I'm Duncan. I make things, and I help the people making things.

Most of my time goes into Whelk, the private AI platform that runs your own models on hardware you already own: phone, tablet, laptop. It never phones home. The rest goes to mentoring 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. New ideas collect under Grazier Ventures until they're ready to be their own thing.

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

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.

Slow Them Down

A cross-platform app for estimating vehicle speeds on residential streets using video analysis. On iOS and Android.

Speaking & Media