A New Chapter

To our clients, collaborators, and friends,

After 10+ years of building revolutionary products with our amazing partners, District Labs has joined Deloitte and Bayer.

Deloitte will take over our client relationships, staff, and managed service offerings. We will be joining Deloitte temporarily to assist with the transition before exiting later this year. Bayer will take on our full IP portfolio and patent library while honoring all current licensing arrangements.

District Labs was born out of a quote from the late Hunter S. Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

The experiment: what happens when you combine a bunch of punks, next-level technical proficiency, a relentless drive towards value, then ruthlessly apply it to enterprise consulting? How do we play on our terms while delivering integrity, empathy, and high-quality solutions for our clients? That conviction carried us from our first project to partnerships with some of the most recognized brands in the world.

District Labs was never just a business to us (wait for it), District Labs was a lifestyle. Every engagement was a chance to solve a real problem, to ship something that mattered, and to leave a company better than we found it.

We’re proud of not only choosing the hard path at every juncture and overcoming every challenge that came with it. Some highlights:

• We never took a client to pay the bills. When the choice came down to compromising our values or keeping the lights on, we didn’t pay the electricity bill that month.
• We never took an easy client. If it was a client we wanted to work with and the problem was too easy, we pushed them to make it harder, more audacious. Then and only then did we sign on.
• We never signed a single renewal, extension, or new contract with the same client twice, even when offered vastly larger sums of money. We solved the problem right the first time, never delivered late, and prioritized unique problems and helping as many different organizations as we could.
• We went 8 years without a website (or any web/social presence for that matter) or full-time employees.
• We booked $140M+ in revenue while increasing net revenue each year we were in operation.

So why walk away now? It’s pretty simple: we are different people than we were 10 years ago. We are builders and scientists; the thing was built and the experiment completed. And like every builder/scientist, we want to build new things and run new experiments — we had nothing else to prove, so we felt it best to go out while on top.

We were rightly asked questions around legacy. Our answer evolved over the years. At the end of the day, we wanted our legacy to be less about our business model and how we approached our work, and more about the people we met and the problems we solved.

In closing, we are eternally grateful for every partner who trusted this merry band of weirdos with their hardest challenges.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Maria, Pawel, and JR