Kåre Kjelstrøm

Kåre Kjelstrøm is Concordium’s Group CTO and CPO. Kåre holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Aarhus and joined Concordium from a hyper-growth American pre-IPO startup where he managed the Core Infrastructure group. 
 

With a master’s degree in Computer Science from Aarhus University, Kåre moved to Silicon Valley early in his career for work, then built his own consulting company, took on ride-sharing, and eventually leapt into the blockchain. He has always been driven by curiosity and a desire to make a real difference with technology.

Before Concordium, Kåre was a manager at Uber, running Core Storage building, a highly scalable distributed ledger and storage solutions. Kåre started initially from Denmark and later moved to Toronto, Canada, where he doubled the Site Lead bringing all of Uber’s Toronto operations under the same roof. 

He is a senior engineering leader with extensive hands-on experience in building systems at scale. He has a proven track record of designing and delivering large distributed systems and infrastructure components in heterogeneous environments across multi-cloud and on-prem. Acting in the roles of leader, software architect, engineer, manager, mentor, and teacher, he enjoys defining, implementing, and running large scale IT-systems.

Earlier in his career, Kåre was a cofounder of the consulting company Silverbullet where he helped drive the digital transformation of the Danish Public Sector with a focus on PKI secured service to service communication. The company designed and implemented the iOS and Android application MedicinTjek for the Danish Medicines Agency. The app is free and allows citizens to read product guidelines for medicines, scan barcodes to get to the product at hand, bookmark products, check for possible drug interactions, and more.

As a blogger, he has contributed to Nordic Workshop on Programming Environment Research as a co-author for ‘A CASE Tool for COM Development’, and also for Uber Engineering Blog on ‘How Uber Engineering Evaluated JSON Encoding and Compression Algorithms to Put the Squeeze on Trip Data’, and also for Version2.dk.

According to his LinkedIn profile: “He has always been driven by curiosity and a desire to make a real difference with technology.”

“As a consultant, he learned the value of customer obsession, coaching, and direct and indirect leadership; his years at Uber taught him how to develop and expand high-performance teams in a hyper-growth environment; and he got to hone his leadership skills in a larger setting on infrastructure teams at a Los Angeles based pre-IPO stealth-mode startup before joining Concordium.”