Founder Chats is brought to you by Baremetrics: zero-setup subscription analytics & insights for Stripe, Recurly, Braintree and any other subscription company!
Like this episode? A rating and a review on iTunes would go a long way!
This week I talk with Jesse Genet, Founder of Lumi! In this episode we talk about being a tinkerer as a kid, getting in to screen printing in high school and how that has been a common thread in every business for 15 years, being on Shark Tank, shutting down a successful business, the role of printing processes in human history and more.
Show Notes
- 3:45- Technology and hobbies as a kid- more into physical tinkering
- 8:00- Impact of parents on entrepreneurial spirit
- 10:00- Job in high school printing and selling shirts
- 11:00- 3 years of high school
- 13:00- Selling t-shirts in California for the summer
- 15:25- Finding a loophole in getting out of Senior year of high school
- 18:55- What Senior year actually looked like
- 20:24- “Push for a thing, get the thing, then you have to actually do the thing”
- 24:00- Pursuing higher education
- 26:43- Moved to LA and went to Art Center College of Design for Industrial Design
- 28:55- The smartest choice Jesse ever made
- 30:38- Meeting co-founder, Stephan
- 31:35- “Let’s start a business”- Inkodye
- 33:10- First Kickstarter project
- 35:35- Balance between creative stuff and business stuff
- 38:10- Sandwich video
- 41:10- Applied and got into Y- Combinator
- 42:58- Catalyst for transitioning out of Inkodye
- 44:20- Shark Tank experience
- 47:30- Results of Y-Combinator and the impact on creating Lumi
- 48:50- Transition from customizing “literally anything” to shipping and packaging
- 50:25- Expert in printing processes
- 51:45- What has made you stick with printing processes for so long?
- 54:45- The next year for Lumi