While it may be easy to assume that Croyle left Nextbit over creative differences post-acquisition, he insisted that this was not the case. He explained that between One & Co and HTC's acquisition, his team suddenly grew from around 20 to over 100 people; he then joined Nextbit to focus on just one product, the Robin, but as the sole hardware guy at a small startup, he was also distracted by marketing, operations and engineering work. Hence his desire to go back to a smaller team and be closer to design work again.

"I wanted to work with a variety of clients and industries again," Croyle said. "For me, it's much more of a lifestyle choice and getting an opportunity to be back hands-on with design, wanting to really focus on what I really love which is actually working on products, and really working with a smaller group of designers and doing some really cool stuff."

In fact, Attic is already up and running as a team of four, serving various clients including some stealth startups in Silicon Valley. I obviously had no luck getting Croyle to talk about his current projects nor the upcoming Razer smartphone, but he did confirm that neither of his fellow ex-One & Co principals will be joining him any time soon: apparently both Jonah Becker (Fitbit's VP of Design) and Claude Zellweger (Director of Design at Google) are quite happy at where they are right now.