A young man with 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 studying electrical engineering at Grove City College in Pennsylvania in 2012 when he was assigned to build a robot that could scale up a local power plant and scan it for cracks or corrosion.
Loosararian’s team of fellow students was the most successful, designing a 40-pound robot equipped with an ultrasound scanner that could collect vital data faster and more efficiently than a human.
Their invention saved the factory tens of millions of dollars in labor costs, Loosararian said. It was natural for him to think about starting a company around the robot if there was such a market need for it.
‘Everyone said, ‘Don’t do it. There is no big market here.” Loosararian said CNBC in an interview. “After that project, I talked to a number of people: my parents, my siblings, people who had started businesses before, people I looked up to from a technology perspective, like professors.”
He ignored the naysayers and did it anyway, even though he had little work experience outside of college, no seed money, and no relationships with people in tech.
Roughly 70 percent of hardware companies like his fail completely or never grow because it takes so long to bring products to market and find customers, according to research. CBInsights.
Today, more than ten years after its founding, Gecko Robotics is a hot commodity in the technology sector. And after a $100 million fundraising round last year, Loosararian’s net worth rose to $633 million.
Jake Loosararian poses in front of his company’s robotic wall crawlers
Gecko Robotics is now a darling of the US Department of Defense.
Last November, the company announced it had signed a contract with the Navy to modernize production of the $132 billion Columbia-class nuclear submarine program.
Of course, this wasn’t always guaranteed, and thousands of hours of hard work stood between him and success. Loosararian bravely rose to the challenge.
Initially, he was encouraged by the fact that not many tech companies were focusing on his niche.
So as soon as he graduated in 2013, he co-founded Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics.
In the first few years of running his startup, he worked 100 hours a week to save “$30,000 or $40,000” just to keep the lights on. He spent those early years sleeping on friends’ floors and climbing into the boilers of power stations, which he described as “dirty and horrible.”
‘I don’t come from a super wealthy family. I had maybe $15,000 [in savings]. “I knew that wasn’t enough to start the business,” he said.
“I took a job in systems automation,” he added. “I spent 50 to 60 hours a week at work, and about 40 to 50 hours at Gecko. My weekends were at power plants and in the laboratory where the robot was built.’
You see the robots climbing a wall. They are used to scan for data and have been used at power plants
After a year at his job, he had the $30 or $40,000 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 poured his life savings into the venture, left the startup, believing it would never go anywhere.
That forced Loosararian to work alone until 2016, when his company caught the attention of technology 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: the people were right. This is a stupid idea. You’re wasting years of your life after working so hard so far. The fear was just a failure,” Loosararian said.
But a bigger fear for him was going back to a cubicle, working for someone else.
“I realized that I would rather be in a deep, dark place in charge of my own destiny than be in a box and subject to someone else’s,” he said.
Pictured: A class of interns at Gecko Robotics will have their last week with the company in 2023
And when his expertise started helping others, he knew he was on the right track.
“What got me through was spending time with customers and hearing how important it was to solve the problem,” he said.
“I help them understand how to refine and create barrels of oil with higher margins while reducing risks to the environment and human safety and extending the life of their assets. I’m trying to keep bridges from collapsing.’
His advice to other startup founders is to get comfortable with failure.
“Determination and perseverance sound good to say, but you don’t know what they actually mean until you’re in the depths of despair,” he said. ‘I know what the bottom feels like. I don’t care if I go back.’