# 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).

## 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 — a manager agent (the orchestrator) runs one specialist agent per product; they coordinate 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.
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)

## Links

- Website: https://davidkooi.com
- The Studio (how the studio runs): https://davidkooi.com/studio
- Daily shipped-work snapshot (JSON): https://davidkooi.com/pulse.json
- 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