He nearly lost everything on three failed startups - then built a $150 million business selling tires

Not every founder story starts with a flash of genius. Sometimes it starts with a bad idea, a family business, and a venture capitalist who sees something you don't.

That's essentially how Jared Kugel ended up building Tire Agent, an e-commerce platform that has grown into a $150 million business. According to a profile in Fast Company, Kugel had spent over a decade working in his family's tire distribution business before pitching a VC on what he himself considered a questionable concept - a search engine for tire and wheel products.

The unlikely pitch that changed everything

In 2017, Kugel brought the idea to a venture capitalist, fully expecting to be turned away. Instead, the firm offered him $100,000 in seed funding and a place at its New York City-based tech incubator, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. It was the kind of break that most aspiring founders dream about.

But the path from that early vote of confidence to a nine-figure business was anything but smooth. Before landing on the model that worked, Kugel reportedly cycled through three failed startup concepts - a stretch that pushed him close to financial ruin and, at one point, left him nearly homeless.

Why this story is worth paying attention to

There's a version of the startup world that gets a lot of airtime - the overnight success, the perfectly timed pivot, the founder who just knew. Kugel's story is a useful corrective to all of that. It's messy, it's uncomfortable, and it's far more representative of how entrepreneurship actually works for most people.

It also raises an interesting question about expertise. Kugel didn't come to the tire industry as an outsider with a disruptive vision - he came from inside it, with years of operational knowledge that eventually helped him build something durable. Sometimes the unfashionable industries, the ones nobody is excited about pitching at dinner parties, are exactly where the opportunity is hiding.

Tire Agent sits at the intersection of a fragmented, largely offline market and the shift toward e-commerce - which, it turns out, is a pretty good place to build a business. Whether you've ever thought about where your tires come from or not, Kugel's journey from near-homelessness to $150 million is the kind of founder story that actually teaches you something.