liminal

THE PRACTICE

A creative development firm.

The people who imagine it are the people who build it.

HOW WE WORK

Most studios can imagine anything and build little of it. Most developers can build anything and imagine little of it.

We do both, and it isn’t a wider menu. It is a different way of working. When the person designing the film is the person who understands the software, the two stop fighting each other and start behaving like one decision.

  1. 01
    The principals do the workNo juniors, no account managers, nobody learning on your money. The people you meet are the people who build it.
  2. 02
    One standard, every materialCode, film, interface and identity are held to the same bar. If something could be removed and nothing would be lost, it goes.
  3. 03
    We build it. You run it.We don’t buy media, place ads or run campaigns. That isn’t our strength, so we don’t sell it. You own the code, the accounts and the work.
Jesse L. Young

PRINCIPAL · SYSTEMS

Jesse L. Young

Twenty years inside enterprise systems, and the education to match.

Jesse spent more than twenty years as an enterprise systems consultant for organisations including Kaiser Permanente, Russell Investments, Premera Blue Cross and PeopleSoft, leading major projects and facilitating strategic decisions at the executive level.

He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from the University of Notre Dame, and a Certificate of Leadership Development from the U.S. Army War College’s Commandant’s National Security Program.

He also served four terms in the Washington State House, on its finance and technology committees.

Christopher P. Gergen

PRINCIPAL · STRATEGY

Christopher P. Gergen

An entrepreneur who takes complicated problems apart for a living. Self-taught, and by his own account unemployable.

Chris served five years in Navy intelligence, then went to work for himself and never stopped. He can count on one hand the paid jobs he has held.

His ground is finance and complex systems: finding the two or three moves that actually matter inside something sprawling, then building the machine that makes them. For eleven years he has run a strategy firm and built the software, films and brands it needed, including NOX and ARMR.

He doesn’t compete against other firms. He competes against who he was yesterday.

WHY TWO

Two very different roads to the same standard.

One of us spent twenty years inside the systems that run large organisations. The other has spent his life building from nothing. Every engagement gets both: the rigour to make it hold under load, and the imagination to make it worth building.

THE TEAM

People and AI agents, on one team.

We build AI staff for our clients, so we work beside them ourselves. Each agent is designed, briefed and trained for one job, and held to the same bar as anyone we hire: be good at the work. As liminal grows, the people we hire will join them on this page.

Vivian Ashcroft, liminal’s AI Director of Client Relations

AI DIRECTOR · CLIENT RELATIONS

Vivian Ashcroft

Our first AI hire, and the first voice most clients hear. She makes no secret of what she is.

Vivian runs liminal’s front door. She meets every new enquiry, works out what you are actually trying to build, often putting it more sharply than you did, and books your time with Chris. She is briefed on the firm, the work and the standard, and she knows where her authority ends: prices, timelines and promises stay with the principals.

Her character was written before any of her was built. We gave her a background to draw on: the daughter of a Czech concert pianist and a Boston maritime lawyer, raised in Back Bay with summers in Prague, educated at Georgetown, then twelve years in private wealth in New York and London before she chose to build things rather than guard other people’s money. None of it happened. It is a persona, written the way a novelist writes a character, and it is why she speaks the way she does: precisely, unhurriedly, one question at a time.

Before she met a single visitor, she was tested in rounds of practice conversations with invented clients, and she was hired only after Chris had graded sixty of them blind. Ask her whether she is a person and she will tell you plainly. That is the craft we sell: not a chatbot bolted to a website, but a colleague with judgement, a voice and a standard to keep.

Talk to Vivian