I'm Duncan, founder and CEO of Whelk.

Whelk is open, sovereign AI: it runs your own models on hardware you own, from a phone to a team server. It is open core, private by default, and secure by design, and it never phones home. The rest of my time goes to Mentorship & Advisory for founders, CTOs, and the engineers about to become them, and to an essay about whatever the work just taught me.

I live in San Clemente, California.

Before this

Two decades of building and running engineering orgs: Chief AI Officer and CTO at BuildOps through its unicorn round, scaling Weedmaps past 300 engineers to IPO, and VP of Engineering at ShopKeep through its $550M sale. The essays draw on all of it; the résumé stays back here.

Projects

Grazier Ventures

The holding company where new ideas collect until they are ready to be their own thing.

Aqen

The AI cofounder I build everything else with.

Civic-SLM

A small language model trained on my city's public records.

Commonplace

A self-hosted knowledge graph that gives AI agents a persistent, private memory. Open source.

Highball

A transit tool I built because I wanted it.

Scriptorium