Jia Huang
Founder of Technical Machine. Olin College, Class of 2013.5
Thoughts on the Entrepreneurship Curriculum at Olin
When Jia was at Olin, she took FibE as a foundational entrepreneurship class. However, the only relevant two weeks of the class where when they had to make money — it was a scramble, because everyone in the class just ended up selling things to other Oliners, so they all had the same market.
In hearing about Products and Markets, she really liked the fact that it sounds more along the lines of UOCD. She found that UOCD was definitely one of the most valuable classes she took at Olin, as it “teaches you a skillset only more senior people in industry have, and allows you to look at your work more critically”.
The Beginnings of a Startup
In the summer of 2013, before her super-senior semester at Olin, Jia and another member of the class of 2013.5 founded a startup — Technical Machine. The idea behind the company was to make working with hardware easier for Electrical and Computing Engineers like herself, and spawned from working on hardware projects for Facebook as a part of Olin’s SCOPE program.
Before they had settled on this idea however, they did quite a lot of brainstorming. In their application to Highland Capital Ventures for $18k of grant money for their endeavor, they pitched a different idea in each of the three rounds of interviews for this grant. Despite this, they ended up getting the grant, which Jia attributes to having a team that showed promise and dedication.
After receiving this funding, the two hired another Oliner (class of 2013) onto the project, and after spending half a day making an extremely simple launch page, the team got 30,000 signups for their product and went #1 for a week.
Moving Forwards with Technical Machine
Because of this slingshot launch into the startup industry, they quickly raised ~$1 million in Venture Capital money — and immediately felt the pressure. As Jia put it, “Once you get money, people expect a 10x return.”
As a fall supersenior semester at Olin, Jia took 3 credits of AHSE!, did minimal work to graduate and spent all the rest of her time working on the startup. She was taking an entrepreneurship class simultaneously to meet requirements, but wasn’t allowed to work on her actual startup for the class, so consequently never showed up to class.
After finishing her final semester at Olin, the team moved out to Berkeley, California, and continued working on the project for the next year and a half. In 2015, they began to realize that they weren’t making enough to continue on their path, and looked at multiple options to sell and get hired by other nearby companies. She ended up going practically next door and getting hired by 3D robotics 8 months ago, and has been working for them on computer science since. Technical Machinne is now in someone else’s hands, and all of the previous team ended up going to other places — some of which are now working at the same place as Jia. It has now transformed into the company Tessel and released its second iteration of its product this month.
Major Takeaways from this Experience
Mentality is key: “You have to look at metric sand you have to look at them well, and you have to be able to talk to your users. Olin is really good at pushing you out of your comfort zone.”
There’s a first time for everything: “You’re always going to be wrong the first time you do a startup.”
Burn-out is real: “Startups fail because people get burnt out.” It feels surreal not to like something that you were once so passionate about, and she’s just now recovering from the burnout close to a year later. If you had asked her if she wanted to do another startup before Technical Machine failed, she would have definitely said yes. Now, however, she said that she would think much longer and harder about it. Burnout is sometimes a result of never being able to find the one pivot that puts you back on the rocket-ship track since some ideas just never had success in them. However, it is also casued by the high stress and pressure environment with no noticeable progress.