# About #10: Hello, we're #10.

#10 is a small, owner-led agency in Palo Alto. We design, build and run Shopify stores and WordPress sites, along with the design work around them.

- **2000**: Started in San Francisco
- **11**: Industries we've built for
- **3**: Things we go deep on

## Why #10: The playmaker.

In soccer, the #10 is the playmaker: the one who reads the whole field and sets the team up to score. That's the job we take on. We look at the whole picture, from strategy to the day-to-day, not one piece of it. The goal is yours. Our job is the assist.

## You work with Tom.

Every project has one person accountable for it. Tom sets the plan, chooses the platform, approves the design and signs off on every launch, and he's the one you talk to. Behind him is a process we've refined since 2000, with testing before anything goes live.

Before #10, Tom managed projects at Toyota's Internet Software Group and at MIC, a Japanese semiconductor equipment maker. He has a mechanical engineering degree from Purdue and an MBA from Thunderbird. He has lived in the Czech Republic, Japan and Mexico, speaks Japanese and conversational Spanish, and can order a beer and find the restroom in a few more languages.

## Our journey.

- **2000, Where it started.** We opened in a small office in San Francisco's Financial District, right as the dot-com bubble burst. Our first work was Flash and rich media for sports teams, built to bring the energy of a live game to a screen.
- **2003, A real web agency.** Websites became the main event. We moved into a bigger space in SoMa, our home for the next ten years, and grew from a media shop into a full web agency.
- **2004, Our first store overseas.** We built an online store for a Japanese electronics brand, on a platform we wrote ourselves. It was our first international ecommerce project, and not our last.
- **2006, Cards you could see before you bought them.** For a stationery company we built previews of personalized cards that matched the printed piece exactly. Nobody else in the industry was doing it yet.
- **2008, Early to Magento.** We were one of the first Magento partners and built stores on it for small and mid-sized brands. All those years of moving stores between platforms are why replatforming onto Shopify is routine for us now.
- **2010, Stores for every kind of business.** Skate brands, schools, game publishers, record labels and manufacturers. Every industry sells a little differently, and we learned most of them.
- **2014, Custom web apps.** We took on larger custom applications for education, recruiting, law and real estate, where the hard part is understanding how the business actually runs.
- **2018, Working with other agencies.** We started partnering with agencies as their strategy and build team on ecommerce projects, which taught us a lot about working inside someone else's process.
- **2022, Fully remote.** After years of hybrid work it was an easy call. It lets us work with the right people wherever they are.
- **2024, AI in how we work.** We built AI into our own work and into the tools behind client sites. People still make the calls.
- **2026, Where we are now.** Shopify, WordPress and design, with AI behind all three. A small team, a wide mix of clients, and a Labs page where we try what comes next.

Human version: https://nr10.com/about-us/