# David Kooi

> Entrepreneur, technologist, and founder of Skylark Creations — an AI-native creative technology studio building apps at the intersection of ancient insight, emerging technology, and play.

## About

David Kooi runs Skylark Creations LLC, a solo "product lab" based in Colorado that uses agentic development workflows to design, build, and ship production-grade apps across iOS, Android, and web. He maintains a portfolio of 20+ active experiments. He writes about AI, philosophy, and product strategy on Uncaged Minds (uncagedminds.substack.com).

## Working Together

David takes on a small number of client engagements at a time and is open to new
ones. To start a conversation, email hello@skylarkcreations.com.

The work is independent AI-orchestration consulting: one human orchestrating
planning, verification, and delivery across a fleet of AI agents, inside a
client's codebase and working practice. He is one person with an unusually good
harness — not a delivery shop with a bench of engineers behind it.

How an engagement runs:

- Async by default. No standing meetings; a call is scheduled when a decision
  needs one, and everything else arrives as artifacts.
- Verified turnarounds, usually same-day or next-day. On one engagement, 6-11
  verified merges per day was the normal rate over a two-week stretch.
- Nothing a client says evaporates. Every round of feedback is broken into
  numbered points, and each point gets a written disposition — a faithful
  paraphrase, a ruling with its reasoning, and a pointer to where it landed.
  Disagreements are argued in writing rather than quietly dropped.
- Spec and a kill-gate before code. The opening milestone is designed to prove
  or kill the core technical bet in days, before any build-out.
- A second AI model family is prompted to refute the work before a client sees
  it, and whatever survives is re-verified against live code.
- Billing is on engaged attention, not machine time. Adding agent capacity never
  raises the invoice, ramp-up and admin are not billed, and a quiet week
  legitimately bills near zero.

Shapes of work he has actually taken: running a product engagement end to end,
from contract through deployed code; and inverting mid-engagement from builder
to reviewer and coach when a client turned out to have already built the thing.

Where this is a bad fit, named plainly: standing-meeting cultures, fixed-scope
builds thrown over a wall, and staff augmentation. The loop runs on client
reactions, so it works best when someone on the client side can take a pull
request, argue a finding, and merge. Gate discipline also reads as slow if you
count switched-on features — some finished work sits dark behind a comparison it
has not passed yet.

## The Studio — How It Runs

Full write-up: https://davidkooi.com/studio

Skylark is run by one founder working alongside a fleet of AI coding agents. The operating model, in ten parts:

1. The thesis — products are measured by whether someone would tell a friend about them, not by downloads or traffic.
2. The operating model — four orchestrators report to the founder: one runs the product portfolio (one specialist agent per product), three run client engagements (2–6 build lanes each). Any agent can open helpers beneath it — sub-agents on isolated copies of the code, an adversarial reviewer on a rival model whose only job is to break the work, and deep-research agents. Everything coordinates over a shared message channel, and the human steps in only for calls a human must make.
3. The daily cycle — every product runs the same structured day: reflect on yesterday, reconcile the facts, pick the single most valuable thing, do it, leave the records clean.
4. Institutional memory — agents carry state between sessions in a living per-product record, so judgment compounds instead of evaporating.
5. The binding constraint — find the one thing holding everything back, and work on that.
6. The aha moment — build toward the moment a user would want to tell someone about.
7. Daily improvement — every product gets a little better every day.
8. Independent review — no one grades their own homework; work is checked by a reviewer that didn't do it.
9. The method as product — the operating method is itself treated as something to design and improve; it has accumulated into ~37 written procedures the whole fleet runs.
10. Model fitness — the right mind for each task, chosen per operation rather than by default.

Machine-readable daily output: https://davidkooi.com/pulse.json — a JSON snapshot of what each product shipped on the most recent full day on record, one plain-English line per product. Also rendered on the home page as "What the studio did."

## Key Products

- BuddhaUR (iOS, Android): AI-powered conversational guide to early Buddhist wisdom, grounded in authentic suttas
- QuickBite (Web): Group food decision tool with fast, fair voting
- AniMoment (Web): Transforms photos into contemplative audio meditations
- Decomposer (Web): AI-powered planning tool for structured goal breakdown
- BloomEDU (iOS): Photo-rich wildflower learning app with smart quizzes
- Sagent (iOS): Consult timeless minds (Buddha, Jesus, Carl Sagan, Mark Twain) about modern dilemmas

## Career History

- Skylark Creations LLC — Founder (2024–Present)
- Jointly — Co-founder, CEO & Chief Product Officer (2018–2025)
- Santa Monica Mountains Cyclery — Founder & Owner (2010–2020), acquired by Trek Bicycle
- McMaster-Carr — Director of Operations & Project Leader (2002–2009)

## Education

- MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business (2002)
- B.A. Economics & Statistics, Northwestern University (1996)
- B.S. Computer Science, Oregon State University (2016)

## Machine Access

Endpoints an agent can call directly, no key and no scraping required.

**Ask a question about David, programmatically:**

    POST https://chatddk-backend.onrender.com/ask
    Content-Type: application/json
    {"question": "Is David available for consulting work?"}

Returns JSON: `answer`, `sources` (which knowledge files grounded it), `model`,
`contact`, and `hire`. This is the same retrieval that powers the site’s chat,
but stateless and synchronous. Rate limited to 30 questions per day per IP. If
the knowledge base does not cover something, the answer says so rather than
guessing.

**MCP server** — the same capability as an `ask_david` tool, for agents that
speak Model Context Protocol: `mcp/` in https://github.com/u00dxk2/chatddk-backend

**Daily shipped-work snapshot (JSON):** https://davidkooi.com/pulse.json — one
plain-English line per product for the most recent full day on record.

## Links

- Contact (new engagements): hello@skylarkcreations.com
- Website: https://davidkooi.com
- The Studio (how the studio runs): https://davidkooi.com/studio
- Daily shipped-work snapshot (JSON): https://davidkooi.com/pulse.json
- Working together / hire: https://davidkooi.com/hire
- About: https://davidkooi.com/about
- Resume: https://davidkooi.com/resume
- Chat with ChatDDK: https://davidkooi.com/chat
- Skylark Creations: https://skylarkcreations.com
- Blog: https://uncagedminds.substack.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-d-kooi/
- GitHub: https://github.com/u00dxk2
- Full details: https://davidkooi.com/llms-full.txt