About
James is a multidisciplinary design leader building products, brands, companies, and teams from 0 to 1 and beyond. He recently led design at Syndicate, leveraging crypto to radically transform how the world builds value, revolutionizing what gets built, by whom, and for whom. Today, he helps build startups as a fractional design leader and advisor and is looking for his next full-time role.
Triple citizen (US, EU, and UK) and native of the internet. Based in New York; designing everywhere.
Currently, I lead design at Syndicate, a startup leveraging crypto to power new kinds of communities at enterprise scale.
Work Experience
Working with clients to deliver full-stack design, strategic consulting, and brand creative direction.
Syndicate started with a radical mission to create a more open, free, and fair economy by putting venture capital on chain, changing what gets built, by whom, and for whom. Since then, Syndicate has grown into a powerful developer platform that powers crypto projects for small startups and Fortune 100 companies.
Syndicate is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Table Management, Variant, Electric Capital, Delphi Ventures, CoinFund, and 300+ top founders and angels.
→ Led foundational design vision as the first employee, architecting multiple crypto investing products from ideation to launch and beyond, leading to over $40M in user deposits and thousands of communities created, all in the first few months after launch
→ Led a major pivot and redesign to a developer platform that now powers projects for companies like Nike
→ Directly hired and managed a design team of 6 and was closely involved in hiring 20+ more, including senior leadership, growing the company to 35 people
→ Led strategy, roadmap, culture, and early company ops like payroll, directly helping close >$28M in series-A funding led by top VCs like a16z, Electric, & Variant
Proxy built a product at the intersection of physical spaces, digital identity, and crypto: a way for environments and devices to recognize and adapt to you, as if by magic.
→ Led a complete redesign of a fragmented, multi-app ecosystem, unifying everything into a single focused UX
→ Overhauled a gridlocked product design process, shipping product for the first time in years
→ Co-led a multi-million-dollar multi-agency rebrand, enabling a pivot and acquisition (by Ōura) shortly afterProxy built a product at the intersection of physical spaces, digital identity, and crypto: a way for environments and devices to recognize and adapt to you, as if by magic. → Led a complete redesign of a fragmented, multi-app ecosystem, unifying everything into a single focused UX → Overhauled a gridlocked product design process, shipping product for the first time in years → Co-led a multi-million-dollar multi-agency rebrand, enabling a pivot and acquisition (by Ōura) shortly after
I was Eight's founding designer and led interdisciplinary design across the company during critical series-C growth and COVID. Led an interdisciplinary design strategy, integrating digital, brand, print, packaging, growth, industrial, and systems design together. Worked cross-functionally with PMs, researchers, analysts, marketers, execs, and more to make design a shared language and competitive advantage.
Founded and led design for a B2B SaaS HR startup, building a suite of research-backed AI-powered tools to identify and disrupt decisionmaking bias in real time.
Side Projects
Collecting resources across design, product, and more.
Helped raise more than $47M in under a week to buy a copy of the constitution, mostly from people who had never contributed to a DAO before.
Led design organization partnerships, expanding and accelerating ADPList's mission to build the future of design mentorship, education, and community. Helped drive ADPList's first round of funding.