# The high school dropout who built a design agency around Claude Code
> Canonical: https://skedsocial.com/newsletter/ep-35-angus-mcglynn  
> Last updated: 2026-08-11  
> Author: Lach Bradford
Refract's Angus McGlynn on the Intercom moment hitting every design agency, and why his team retired its own project managers.
**Angus McGlynn** told me about the day he landed his first design job. Sixteen years old, dropped out of high school the week before, and he had never once opened Figma. He walked in over his head and learned everything from there. That instinct, throw yourself at the hard thing before you feel ready, is the same instinct running Refract two years into building it. Except now the hard thing is not a new tool. It is rebuilding what an agency actually sells. Angus has a phrase for it that I have not stopped thinking about since we recorded.

### The Intercom moment for design agencies

**Every agency eventually has to choose between rebuilding its identity or managing a slow decline, and most wait too long to notice which one they are doing.** Angus points to Design Studio's rebrand last year as the visible version of this: an established, well known agency tore up its own brand to become something else entirely. He has had the same conversation with organisations running thousands of staff, right down to studios the size of Refract. The pressure is the same at every scale. Clients can now watch a competitor ship hundreds of ads in an instant, so an agency still charging for ten posts a week per client is competing against a speed it cannot match with headcount alone.

### Retire the project manager, keep the leverage

**Refract's project managers told the team something on their way out: the role was not actually needed.** Most of it was briefing the team and managing schedules, and Refract has since built that in-house so a client can come on board with briefing, scheduling and time tracking handled automatically. The capital that would have gone to a PM now goes to better freelancers and designers instead. The team spent the past six months learning Claude Code and Codex, with engineers brought in to teach product designers how to ship design straight to code. The output for a client is no longer a static brand file, it is a system that generates its own assets, sometimes including the client's own social posts.

### The design jewels: hiring for craft and the nerve to defend it

**Refract hires by watching designers work under pressure, not by reading portfolios.** Roughly 40 Sydney designers show up, get a brief, get one hour to design against it in Refract's office, then pitch the work live in front of the room. Angus says the willingness to stand up and defend a rough hour of work in front of 40 strangers matters more than the polish of the work itself, calling it 75 to 80 percent of what the agency looks for. It tracks with his own start: no portfolio, a couple of unfinished pieces, and a case that he could learn fast and communicate clearly. That is the same case he now asks every hire to make for themselves.

Every one of Refract's calls this year points at the same bet: keep the human judgment, retire the parts of the job that were never really design, and hand the client something they can run without you. That is the Intercom moment. Burn the static deliverable, ship the system.

**[Watch Episode 🎧](https://youtu.be/cqhZeuGsGm4)****: “The high school dropout who built a design agency around Claude Code”
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Reply and tell me what you're changing after this one. I read every reply.

– Lach