Jake Loosararian is perhaps one of the most interesting businesses that came out of Grove City College. He started off as an electrical engineer major with a school project. His team built a rather large robot with a scanner that collects data in risky environments that human workers do not want to work in. This one design is estimated to save power plants over tens of millions of dollars in labor costs and time.
Loosararian was warned by professors and family to not create a business with this idea, and validly so. Over 70% of hardware startups crash and burn. Overhead costs are extreme, and these types of companies rarely grow. He graduated in 2013 and then soon co-founded Gecko Robotics. He even confessed to working over 100-hour weeks to save money for his passion project. Loosararian spent time doing ugly jobs and working to understand what his robots were required to do on a day-to-day basis. He got a job in system automation and absolutely hated it. When he quit his main job and started working on Gecko, his co-founder had to step back and left the business.
He describes his business as a secret hiding in plain sight and that he could practically see the business succeeding. It got tough though and he was down to his last dollars. He constantly worried about failing and people being right on how he couldn’t do it.
Today, Gecko Robotics is ever-growing with over $220 million in funding. Which is not a small number. The company is valued at over $633 million and very successful. This impressive because when he started, he had at max $15,000 in savings and knew it wasn’t enough to actually start a business.
This is a really neat idea. I like how he thought big and wanted to make changes and save alot of money. He acted upon his passion and is now making boat loads of cash. He saved every penny and was willing to risk it all.