Jake Loosararian had less than $135 in his bank account.
It was 2015, and he’d spent nearly three years struggling to bootstrap Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based startup he’d launched right out of college with wall-climbing robots that scanned infrastructure like power plants and nuclear missile silos for structural issues. So when a customer offered him $500,000 to buy the company, seemingly out of nowhere, the “transformative” offer stopped him dead in his tracks, he says.
“It was earth-shattering money for me,” says Loosararian. Running Gecko had led him to “some deep, dark places,” both literally and figuratively, he notes — from emptying his bank account and sleeping on friends’ floors to soldering circuit boards in hot, dusty, eerie power plant boiler rooms. He’d thought, repeatedly, about walking away.
He rejected the customer’s offer anyway.
Today, Gecko is valued at $633 million, as of a fundraising round last year. Its clients include the U.S. Navy and Air Force, and it ranked 42nd on the 2024
Gecko’s growth hinged on another meeting Loosararian took the same week as the acquisition offer: He spoke with two representatives from Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has helped launch companies like Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox and Stripe. Loosararian “didn’t even know who Y Combinator was at the time,” he says, but the representatives convinced him to submit an application.
Gecko got accepted, receiving Y Combinator’s standard $125,000 investment in exchange for a 7% equity stake in the business — resulting in an initial valuation of nearly $1.8 million and access to the accelerator’s network of bigger investors. Within months, Loosararian turned down another investment offer, from a “very renowned” billionaire investor that would’ve valued Gecko at $10 million, he says.
‘It came down to: What is the thing I believe in most?’
Gecko may never have reached its current state had Loosararian accepted that first $500,000 offer, which he says came from a company that built power plants. “It’s damn hard to turn down half a million dollars when all you had was 100 bucks,” he says.
The alleged billionaire’s investment offer was hard to turn down, too: Gecko would’ve received $2 million in funding, and Loosararian would’ve kept a majority stake of more than 70% in his startup, he says. But it came with a condition: Gecko would have to be headquartered in San Francisco and build its robots in a lab, rather than Loosararian’s preferred method of field testing and making on-site adjustments.
“I just fundamentally could not agree with that, as it relates to how you build robotics. You’ve got to build it close to the customers out in the field,” says Loosararian, who’s seen robotics startups “die, time and time again” by assembling and testing solely in labs.
“Someone’s offered me $2 million for a $10 million valuation? It’s pretty ridiculous and crazy,” he adds. “But it came down to: What is the thing I believe in most? What’s going to help not just me become a better person, but also this company become all it could be, in pursuit of a mission that now I had more visibility and clarity about what it could be?”
Trusting your gut can be hard, especially when your bank account is nearly empty and you’re offered a windfall. But it’s often touted as important advice by CEOs, entrepreneurs and other successful executives who took risks to work their way up the ladder.
“Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion,” Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once told writer Walter Isaacson.
Loosararian stayed at Y Combinator, ultimately pitching a room full of investors at the accelerator’s Demo Day — he threw up right before his presentation, due to nerves — and landing seed funding that valued Gecko at nearly $14 million, he says.
“I want to chart my own course,” says Loosararian. “I don’t want you telling me how to run this company, because there’s just no way that you understand more about the power sector or robots or software than I do.”