Kaleb
Dane.

About me.

My first PC was an old computer my grandma gave our family. It was painfully slow. We didn't have much money, so I made a deal with my dad: if he bought me RAM to speed it up, I'd edit his videos for him.

Good trade for an eight-year-old.

That computer got me hooked. My first game was Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, a strategy game. Then I started exploring other software and learning how the computer worked.

Growing up in Austin

I grew up in Austin, Texas, in a lower-middle-class family. My dad was a college professor and preacher. My mom was a homemaker and my homeschool teacher.

I was the oldest, with one younger sister and two younger brothers. I took care of everyone.

My mom homeschooled me until seventh grade. She wanted to bring out my natural abilities and grow my curiosity in a way public school wouldn't have. I'd finish my schoolwork in a couple of hours. Then the rest of the day was mine to play and tinker with electronics and computers.

I wanted to understand how things worked, and I was quick to pick up patterns. By age seven, I was soldering circuit boards and reading circuitry books.

My favorite store was RadioShack. That probably tells you what kind of kid I was.

My dad always said, “You just need to invent something.” Looking back now, I can see what a big impression that made on me. I always wanted to find a way to provide for everyone and give them what we didn't have growing up.

My dad worked with what he knew and believed was the best way. I saw firsthand the limits of working a job for a paycheck. Learning to sell a product or service and operate a business was the real way out.

Like the saying goes, “A smart man learns from his mistakes, but a genius learns from others.”

A taste of it for myself

My dad's glory days of sports and college put a spell on me too. We were an athletic family, and I wanted a taste of it for myself.

So in seventh grade, I gave up the freedom to follow my curiosity at home and went to public school. I wanted the typical public school experience and the glory of sports competition.

And I was interested in girls. Not much of a dating pool in homeschool. Not that they would have been good for my productivity...

I didn't really know what to expect. I'd do push-ups at night in my bed, anticipating the fierce competition.

Football started the summer before school. It was strenuous and a completely new experience, but lo and behold, I surprised myself. I was one of the top athletes. The coaches quickly took a liking to me, mainly because of my effort.

I was what you could call a tryhard. Still am. Whatever I do, I do it fully and completely. Why only give it 50% anyway? Says a tryhard...

I was good at track, football, and basketball, and competed until college. I had fun and learned discipline. But I always found more joy and meaning in building something than just playing a game. A healthy body is a healthy mind, so I still play sports to this day. It's just not my main focus.

Computers, film and music

Video games were another place I liked to compete. I used to play competitive first-person shooters like Battlefield. But playing was only part of what interested me. I got into modifying games like Halo: Combat Evolved by guessing hex values. Then I started experimenting with building plugins for games. I also started editing 3D models in Blender.

That interest in computers and making things carried into college, where I studied computer science and cinematography. I love good films, and I love making short films myself.

Music goes back even further. I've played piano since I was five and produced thousands of songs over the years. More by ear than sheet music.

Making music also gave me a reason to build websites. I wanted to sell my own sound sample packs, so I designed the product, the landing pages, and the sales funnels.

Then I started learning to code in Python, which led me to C. A whole new world opened up when I saw what I could make.

Learning to lead with value

I was looking for a vehicle to build a lot of wealth, quickly. What better way than sales?

A friend told me that before anyone starts a business, they should sell cars, or sell something face to face. Learn human psychology and the art of sales. So that's what I did.

I moved to Kansas to sell vehicles at one of the largest dealerships in the country. I wanted to learn in the wolf's den.

Turns out it was a lot harder than I was sold. The first thing they tried to do was get me to quit. They gave me no leads. If I wanted to sell a car, I had to catch someone in the parking lot looking at one.

After three months of grueling effort with nothing to show for it, it finally dawned on me: I needed to forget everything I'd been told, relax, and actually help people.

Before I could help someone, I had to find out what they were actually after.

Maybe I ask a guy, “How's it going?” and he tells me he's getting divorced. He's going through a midlife crisis and wants a thrill, something to distract him from an unhappy life. Of course he's looking at a sports car.

Or maybe someone's old car keeps letting them down. They want to feel safe and secure. To know it'll start and get them where they need to go, without the stress of wondering when it'll break down again.

I had to understand the emotion behind the purchase and what kind of emotional service I was providing. Excitement and a distraction for one person. Safety, security, and peace of mind for another. The car was how I helped them get that feeling.

Instead of asking “Can I help you?” like everyone else, I started showing people something they didn't know about the vehicle they were looking at. Something that mattered to them. That's how I earned their trust. Once I had that trust, selling was easy.

Those couple of years were my first step in learning the customer side of business. I learned what the market actually wanted, and how much effort and persistence it took to provide it. What I learned about human emotion, communication, and people carried into everything else I did.

On the admin side, I used an old-school CRM to keep track of customers. That taught me how the software works, including all the annoying work it still leaves you doing by hand.

That experience led me to build Ops, an automated CRM that handles the annoying work those older systems didn't. I wouldn't have understood the problems if I hadn't spent two years using them.

Why I started growing food

My interest in health started early. I watched my dad go from hospital to hospital, seeing doctor after doctor with one problem after another. It seemed like every visit created another problem he needed to see another doctor for. It didn't make sense to me that people had to live that way.

My dad cared about his health because he knew what it was like not to have it. I picked that up early. That got me interested in food, and then in growing my own.

With food from a store, you don't know how it was grown or what was sprayed on it. Just compare a normal grocery-store tomato with a homegrown one. The store-bought one hardly has any taste.

As a kid, I'd grow small gardens here and there. I liked checking on my plants and nurturing them, watching a seed turn into something productive. Nothing too serious. I just wanted to get things to grow and produce.

I revisited it later and found out I was pretty good at it. Plants and agriculture fascinate me. Each plant has its own preferred growing environment. Looking closely at plants and nature's ecosystems taught me a lot about biology and patterns.

In 2022, I started sharing what I knew on TikTok as @soilconnection. It was a place to experiment with marketing and see what people wanted and responded to. I filled the gaps where I could.

Turns out what I'd learned was really valuable to other people, so I stuck with it. The account took off unexpectedly and grew to almost 200k followers.

I enjoy teaching what I know well. Having a college professor for a dad and a good homeschool teacher for a mom helped me learn to explain complex ideas in simple ways. I used that when explaining vehicles to customers and when sharing what I knew about plants.

Colorado to Bali

I lived in the mountains of Colorado and really enjoyed it. Except for the long winters. That's where I realized how much I value sunlight and warmth.

So I moved to Bali for sunlight and warmth all year. I wanted to see the other side of the world and find something new and different. The unique culture, happy people, and community of aspiring entrepreneurs gave me more reasons to love it.

Not to mention my kryptonite: beautiful women.

My love for motorcycles and bike culture also turned into a business here: EREBORA Motorcycle Rentals.

I used to do all the admin myself. I used my computer knowledge to build a complete system that automates that work, so I can focus on the fun stuff, like showing customers the custom-designed motorcycles.

Currently, I like heavy weight training, running sprints, riding hard, and playing beach volleyball.

Day to day, I'm mostly a night person, but I can be a morning person. When it comes to food, I'm mostly vegetarian. But fish is very good.

Learning to build with AI

I wanted to build apps, but making anything worthwhile took me so long. As AI got better, I started using it to help me code. It was a slow process at first, but still faster than writing everything manually.

Learning how to get AI agents to actually do what I wanted took tremendous trial and error. Most people talk about building with AI agents but have never finished a real project worth talking about.

The truth is, it takes much more effort and control over the workflow to get good, correct work out of them.

So I started building my own workflow. As I got faster, I wanted to build faster still. Then I built a remote control for the system so I could direct the work from my phone. That became MANTIS.

Why I'm telling you all this

Every experience has shaped me and given me a different angle on business. Studying patterns in circuits and biology has helped me go deeper into code, logical systems, and equations.

Growing something from seed also shows you the power of compounding and exponential growth, like the financial markets. I see everything as an investment. Whatever I put in, I want to see it grow.

That includes relationships. Trust is the most important thing, and you can't break it. I never understood why people take shortcuts without realizing they'll cost more later. Everything compounds.

You could call me a jack of all trades, master of none. I like the version that adds, “but oftentimes better than a master of one.” Feels fitting, but you can be the judge.

I get bored super fast. I need something challenging. I'm naturally to myself, deep in a project, but with the right people on the right mission, nothing is better. I love working with intelligent people building helpful, interesting things.

The world is changing too fast to tie my identity to one thing. I'd rather understand how someone thinks, how quickly they learn, and what they value. That's how I want us to figure out if we're a good fit for each other.

This is so you can know the person behind the work. After all, the results I get are what matter. Everything else is just good marketing.

I hope you're seeing the pattern with me. And I hope to get to know you.