Jeff Veen

The co-founder of Adaptive Path and Typekit charts his journey from fonts to finance, and shares how he helped change the face of web analytics.

- Jim McCauley

“I’d never thought, like, some day I’d be in finance, ” says Jeff Veen. But here we are; having played a major role in some of the most web’s most important developments – spearheading UX-driven design at Adaptive Path, bringing analytics to the masses at Google Analytics, and upending the way we approach fonts on the web at Typekit – Veen is now a design partner at venture capital firm True Ventures.

He’s also made the surprisingly smooth transition from the West Coast to Hoxton, London. “You know, we’re on the other side of the road when we’re driving around, but other than that it’s still startups and pourover coffee and fixed-gear bicycles everywhere I look, ” he smiles.

Veen’s early years were marked by an interest in technology, but a career in straight computing was never on the cards. “I did a bit of computer science in university, ” he says, “and found I was not interested in the rigour of learning the math and things like that, but I was enamoured with what you could do with the machines themselves.”

DIGITAL DAWN

So after studying journalism and history, Veen found himself working at a Santa Barbara newspaper just as traditional print publishing methods were being swept away by digital workflows. Different departments were being merged together, and the young Veen found himself not only writing and editing stories, but also getting involved in issue planning and laying out pages.

“I found it fascinating, ” he says. “I was really interested in the information hierarchy and even things like how the flow of the pages worked together.”