‘I love taking VC dollars and turning it into jobs’: inside SendCutSend’s $2.1 billion bet on American metal
Source: Fortune ·
Jim Belosic avoided VCs for years while 60% of the Fortune 500 became customers.
From the source
It started with a steam-powered car. That’s precisely what it sounds like, by the way. In 2017, Jim Belosic was building out what was once a Ford Model A—most famously produced in the late 1920s—to run on a steam engine. “It’s an art,” said Belosic of engineering and re-engineering classic cars. “It starts small, and at some point you’re building drag-racing cars, or a custom chassis, or a big crazy motor. I’d done a lot of that, but it had started getting boring. But saying: ‘Hey, I want to build something powered by steam and drive it around the block,’ that was problem-solving in uncharted territory.” The result: a skeletal cyberpunk wonder that could take a head-turning swirl around the block. However, halfway through the process, Belosic ran into a problem. He wanted the throttle control to have three labeled speeds, inspired by the oxen of the computer game Oregon Trail—“steady,” “strenuous,” and “grueling.” For this to work, he needed tiny, intricate letters, and had no…