Jeffery: Welcome to Ask An Angel! And today, very excited to have you join us Kal because we’ve been doing lots of other things in the background. So even more exciting to kind of dive in and explore more about yourself and the business, and things you’ve been doing. So to start off, the best way is to give us a little bit of background on yourself, kind of where you’ve come from, where you’re at, where you’re going, and then one thing about you that nobody would know.

Kal: All right, that sounds like fun. So I actually started my career more at big companies like Wells Fargo Bank, and Visa, and Pricewaterhouse, and so did the fortune 100 executive thing but midway through my career I realized, I think I would have more fun on the entrepreneurial track. So from that I went to several real estate tech startups for many many years and soup to nuts, did all kinds of things when I reinvented myself that I was doing product, and then you know online marketing, and strategy, and so forth. And just had a grand old time just being an entrepreneur at several startups and then later, in probably about seven years ago, I got involved with an alumnus- alumni angel group called Berkeley Angel Network which is, obviously as the name indicates, an angel group four oven by UC Berkeley alone, which gave me my first exposure to the other side. And so, I’m been doing some angel investing through them and through other organizations, and kind of learned from the ground up how to do, you know, the deal flow vetting, doing due diligence, working with the startups to get them ready for pitch events and so forth, and through that I basically got embedded in sort the angel investing scene in the bay area. Connected with a group from Santel Angels that started an accelerator in Berkeley called Bachery, which now is five years in 12th Cohort, about 150 companies graduated. So I started as a limited partner and then over time I became one of the managing partners, and then CEO, and then I helped develop the curriculum in the program which really just gave me a good feel for: ‘how do you coach and train startups to succeed?’, and handed off day to day operations on that a few years ago, and then switched to another accelerator where we had another analytical framework to assess startups and, kind of rambling here, but.. very quickly what I’m doing now is a company called DealEngine. DealEngine.ai, which does analytics on startup success. So basically, think of it as the turbotax for startups where we collect a lot of data, crunch numbers, give quantified feedback back to the startups, as well as generating deal scores and team scores for the benefit of investors, and basically our northern light is, you know, the the elephant in the room with VC is that overall the industry has something like a 90% portfolio failure rate. So if we can use data science to de-risk startups from the earliest stage, and even get the success rate from 10% to 20%, we have a chance to disrupt the industry. So we’re in beta now and very excited about working with startups and just using data to help them get better.

Jeffery: I love it, and one thing about you that we wouldn’t know.

Kal: Okay, let’s see. Believe it or not I am also a Sundance nominated filmmaker because I produced a mockumentary short. Again, I couldn’t leave my roots of startups. So I did a mockumentary about the worst possible startup in the world, called Icevan.com, and made it to a few film festivals including Sundance which, god, if being a filmmaker could be a little bit more lucrative, I might stand that. But, god, I had a lot of fun doing that.

Jeffery: It was called Icevan.com?

Kal: Icevan. So think about: way back in the day, there was web van, and then we said, “What’s even worse than, you know, the worst of the worst?” So delivering bags of ice guaranteed in an hour, we almost did it about cinder blocks but we basically created ice van for, you know, the the company that delivers ice.

Jeffery: And that was the worst?

Kal: At least that’s the time, the best thing we could have come up with that, this was you know, some 20 years ago. I bet if we kind of brainstorm now and get really into non-fungible tokens, we can say you know, let’s have some NFTs for ice-

Jeffery: Yeah

Kal: -and it can probably get exponentially worse with some of the later technologies we have.
Jeffery: Well, just popped it in my head because I remember I was going through, I think it was Vietnam, and there’s you know, like a tuktuk. But it was kind of like a buggy with a bike on the front, but it was carrying a buggy and it was an ice buggy, and they’d go along every morning and everybody would come out at 4 or 5 in the morning, and grab their big cinder blocks of ice, and they had a little chainsaw, and they would just zip through and drop these blocks out in front of all the stores because they had to keep their beer cold. So that’s how they would do that.

Kal: That is awesome!

Jeffery: Yeah. So this guy would just literally drive around the blocks and just drop off ice, and it would go on. I think a couple times during the day and it would just be big cylinder blocks of ice, and then they would sit there with a pick, and then they would put their beer on it and everything else. But that’s how they delivered it. I don’t know what they charge for it but I remember that specifically because I was taking pictures of it. I thought this was a you know, great little business run and yeah it was pretty cool.

Kal: Well, that’s awesome! That actually tells me, maybe there’s even hope still for iceman someday.

Jeffery: 100% yes! Especially these hot climates where they can’t- the streets are too narrow or they’re- and they’re really just made for, they’re doing this on Yonge street or they’re turning them into- they’re reducing it down to one and one lanes for a certain extension and that way they’ll have more sidewalk sales, more people walking on the sidewalks, opening up. It’s not going to be like as much as it should be. I think they should open up all of Yonge street and get rid of car