded, and maintained by Ben Firshmen and myself.