Jeremy Cai

In his application for the 2015 Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry class, which he has posted on his personal website, he writes: “I’m currently on a (up-to-7-year-long) leave of absence from Babson College.” In the essay “An Honest Year as a Dropout” on his website, marked as written in 2015, he writes: “I left college last May.” UncoverLA wrote in November 2018 that he dropped out of college at 19, started his own software company and received funding from the startup seeder Y Combinator. Mission.org’s episode page states that after leaving college he learned the ropes of start-up life in Silicon Valley, and quotes him: “Not a lot of kids drop out of college to work on HR software.”⁠[1][2][3][4]

In that application he describes himself as a product designer with marketing and growth experience, and writes that he had worked with the operations team at Shyp. The earlier projects it lists are Honest Snaps (“First app using Snapcash for monetization”; No. 2 on Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry, proceeds donated to Women Who Code, later pulled by SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry), Gravity (second place at the Facebook Global Hackathon Finals and No. 3 on Product Hunt, a tool for sharing contacts), and Sprout Products and Tacklebox (each marked “Founder, currently advisor”; the former with a note of a team of five, the latter with notes of more than 1,600 signups and of winning “Best Use of Parse API” at Cal Hack). He also writes: “I’m passionate about ops efficiency and sociology.” OnboardIQ’s application to Y Combinator states that he had previously worked at the on-demand companies Shyp and Game Plan. In his first-person biography on his Gold House profile he writes that before starting companies he worked in product and operations roles in San Francisco and Chicago.⁠[1][5][6]

“An Honest Year as a Dropout” is written mostly in the second person and opens with “It’s August, and you just finished your internship”; it includes the line “You’re 19 and you’re broke,” later describes closing some money from a genuine, supportive group of people he trusts, has the lines “Your family thinks you’ve gone insane and disappeared,” “You miss your sister more every day,” “You love SF” and “You call Mom and Dad more often,” and states: “You’re a YC Founder, a Thiel Fellow, and you’re VC-backed.”⁠[2]

The company was OnboardIQ, a software company for hiring on-demand and hourly workers. In his Thiel Fellowship application he writes: “I’m cofounding OnboardIQ with Keith Ryu, a software engineer with a finance background”; OnboardIQ’s application to Y Combinator states that the two met through mutual friends in a young hacker community and had then known each other for eight months. Both TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry articles of March and May 2015 call him a co-founder of OnboardIQ; TechCrunch in July 2017 calls Keith Ryu the founder and CEO of OnboardIQ; the Axios article on the company’s Series A calls him co-founder and COO; Fountain’s October 2019 release calls Keith Ryu CEO and co-founder; and the Salesforce VenturesSalesforce VenturesSalesforce Ventures is Salesforce’s corporate venture capital arm. Active since 2009, it backs companies from seed through growth across enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, data, security and AI. Salesforce supplies all of its capital.Open the full entry portfolio page lists both him and Keith Ryu as “Founder” and Sean Behr as CEO.⁠[1][5][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Several starting points are given: OnboardIQ’s application to Y Combinator states, “We started working August 25, 2014 and launched beta in Nov 2014”; TechCrunch wrote in July 2017 that the company was “three years in,” and the Axios article on the same round also calls it a three-year-old startup; Il Post wrote in December 2018 that he had founded Fountain four years earlier; Fountain’s October 2019 release and Y Combinator’s company page give 2015 as the founding year, and the release calls the company San Francisco-based.⁠[5][9][10][13][11][14]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Fountain in the Summer 2015 batch. He has posted the application of that time on his personal website, where the page is marked “Original application from Summer 2015. At the time, Fountain was called OnboardIQ”; his Thiel Fellowship application also states that OnboardIQ had been accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 batch. On his Gold House profile he writes that he went through Y Combinator’s S15 batch, and on Acquired’s show in January 2022 he said: “I did YC as well, by the way, six years ago.”⁠[14][5][1][6][15]

The application states that OnboardIQ was an applicant tracking system for on-demand companies that charged $30 per successful hire, that it then powered the supply-side operations of 40 active businesses and had revenue of $5,000 a month, and that it had received $25,000 from Rough Draft Ventures on an uncapped convertible note. It states that the two had earlier applied to Y Combinator’s Winter 2015 batch: “We got in, but lost a cofounder and the acceptance got deferred as it wasn’t best timing.” It also describes Honest Snaps, which the two had built: after Snapchat launched Snapcash, it asked people to send $1 to “HonestSnap” with a photo of themselves in return for fashion recommendations.⁠[5]

He has posted on his personal website an essay titled “The Modern Workforce,” marked 2015. In it he calls himself a co-founder of OnboardIQ, writes that he built the company with Keith after working at Shyp, and writes: “We now power most of the leading small to mid-tier on-demand startups.” The essay argues that “On-demand is not a trend and is here to stay,” and states: “operational workforces are hired by cohorts, corporate positions are hired on an individual level.”⁠[16]

On March 16, 2015, TechCrunch published the news that OnboardIQ had opened its private beta that day: the product automated parts of the funnel through which on-demand startups recruit contractors, such as scheduling interviews, so that HR staff had more time to review applications and interview candidates. The article gives his account that OnboardIQ did not replace existing recruiting tools such as Checkr (background checks) or HelloSign (signatures) but removed the hassle of switching between tools and tracking everything in a spreadsheet; Eaze and Spoonrocket were already using it for onboarding, and the company planned later to help customers widen their applicant pools and to analyze weak points in recruiting.⁠[7]

His Product Hunt profile lists OnboardIQ among the products he launched, dated March 2015, with the tagline “Simplified hiring for on-demand workforces.”⁠[17]

On May 18, 2015, TechCrunch published the news that OnboardIQ had raised $1.65 million in seed funding. The investors included SoftTechVC (with Andy McLoughlin joining OnboardIQ’s board), Slow Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann, Dropbox head of product Ilya Fushman and all four founders of Caviar.⁠[8]

He described a typical customer’s hiring funnel to the article’s author: buying 50 Craigslist ads at $75 each, with 10 to 15 applications per ad, in order to reach about 1,000 applicants; about 500 of them would attend interviews, 300 would pass background checks and 250 would attend orientation, which he called a generous estimate. In his words: “You’ll get 10-15 applications per ad, but you’re trying to get 1,000 applications.”⁠[8]

The article states that OnboardIQ had automated 100,000 hiring steps for customers since January of that year, a figure he said understated the time saved; dozens of on-demand startups were using it, among them Shyp, Munchery, Aliada and Eaze, and a San Francisco drone startup was using it to hire pilots. He expected traditional companies to adopt the product as well, on the ground that they compete for the same workers and that hiring a driver for an on-demand startup differs little from hiring a cashier at McDonald’sMcDonald’sMcDonald’s is a publicly traded restaurant company headquartered in Chicago, known for hamburgers, fries, drive-thrus and its franchise network. Its origins lie in the restaurant opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1940; Ray Kroc expanded franchising from 1955. It operates across more than 100 countries, with the great majority of restaurants run by independent operators.Open the full entry. The company planned to hire front-end and Ruby on RailsRuby on RailsRuby on Rails (often shortened to Rails) is an open-source, full-stack web application framework written in the Ruby programming language that builds database-backed web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson and first publicly released in 2004, it is known for design principles such as “convention over configuration,” and companies including GitHub and Shopify use it in production.Open the full entry engineers and its first dedicated salesperson.⁠[8]

On June 5, 2015, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2015 class of Thiel Fellows, and he was among them. The announcement gives his field as software and human resources, calls him founder and CEO of OnboardIQ, and gives his hometown as Chicago, IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry.⁠[18]

He has posted his application on his personal website, where the page is marked “Application from the 2015 cohort.” In it he writes: “Since launching our private beta in November, we have 14 customers like SpoonRocket, ZIRX”; the application states that OnboardIQ automates the cumbersome tasks of filtering out unqualified applicants, scheduling and rescheduling interviews, running background checks, e-signing documents and sending reminders. He also writes: “I live with and have become quite close friends with many of the ’14 and ’13 fellows,” and “I work at the Thiel CapitalThiel CapitalThiel Capital is an American investment firm founded by Peter Thiel in 2011 that provides strategic and operational support for his investment initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures; Founders Fund, Mithril, Valar Ventures, the Thiel Fellowship, and Breakout Labs were all incubated by the firm or its predecessors. It also invests in startups in its own name, partnered with Pacific Century to sponsor the Bridgetown series of special purpose acquisition companies, and took part in Bullish’s strategic funding round in 2021.Open the full entry office around once a week.”⁠[1]

UncoverLA writes that he received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship. The Fashion Law in 2018 called him an HR software entrepreneur and former Thiel Fellow, and in a question-and-answer piece published by SwagUp in December 2022 he said: “I dropped out of college as part of the then-new Thiel Fellowship.”⁠[3][19][20]

On Acquired’s show in January 2022 he recalled the period: “I think we were the third class. My class started in 2015.” He said that as an Asian kid with Asian parents he needed some justification to be out of school, and that the program’s “very prestigious name obviously helped me make the case to my parents”; he said: “I didn’t grow up in the Bay Area. I didn’t know anything about tech,” and that the programs fast-track a person to meeting the right people. He also said that “the Thiel Fellowship itself was really just a grant,” one that was not enough to live on in San Francisco at the time. He also said: “I think the biggest regret all of us have from the program is there was this one winter where Vitalik emailed the whole list and he’s like, hey, man, you should buy this presale.”⁠[15]

On July 6, 2017, TechCrunch published the news that OnboardIQ had raised $9.1 million: Origin Ventures led the round, SoftTech VC, Crosslink Capital and Y Combinator took part, and total funding reached $10.75 million. The article states that since its founding the company had processed more than 3.5 million applications and facilitated 400,000 hires, that many of the on-demand startups it had served in 2015 had since failed, and that it had widened the employers it serves to sectors that likewise hire hourly workers, such as retail, logistics, restaurants, grocery, warehousing and staffing. The remarks quoted in the article are Keith Ryu’s.⁠[9]

The Axios article on the same round calls it a Series A and states that the company had processed more than 3.4 million job applications yielding 400,000 hires, that Origin Ventures partner Brent Hill joined the board, and that customers included Safeway, GrubHub and Deliveroo. It states that for its first 18 months the company focused on on-demand services such as home cleaning, deliveries and valets and, as many of those startups shut down, expanded into retail, logistics and fulfillment. It states that the company had noticed that about one in five candidates also applies to work at another company, and gives his account that workers’ two primary priorities are flexibility and more work hours, both of which they meet by working for multiple services.⁠[10]

OnboardIQ was later renamed Fountain: TechCrunch wrote in November 2018 that he had previously co-founded the Y Combinator-backed hiring startup OnboardIQ, “now known as Fountain.com,” and the Salesforce Ventures page gives the company as “Fountain (prev. OnboardIQ).”⁠[21][12]

He has posted on his personal website a farewell note to the Fountain team, “Leaving Fountain,” marked 2018, in which he writes: “As you all know by now, I’ll be leaving Fountain at the end of the year.” The note states that the previous day had marked three years of him and Keith officially working together on what was first called OnboardIQ; that the two, neither of them technical, had been building and selling software to technology companies; that the company was no longer two people but a team of more than 30; and that he was leaving just after a record sales month.⁠[22]

Product Hunt’s article of March 2022 states that about four years into the startup he started thinking about what would get him excited again. On Acquired’s show he said that “enterprise software is not for me for five years in.” In an article under his own byline in June 2021 he describes himself as co-founder and COO of Fountain.com and writes: “After making a graceful exit, I pursued building a business in an industry I was passionate about.”⁠[23][15][24]

In that bylined article he writes: “I founded Italic in 2018 as a means to democratize access to quality goods,” after years of planning and speaking with manufacturers. Italic is an online retail platform on which manufacturers that produce for well-known brands sell unbranded goods directly to consumers; The Fashion Law wrote in November 2018 that he had founded it that year and that it was a members-only marketplace based in West Hollywood, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, while UncoverLA and dot.LA call it a Los Angeles company.⁠[24][19][3][25]

On Acquired’s show he said of his Fountain years: “I think I spent quite a lot of time with my family during that time traveling to Asia,” and tied the idea for Italic to his conversations with manufacturers. Product Hunt’s article quotes him as saying that in the first year he and Polo, the sourcing manager, visited more than 150 manufacturers in Asia, Europe and the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and only two said yes: a leather goods manufacturer and a cashmere scarf manufacturer. On Acquired’s show he said: “Polo is our first sourcing manager and employee”; he said the two of them visited 150 manufacturers in 2018 and that, because the company launched in November, this in fact took six months. Trend’s episode page states that he spent time living in China and Italy to build relationships with manufacturers; InsideHook writes that he met with factories throughout Italy and China; and in the SwagUp piece he said the team visited hundreds of factories in Asia, Europe and the Americas.⁠[15][23][26][27][20]

On November 15, 2018, Italic’s marketplace officially launched. TechCrunch wrote that Italic said it had more than 100,000 signups and had raised $13 million from ComcastComcastComcast Corporation is an American media and technology company headquartered in Philadelphia. It began in 1963 when Ralph J. Roberts bought a small cable television operator in Tupelo, Mississippi, and its businesses include Xfinity, Comcast Business, NBCUniversal, Sky, and Peacock. The company completed the spin-off of Versant Media in January 2026 and in June of that year announced plans to separate NBCUniversal and Sky into an independent public company, expected to take about a year.Open the full entry Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry, Ludlow Ventures, Kindred Ventures and others; the article calls him founder and CEO and says he comes from a family in the manufacturing business. AxiosAxiosAxios is a US digital news media company founded in 2016 by former Politico executives Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz and launched in January 2017. It is known for short news items and industry newsletters in the “Smart Brevity” style, especially for its Washington political coverage, and publishes local news newsletters in cities across the United States through Axios Local. Since 2022 it has been owned by Cox Enterprises.Open the full entry wrote that he said Italic had partnerships with 15 factories, with products ranging from handbags to skincare and winter jackets, and a waitlist of about 100,000 people, mostly urban, well-educated and aged 20 to 35.⁠[21][28]

TechCrunch wrote that under this model Italic handles consumer-facing work such as product design and marketing but does not buy inventory, and that manufacturers assume more of the risk around the initial cost of creating the products; he said manufacturers earn several multiples of what they make with their current brand clients, and declined to disclose Italic’s commission. His words in TechCrunch were: “The history of manufacturing has been about margins,” and “Even though they make the final product, they barely make a profit.” The manufacturers remain anonymous; Italic said its handbags and leather goods came from factories that work with Prada, Christian Louboutin and Givenchy, eyewear from a factory that works with EssilorLuxottica, bedding from factories that work with Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons, and leather jackets from the same factory as J Brand.⁠[21]

On prices, he said most handbags cost under $300, prescription eyewear under $100, leather jackets about $425 and bedding $80 to $120; Italic was aimed at the “middle 40 percent” of consumers who want quality and are careful with their spending. Italic used a membership model: members who signed up initially got a year free, and membership would eventually cost $120 a year; he said membership let the company control demand while quantities were limited and collect product feedback from members. He set Italic apart from direct-to-consumer brands such as Warby ParkerWarby ParkerWarby Parker is a U.S. eyewear and vision-care company founded in 2010 by Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider, and headquartered in New York. Starting with direct online sales, it expanded into stores, contact lenses and eye exams, and is developing intelligent eyewear with Google and Samsung. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under WRBY.Open the full entry and Casper, while conceding: “At the end of the day, it’s impossible to say we aren’t building a brand.”⁠[21]

Axios wrote that he said “The quality of apparel and fashion manufacturers in the US don’t compare to Asia and Europe”; he acknowledged that the model does not suit every product, for example a logo-covered Louis Vuitton bag, where the brand itself is what is bought, and said that persuading factories to take on inventory risk was hard while Italic’s model was unproven. Glossy’s article of the same day states that he said the team included people from Calvin Klein, Armani and Patagonia and that “We’re not tech bros from outside the industry trying to shake things up”; he gave the example of a manufacturer that sells a shirt to Calvin Klein for $20 and keeps 20 percent of that, or $4, and said “Expensive things aren’t that expensive to make; they’re expensive to sell” and “We don’t want to frame ourselves as replacing a luxury brand.” The Daily Front Row’s article of that day states that he visited the publication’s offices.⁠[28][29][30]

On November 20, 2018, The Fashion Law published an article arguing that Italic was not truly brand-free: its marketing and Instagram bio tied its leather goods to factories linked to Celine, Givenchy and Prada. The article argued that this use of other brands’ names could raise trademark infringement concerns, in particular a likelihood-of-confusion claim by Givenchy, which is owned by LVMH, and possibly a dilution claim, which does not require proof of consumer confusion; Italic could raise a nominative fair use defense. It also argued that luxury brands often require suppliers to sign non-disclosure agreements and that Italic might face contract disputes. The article refers to the situation as “the (hypothetical) case at hand.”⁠[19]

The article states that Gucci’s name had been removed from Italic’s Instagram bio in the preceding weeks and replaced with Givenchy, and it quotes a remark of his in Fast Company: “We’re a little controversial in that we say ‘here is a handbag made in the same factory as Prada.’” PYMNTS wrote in December 2018 that Italic said all its designs were new, that it sold nothing resembling a copy, and that it had worked with a legal team to check its approach; he said Italic’s factories were huge, well-established ones that had been in business for 50 or 60 years, and that it would never work with a factory relying solely on one client for its revenue, and said: “We are never going to have the Gucci handbag shopper buying a handbag from us.”⁠[19][31]

On the same day UncoverLA published an article introducing Italic, which states that he was then 23 and that his career had “detoured from finance to fashion by way of tech”; members could buy two items a month, some items might have only 30 to 200 units, and members of the founding team had worked at companies including Snap, ShopifyShopifyShopify is a commerce software company that originated in Ottawa, Canada, providing merchants with tools for online stores, physical retail, payments, orders and inventory management. The business began with Snowdevil, an online snowboard store founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke and others, and the standalone e-commerce platform launched in 2006. The company went public in 2015 and now trades under the ticker SHOP on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange.Open the full entry, Patagonia, Pinterest and Calvin Klein.⁠[3]

On August 19, 2020, Glossy published highlights of his conversation on the Glossy Podcast. The article states that Italic had launched in 2018 with a different membership model and that the annual fee was now $100; he said the new membership began as a pilot in April and that more than 90% of the time a member’s first purchase saves more than the fee. He said that the attention to value shown by Costco and Spotify customers had hastened Italic’s decision to launch its membership, and that Italic would probably not go into technically complex categories such as razors, subscriptions or custom products.⁠[32]

In the conversation he said that retailers used to take 30% to 50% of the wholesale margin, while today’s direct-to-consumer brands price at 5 to 10 times the cost of goods and may spend 30% to 50% of that on acquiring customers; the headline quotes him saying that such brands “price high, but still use the narrative of cutting out the middleman.” The article states that Italic sold leather jackets, handbags and cookware, and that its site listed the companies each manufacturer supplies, such as Hugo Boss, Armani and Longchamp for its backpack maker.⁠[32]

He has posted on his personal website a memo titled “Italic Membership Strategy,” marked “c. 2020,” which proposes “$60 for an annual membership to shop quality goods at truly at-cost prices” and states that more than 90% of inventory is held on consignment from manufacturers. The page opens with a later note headed “Retrospective (2026): Why This Was a Bad Idea,” in which he writes: “Looking back, I think we identified the problem correctly and chose the wrong solution,” and “Membership is a reward for an existing habit, not a substitute for creating one.”⁠[33]

dot.LA wrote in August 2021 that Italic had closed a $26.9 million early-stage round in April of that year; Product Hunt’s article of March 2022 calls it a $26.9 million Series B. The Org’s article gives Italic’s Series B as $37 million and its total funding as $50 million from venture firms and more than 100 founders, with 90 employees; on Acquired’s show in January 2022 the host Ben remarked: “I think you’ve raised $50 million, just recently $37 million.”⁠[25][23][34][15]

On April 19, 2021, the podcast The Founder Hour released an interview with him; the episode description states that it covers his upbringing and early career, why he started Italic, the company’s long-term vision and what he observed growing up around manufacturing.⁠[35]

On June 7, 2021, BANKNOTES, a publication of #paid, ran a first-person article under his byline, labeled on the page as sponsored. He writes that Italic launched in 2018 with about 40 products and now offered more than 800, some at up to 80% less than leading brands; that Italic had been named one of Fast Company’s most innovative retail companies; and that the company planned to expand into beauty, outdoors and pets.⁠[24]

On August 10, 2021, dot.LA’s article on Los Angeles e-commerce startups stated that he said Italic takes almost no inventory risk: it earns money when a customer buys, then pays the manufacturer and keeps a cut; he described the business as focused more on technology, operations and product development than on sales and marketing, and called customer loyalty “pretty deep.” He said Italic planned to let non-members shop later in 2021 and saw the future of shopping as split between “value-driven shopping and branded shopping.”⁠[25]

On December 27, 2021, Trend published its page for episode 43 of DTC POD, which calls him founder and CEO of Italic and states that he dropped out of school to build an enterprise software company.⁠[26]

On January 6, 2022, Acquired released the ACQ2 episode “Italic & a New Era of Online Retail,” in which he took part, with a transcript on the page. On the show he said that Italic had been members-only for about the previous year and a half, said of the change to the membership model that “we just did it last month,” and said that the number of customers grew tenfold overnight after the marketplace opened; the membership offer was “You pay $60, you get $120.” He said Italic had been around for about three and a half years and that he had personally spoken to well over 1,000 factories.⁠[15]

The Org’s article summarizes the changes in the membership fee: $120 a year in 2018, later lowered, most recently to $60, after which Italic did away with its members-only plan.⁠[34]

On March 22, 2022, Product Hunt published an article by Sarah Wright. It states that his goal was “to digitize the supply chain and bring these manufacturers online”; that Italic then had about 70 manufacturers, 5 to 10 of them publicly listed and most without websites of their own; and that these manufacturers sold the same products they supply to brands at prices 50% to 80% lower. He gave the example of a scarf: raw labor or material costs of $10, sold by the manufacturer to a retailer or brand for about $12, marked up 5 to 10 times, so that the consumer pays $60 to $120.⁠[23]

The article states that Italic reached a tipping point in the previous year and changed its model, opening purchasing to everyone and making membership optional; that the company planned three revenue streams, namely membership fees, commissions on product sales and service fees; that it had increased its assortment by 50% over the holiday season and he planned to more than double it that year; and that surveys kept showing friends and family as the leading source of purchases.⁠[23]

On June 9, 2022, Modern Retail published an article by Cale Guthrie Weissman based on his interview on the Modern Retail Podcast. It states that Italic partnered with manufacturers of well-known brands such as Staub and Samsonite and had recently halted its membership-only model. He said the company had to build its own supply chain orchestration platform, returns platform and fulfillment network: “We basically had to build our own version of Shopify.” Italic had first described itself as a marketplace matching manufacturers with customers; he said customers did not see it that way: “For all intents and purposes, we are a brand.”⁠[36]

He said he had earlier planned to expand into many categories with numerous manufacturers and now thought curation mattered more: “We can’t simply expand rapidly for the sake of expanding supply”; Italic had planned to launch 1,000 products that year, and “We’ll probably launch 100.” When products do not sell through, manufacturers are left in a difficult position, and he said: “We do have a tremendous amount of responsibility.” He said the company had cut its growth spending by a factor of five from March to April of that year while revenue kept growing, and that over the following year he aimed to find a path to growth that did not rely solely on paid advertising.⁠[36]

On December 1, 2022, SwagUp’s blog published a question-and-answer piece with him. In his answers he said that after leaving college he “pursued a career in technology startups” and later returned to the manufacturing world through Italic.⁠[20]

The Org’s “Founders File” article (shown on the page as last updated on February 15, 2023) calls him Italic’s founder and gives the company’s core belief as that people are happier, healthier and more fulfilled when they can afford to live well. He said his days were split among operating reviews, service culture and recruiting; on values he said, “There are two types of startups: those where values are just words on a wall,” and placed himself with the other type; on hiring he said, “There is a time for potential and there is a time for wisdom.” He said his advice to his earlier self would be to build a strong relationship with early customers and spend as much time with them as possible, and that scaling remotely depended on excellent leaders and on assigning clear ownership and accountability.⁠[34]

His parents are immigrants. The Org’s article gives his account that his parents immigrated to the United States with $500 and built a successful business, and that they “have always been my inspiration.” In the SwagUp piece he said that before starting businesses his parents worked late-night restaurant jobs to pay the bills, and that they started several businesses, from vegan cheesecake to electronics, most of which failed; “the one that stuck was in manufacturing.”⁠[34][20]

Il Post wrote in December 2018 that his family are Chinese people who immigrated to Chicago and run a factory making car parts for Nissan, BMW and Tesla. The Org describes the business as a decades-old manufacturing operation producing industrial parts. Accounts of how long the business has run differ: UncoverLA wrote in 2018 that his immigrant family started a manufacturing business 30 years earlier and that he grew up helping out there; Product Hunt wrote in 2022 that his parents started a manufacturing company before he was born, 30 to 40 years earlier; and on Acquired’s show in January 2022 he said: “They’ve been in manufacturing for 40, 50 years.”⁠[13][34][3][23][15]

In his 2021 bylined article he writes, “My family has a long history in manufacturing,” and that he worked in the industry at a young age. On Acquired’s show he said that one grows up always thinking one will never do what one’s parents do, and that several of his friends have family manufacturing businesses and launched direct-to-consumer brands alongside them.⁠[24][15]

On where he has lived: in his application for the 2015 Thiel Fellowship class he writes that he was living in San Francisco; Il Post wrote in December 2018 that he lived in Los Angeles; on his Gold House profile he writes that as CEO of Italic he splits his time between Los Angeles and Shenzhen; on Acquired’s show in January 2022 he said: “I live in UtahUtahUtah is a U.S. state bordered by Idaho to the north, Wyoming to the northeast, Colorado to the east, Arizona to the south and Nevada to the west, with its capital at Salt Lake City. It was admitted to the Union on January 4, 1896, as the 45th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 3,271,616 residents.Open the full entry”; in “Park City Recs” on his personal website, marked May 2025, he writes: “I’ve lived in Park City for 6+ years now,” and that when in town he works from the Kiln Park City office.⁠[1][13][6][15][37]

His personal website has a “Travel Log” page, described on the page as “Where I’ve been since 2014, by month.” In November 2026 the page listed 81 cities, 6 continents and 447 stays, with the highest all-time day counts for Salt Lake City (1,133 days), San Francisco (1,027), Los Angeles (481), Boston (280), San Diego (233), Chicago (219), New York (173) and Shenzhen (168); its earliest entries are Bloomington and San Francisco in January 2014, Boston from January to May 2014 and Chicago in March 2014.⁠[38]

On his Gold House profile he writes that he co-founded Blemish, the holding company behind the Not Pot brand, with Kati. On Acquired’s show in January 2022 he said: “Not Pot was a company that my girlfriend Kati and I started five or six years ago,” and that it was a bootstrapped direct-to-consumer brand, unlike the venture-backed Italic and Fountain. Trend’s episode page states that he “helps his SO Kati with Not Pot.” Dieline, introducing Not Pot’s daily CBD gummy in December 2018, names Kati Holland as the founder.⁠[6][15][26][39]

His Product Hunt profile also lists under “Maker History”: Miley (June 2015, described as a way to get a job in San Francisco and New York by text message), Cardpress (December 2015, “Premium Holiday cards, shipped instantly”) Italic (“Luxury without labels.”; seven launches listed between November 2018 and August 2020) and Rubber (“Build powerful AI apps without code”; under it, Hubble in March 2023 and Hubble with Google PaLM in May 2023).⁠[17]

On his Gold House profile he writes that he made occasional startup investments and has since stopped.⁠[6]

The homepage of his personal website lists, under “Founder,” Italic, Fountain, Carbon (marked “Acq Perplexity”), Courtly and Tonari (marked “Acq Creative Freaks”); under “Investor,” RampRampRamp is a corporate financial technology company founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee. It provides corporate cards, expense reimbursement, bill payments, procurement and finance automation. Glyman and Atiyeh became co-CEOs in June 2026.Open the full entry, Notion, PerplexityPerplexityPerplexity is a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company founded in 2022, known for its “answer engine” that gives answers with cited sources, and it has also launched products such as the Comet browser.Open the full entry, Oura, Proximal, Erebor and “+97 More”; and under “LP,” Dragonfly, Patron, Treble, Seven Seven Six, Enduring Ventures, Not Boring and Ravikant Capital. The “Writing” and “Ramblings” lists on the homepage give his pieces, among them “Margins Determine Your Destiny,” “DeepSeekDeepSeekDeepSeek is a Chinese AI company developing large language models and providing generative AI services through websites, applications and APIs.Open the full entry” and “Luxury Hotels,” marked 2026, and “Park City Recs” and “The Only American City,” marked 2025.⁠[40]

Fountain: Official website: https://www.fountain.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Italic: Official website: https://italic.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24][40]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

Personal website: https://jeremycai.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26][40]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jjeremycai (opens in a new window).⁠[6][15][26]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyhcai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6][15][4]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/jjeremycai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6][40]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/jjeremycai (opens in a new window).⁠[40]