Meet Innovator of the Week
Jake Reisch
Co-founder & CEO at Eversound
Please provide your 30-second pitch about your company.
Eversound designs audio technology products to meet the unique ergonomic, auditory and aesthetic preferences of older adult users. Our flagship product, the Eversound SLS, is a personalized audio amplification system allowing individuals in an audience to adjust sound to their own specific preferences. A graduate of Cornell University’s eLab Accelerator, Eversound products have been used by numerous Fortune 500 companies and the company has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider and USA Today.
Who or what was your best resource for starting your company?
The best resource for building my company has been Entrepreneurship@Cornell, a network of alumni and events that helped me connect with some of the most influential people from our industry.
What was your biggest obstacle in starting your company and how did you overcome it?
As a first time founder, every corner has a new obstacle; setting up accounting systems, building sales processes, fundraising and recruiting talent to name a few. I would generalize to say the biggest obstacle for me was efficiently learning how to handle each challenge while keeping emotionally fit. I’ve managed to overcome this fairly consistently by learning deeply about a specific topic only when that topic has become what is currently most important to the company. If the top priority for your company is early sales and showing traction, you would not find me reading a book about financial statement analysis. I’ve also found that by surrounding yourself with people who are uncomfortably smarter than you, there is very little that can’t be learned quickly.
What’s the best advice you have received?
Start with the end in mind.
What about the NH lifestyle appeals to you?
We moved to NH to have our whole team in one place. Our engineering firm was in Manchester, our COO in Concord and some investors in Boston. It just made sense for us. As a recent transplant, I have zero complaints. I can be at the beach, hiking trails and the heart of Boston all in under an hour!
What does the future look like for your company?
Our team is super excited to launch the first product lines to the public in Q1 of 2016. We will be hiring for a number of entry and executive level positions over the next several months, so if you are excited to improve quality of life for seniors through sound I would love to hear from you!
Connect with Eversound on their Website!
