This site is a collection of stories as captured by students from Olin College’s Products and Markets course. Each story is assembled from background exploration and an interview with Olin College alums with experience in the world of startups and entrepreneurship.

Ben Salinas

by Silver Dynamos
Luminaire Coffee

“One important thing that Olin doesn’t teach is crossing the 80% mark”

Background

  • Member of the Fourth Graduating Class

  • Major – Engineering with Concentration in Product Design

  • Interests While at Olin:

    • Product Design and Development

    • Sustainable Design

    • Design for Manufacturing

    • Human Factors Interface Design

    • User Oriented Collaborative Design

    • Distributed Engineering Design

    • Technology New Ventures

    • Social Entrepreneurship Management

  • Currently working at Luminaire Coffee

Timeline

  • At Olin

    olin

    First encounter with entrepreneurship; sets out to start a company, the first idea being USB controlled home coffee roaster. Conducted hands-on market research by visiting local stores; met his first important connection; and developed circuit prototypes, meanwhile also getting experience in bigger-scale manufacture.

  • After Graduation

    olin

    Working part-time at Luminaire; during the period, he often had to subsidize the company from personal funds. He encountered a lot of unexpected troubles when he tried to manufacture the first product. He built up connections with a Korean manufacturer, and gave all the documents they need for production. However, about 30% of the product they received did not work at all. Then he learned that they need to build several product tests to ensure a low failure rate. As a result, his team ironically ended up spending more time on building the tests than that they spent on developing the actual product.

  • Closing the loop

    olin

    Over last three years, Luminaire has been able to transition to making all the money they need to spend and making a profit. They did that by keeping their salaries low and growing them every year while continuing the build the business. Ben left his part-time job at another engineering company, and began focusing on Luminaire.

  • Outlooks

    olin

    Currently there are 3 full-time employees in Luminaire. Ben does not plan to enlarge this business too quickly. Instead, he really cares about the sustainability of this business. He is expecting to have 6 full-time employees in the near future while keep growing their salary each year. Ultimately, as Ben said, he would expect the whole business to have about 15 full-time workers in total, with different departments focusing on engineering, financing, human resource, etc.

Interesting Facts About Ben

  • Before coming to Olin, Ben had no experience with business and was even “against” the idea.
  • He now views business as a mechanism for creating change.
  • Ben came back to Olin in Fall 2014 to teach a 1 credit course called 5 More Topics that taught practical skills and principles for designing beautiful and usable software.
  • He was one of the first Olin students to take a full year entrepreneurial leave of absence.
  • His blood type is “coffee + code.”
  • The Luminaire team all met at Olin and graduated between ’08 and ’11. They know each other so well that they commonly finish each other’s sentences.
  • The team goes to Italy 3 to 4 times a year!

Featured Links

Personal Website

  • Features cool entries from his time at Olin

Olin Article

  • Olin blog entry describing his procedure of launching a start-up

Boston Article

  • Article that highlights one of his presentations at an Olin Expo