Robert Kaskel is inventor, founder, investor, and sponsor. Mr. Kaskel’s background in two distinctly different industries Wall Street Technology and Restaurant operations revealed a deficiency in technology services to support the needs of brick and mortar businesses.
For twenty years, Mr. Kaskel was an innovator at designing and developing Wall Street marketplaces of numerous kinds for all levels of business from startup companies to the very largest Wall Street firms. Mr. Kaskel is intimately familiar with every aspect of marketplace operations and the technology to support it from indications of interest, strategy, analysis and trade execution to trade
support, portfolio management and clearance and settlement. Bank of New York Mellon is the world’s largest U.S. government bond and mortgage-backed clearing and settlement agent, clearing three to five trillion dollars a day. Their system is built on licensed technology designed, developed and sold by Mr. Kaskel and his former company. A leader in his field and expert in various innovative technologies and methodologies, his solutions exemplified leading technical capabilities and he spoke at numerous conferences. Mr. Kaskel brings these world class technology development capabilities and knowhow to Onhand and its marketplace.
Mr. Kaskel dedicated much of his career discovering marketplace opportunities and developing
actualizing technologies. His projects ranged from traditional bond and equity exchange platforms to more obscure opportunities such a carbon credits, loyalty reward points, a salmon exchange, nuclear power plant parts and even a healthcare receivable exchange.
In 2011, Mr. Kaskel partnered with his wife and started a new career as restaurant operator. He built a successful business and in doing so recognized a clear business opportunity to service the restaurant industry and more broadly most small businesses in the United States.
After eighteen months of successfully operating his restaurant, the business was wiped out by Super Storm Sandy. Many paper files and business documents were lost forever. Mr. Kaskel struggled to get his restaurant back on its feet and was dismayed by the lack IT of services available for his small business to manage its most basic, let alone complex, essential business operations information.
In the aftermath of Sandy, he had a two-week lapse in worker’s compensation insurance, the NYS Labor Department assessed a punitive penalty and ultra-high cost policy to cover the lapse. Still struggling with the rebuild efforts, this moment revealed insight into how small businesses are at a competitive disadvantage to their larger counterparts insomuch as operational scale for larger businesses enable specialized attention and focus to a wider variety of business issues.
Mr. Kaskel put mechanisms in place to help him track his business requirements and built a set of useful tools and techniques. The more he poured over the management of his own services, the more fascinated he became by the lack of vendor transparency. After all, most of his professional career was about increasing transparency via marketplaces. These two critical elements, the management of mission critical information and service transparency fueled the formation of Onhand.
