Personal by design

There’s a file on Pete Baker’s computer somewhere called finalfinal_v3_FINAL_actual_last_one.psd. Or something close to it. Every designer has a version of this file. It’s the one you save at 2am after a client sends one more round of changes on a deliverable you’d already mentally shipped. The filename is part joke, part confession: you thought you were done, and you weren’t, and maybe you never will be.

Baker turned that confession into an agency. FinalFinal is a strategic design studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that works with B2B technology companies to build brands people actually remember. The client list includes Anthropic, Push Security, Greenplaces, and a roster of cybersecurity, fintech, and developer-tools companies whose products are complex enough that most agencies wouldn’t know where to start. But the agency is only part of Baker’s story.

He also co-owns Lowertown Bar & Cafe, a neighborhood gathering spot carved out of a 1938 mechanic’s garage on Ann Arbor’s north side. He’s a former commercial photographer who shot for Rolling Stone and Getty; he built Tesla’s first website, and he led design at Duo Security during the stretch when a small Ann Arbor startup rewrote the visual language of an entire industry before selling to Cisco.

All of it is connected by a single instinct: he keeps finding places where the surface of something — a brand, a bar, a finance setup — isn’t matching the seriousness of what’s underneath. And he can’t leave it alone.

For years, Baker worked alone. He freelanced, took contract work, built things for clients, and moved on. It was good, itinerant creative work — the kind where you fly somewhere odd on short notice, make something beautiful, and don’t think too hard about what comes after.

Then he had a child, and short-notice flights to odd places became harder to justify. Around the same time, two co-founders of a small cybersecurity company in Ann Arbor — then called Scio — asked if he’d come on full-time, or help them find someone who could. The timing worked. He told himself he’d stay two years and then go back to the solo thing. He stayed a lot longer.

Scio became Duo Security, and Duo grew fast. “I realized after growing our team, I wasn’t as good as I thought I was,” he says. “Bringing on other people that were so much better was still creatively satisfying because I got to build that team and direct some of the work. But I wasn’t doing the work, which actually accelerated the quality of everything.”

It sounds obvious, said that way. But for a designer who’d spent years as the sole name on every project, it required unlearning something fundamental about ego and ownership. Baker calls it a maturation: getting past the egocentrism of solo creative work and finding satisfaction in the output itself, regardless of whose hands shaped it.

The cybersecurity industry, when Baker joined in 2014, was a visual and verbal wasteland. The dominant aesthetic was fear. Brands leaned into shields, skulls, lock icons, dark color palettes, and copy built around anxiety: Not if, but when. The implicit message was always the same — be afraid, and buy our product so you can be slightly less afraid.

Duo went the opposite direction. Baker and the team understood something about the product’s actual users: multi-factor authentication had to become mainstream to actually work. And for it to become mainstream, people had to not hate using it.

“The dichotomy between security and usability was, we thought, a misnomer,” Baker says. Making something easier to use didn’t have to make it less secure — and easier usage meant the product could go everywhere.“It wasn’t such a pain in the ass.”

Before Duo, companies put heavy security in front of their most sensitive assets because nobody wanted to jump through those hoops for routine access. Everything else was left exposed. Duo’s bet was that if the hoops felt easy enough, people would put them in front of everything, not just the crown jewels.

The brand reflected the product philosophy. Where the industry was dark and foreboding, Duo was colorful and human. Where competitors used fear as a selling mechanism, Duo showed up at conferences and just tried to be interesting. During DEF CON 24, the team launched a weather balloon into the stratosphere from the Mojave Desert and performed a two-factor authentication push from the edge of the atmosphere using an animatronic astronaut’s hand, a satellite phone hacked into a modem, and a Duo Push notification. Because why not.

“Somebody came up to me and said, ‘Why does everyone at this conference seem to hate their jobs except you guys from Duo?’ And I thought, "That's sad, but also that’s really cool to hear.”

That question, from a stranger at a DEF CON after-party, is the moment Baker points to when asked how he knew the brand had landed. It wasn’t a sales number or a press hit. It was someone noticing that the enthusiasm behind the brand was genuine — and that it radiated outward through everything Duo touched: the product, the marketing, the event presence, the team itself.

That energy carried Duo through four more years of growth. Then, in 2018, Cisco acquired the company for $2.35 billion. Baker stayed for a while, then woke up one morning and realized he was middle management at a Fortune 50 company. That wasn’t the plan.

After leaving Cisco, Baker tried advising and working at a couple of other places, but nothing stuck the way Duo had. He missed the variety of freelancing but knew he didn’t want to go it alone again. He found partners in Jim Renaud and Ruth Facer. Together they built FinalFinal — three full-time people today, plus a rotating cast of about a dozen collaborators who staff up and down based on the work.

The studio’s focus on B2B tech comes from Baker’s own wiring. He’s a designer by trade but a programmer by passion, with the kind of enthusiasm for esoteric infrastructure that makes him a natural fit for clients whose products sit deep in the stack. FinalFinal works with products that are genuinely hard to explain, especially if you’re too close to them.

Baker sees that proximity problem as the biggest credibility mistake companies make. When founders come to him convinced their product speaks for itself, his response is blunt: “Product might speak for itself, but nobody’s listening.”

Most founders, Baker finds, confuse proving their product works with showing they understand the person using it. The first earns respect. The second earns trust.

Good designers, he believes, can “sit in someone else’s experience.” He calls it the empathy bone — the instinct that makes a designer look at a beautiful poster and ask, but do I know what day this event is?

Baker pushes founders to get a designer in the room as early as possible, even when a product is mostly a command-line interface and the founders think they don’t need one yet. “The point of the first designer is to ask the questions nobody else is asking,” he says. “Not what does it do, but why do we do it this way?”

Baker runs the agency, co-owns Lowertown, invests in real estate, and probably has a side project or two he hasn’t mentioned. These businesses share almost no operational overlap. Different margins, different cash-flow patterns, different tax considerations. What they do share is the underlying financial infrastructure used to manage them. When Baker mentions Mercury, it comes up the way you’d mention an operating system — something so embedded in how he works that it barely registers as a choice.

“Every one of my businesses is in Mercury, plus my personal and joint accounts.”

For a founder running multiple ventures, the line between and personal finances isn’t a clean one. Without a shared system, each entity ends up at a different institution, with its own interface, its own login, its own way of displaying a balance.

Baker’s sit next to his . Same interface, same mental model. No switching between platforms with different design philosophies and ideas about how to display a balance.

For someone whose professional identity is built around eliminating unnecessary friction between complex things, this is the kind of detail that matters.

On a given week, Baker might review brand concepts for a cybersecurity startup in the morning, check the bar’s weekend numbers over lunch, and spend the afternoon arguing about kerning with a collaborator. None of these things obviously belong together. But for Baker, that’s the point — each one keeps him from settling too deep into the others, and all of them demand the same underlying instinct: look at the surface of something and ask whether it matches the seriousness of what’s underneath.

“Right now I have multiple — not just jobs, but careers — going,” he says. “I think that’s keeping my interest more than any one of them would if it was the only thing I was doing. Makes it a little hairy to juggle them all, keep all the plates spinning. But I had zero background in running a bar and coffee shop or retail. It was nice to have the excuse to learn a whole other area.”

He pauses. “Everything has to be ready, but it’s never really done.”