Successful Serial Entrepreneur Takes It to the Next Level with JetPack: From Coffee to LA Fires, A Story Only Possible with AI

Remington Hotchkis, a serial entrepreneur in Los Angeles (LA), California, had just seen his latest and biggest venture—Bixby Roasting, a successful D2C subscription coffee business patterned after Dollar Shave Club and Chewy.com—acquired by a much larger company in a successful exit where it could realize its full potential. He should have been celebrating and maybe even relaxing for the first time in six years, surfing at Laguna Beach, and appreciating how he had made people’s lives better by making them happy with better and more accessible coffee.

But he could not. He knew he could do more.

And then his world changed completely on January 7, 2025, when the fires of LA, specifically in the Pacific Palisades, raged out of control and caused billions of dollars of economic damage and even more emotional damage to his friends and community. Fortunately, he and his family were spared the direct devastation this caused, but it was all around him and deeply affected him indirectly. What could he do?

For some reason that is not completely clear to him, he was online and trying to think about this and came across the late January class at MIT on entrepreneurship (MIT EDP) and thought it looked interesting and might be a good distraction at this tough time. He applied, thinking he would not get in, but surprisingly, thanks to Ann Marie Maxwell and Paul Cheek, he was accepted into the program. He headed from LA, where fires were burning hot, to Cambridge, where it was a freezing winter. not sure what was next.

MIT EDP is a program that brings about 70 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship educators from around the world for a fully immersive program where they have to create a new company from scratch in 6 days. On the first night, each student pitches an idea, and then ideas form around about 15% of the ideas proposed. Remington gave a passionate 90-minute talk about the LA fires and the economic and human toll it was taking and how something had to be done. Again, he cleared the bar, and his very general idea was chosen, and he had a team of himself and 7 others from around the world he had never met before.

Over the week, they ran through the 24 steps of the Disciplined Entrepreneurship process, and even more importantly, they were able to use the new JetPack AI Entrepreneurship Assistant to turbocharge their efforts. By the end of the week, they had a real business with customer letters of intent, investors willing to invest, and a highly motivated team.

In an emotional final presentation, the team and Remington talked about how this process, tool, and experience, combined with the human energy of his team, had taken him from being an entrepreneur whose impact was to make people’s lives better with coffee to a whole new level of actually saving their physical, economic, and emotional lives at a level he had never imagined.

I just got off the phone with Remington, and he is not only pursuing this full time with a gusto, commitment, and fulfillment he had never had before, but so is the team that he met for the first time less than 60 days ago. And he continues to use the JetPack tool every day to make course corrections.

Here is an article from Bloomberg that captures and extends this story, but it is truly an incredibly inspirational real-world example of the power that the combination of a proven entrepreneurial framework when combined with the power of AI (embodied here in the JetPack tool) can take even successful serial entrepreneurs to the next level of impact. To me, this bodes very well for the future.