I'm Duncan, founder of Whelk.
Whelk is private AI and agents: 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 through its public listing and then serving as its CTO, and VP of Engineering at ShopKeep (acquired by Lightspeed for $440M). The essays draw on all of it.
Ventures
The holding company where new ideas collect until they are ready to be their own thing.
An AI cofounder, built on Whelk. Closed source.
Open source & passion projects
Things I build on my own time. The open source ones are on GitHub.
A self-hosted knowledge graph that gives AI agents a persistent, private memory. Open source.
A small language model trained on my city's public records. Open source.
An app for estimating vehicle speeds on residential streets using video analysis. On iPhone, with Android in testing. Open source.
Scriptorium
A self-hosted workspace for tasks, docs, decisions, and code review, kept as markdown in git.
A transit tool I built because I wanted it.
Speaking & Media
I speak about private AI, AI implementation, and engineering leadership: keynotes, panels, and podcasts.
2026 · podcast
2025 · podcast
2015 · talk
For invitations, reach me on LinkedIn.
Elsewhere