A reintroduction

Time for a LinkedIn reintroduction 👋

I'm Jacob. An MIT trained mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur. I sold my company recently and I'm figuring out what I want the next ten years to be.

MIT is where I learned to love building. Products, at first. To uncover a problem, question assumptions, ask why things are done the way they're done, start from first principles. During school I interned at Oculus right before Facebook / Meta bought them, then at Apple. Two great companies, two completely different worlds. Oculus pulled at me and Apple didn't. Everything was still being figured out.

That experience turned my love for building products into a love for building companies. That's the pull I've followed ever since.

It took me straight into Bill Aulet's entrepreneurship class senior year, where starting something seemed like a thing normal people were allowed to do. A few buddies and I tried. That became Perch, computer vision and fitness tracking for the weight room, built by nerdy MIT athletes who knew the problem firsthand.

We had no idea what we were doing and even less traction by graduation. I started grad school at MIT, partially because I didn't know what else to do, and we kept chipping away on the side. Machine shops between lectures. Prototypes at 2am. Somewhere in there it stopped being the side thing.

So I dropped out.

Perch ended up in 300+ elite weight rooms across the world. LSU, Georgia, Duke, the NY Giants. Nine years, a lot of mistakes, one acquisition by Catapult Sports.

I stayed on after. That same pull I felt at Oculus came back, stronger. The only work I actually want is zero to one.

So I left. I literally spent a few days in the woods to figure that out.

Now I'm building again. Experimenting with agents and what they actually change about running a business. Vibe coding a number of side projects that may or may not turn into companies. Advising early-stage founders, starting to angel invest, paying forward what nine years taught me.

All of it pointed at the same thing: learning, growing, and rejuvenating to figure out where I want to spend the next decade. Likely physical AI, robotics, energy, healthcare. Big, hard, real-world problems.

At home, Deanna and I moved to Durham for her surgical fellowship, with our six month old daughter and our dog Oso.

What I'll write here is the honest version of building. The constraints, the mistakes, the luck, the parts that never make the highlight reel.

If you're in the middle of something hard right now, I'd love to hear from you.