Duncan Platt

Duncan is co-founder and Group CTO of Openfin Ventures. More than twenty years of building have taught him that the code is never the hard part. The hard part is knowing what to point it at. In his view, most software shouldn’t be built to last; it should be built to learn. He puts real weight behind the few decisions that have to survive scale and lets everything else move at the speed of the real question. For him, AI didn’t just make building faster — it changed what’s worth attempting at all, and it lets founders multiply: a handful of people now build what used to take an army, and reach for what used to be out of range.

What pulls him is the 0→1, the moment before a thing exists, before anyone has charted the territory or knows the answer is even there. The labels never quite fit — the architect, the engineer — because the work that matters lives between a real human need, a new technical possibility, and a business model that holds, and someone has to see all three at once and set the direction. The best systems, he’s found, come from collision: the overlap between fields that rarely meet. That’s the idea behind Openfin. And under all of it, he works only on problems where the answer matters.

Duncan holds a US patent and has shipped more than a hundred products. Born in South Africa, now a dual US–South African citizen based in Florida, he holds degrees in entrepreneurship and business management from the University of Pretoria and a master’s in organizational leadership from Regent University.