John Andrew Sinclair

John "Sinx" Sinclair co-founded ustwo in the Shoreditch district of London on 15 November 2004 with his childhood friend Matt "Mills" Miller — the two had been friends since the age of eleven, which is the origin of the studio's name ("us two"). Before ustwo, Sinclair worked as a designer at a firm called Big Animal. He and Mills were in their mid-twenties when they launched the studio to enter the then-nascent mobile app market, winning early client work with companies such as Sony Ericsson and JPMorgan largely through word-of-mouth referrals.

Over two decades, Sinclair helped grow ustwo from a client-services shop into a globally recognized digital product studio built on a mix of client work, self-developed intellectual property, and joint ventures. ustwo operates studios in London (HQ), Malmö, Lisbon, New York, and (historically) Tokyo, employing roughly 260 people. Its breakthrough came with the game Monument Valley (2014), which won an Apple Design Award and has generated over US$14 million in revenue from more than 26 million copies sold; the franchise continued with a WWDC-premiered sequel in 2017 and Monument Valley 3 in 2024.

Alongside the studio, Sinclair and Miller built a venture/company-building capability. ustwo has spun out internal ventures such as ustwo Games, the live-events ticketing app DICE, and the wellbeing app Moodnotes, and ran ustwo Adventures, an arm that provided "experience, advice and funding" to early-stage, values-led companies. Sinclair has framed this partly as a talent strategy, noting: *"Our main competition for talent is startups — so we want to offer the safety of a platform but still allow people to spin out their own products."*

In April 2022, Sinclair and Miller transferred majority ownership of ustwo to its staff via an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), with roughly 62% of the company owned by current and future employees. Sinclair has since spoken publicly (e.g., on The Wow Company's *Beautiful Business* podcast) about the EOT model, succession, and prioritizing legacy and long-term sustainability over financial extraction, describing a culture grounded in "trust, collaboration and honesty."

• Backs, in ustwo Adventures' own words, "great people and companies that put their values first" — values-alignment and mission come first, financials second.
• Focus on early-stage ventures "grounded in creativity and the desire to make a positive impact."
• Prefers to act as a company builder rather than a passive check-writer — providing design, product expertise, advice, and funding, and in several cases incubating and spinning out ventures from within ustwo itself (DICE, ustwo Games, Moodnotes).
• Sector interest clusters around digital products and software, creative/design tools, media and community platforms, live entertainment, mental health/wellbeing, education, and creator-economy commerce.
• Talent-and-culture lens: Sinclair views startups as ustwo's main competitor for talent, so ventures that let creative people "spin out their own products" fit his model.