Titan Leeds, LLC  ·  Est. MMX

An independent studio for product, platforms, and machine intelligence, run by people who build. Complicated problems preferred. In business since 2010.

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§ I · Our trades

A small shop with a broad bench.

i.

Product

Deciding what to build, for whom, and what to leave out. An almanack-maker would call it editing.

ii.

Platforms

The systems other systems stand on, and the ones that make hard calls quickly. Set the way type is set, backwards and upside down underneath, so that the page reads plainly.

iii.

Software

Applications and tools for the web and the pocket, built by hand from the first sketch to the thing people use.

iv.

Intelligence

Machine intelligence, applied where it earns its keep and left out where it doesn’t.

v.

Counsel

A second opinion on product, strategy, and the teams that carry them out, from people who still build. Given plainly.

§ II · The press

The tools change. The trade doesn’t.

A printing press once let anyone with a shop and an idea reach the whole town. The web did it again, for the whole world. We think of our work as the same old craft, practiced on newer machinery.

Franklin went on to run a good many things, and to the end of his life still signed himself “printer.” We take the same view of titles.

Then, c. 1733Now
Movable typeCode
The pressThe web
The almanackThe app
The apprenticeThe model
The master printerThe product lead
The proof sheetThe pull request
From the house almanack
Well tested is twice done.
§ III · The name

Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Titan Leeds (1699–1738) was a colonial almanack-maker with the misfortune of acquiring a competitor named Benjamin Franklin.

In the very first Poor Richard’s Almanack, Franklin solemnly predicted that his “good friend” Mr. Leeds would die on October 17, 1733, at 3:29 in the afternoon. When the day passed and Leeds protested in print that he was very much alive, Franklin replied that the real Leeds would never be so rude, so he must indeed be dead and his almanack carried on by an impostor.

It was the best marketing stunt of the eighteenth century, and Leeds kept publishing straight through it. We admire the inventor. We are named for the one who kept showing up to work.

§ IV · Inquiries

Have something
worth making?

Write to us contact@titanleedsllc.com
Engagements Taken selectively, by introduction or good argument.
Established 2010. Per the above, not dead yet.