Jeffery:
Kae, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us today. We are on the OPN Ask an Angel podcast. This is, I should actually get the exact number but I think, let’s just say we’re between 40 and 50 of some great interviews that we’ve had with Angel Investors across the globe. And today we’re with Kae. And Kae, the best way to start this off is for you to give a bit of a background on yourself, where you’ve come, from what you’ve done, and kind of where you’re at now, and then we’re gonna just dive right into a conversation, and we’ll go from there, and at the end of it, give me one thing that nobody would know about you.

Kae:
Okay, do you want me to tell you the long story or the the short short?

Jeffery:
You do what’s best to give you enough information. We wanna understand more about you, and how you think, and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Kae:
Yeah, yeah, so okay. I’ll give you the story that I tell everyone. So, I’m Kae, also known as EnterpriseGuy. It’s sort of cheesy but there’s a story and logic and strategy as to why I chose that stage name, right. And there’s a reason why I chose a stage name. So I’ll tell you the story. Everything from me started four years ago when I left the financial services industry. And the reason why I left was conflict of interest. What I realized is that working there they wouldn’t allow me to invest my money the way I wanted to. And so the moment I left, I literally had no idea what to do. But I knew I wanted to practice finance. So I started this investment club and that club started off with just three people at a cafe. And after that moment, I fell in love with teaching. And then fast forward four years later to today, I still teach every sunday and I get about 100 to 110 attendees. And through that journey alone, I get to meet… I got to meet engineers, investors, professionals all over Silicon Valley, as well as master my understanding of investing at the global macro level. Right, we talked about investing into gold, silver, gold miners, uranium, oil, agriculture. But, I eventually developed a sweet spot for enterprise software and this is from me slicing and dicing the global economy in 11 different sectors. So companies like, you know, Datadog, Sumo Logic, Snowflake, MongoDB, all those companies fascinate me. But if you’re like a pretty, I guess you could say well, sophisticated investor, and you track the markets pretty actively. These are some of the most fast… fastest growing securities globally today. So that’s how I kind of primarily focus my investment thesis on enterprise software. So as I was teaching eventually I met people that came into my life that really changed my life. The first one I would like to say is a meetup partner and then the second one’s a venture capitalist. The first one, the meetup partner he reached out he said, “Kae you’re growing on the meetup.com platform. Why don’t we team up and host events?”. And I told the guy, “Sure! Where can I help?”. And next thing you know, we’re hosting all these events all over Silicon Valley. And it got to a point where I was meeting about 400 people in person each month I counted. And the ultimate thing I learned was that people wouldn’t… were not able to remember remember my name. So I was the host of my own event but people were calling me like “Hey! you’re the host guy, right? You’re the startup guy, right?”. And I realized like huh these engineers are too busy to remember anything. So I decided to brand myself as EnterpriseGuy and that also fits a investment thesis that I see on the
world as well, right. The changing landscape of the consumer technology stack everyone has a higher level of digital infrastructure in their pockets today. It allows one to essentially build and distribute a lot more information more than ever. So I personally believe with that stage name the thesis is that everyone’s going to become an enterprise guy or girl they just don’t know it yet. But soon as the global economics and the wage inflation and all that and wealth inequality expands, all that economics they’re going to line up that’s going to force the average individual to participate more on the I guess you say digital economy, as well as the influencer stack. So I’m bullish on that stack. And again I think the individual today has a lot more digital firepower than they really know. So everyone’s becoming an enterprise guy or girl. Just saying that. So that’s the story of the stage name but what happened next was I eventually bumped into a venture capitalist at one of my lectures. And I guess he enjoyed the lecture enough to give me a call after and said, “Kae, I want you on my team and do venture capital with me”, and I said, “Sure. Where do I sign?”. And so the rest is history. And so today we’ve done about nine opportunities. And I think we’re looking at our tenth one right now. So the tenth one’s pretty interesting. It’s in the web 3.0 segment or blockchain and there’s also a billionaire who’s also an advisor investor in that startup as well. So still in the works but that’s where we are today. That’s my intro.

Jeffery:
Very cool. Can you give us a little bit on your background? Like, what got you into this? What was your, I don’t know, were you a little hustler as a kid? And you were making money selling toys? Or what were you doing? Like, what was the background? What got you into finance and got you moving along
this train?

Kae:
Damn, that’s pretty personal. I think the thing that got me into finance and economics was just kind of like growing up I wanted to… I guess it comes to a point in high school when you get out of high school you got to figure out what you want to do in life. And so the first thing I did was I went
to the library and I started checking out these books and they were related all in self-development. So I went through I… little did I know I was going through sales training so I was reading books on like Brian Tracy and all that. And you know just kind of reading those books it eventually made me realize like, oh all these sales people or all those self-development books they keep talking about economics. So, why don’t I jump into economics? And so I started with self-development, moved to economic books, and that gave me a foundation. And then I realized like huh a lot of the economics they kind of revolve around a specific technology hub in in the world somewhere, right. These financial centers believe. And so that that led me to the next
thing where I started chasing finance and then in college I jumped into this investment organization in college and became the chief investment officer.
And so I started running these stock market simulators in college. and what happened was well and I played a total of five games. The first game I played I was like top five, the second game I played I was dead last, and then the third game and then that summer I said I’m gonna train really hard and study the stock market to win this simulator game. And so that summer I came back and then I got first place the third time. And then the fourth and
fifth time I got first place. And it got to a point where they thought I was rigging the game because at one point I was the CIO or chief investment
officer of the organization and I ran the game and I won the game. And they’re like this guy is cheating so he can’t take the prize but it’s okay I did it for myself and that’s basically what inspired the journey for me to get into security analysis. And everything really star