Hi, I’m David Wilson.
Turns out this is a super common name and pretty much SEO proof! I’m the David Wilson who was born and raised in Cape Town and now lives in San Francisco with my wife and two daughters.
I am building hunch.tools, a visual interface to get real work done with AI.
I started working with one of my cofounders, Ross, when I convinced our ninth grade biology teacher to let us mod a video game instead of doing our assigned class project. Neither of us coded but it seemed like it would be fun! We worked on it for nearly a year. I became hooked on software and product design, and learned that sustained maximum effort is amazingly effective.
I’ve worked with Ross and other excellent people on various companies and projects since, including Cape Networks, which Aruba acquired in 2018. We came a long way—we’d designed and built our first hundred hardware units in a friend’s basement in Cape Town, where team-building consisted of smashing rubble in his backyard with a sledgehammer. I learned a lot about designing and scaling hardware, software, and sales—we grew from around $500K to $10M in one year. Our hardware-enabled SaaS product was used in more than 80 countries, at thousands of the world’s biggest companies, but I’m proudest of making something people really love with an NPS of 75.
We initially founded Hunch to be the best data tool we could imagine. I’d been dreaming about it for a long time, the timing seemed right, and I think we got pretty close too. And then GPT-4 opened our minds to what LLMs made possible and inspired us to set our sights on an even more ambitious goal, which we’re working on right now...
In-between, I:
Lived in Windsor for a year and worked at a school, pub, and chapel to pay for travels throughout Europe
Served as The Editor of Varsity, the University of Cape Town’s student-run newspaper
Consulted for clients in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe on M&A, pricing, business strategy, and product development
Make time for playing the piano, building Star Wars Lego with my kids, and watching movies at the Alamo Drafthouse