Uncompromising. Unconstrained.

I’m Kade, the founder of Acquire Escape Velocity.

I spent my entire career building, breaking, and fixing tech. I was the guy in the shadows helping companies punch above their weight.

As an early employee at two billion-dollar companies, I shipped creative software (including an issued patent), and helped shape the early social media landscape and then guided companies through its first wave of public crises. Wrote my master's thesis in 2009 on the future of content creators on YouTube and the business models that would emerge.

Operating in those chaotic, ‘get-it-done’ environments eventually proved unsustainable. But not because I couldn't run on cases of Red Bull and delivered sushi.

I burned out trying to fit into the mold of a "good employee" and "team player." I was the guy who asked, "Why?" when everyone else just nodded along. Blindly following orders and processes felt like a betrayal of my own creativity and passion.

To try and squash my internal rebellious tendencies, I launched two side projects for those in the creator economy:

• Captions Created - A closed captioning company for YouTube and Instagram celebrities
• Make Echoes - A clip generation and transformation system for Twitch Streamers

While both were profitable, something always felt off.

Captions Created was a service that required constant manual intervention and consistent education as to why it mattered even though I had the data to prove that closed captioning content increased watch time and search results position.

Make Echoes was a product that required constant updates and a ever-present fear that the hole in Twitch's API I was exploiting would be closed.

So I closed both and stepped away, stopped building apps entirely, and spent a few years chasing jobs around the country.

Then I landed on a build philosophy that not only inspired me but made it inevitable that I would step back into coding creator focused tools:

Fuck That Meets Fun.

"Fuck That" because I've worked with too many vendors who are ready to continue to build features that may give them 1% more market share but makes the product 10% harder to use.

“Fun” because tools should reflect what brings us joy and help us find the people who feel it too.

Acquire Escape Velocity takes all the weird parts of my brain, including my need for novel problems and generating original solutions for them. That combination—paired with my mad-scientist-lock-me-in-a-basement mentality—is the perfect mixture to create apps that will help your business.

I’m not VC-backed.

I’m not building to exit.

I’m building to earn your trust—and to make things I’m proud to put my name on.

That’s the whole game. You get something genuinely useful that you pay only once for and I get to know I’ve made something that matters.

If that sounds good, try one of AEV's tools.

Ad Astra Per Aspera,
Kade
Email Me!

P.S. If you want to learn more about the larger mission and how its business model works, that's over at the "What is AEV?" page.