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David Kooi

Résumé

Work Experience

Independent AI-Orchestration Consultant

Denver, CO (2026 – Present)

Runs client engagements end to end on the same agent-fleet operating system that runs Skylark – one human orchestrating planning, verification, and delivery across a fleet of AI agents.

  • Async-first engagements: no standing meetings – artifacts land in the client's inbox, and client reactions routinely return as verified, deployed changes the same or next day
  • Sustained a verified daily ship cadence – on one engagement, 6–11 verified merges per day was the normal rate over a two-week stretch
  • Spec-and-kill-gate before code: decide and spec first, with the opening milestone designed to prove or kill the core technical bet before any build-out
  • Adversarial cross-model verification as a release gate – a second model family is prompted to refute the work before the client sees it; this gate caught a second bypass in an already-reviewed fix
  • Every client point tracked in a dispositioned feedback ledger: faithful paraphrase, written ruling with reasoning, and a pointer to where it landed – disagreements argued in writing, never dropped
  • Bills on engaged attention, not machine time – adding agent capacity never raises the invoice, and quiet weeks legitimately bill near zero

Skylark Creations LLC – Founder

Denver, CO (2024 – Present)

Founded a one-person, AI-native product studio that designs, builds, and ships apps from zero to live – using AI at every layer of the stack. Reasoning partners for architecture, coding agents for implementation, human advisors for taste and truth.

  • Shipped 10+ live production apps across iOS, Android, and web – including Decomposer (AI planning), Agentic News (news intelligence), Agentic Directory (AI product curation), BuddhaUR (Buddhist learning), BloomEDU (46K+ wildflower species), Urban Journeys (themed city walks), FrameDial News (cited daily briefings), AniMoment, QuickBite, Quiet Tab, and Sagent – each instrumented with analytics, error tracking, and subscription infrastructure
  • Built an agentic development workflow that lets a single founder approximate a small product and engineering team – using LLM-based coding agents, automated research, and scripted QA to move from idea to production in days instead of months
  • Operates the portfolio as an orchestrated agent fleet: a manager AI runs each product's daily cycle over a shared message bus, daily reports are cold-audited against their own claims, and only true decisions reach the founder
  • Actively developing additional products including Syntopica (cross-book synthesis), Frolic (outdoor activity recommendations), Dreamflyer (meditative flying game), and Urban Beaver (puzzle game)
  • Products span news intelligence, spiritual practice, botanical education, urban exploration, group decision-making, and developer tools – with paying subscribers acquired entirely through organic discovery

Jointly – Co-founder, CEO & Chief Product Officer

Denver, CO (2018 – 2025)

Led all product and organizational strategy for a purpose-driven wellness technology platform, integrating AI/ML to deliver personalized cannabis consumption experiences. Dissolved the company in 2025 – we built for precision in a market that wanted speed, and arrived early to an industry that wasn’t ready to buy data. The dataset and the theory it produced outlived it.

  • Conceived and launched Spark, first AI-powered virtual assistant for personalized recommendations
  • Grew app to 500,000+ downloads, tens of thousands of MAUs, achieving 35% 30-day retention
  • Engineered proprietary algorithms using LLMs and feedback loops from millions of interactions
  • Led remote, international team of 15+ across engineering, data science, design, and marketing
  • Authored "Theory of Purposeful Cannabis Consumption," the company's framing of cannabis as a purposeful wellness tool

Santa Monica Mountains Cyclery – Founder & Owner

Los Angeles, CA (2010 – 2020)

Built one of Southern California’s top cycling retailers over a decade; co-founded Jointly in 2018 and sold the shop to Trek Bicycle in 2020.

  • Achieved 10 consecutive years of revenue and profitability growth
  • Maintained 4.92 average rating across 1,200+ five-star reviews
  • Launched drop-ship partnerships, increasing online sales 60% YoY
  • Negotiated the exit to Trek Bicycle

McMaster-Carr – Director of Operations & Project Leader

Los Angeles, CA (2002 – 2009)

Oversaw a $1B+ distribution operation with 300+ staff.

  • Led implementation of parametric search for e-commerce
  • Managed 10,000+ daily shipments achieving 99.4% fulfillment accuracy
  • Devised same-day delivery programs, increasing metro order volume by 25%

Education

Oregon State University

B.S. in Computer Science (2016)

University of Chicago Booth School of Business

MBA, Strategy, Finance, and Entrepreneurship (2002)

Northwestern University

B.A. in Economics & Statistics, Minor in Mathematics (1996)

Skills & Expertise

Core Competencies

• AI Agent Orchestration & Multi-Agent Systems
• Product Strategy & Roadmapping
• AI-Native Product Operations
• Cross-Functional Team Leadership
• Data-Driven Decision Making
• Rapid Prototyping & Iteration
• Go-to-Market & Growth Strategy
• Strategic Partnerships
• High-Level Stakeholder Management

Technical Skills

AI Agent Systems: Multi-agent orchestration in production – one specialist agent per product across the portfolio, each running its own daily cycle, one human orchestrating – agent message buses and phase-gated workflows, Claude Code and agent SDKs, MCP, RAG pipelines, tool-use agents, browser and mobile automation agents (Playwright, Stagehand, Maestro).
LLM Engineering & Evaluation: LLM-as-judge ensembles with position-swap debiasing, shadow A/B prompt experiments, noise-floor-calibrated evals, adversarial review gates, synthetic-persona user testing, prompt and schema design, structured outputs, semantic search (pgvector, Weaviate, Chroma), cross-provider model audits and per-token cost observability (Anthropic, OpenAI), Python (NLP, pandas), XGBoost, vision models.
Web & Mobile: JavaScript, TypeScript, Next.js 15/16, React 19, Node.js, Express, Fastify, Swift/SpriteKit/SwiftUI, React Native + Expo, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Zustand, Framer Motion, Mapbox GL JS.
Data & Cloud: PostgreSQL (Neon) + Drizzle ORM, MongoDB, Prisma, Redis, Supabase Auth, AWS (ECS, Fargate, S3), Stripe, BullMQ, Docker.
Development: Microservices, REST/JSON APIs, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), real-time features (SSE/WebSockets), Chrome Extensions (Manifest V3), Agile/Scrum.
Tools & Automation: Claude Code, Cursor, n8n, Render, Vercel, Sentry, Amplitude, PostHog, Doppler, Firecrawl, SendGrid, ElevenLabs.