About David Kooi

Now

I founded Skylark Creations, a one-person, AI-native product studio in Colorado. I design, build, and ship apps and tools from zero to live, using AI at every layer of the stack – reasoning partners for architecture, coding agents for implementation, and human advisors for taste and truth.

The studio runs as a real portfolio, operated day to day by a fleet of AI agents I orchestrate. A manager AI runs each product’s daily cycle. Every report gets cold-audited against its own claims. Only the decisions that genuinely need a human reach me.

In 2026 that same operating system started running client engagements end to end, with me working as an independent AI-orchestration consultant. Engagements are async-first – artifacts land in your inbox instead of meetings on your calendar – and a reaction sent one evening routinely comes back as a verified, deployed change the next day.

A few habits define the practice.

Nothing a client says evaporates. Every round of feedback is broken into numbered points, and each point gets a written disposition – accepted, deferred, or noted, with the reason – in a ledger that runs for the life of the engagement.

My own improvements have to pass pre-registered gates. The pass/fail rule and the evaluation data are frozen before any results exist, and work that fails its gate is discarded rather than shipped.

And before anything leaves, a second AI model family is prompted to refute it. Adversarial review as a release gate.

The products that are live are on the home page, and the whole portfolio lives at Skylark Creations.

In development: Syntopica, a tool for cross-book synthesis using your Amazon library and Kindle highlights; Frolic, AI-powered outdoor activity recommendations; Dreamflyer, a meditative flying game; Urban Beaver, a relaxing dam-building puzzle game; and Billionaire Army, a civic-accountability platform that tracks U.S. billionaires against public-defined goals, with receipts.

I write about AI, philosophy, and product strategy at Uncaged Minds.

Previously

I co-founded Jointly (2018–2025) and served as its CEO and Chief Product Officer – a purpose-driven cannabis wellness technology platform. I conceived and launched the industry’s first AI-powered virtual assistant for personalized product recommendations, built on 500K+ user data points. Jointly grew to 500,000+ downloads with tens of thousands of monthly active users and 35% retention at 30 days, and I wrote the “Theory of Purposeful Cannabis Consumption,” which reframed cannabis as a tool for purposeful wellness.

We dissolved the company in 2025. We built for precision in a market that wanted speed, and we arrived early to an industry that wasn’t ready to buy data. The dataset and the theory it produced outlived it – I’m writing the book now.

From 2010 to 2020 I founded and ran Santa Monica Mountains Cyclery, building it into one of Southern California’s top cycling retailers: ten consecutive years of revenue and profitability growth, a 4.92 average rating across 1,200+ five-star reviews, and drop-ship partnerships that grew online sales 60% year over year. I started Jointly in 2018 while still running the shop, and sold it to Trek Bicycle in 2020.

Earlier I held leadership roles at McMaster-Carr (2002–2009), where I oversaw a $1B+ distribution operation with 300+ staff, implemented e-commerce parametric search, and achieved 99.4% fulfillment accuracy. Before that, Click Commerce, Navistar, and other enterprises – mostly data-heavy operations and e-commerce.

I hold an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (2002), a B.A. in Economics & Statistics from Northwestern (1996), and a B.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State (2016) – the last one earned at 43, because I wanted to build things myself.

Interests & Personal

I’m a naturalist – daily mindfulness, mountain hikes, and a running obsession with geology, botany, ecology, and early human history. (Ask me about mantle convection.) Those interests shape the products: technology that deepens a person’s connection to the natural world instead of replacing it.

Beyond technology: cycling, community advocacy, piano, and banjo. The music leans bluegrass, jamgrass, folk, and reggae. My dog comes along on every adventure – and the best product insights tend to show up on long walks, not at the desk.

The through-line is calm tech: tools that respect attention instead of farming it. I’d rather build supportive scaffolding than addictive slot machines, and I think AI should augment people, not audition to replace them.

Say Hi

I’m up for good conversations about AI, entrepreneurship, product strategy, or philosophy. If you’re building something interesting – or just want to compare notes – reach out.

Email hello@skylarkcreations.com or find me on LinkedIn. Or ask ChatDDK – it’s trained on my writing and it will answer for me, more or less.