I was born and raised in the heart of Seattle on Queen Anne hill. I grew up all over the Pacific Northwest (PNW), camping along the Nisqually river, hiking the Cascades, skiing Mt. Hood Meadows, and learning to sail in the Puget Sound.
10 years after our one-and-done first date at Republic in South Lake Union, I reconnected with Lela Lucht, got married in Mexico, and we are raising two daughters—Livia (5) and Janae (2). We moved from Seattle to live by lake Pend Orielle at the base of Schweitzer mountain in Sandpoint, Idaho.
To connect, text (206) 854-8814, email erik@erikkjell.com, DM @erikkjell, or follow along @erikkjell.
Erik Kjell - Seattle, WA
Role
Product Lead
Dates
Month, 2018 - Month, 2019
Accomplishments
- Seed funded a startup with $2M from Dan Nordstrom
- Built a team of 8 including specialists in marketplaces, payments
- Designed an end-to-end licensing and royalty payment platform
- Negotiated a partnership with the NFL Players Association
- Reduced overhead of licensing department by a factor of 50:1
- Sub-licensed digital assets from NFL licensees Topps and EA
- Reduced the time to get a licensing deal from 6 months to 6 days
- Collected pre-paid, guaranteed, and advance royalty payments
- Tracked sales via API and computed revenues for reporting
- Computed royalty payments for 1,800+ NFL players on 32 teams
- Sold the technology to the NFL Players Association
I was born and raised in the heart of Seattle on Queen Anne hill, camping in greenbelts and sleeping in tree forts we built with money we made from selling lemonade. I grew up camping along the Nisqually river, hiking in the Cascades, skiing Mt. Hood Meadows, and learning to sail in the Puget Sound. There is nothing quite like growing up in the Pacific Northwest.
In 10th grade, I eagerly moved to a small town in northern Minnesota called Fergus Falls to go to a private Norwegian boarding school that was a family tradition. In many ways, it was kind of like Dead Poets Society. When I came back to Seattle, I did a one-time, 72-day stint in Alaska as a commercial fisherman where I got really good at knots. Now that I had a pile of cash, I bought my first car, a 1970 VW bug, and decided to go to college at UW that inspired me to get into tech. No surprise there.
After asking her out on a first date in 2009, I followed up with a second date 10 years later. Timing is everything. Lela and I knew we both wanted a family, so we quickly had our first daughter Livia, then we got married at a destination wedding in Mexico on February 22, 2020—the very month before the global pandemic. Like many people did when the whole world changed, we decided to move our new family from Ballard to Sandpoint to be closer to Lela's family. Now, our first daughter Livia has new sister Janae, and we all live right by lake Pend Orielle at the base of Schweitzer mountain.
If you'd like to talk, send me a text (206) 854-8814, email erik@erikkjell.com, or connect on X @erikkjell, and IG @erikkjell.
