Tom Huddleston Jr.

To become successful, you might have to learn to take yourself less seriously and be willing to keep doing the work, even when times get tough.

That’s according to Jake Loosararian, the co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, a tech startup that makes wall-climbing robots for jobs too dangerous for humans, like scanning the inside of a power plant boiler or nuclear missile silo for critical structural issues.

After starting as a college engineering project, Gecko launched as a business in 2013. It ranked 42nd on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 List and was most recently valued at $633 million.

Loosararian, 33, says Gecko never would’ve made it this far if he weren’t willing to “go into the unknown and the dirty and unexplored.” He means it literally: Loosararian spent parts of the last decade testing robots in dark, dangerous environments, soldering circuit boards in hot, grimy power plant boiler rooms.

Even launching the business in the first place was a risk — many of his closest friends and advisors thought it was a longshot, he says.

Ultimately, Loosararian says getting his hands dirty helped set him and Gecko apart from the many potential startups and prospective “innovators” who haven’t prospered. “So much of Gecko’s success and progress has been just through embracing that value of grit and gritting your teeth,” he says.

Grit, or the ability to persist in striving toward a goal over the long term, and in the face of any number of obstacles, is a trait that psychologists often associate with success. It can be even more important than skill or intelligence, according to University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth.

“Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality,” Duckworth said in a 2013 TED Talk.

A company built on grit

Loosararian spent three years bootstrapping Gecko Robotics after graduating from college with a degree in electrical engineering. He had no money to pay himself, so he slept on friends’ floors and at the power plants where he tested early iterations of Gecko’s robots.

At times, Loosararian considered giving up. He remembers thinking to himself: “I don’t belong in this place. ... I’m a talented engineer with a hard hat on, steel-toe boots and covered in coal soot. I shouldn’t be here.”

Instead, he decided to embrace those challenges, leaning hard on his initial belief that he’d found an untapped, potentially lucrative market — “a secret hiding in plain sight,” he says.

Plenty of other successful businesspeople agree with Loosararian on the importance of endurance. “The most successful people have a lot of skill, but they also have grit,” billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC Make It in 2022. “In other words, they’re willing to put up with the setbacks and the inevitable challenges that people deal with.” 

Unwelcoming environments, like the ones where Gecko’s robots typically operate, are “actually where we’re needed the most as innovators and designers and technologists,” adds Loosararian.

Gecko’s challenging origins helped shape its company culture for the better, he says: Determination and resilience now “permeate” throughout Gecko’s 300-plus employees.

“Everyone has to drive robots and run the software, and has to understand how the built world works. And, man, that’s exciting,” Loosararian says. “You want to get a group of people that are all convicted in that value.”

CNBC