Builder
Simon is the one who builds. At Formise he takes an idea from observation to something that runs: prototypes, products and the technical foundation they stand on.
He owns the technology end to end, from rendering and performance to tracking and accessibility. It is rarely one person doing all four, and building them separately tends to mean they never quite work together.
He is also a partner and COO at Memorise. That is what makes the pipeline work in practice rather than on paper: the person building in the lab sits in the agency where the clients are, so the distance from a finished build to someone actually using it stays short.
In the lab that means getting to break things, learning fast, and taking what earns it all the way to its own company. Dynamic SEO went that route, from an observation that technical SEO is stuck in the code to a product with its own name and its own home.
- Product development
- Web development
- Performance & engineering
- Process
- Venture building
- He would rather build than describe. Both memorise.se and the site you are reading this on were built in the lab, not commissioned from outside.
- He builds for scrutiny. memorise.se has to rank in one of the most competitive markets there is, and it gets read by exactly the people who know the craft best. A slow site would have contradicted the agency's whole promise before a conversation could start.
- He builds to be left behind. A build that needs him to survive has failed, however good it is. Dynamic SEO stands on its own now.
- Building in a lab: why ideas need a space of their ownWhy most ideas die as notes, what a lab does differently, and why the first things built are the things we need ourselves.
- The spinout model: assets up, risk downWhy what succeeds in the lab moves out, when the step is taken, and what the spinout does for both the lab and the companies that leave it.
- Siblings, not a group: how the ecosystem fits togetherThe agency, the lab and the spinout share craft but not an org chart. The roles, the pipeline that ties them together, and why it is built that way.
Want to build something together?