Jared Pobre graduated USC in 1999 with a finance degree, took a short detour into wealth management, and quickly pivoted into the early internet industry instead. By 2001, during the dot-com crash and right after 9/11, he was watching startups collapse around him — so naturally, he started his own lead-gen business on the side while working a day job at Autobitel. Within three months it was doing six figures in revenue. He quit soon after.
That business ran on a single client, a mobile carrier called WorldCom Wireless, until WorldCom went bankrupt four months in and left him holding the bag on publisher payments. He diversified, rebuilt, and eventually turned it into Future Ads — a fully bootstrapped ad tech company that grew into nine figures of revenue with no outside investors and no debt. In 2015, a roll-up group bought a third of the business and merged it into a new entity called Propel Media, with Jared staying on as the largest shareholder and eventually executive chairman. Propel later acquired a pre-revenue company called DeepIntent in 2017, which Jared helped fund and build — and sold entirely to private equity.
Around that same time, Jared and his wife built a vacation home in Jackson, Wyoming, and he tried stepping away from entrepreneurship altogether. It didn’t stick. What did stick was a problem he couldn’t solve: the high-alpine climate was wrecking his skin, and nothing made for men actually worked. He started using his wife’s skincare products instead, got real relief, and realized a handful of other guys in Jackson were doing the exact same thing. He spent two years in R&D and ran independent clinical trials before launching Caldera Lab in January 2019 with a single product — The Good, a serum built specifically for aging, dry, weathered skin, something that essentially didn’t exist for men at the time.
The brand stayed fully DTC, grew through COVID without ever getting the bump many beauty brands saw, and scaled to eight figures in revenue entirely bootstrapped before finally raising its first institutional round, a Series A, in 2024. Caldera Lab has since expanded into Nordstrom as its first national retail partner, with the brand now sitting near the top tier of men’s grooming there, alongside a growing lineup that includes the Base Layer, Clean Slate, Grade, and Hydro Layer.
Make sure to check out Caldera + Lab at: https://calderalab.com/
Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX
Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO
Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/
Subscribe to exclusive
Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup
Follow Starting Small:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle
