Jake, a mechanical engineering and product design grad from Olin, cofounded a product design studio called Little Bonsai and currently works at a Cooper Perkins office in SF.
At Olin, Jake participated in almost no E! – and very little AHS for that matter. Nevertheless, he and Ollie Haas decided before graduation that they wanted to start a company together. Shortly after graduating a MechE in 2011, the time came. Despite having a stable job at the time, after considering the worst-case scenario, Jake decided that starting a company was worth it. After some consideration, he and Ollie named the company Little Bonsai – “Little” to imply cuteness, and “Bonsai” to imply sustainability and craftsmanship.
After two years of working on projects of varying sizes, Ollie’s Visa expired, and he decided to move back to Austria. Little Bonsai officially ended in the spring of 2013. Jake and Ollie got matching “Little Bonsai” tattoos, and then they parted ways. Jake was soon hired by Cooper Perkins and went to start a new office in San Francisco.
Little Bonsai’s first successful venture was The Clip. Originally intended to be a combination of a clip and a bottle-opener with 100 different uses, this experiment initially floundered. However, after the number of supposed uses was reduced to 4 (it turned out to be a terrible fruit peeler), Gizmodo picked them up. Product-market fit clicked and thousands of units were sold in a matter of days. Legal issues ensued soon enough, but Little Bonsai was able to fulfill all of its pre-orders before deciding to close the product line. Thus, Little Bonsai’s first project ended with considerably more success than either of its founders had anticipated.
One of Little Bonsai’s other projects was the ReBrush. A recyclable line of toothbrushes with replaceable heads, ReBrush was meant to change consumer relationships to toothbrushes to reduce landfill waste and promote awareness about personal environmental footprints. But Little Bonsai “didn’t nail down our user group precisely – we went with our gut a little too much and ended up designing for ourselves, marketing ReBrush as a weird mix of a designer product and an environmental one”, and the project eventually went under. It has been picked back up by multiple companies, however, and the Tulip Toothbrush company is currently working on making it into a real product.
Jake described several significant differences between the entrepreneurship atmosphere in Boston and San Francisco. While Bostonians are often lauded for being well-educated, San Franciscans tend to commended high-school dropouts. In Boston, business people tend to be slower and more cautious. One does not simply rush through a deal in Boston. San Francisco, on the other hand, is often on the leading edge of technology, and thus people prefer to move fast and close deals before the competition can. All in all, Jake claims to have no opinion on which environment is better.
Jake’s favourite pun is:
“Do you ever get tired after eating a big burrito for lunch?”
“Uhhh…”
“Just say yes.”
“Okay, yeah.”
“There’s a napp for that.”
Jake’s favourite colour is Orange.