I’ve spent my entire career building, breaking, and fixing tech—sometimes for companies with millions on the line, sometimes just to solve my own problems.
But the more I built, the more I saw a pattern emerge.
I started in big tech, working at GoDaddy when it was just 128 employees. I helped ship products at scale and even landed my name on a patent. From there, I moved into the high-stakes world of crisis management, leading digital strategy for a media mega-corporation when everything was on fire.
When that chapter ended, I took matters into my own hands—building my first business, a closed captioning service that scaled to more than a dozen YouTube channels with millions of views each month.
During the COVID pandemic, one of my closed captioning clients, Yoga With Adriene, brought me in to overhaul their technology stack.
As that business grew, I found myself on the receiving end of bloated dashboards, overpriced subscriptions, and vendor support black holes.
That’s when it hit me—
Most software makes running a business harder, not easier.
I know what it’s like to just need a tool that works—without signing up for another monthly charge, watching six hours of tutorials, or waking up to find the one feature you actually use got “updated” into something worse.
That’s why I started AEV. No investors. No growth hacks. Just simple, effective tools designed to solve real problems.
I build software the way it used to be—something you own, not rent.
Ad Astra Per Aspera,
Kade
