Trash Panda Capital
The personal holdco of Ross Kinkade.
Western Michigan operator building an aviation and sovereignty stack.
Core Focus
Three ventures. One ecosystem. Every piece feeds the next.
Asteria Air is a premium regional airline concept focused on restoring and pioneering routes across the Upper Midwest. It pairs a modern, comfortable regional fleet with genuinely human, all-in service and model-driven routing that makes underserved city pairs viable again.
The thesis is straightforward: dozens of small and mid-size markets lost reliable air service over the past two decades. Asteria Air uses demand analytics and lean fleet economics to identify which of those city pairs can sustain profitable, scheduled service today. The airline is the primary operating build for the next decade.
Asteria Partners is an aviation-focused consulting and GTM studio. It blends analytics, AI, and real-world airline and airport experience to help carriers and infrastructure players improve efficiency, grow routes, and modernize their tech stacks.
The practice generates revenue, but it also generates something harder to buy: insider-grade data on route performance, airport capacity, and carrier operations. It exists to generate cash, data, and deal flow that reinforce the broader Asteria ecosystem — turning advisory work into a strategic advantage for every other piece of the portfolio.
Talora Solutions is my catch-all lane for mentoring, advisory work, and selective consulting with operators I actually respect. It's where I help founders and teams untangle GTM, systems, and career moves without turning it into a full-time agency grind. If you're here via a warm intro, this is probably the bucket you fit into.
Sovereignty Pipeline
Long-Term Vision
Trash Panda is the wrapper while I assemble the Asteria Group: airlines, GTM, and more aviation and infrastructure plays under one roof. The holding company stays deliberately quiet — a backstage structure designed to accumulate equity across a tightly connected portfolio.
The long-term goal is sovereignty: aircraft, routes, and a physical base that keep working when everything else wobbles. Think resilient aviation, off-grid infrastructure, and an operator stack that doesn't depend on anyone's permission. Every asset is selected for durability and optionality — things that hold value regardless of market cycles or political weather.
The roadmap is sequential and disciplined. Consulting cash funds route development. Route data funds fleet decisions. Fleet operations fund infrastructure. Each layer de-risks the next.
Past Life: Pong Solutions
Built. Scaled. Exited.
Pong was a Salesforce and CRM consulting firm that turned messy go-to-market systems into reliable, repeatable revenue engines for mid-market companies.
Before Asteria, I built and exited Pong, a Salesforce and CRM consulting firm. The work was unglamorous but clarifying — untangling broken pipelines, aligning sales and marketing data, and installing the discipline that turns sporadic deals into predictable quarters.
It taught me how to turn messy go-to-market systems into reliable revenue, and I've carried that discipline into aviation and infrastructure. The same principles apply: instrument everything, eliminate friction, let clean data drive decisions. Pong was the proving ground; Asteria is where those lessons compound.
Operator Note
I treat life like a cockpit. Lean stack, no noise, everything instrumented. My work sits where software, aviation, and autonomy intersect — with Asteria as the main story and Trash Panda quietly collecting the equity.
Software
Data-first systems that drive every decision
Aviation
Routes, aircraft, and infrastructure that endure
Autonomy
Assets and operations that don't ask permission
Get in Touch
No forms. No calendars. No gatekeepers. If this resonates, email me.
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