Kalman (Kal) Saffran is an innovative Businessman / Scientist / Engineer and Serial Entrepreneur who has advanced the state-of-the-art in several fields including engineering methodology, the Internet, securities price prediction and computer performance management. He is an accomplished multidisciplinary theorist and experimentalist, with over 30 years of extensive experience in the commercial, industrial, academic and defense communities.
Kal currently is the Chief Executive Officer of Summa Management LLC. He led the development of the ultra-successful SETS trading system and has researched, analyzed, developed and verified various trading strategies for equities, fixed income, commodities, and derivatives.
Prior to co-founding Summa, Kal founded and served as President of KSA, Inc., a leading contract product development firm, and co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Monitrex Corporation, a developer of computer performance management systems.
While at KSA, Kal pioneered the market for advanced, project-based electronics and software contract engineering, developed advanced products for leaders in the computer, telecommunications, data communication and CATV industries including AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent, 3Com, Motorola, Nortel, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, DEC, Prime, DG, and Raytheon. KSA also developed advanced Information Technology (IT) systems in the financial services and manufacturing industries, including for Fidelity, State St. Bank, N.E. Life, Sheraton, Foxboro, and Putnam. He specified, directed and/or managed and staffed over 3000 separate projects with almost 100% success. Kal developed Quantum Leap Methodology (QLM), a state-of-the art engineering and IT development system.
His previous experience includes a corporate staff position at United Brands Company (Fortune 75) and senior research management and staff positions at MIT, where he was part of the team headed by Professor S.C. Ting, leading up to Professor Ting’s being awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1976, Kal developed the first ever application for the Internet and was the Internet’s first ever user. Under ERDA contract, he connected the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBL) CDC computer to the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science’s (LNS) IBM computer so that MIT physicists could access their LBL experiments from the MIT campus. This development demonstrated to ERDA and DARPA that there were feasible applications for the Internet.
Kal holds a B.A. degree in Physics from Northeastern University and has completed graduate studies in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
