The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.
After graduating college in 2013, Loosararian co-founded Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics. He worked 100-hour weeks to save "$30,000 or $40,000" and fund his startup's first few years of existence, he says. He spent a lot of that time in some dark places — going broke, sleeping on friends' floors and climbing inside power plant boilers, which are "dirty and horrible," he notes. Repeatedly, he almost walked away.
I'm not a very smart individual, but I just began to think: It seems like the robots are an incredible way to localize and gather information using sensors that couldn't get to these places without robotic systems. Customers will pay me to collect and own that data on their assets, which no one else has access to.
Jake Loosararian, pictured here in college, working on Gecko Robotics' earliest version of a wall-climbing robot. poured his life-savings into it, too. He worked on it full-time. The week before I quit my other job, he said: "Jake, I can't do this anymore. Mentally, I'm exhausted. It's just never going to go anywhere and I have to get out."But I was so obsessed with this problem.