MarkUlett

I've spent my career trying to understand how people come to know things, and how to build tools that make that easier.

I did my undergraduate work in Halifax (King's College and Dalhousie), an MA at the University of Leeds, and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science at Arizona State. My dissertation was on counterfactual evolutionary theories from the 1880s to 1920s — asking what biology would have looked like if a few key intellectual moves had gone differently. I taught writing at Duke for three years, including the inaugural writing course at Duke Kunshan University in China.

Since 2017 I've worked across tech in roles that look unrelated until you trace the through-line. Chief of Staff to an entrepreneur. Co-founder of a publisher serving senior and dementia care. Onboarding lead at a telehealth company serving over 100,000 users. Product and QA leadership at ShyftLabs, an enterprise software consultancy with clients including Petco and AmeriVet. In each role, the work that mattered most was figuring out how a system actually behaves, naming what it does, and building the tools to keep it honest.

I found I wasn't well suited to enterprise C-suite communications. I'm too honest. The qualities that made me a bad fit there — earnest, open, direct — turned out to be the qualities that fit the work I do now.

Five continents. Thirty-six places called “home for now.” Montana is where home is.

I moved to the Flathead Valley in 2019, pre-COVID, to be near family. Schuyler — who I grew up with in Seattle — told me years ago that if I ever visited Montana I wouldn't leave. He was right.

What I Build

Through BeargrassAI, I build websites and business memory systems for small businesses in the Flathead Valley. My clients are mostly solo operators (a luthier, a fine jeweller, a veterinarian, a food maker, others) where the owner is the only employee and every tool has to earn its keep.

Alongside the client work, I've built an agent-first operating system for my own business: a multi-agent panel called Jayson, with persistent memory, verified boot sequences, and a Cloudflare-backed knowledge graph. It runs every working session. The architecture is also the basis for a writing and research project on how AI systems behave when they're built for serious practitioner use, published at Reflective Practitioner. My provisional patent on AIPassWeb, a comprehension-based verification mechanism for AI agent context integrity, was filed with the USPTO in April 2026.

The Partnership

The partnership taking shape between BeargrassAI and CubCloud AI (Missoula, MT) is one of the things I'm most excited about right now. CubCloud brings sovereign compute infrastructure and enterprise AI delivery; I bring practitioner-level client work and an agent architecture already running in production. We co-present at Flathead Valley Community College on May 21, 2026 (an introduction to AI for small business owners), and the partnership is building from there.

Other Things I Care About

Hiking the trails around Glacier and the Flathead. Running. Fishing the rivers when I can get to them. Reading widely across philosophy of science, intellectual history, and the literature of practice. Family time with my partner and our dog, Sinopah, who has strong opinions about which trails are worth walking.