For his friends, these business ideas
conjure forth many smiles and memories, as we picture Jake's
imaginative and analytic mind scanning the world economy
for gaping holes that needed to be attended to. Please
feel free to add your own recollections so that we can all
share in them.
Many friends recall "all that
stock swapping stuff" but none of us can recall the
specifics, not least because they were always pretty complicated.
Instead, many people remember other business schemes, often
related to spotting arbitrage opportunities in the material
economy and other disappointments with regard to other sorts
of misaligned ratios.
1) His bathroom cabinet was full
of ibuprofen creams from Europe that he wanted to import
to America. They actually worked quite well.
2) Also from England, he brought
back all these Nicotene inhalers that he thought, if introduced
to the States, would give the patch a run for its money.
3) Following the national tobacco
suits, Jake knew that a new company wouldn't be liable for
damages, so he proposed the creation of a new cigarette
company that couldn't be hit for damages. One person writes:
"I think the biz scheme I heard most about was Cloud
9, the cigarrette company. He loved the pun of the title,
and as I recall, he thought that cigarette containers were
ugly and he liked the idea of having blue cloudy boxes;
instead of light, regular, extra strength he was going to
make them 1,2,3. He thought American cigarettes were terrible
and ranted often about the high tar to nicotine ratio. He
would buy cartons of Silk Cuts abroad (not available in
the States) and bring them home for later consumption. He
had done a fair amount of research and Silk Cuts had the
best nicotine to tar ratio. I think he thought the idea
of the cigarette company was a good one from a business
standpoint, but I also think he liked the idea of doing
something that was so unPC."
4) He was very interested in the
gray market. He thought he could import cigarettes
and the like that had been sold to third-world countries
and sell them back to stores in the U.S. Because the
dollar was strong, he'd make a profit.
5) He talked about inventing a coffee
stirrer/straw that could tell the coffee drinker whether
the coffee he or she was consuming was in fact decaf or
vice versa. The problem, Jacob said, was that they
couldn't get the pricing cheap enough, down to 5 cents a
straw, to do so.
6) He wanted to invent and package
a hangover cure.
7) He talked passingly about opening
a movie store in Tribeca because the movie store a few blocks
away was so terrible and had about the worst cataloguing
system in the world.
8) He had apparently conceived of
a new type of fiber optics that he proclaimed was "massively
parallel."
