Entrepreneurship & Business
Alex Bäcker
2 min readAlex Bäcker reflects on his entrepreneurial journey, drawing from his family's rich history of business and scientific achievement to his own early ventures in childhood, college, and graduate school that eventually led him to found his own companies.
I come from a family of scientists and entrepreneurs. My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Hayum Moos, was Albert Einstein's great-great-grandfather. My grandfather, Ernst Moos, had to quit medical school in Berlin due to Nazi oppression and fled to Argentina, where he started two small companies as a penniless Jewish refugee. My uncle Ron Baecker is the founder of several companies, and Professor of Computer Science, Bell Universities Laboratories Chair in Human-Computer Interaction, and founder and Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto, was named a Pioneer of Computer Graphics by ACM SIGGRAPH, has been elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and has been given the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. My mother, Silvia Moos, is the founder of Centralab, Argentina's most important clinical chemistry lab and a state of the art automated facility, and Klik, Argentina's first mental fitness company. My Dad started the Argentina offices of Heidrick & Struggles, headed Korn Ferry South South America for years, then started his own company.
My own first entrepreneurial venture was making and selling ornamental candles with my brothers in the neighborhood, when we were all children --although my brother Nico was the spirit principally behind the candle factory. It got a little more serious in college, designing, making and selling T-shirts and sweatshirts with the university name and logo; we did very well until both partners left the country to pursue scientific studies, sacrificing the venture to science. In grad school, I took a break from earthly profits and founded the Caltech Filmmaking Club, the Caltech Kiteboard Club, the CNS Journal Club (also with Gabriel Kreiman) and the Da Vinci Club (with Dan Lieberman), all of which got funded and exist to this day. It was during this time that I started writing up some of my first inventions. Initially, I thought established companies such as Google would soon catch up to my ideas, so I did nothing. When several years passed and they had still not come up with my inventions, I decided to start Adapt. I have not stopped since. Read The Invention Factory's blog for up-to-date news on my latest ventures.