Building software got cheap. Judgment did not.
Dacard is the applied AI studio of Darren Card, a product and technology leader. Bring him in full-time as VP of Product, CPO or CPTO, fractionally, or for one project. He decides with you what is worth building, owns every call, and shows you whether it landed.
Twenty years of work sits behind every call.
Darren’s product and technology leadership, and the studio’s work now. Recent work is scored landed, watch, or stalled against a bar agreed up front. Earlier roles are background.
Lexful reached paying customers in twelve months
Darren was employee #1 and CPTO, against a $100M+ ARR incumbent: six to plan, raise and hire, then six to build.
Cognota moved from SMB deals to enterprise contracts
Revenue tripled, and the pivot was a key element of a $5.5M Series A.
Agents make it. Someone owns it.
We work with three kinds of company, and one owner stays throughout.
Full-time, fractional, or by the project. A full-time seat is a normal hire. Fractional and project work starts with discovery, the smallest piece of work, and you can stop after it with what it produced. Timing and price are set after it, in writing, and what we build sits in your accounts from day one.
Darren, full-time as VP of Product, CPO or CPTO at a Series A to C company, or fractional for AI-native teams that need the operating model before the headcount. One owner for the portfolio: the roadmap, the team, pricing and packaging, and what to build, buy, partner on, or stop, taken to the board in plain numbers.
For a pilot that demos well and has not shipped: one agent live on real work, with evals agreed before launch, a permission model scoped per role (and per customer where your records are split by customer), and a cost per run, set against what the same work cost before, that your finance team can plan against.
A product and technology leader. Cognota: first product and technology leader; revenue tripled, and the enterprise pivot was a key element of a $5.5M Series A. Lexful: employee #1 to paying customers in twelve months. Both CEOs take reference calls. If Darren takes a full-time seat, the studio stops taking new work and hands current work over.
Agents in production. Lexful: agents in production under a permission model set per customer and per role, an MCP server so outside agents called in under the same rules, and every release gated on evals. Darren still builds in Claude Code most working days.
Turn an agency’s best one-off work into a product: packages, pricing, the software under it, and the partners who install it. You keep the craft and the client. Darren co-founded and ran a digital agency from 1999 to 2006.
In progress: a project with an experiential production studio. Business case, packages, pricing and decks delivered; first buyer meetings are under way and nothing has sold, so it says watch.
Busywork goes to Claude; decisions stay with people. Small teams get a ready-made setup on Claude for Small Business. Bigger operations get one system built around how they run. We agree the number before anything is built.
In progress: an environmental consultancy of about 90 people. System design, plan, and prototype delivered; the pilot is next, so it says watch.
The lab ships in public.
Experiments we run on ourselves first, in public. Read them, try them on your own team, and tell us what they got wrong.
We stay small, so you always work with Darren.
Dacard is run by Darren Card, who has spent twenty years in software product, the last five with engineering too, most recently as employee #1 and CPTO at an AI company. Specialists join by the project, under your access rules and your NDA. You always know whose name is on a decision. The limit is plain: Darren is one person, which is why a full-time seat stops new studio work.
Bring the decision you are stuck on.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no fee. If we are not right for it, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
Hiring for a VP or chief seat? Email the role to darren@darrencard.com, read the CV, or download it.