We believe great work
starts with real people.

I'm Jake Ottiger. I grew up in Cleveland, went to school at Boston College, took a gap year to work at a startup in Lake Tahoe, and then moved to New York City to join Thrive Capital.

I taught myself how to code four years ago. In college, I built what was roughly Facebook for students studying abroad in a single weekend. It reached 84% of students studying abroad at BC by the end of the semester. I onboarded 670 users myself while managing classes. By the end, students were approaching me in the dining hall calling me "the website guy.".

I worked at Ghostwrite, a startup founded by William Guss — an early OpenAI researcher who built the first version of Github Copilot. He convinced me to take a gap year and become his first employee. Over a year and a half, I helped manage the business: selling to enterprise clients at 19, negotiating with public companies, and building AI agents that reached reply rates of 35% on email campaigns.

I was then selected for Thrive Capital's inaugural fellowship program, which led to a full-time job. I became the second engineer on their Product & Engineering team, built the firm's core portfolio reporting dashboard, and contributed to their internal AI research agent.

I started Ottiger, LLC to go back to my roots — sharing how the world was changing with family in Cleveland and craving an outlet to do that everyday. Now I get to share my skillset with the businesses that power our economy.

I'm Patrick Hultquist. I grew up in the small town of Bartlett, Illinois, went to school at Georgia Tech, took time off to work at a startup in Silicon Valley, and then stuck around to make projects with friends.

I've been coding since middle school. My dad brought me into work one snow day at an automotive company. I watched Ben in the warehouse spend 3 hours formatting custom labels — every single day. I built the tool he needed and proceeded to build nine more projects over two months. The shipping manager was so happy that he invited me to his wedding. We'd only known each other for a month.

I continually expanded my scope — from a major Midwestern grocery store chain to an energy services company in New York. In my junior year of high school, my friend and I started a company that made digital album cover displays. We sold it a year later.

In college, I joined Suhail Doshi as the first employee working on Playground, a startup that made tasteful AI images for stickers, shirts, and posters well before ChatGPT and Gemini. After three years, I left Playground and spent seven months traveling the world — sometimes without a phone — meeting interesting people and learning about manufacturing and supply chains.

I joined Ottiger, LLC to serve with passion again. I found joy in my youth building for businesses that powered America and strive to do that here, especially with manufacturers and operationally intensive businesses.