A young man with practically no work experience or industry connections left college with one great idea, and that idea allowed him to amass a fortune of more than half a billion dollars.
Jake Loosararian, 33, was a electrical engineering student in 2012 at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College when he was given an assignment to build a robot that could scale a local power plant and scan for cracks or corrosion.
Loosararians team of fellow students were the most successful, designing a 40-pound robot equipped with an ultrasonic scanner that could collect vital data more quickly and efficiently than a human could.
Their invention saved the plant tens of millions of dollars in labor costs, Loosararian said. It was natural for him to think about starting a business around the robot if there was such a market need for it.
Everyone said, "Don’t f---ing do it. There’s not a big market here." Loosararian told CNBC in an interview. I talked to a bunch of people after that project — my parents, my siblings, people who had started companies before, people I looked up to from a technology standpoint, like professors.
He ignored the naysayers and did it anyway, even though he had little work experience outside college, no seed money and no relationships with people in tech.
Roughly 70 percent of hardware businesses like his fail completely or never grow because of how long it takes to get products to market and find customers, according to CBInsights.
Today, over a decade after its founding, Gecko Robotics is hot commodity in the tech sector. And after a $100 million fundraising round last year, Loosararians net worth surged to $633 million.
Jake Loosararian poses in front of his companys robot wall crawlers
Gecko Robotics is now a darling of the US Defense Department.
It announced last November that it was contracting with the Navy to modernize the manufacturing of the $132 billion Columbia-class nuclear submarine program.
This, of course, wasnt always guaranteed, and there was thousands of hours of hard work standing in between him and success. Loosararian bravely took on the challenge.
He was initially encouraged by the fact that not many tech companies were focused on his niche.
So as soon as he graduated college in 2013, he co-founded Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics.
In the first few years of running his startup, he worked 100-hour weeks in order to save $30,000 or $40,000 just to keep the lights on. Those early years were spent sleeping on friends floors and climbing inside power plant boilers, which he described as dirty and horrible.
I didn’t come from a super well-off family. I had, maybe, $15,000 [in savings]. I knew that wasn’t enough to start the company, he said.
I took a job doing systems automation, he added. I spent 50 to 60 hours a week at my job, and about 40 to 50 hours at Gecko. My weekends were at power plants, and in the lab building the robot.
The robots are seen climbing up a wall. Theyre used to scan for data and have been used at power plants
After a year of working at his job, he had the 30 or 40 grand he needed and quit on the spot.
The week before he left his other job, Loosararian suffered a major setback.
His co-founder Orion Correa, who put his life savings into the venture, quit the startup believing it would never going anywhere.
That forced Loosararian to work alone until 2016, when his company caught the eye of tech accelerator YCombinator, then run by OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman.
But before that big break, he considered giving up.
The worst-case scenario was: People were right. This is a stupid idea. You’re wasting years of your life after working so hard up to this point. The fear was just being a failure, Loosararian said.
But a bigger fear for him was going back to a cubicle, where he would be working for someone else.
I realized that I’d rather be in a deep, dark place being in charge of my own fate than in a cubicle and subject to someone else’s, he said.
Pictured: A class of interns at Gecko Robotics have their last week at the company in 2023
And when his expertise began to help others, he knew he was on the right track.
What helped me get through it was spending time with customers and hearing how important the problem was to solve, he said.
I’m helping them understand how to refine and create barrels of oil at higher margins, while reducing environmental and human safety risks and increasing the longevity of their assets. I’m trying to make sure bridges don’t collapse.
His advice for other startup founders is to get comfortable with failure.
Determination and persistence sound good to say, but you don’t know what they actually mean until you’re down in the trough of despair, he said. I know what the bottom feels like. I don’t mind if I go back.