Erik Kjell (ch-el) is a partner in Beginner Bank – a venture studio that helps pre-product founders finance principal product design. With both eyes on the metrics and both hands on the product, Erik works as a business model mechanic, creating flywheels that drive revenue up, and the cost of user-growth down.
Previously, Erik was co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of the Tomorrow app, which helps people prepare for future risk. Tomorrow was the first acquisition by all-digital insurance company Ethos in 2022 after its $100M investment from SoftBank. The Tomorrow app is now core to Ethos' customer lifetime value (CLV) growth strategy: TMRO.com
Erik is a seed investor in Coinbase, Instacart, et. al. He's always looking for product-led growth (PLG) companies with over 100% net recurring revenue (NRR). He invests when they have customers who would be very upset if the business didn't exist.
Erik Kjell
Role
Product Lead
Dates
Month, 2018 - Month, 2019
Accomplishments
- Built a team of 6 developers specializing in A.I. and data science to make a new search engine
- Seed-funded a startup from concept to MVP in 3 months
- Conceived of a new approach to natural language processing (NLP) to measure sentiment
- Created an algorithm that separated signal from noise in unstructured data
- Achieved a combined relevance and confidence of 95%
- Applied the algorithm to public data sets at a volume of 1B posts per week
- Negotiated a 1-year global Twitter firehose partnership
- Built an automated net prompter score (NPS) for the top 1,000 consumer brands
- Optimized the model to infer intent for user acquisition, retention, and churn in social data
- Learned the risk of building a product on a 3rd party data when renewal cost increased 10x
Erik Kjell (ch-el) is a partner in Beginner Bank – a venture studio that helps pre-product founders finance principal product design. With both eyes on the metrics and both hands on the product, Erik works as a business model mechanic, creating flywheels that drive revenue up, and the cost of user-growth down.
Previously, Erik was co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of the Tomorrow app, which helps people prepare for future risk. Tomorrow was the first acquisition by all-digital insurance company Ethos in 2022 after its $100M investment from SoftBank. The Tomorrow app is now core to Ethos' customer lifetime value (CLV) growth strategy: TMRO.com
Erik is a seed investor in Coinbase, Instacart, et. al. He's always looking for product-led growth (PLG) companies with over 100% net recurring revenue (NRR). He invests when they have customers who would be very upset if the business didn't exist.
