Jesse & Kaia: The People Behind Keyboardio
Jesse Vincent and Kaia Dekker founded Keyboardio in 2014.
Before that, Jesse got a BA in Russian Studies from Wesleyan University before spending the first couple decades of his career as a software developer, creating open source software including Request Tracker and K-9 Mail (now known as Thunderbird for Android) and serving as the project leader for the Perl programming language.
Kaia got a BS in Physics from MIT and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business. In prior lives, she's worked as an investment banker, advising on mergers and acquisitions, and as a strategy consultant to some of the world's best-known brands.
Jesse and Kaia live and work in Berkeley, California.
The Keyboardio Story
Keyboardio began as a hobby project in the summer of 2012. A SaaS startup Jesse had been working on was failing. He was pretty burned out and decided to take a bit of time off to play around and figure out "the next thing." While he was experimenting with new software startup ideas, Jesse procrastinated by trying to build himself a keyboard. When we started out building our first keyboard, it was very much a hobby project. After the second or third prototype, we started having trouble using our keyboards in public–people kept interrupting us to ask where they could buy the keyboards we were using. At that point, we pretty much had to make it happen.
