Three decades of code. Sixteen years as INNOV8.
INNOV8 Interactive is the frontend studio Mike Lilli founded in 2009. Sixty-plus projects across twenty-eight Fortune 100 and 500 clients later, the practice still ships the same way: small picked teams, a maximum of three simultaneous engagements, and a refusal to over-engineer what the work doesn’t ask for.
Started in 1982. On a TI-99/4A.
I started writing code in 1982 on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A — BASIC, text-based adventure games saved to audio cassette tape because that’s how you persisted state in those days. By twelve I was running an ANSI-graphics BBS from my bedroom over a 1200-baud modem. By nineteen I’d dropped out of college and opened my first web design firm in Austin. That was 1994.
Fifteen years later, INNOV8 Interactive opened — the natural evolution of that solo-operator work into a studio that could take on Fortune-class engagements at agency scale while keeping the operator-grade discipline. Our name reflects the posture: innovate with the eight ringed in, because a frontend engagement should leave the codebase better than it found it, not just shipped.
Small team. Big enough.
When an engagement calls for a single specialist, that’s what we ship. When it calls for twelve — designers, engineers, animators, copywriters, QA — that’s what we ship. Our bench is deep: people we’ve collaborated with across years of shipped work, brought back per engagement for the right specialists for the brief rather than whoever happens to be on payroll. No bench overhead. No junior B-team. No conflict between what the engagement actually needs and what the studio has to bill against.
Maximum simultaneous engagements: three. A hard ceiling, not a marketing claim — the number of clients we’ve found we can stay fully present with at once without one engagement starving another. Saying no to the fourth has compounded into the long-tenure relationships that define the practice.
Track record is one thing. Standards are another.
From kickoff to launch. Standard-scope marketing engagement, hero to changelog.
Lighthouse score on every site we ship. Performance budgets enforced from the first commit.
Reply window on inbound inquiries, every weekday. Two sentences is fine; we’ll write back.
Sixty-plus projects. Twenty-eight clients. Since 2009.
The roster: Honda, Acura, Ford, Lincoln, Toyota, Alaska Airlines, Charter, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, Origin, Hulu, SmartSheet, Barnes & Noble, Cessna, Citi, ING, Cantor Fitzgerald, Allergan, Kraft, Benjamin Moore, ClearChannel — the kind of names that imply long sales cycles, large stakeholder maps, and quarterly business reviews. The work behind those names ranges from short marketing-site engagements to multi-year configurators that ran in production for half a decade and counting.
A few specifics worth surfacing. The Acura.com redesign and Build & Price configurator we architected launched in January 2009 and ran until 2016 — Acura won multiple J.D. Power awards across that span, including the 2010 MWES Wave 2 ranking. The successor work — automobiles.honda.com’s landing page and online shopping tools (2020–2023) — is still in production today. Earlier still, Mike served as the founding frontend lead at TopLine Game Labs (2013–2016, $25M seed from Cantor Ventures), and before that as a Senior Technical Yahoo! at Yahoo! Music, where he re-architected the LAUNCHcast radio player and built the event-data infrastructure that served 500-million-plus page requests on Grammy night at music.yahoo.com.
Different decades. Different stacks. Same standards.
Three decades,
four chapters.
The same operator, across the four eras that defined the modern web. We didn’t pivot. We absorbed.
-
.COM BOOM
The Web Group → Protean Group
1994 — 2001
HTML · CGI · Early JS · ASP · ColdFusion
The Web Group (sole proprietorship, 1994–1999) → Protean Group Corporation (incorporated with a cofounder, 1999–2008). Mike opens his first web design firm in 1994 at nineteen — when the commercial web is still measured in the hundreds of public sites. Early Web Group clients: Dell Plus (Dell’s B2B division), the National Cotton Foundation. Protean takes on XTime, E*Offering (E*Trade’s IPO division), WebSwap. By 1998 he’s shipping ASP and writing C# against the .NET beta, four years before its public release. The same kind of pioneering work that would later become INNOV8, at the dawn of the medium.
-
WEB 2.0
Pre-INNOV8 → INNOV8 founded 2009
2002 — 2010
AJAX · PHP · jQuery · Flash (2003–2008) · ASP.NET
Protean Group wraps in 2008. INNOV8 Interactive incorporates in September 2009 — the same month Electronic Arts brings the studio on direct, no agency middleman, to architect ea.com and its custom component system with a five-engineer team. Earlier that year the Acura BAP had shipped via Genex. The studio’s first two flagship engagements, side by side: one through an agency, one direct-to-Fortune-500.
-
MOBILE ERA
INNOV8
2008 — Present
iOS (Objective-C / Swift) · Android · React Native · PhoneGap / Cordova · Capacitor · PWAs · Responsive Web
Touch becomes default. Mike attends the 2008 Google I/O in San Francisco — Android on full display, each participant leaving with the HTC Sooner prototype, ‘Google I/O’ etched on the back. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch ships in January 2009 — his first iPhone-era contribution. Acura BAP responsive rebuild. Honda BAP mobile-first iteration. We never stopped shipping for mobile.
-
AI FRONTIER
INNOV8
2020 — Now
Cloud · LLMs · Edge · RAG · Task-Aware Multi-Model Routing · Multi-Pass Critic-Refine Pipeline · Prompt-Caching
Cloudflare-native marketing surfaces (innov8.io, phlip.app, investors.phlip.app) sit alongside multi-vendor product runtimes (Railway compute, Supabase Postgres, Upstash Redis). Anthropic Claude across the build itself; multi-model integrations spanning OpenAI, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and Llama, with task-aware multi-model routing, multi-pass critic-refine pipelines, and prompt-cache discipline. Phlip — AI-native marketplace arbitrage — is the current engagement.
Four phases.
No mystery.
-
Discovery
We sit with what’s actually being built: the audience, the constraints, the dependencies that aren’t on the spec doc. We come out with a one-sentence brief, three references, and a clear scope. No fifty-slide kickoff decks.
-
Design directions
Parallel directions, not different shades of grey. Different bets, different emotional registers. We commit to one before code starts so the build doesn’t have to negotiate with itself later.
-
Architecture & build
Designers and engineers in the same workspace, daily. Performance budgets and accessibility constraints enforced from the first commit, not bolted on at the end. Production-ready every Friday.
-
Ship & maintain
We ship, we measure, we hand it back documented in a system you can keep building on. For engagements with longer arcs — Acura B&P ran in production seven years, automobiles.honda.com is still in production today — we stay on the wheel.
Focused on Phlip. Selectively open.
INNOV8 is not currently accepting new engagements while Mike is full-time on Phlip — an AI-native broker platform for the ~50 million Americans who resell as side income or as full-time work, currently raising a seed round. Phlip is shipping as a one-engineer-plus-AI-agent-stack company; eight weeks in March–May produced the full marketing site, the complete investor data room, and a substantial portion of the broker product itself — scope that historically required six to twelve specialists. The agents are the multiplier. Three decades of operator instinct is the steering.
That said, we’re selectively open to the right next chapter. If the work calls for what we know how to do — frontend architecture that ages well, marketing sites profiled to a perfect Lighthouse score, product UI deep enough to survive a six-year configurator rebuild — get in touch. Two sentences is fine. We reply within twenty-four hours, every weekday.
INNOV8 Interactive is a DBA of INNOV8 Ventures LLC, Colorado.
Have something worth building together?
INNOV8 is currently focused on Phlip — but selectively open to the right next chapter. Two sentences is fine. We reply within twenty-four hours, every weekday.