SLO LIFE Oct/Nov 2020

kay, Jesse, let’s start from the
beginning. Where are you from? I
was born in San Luis Obispo at Sierra
Vista hospital in 1985 and then grew
up in SLO. I’m one of nine; it’s a
little bit of a Brady Bunch situation.
So, there was six original Dundons.
My mother passed away when I was a
young kid and my dad met a woman Owho had two kids already and then, together, they had one more. And
that makes nine, so I would be the eighth of nine. The oldest eight are
basically every two years over a fifteen-year span. So, there is a large
range in ages. It was competitive for scarce resources. Let’s put it that
way. Attention, rides, carpools, food, those sorts of things.
Tell us about your dad. My dad was a philosophy professor. He was
a big believer in dinner with the whole family every night. There was
always robust dialogue about various issues. As a result, a number of
my older siblings went on to become lawyers. I would say, to a fault,
we’re all very opinionated. My dad was a Cal Poly professor and then
moved us up to Davis when I was a kid. He then transferred to Sac
State, so I spent a lot of my childhood in Davis and Sacramento.
It was around that time I started mowing lawns and walking dogs,
those sorts of things. Davis is a big bike town, so I got my first job at
a bike shop the day I turned fourteen, which is the earliest you can
get a work permit. I worked there fixing bikes for the next three years
through high school.
What happened next? When I was seventeen, I came down to Cal
Poly to study Industrial Technology. I was in the Santa Lucia dorms.
On the first day, I met my business partner, Kevin Rice, there in the
dorms. We’ve been friends ever since. While we were in school, Kevin
ran the local branch of a residential house painting company. They’d
set up college students to do house painting jobs in their hometown.
He managed a crew here. I did a similar thing for a screen-printing
company. My job was to go out and drum up business from the
campus clubs, and fraternities and sororities, and sports teams, and
stuff like that for T-shirt orders and apparel orders. Also, I played
rugby in high school and in college and, at that time, they had a
five-year eligibility window for collegiate rugby. So, you could either
take five years to get your bachelors and play all five years, or you
could do a four plus one program and get your bachelor’s in four and
then as long as you got your master’s at the same school, they would
extend your eligibility. And, so, I was one of the few on the team that
decided to graduate in four and then stick around for a fifth year. And
I was on the fence actually, I almost left and didn’t do the master’s
program and almost took a job at Shopatron. Then, I just decided to
stick around and get my masters and play another year of rugby. So,
after I graduated with my bachelor’s, that summer we started a carpet
cleaning business.
Interesting… We looked at the map and we said, “Hey, in San Luis
Obispo there’s 20,000 students or so. Let’s say four or five to a house,
which means there’s four or five thousand student houses in town,
or apartments, and they all need to get their carpets cleaned every
summer when they move out.” We said, “If we could get that, it’s
a market value of a hundred bucks or so per house, so if we could
get a certain percentage of this market it would
work.” And we’d basically do a similar model to
the house painting Kevin did, where we would
line up jobs all spring and then do carpet cleaning
all summer. Then we could test it out one year
in San Luis Obispo and then scale it out similar
to how the house painting thing worked, or how
my screen printing thing worked. So we started a
company called University Steam Cleaners. This
was 2007, so this was my fourth year, Kevin had
already graduated a little bit early and we did
all the marketing all spring, and then we did the
carpet cleaning all summer before we realized a
couple things.
What did you realize? One of them was that
the sales and marketing piece was not the most
challenging part of it. Doing good work and
making your customers happy was quite a bit
different, especially when you didn’t invest in the
right level of equipment. We didn’t have a $50,000
truck-mounted steam cleaning machine, which
is what, as it turns out, any actual commercial
operation needs to use. We got the $3,000
machine and we didn’t really have any training. I
think we had a certain amount of hubris, I’d say,
going into it, and we learned a lot. We came out
of it with a great respect for people in the trades,
and doing proper training, and investing in the
right equipment to get the job done. But after one
summer of mostly doing the work ourselves and
employing some of our friends to help us with it,
we threw in the towel on that and then wanted to
get into something that was a little bit more based
in technology. Something that wasn’t hard physical
labor, so we moved on to start the next business.
What was the next venture? It was a company
called WiHire. We had lived in various houses on
Hathaway for most of college, not all of college,
but most of the time after college. It was the street
that taught us everything we knew at the time. It
was funny, actually. We started that business a few
months later. It was initially about, again, solving
another college problem right in front of us, which
was how to help college students get jobs and
internships, and how to help companies better
recruit for interns and entry-level employees.
The economy was going great, so we thought it
was going to be a great idea. We had some cool
features in our platform for things like video
resumes, and campus clubs, and interest groups
using this recruiting channel, and those sorts of
things. So, we did it, but we didn’t know anything
about technology. So once again, we chose to start
a business that we had no training in whatsoever
[laughter]. But, I will say, we had learned enough >>
OCT/NOV 2020 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | 39