Arron Kallenberg

Arron grew up in rural Alaska with no running water in a house that he helped his father and grandfather build. Summers were spent as a deckhand on his family’s commercial fishing boat; and winters were divided between school, snowboarding and teaching himself how to code.

In 2000 Arron moved to the “Lower 48” to study math, computer science and Cultural Anthropology at Western Washington University. An economic downturn in the commercial fishing industry prompted Arron to “dropout” of college and start Kalbay Systems, a web-based application development and consulting company.

In 2006, after several years of client work, Arron co-founded Villij.com, a social recommendation utility. In 2007 Villij was accepted into the inaugural class of TechStars, a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. In 2012 Villij was acquired by Which Ventures Inc, and named one of the most successful startups to come out of TechStars by Business Insider.

Arron is also the co-founder of Olive Interactive, LLC. Between 2008 and 2010 Olive built and released Claim.io and DandyID.org, which provide social media identity management services to businesses and brands respectively. In 2011 Claim.io and DandyID were both acquired by a Canadian SEO company, which maintains them to this day.