# Faculty

> Faculty is a product studio in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Chris Shiflett in 2016. We shape ideas into products — strategy, design, and engineering under one roof, with one point of view — for founders who care about getting it right from the start. We offer three fixed-scope, fixed-price engagements: The Faculty Sprint (five weeks, $55,000, a working product on the client's own infrastructure), a GEO engagement ($5,000, ~one week, making a business legible to AI search), and a Security Review ($10,000, ~one week, a senior security review and fix).

Most studios hand off — design to engineering, strategy to design — and something gets lost in each transition. At Faculty, the decisions that shape a product are made by the same people who build it.

## The Faculty Sprint

Five weeks. $55,000. One product. You bring the vision; we bring the judgment. Five weeks later, you have something real — grounded in decisions that will hold up as you grow.

- [Overview](https://faculty.com/): What's included, how the five weeks unfold, and what you walk away with.
- [Apply](https://faculty.com/sprint): Brief project intake. One client at a time means every submission is read personally.

**What's included**

- *A real product, not a prototype.* Working, focused, functional, and ready for customers. It won't have every feature you imagined — it will have the right ones.
- *Full ownership.* No licensing, no equity. Take it anywhere.
- *Deployed on your infrastructure.* Your own AWS account. Your server, your data, your costs — typically $100/month or less to start.
- *Customers can use it.* We don't ship demos. The sprint ends when something is live and working.

**How we work**

- *Listen first.* Customers, constraints, what matters most, what can be left out.
- *Decide together.* Scope and priorities set before a line of code is written. Preserve the essence, not the scope.
- *Build to ship.* Design and engineering together. Nothing gets lost in translation.
- *Hand off clean.* Code, docs, and infrastructure are yours from day one.

For longer engagements, write to hello@faculty.com.

## Services

Three ways to work with Faculty, fixed in scope and price. See [Services](https://faculty.com/services).

- *The Faculty Sprint* — $55,000, five weeks, one product. The full 0→1 build, deployed on your own infrastructure. [Apply](https://faculty.com/sprint).
- *GEO engagement* — $5,000, about a week. We find why a business is invisible to AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI summaries) and fix the technical and content reasons — structured data, machine-readable content, answer-engine legibility. You buy demonstrated correctness, not a promised ranking. Inquire at hello@faculty.com.
- *Security review* — $10,000, about a week. A senior review of a web application's security by the person who introduced the CSRF token and wrote *Essential PHP Security*. Findings prioritized, high-risk issues fixed. Inquire at hello@faculty.com.

## Products

Faculty makes its own products. We're founders, not just consultants.

- [Studioworks](https://studioworks.app): Invoicing and client management for creatives and freelancers. Co-founded with Jessica Hische.
- [Schoolcase](https://schoolcase.app): A smart assistant that helps families stay on top of school and activities.
- [Matter](https://matter.xyz/): Neuroscience for longer, healthier, happier lives. $26M raised.

## Selected Work

Faculty has worked with founders and teams from early-stage startups to global enterprise.

- [Samsung](https://faculty.com/work/samsung): Architected and built a global ecommerce platform, rolled out to dozens of countries, establishing a direct-to-consumer relationship for the first time.
- [Keybase](https://faculty.com/work/keybase) (2020): Narrative, design, and engineering work that helped a brilliant product click. Acquired by Zoom shortly after launch.
- [Simply Framed](https://faculty.com/work/simply-framed) (2018): Commerce, fulfillment, and operations architecture that became foundational to the business — the system they still run on.
- [More work](https://faculty.com/work): Additional case studies and engagements.

> "Faculty helped us reach a much wider audience at exactly the right moment. The work was beautiful, and the impact was real." — Chris Coyne, cofounder of Keybase

> "Faculty designed and architected a system that became foundational to how we operate." — Dara Deshe, founder & CEO of Simply Framed

## Standards

Three short guides that document how we think about the work. They're written for ourselves, but they're public because industry peers learn from them.

- [Good Work](https://faculty.com/standards/good-work): Ten principles for deciding what good work means.
- [Best Practices](https://faculty.com/standards/best-practices): Sixteen conventions covering accessibility, accounts, code, cookies, email, forms, Git, JavaScript, responsive design, security, sessions, SEO, typography, URLs, and UX.
- [Style Guide](https://faculty.com/standards/style-guide): Writing and design conventions.

## About

- [About Faculty](https://faculty.com/about): Background on the studio and its principal.

## Founder

Faculty is run by Chris Shiflett. Thirty years of work across infrastructure, security, design, and product.

- Originated "filter input, escape output" — a foundational principle of web application security — and introduced the CSRF token. His 2003 article was the first published treatment of cross-site request forgeries; his 2004 article remains the primary reference on the Wikipedia page for CSRF.
- Author of *Essential PHP Security* (O'Reilly) and *HTTP Developer's Handbook* (Sams). Contributing author of *Programming PHP*, *PHP Cookbook*, and *PHP in Action*.
- Former CTO of OmniTI, the team that built the world's fastest mail server — which became SparkPost (delivers ~40% of commercial email globally; acquired for $600M in 2021).
- Earlier infrastructure work included eDonkey (the largest peer-to-peer network in the world at its peak) and the U.S. Postal Service's universal certificate authority.
- Co-founder of Brooklyn Beta, the small conference that ran 2010–2014. Attendees included founders of Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Kickstarter, and Squarespace.
- [shiflett.org](https://shiflett.org): Personal site — biography, articles, blog, books.
- [shiflett.org/llms.txt](https://shiflett.org/llms.txt): Comprehensive index of Chris's writing and contributions.

## Contact

- Email: hello@faculty.com
- Address: 3200 Carbon Pl Ste 101, Boulder CO 80301
- [Apply for a Sprint](https://faculty.com/sprint)