Jake Nickell
Founder and CSO, Threadless

Website

Jake Nickell is a young, entrepreneurial mad man that programs community websites non-stop. He is the founder and CSO of skinnyCorp and Threadless.com, along with countless other side projects.

Jake dreamed up the Threadless concept in 2000 after winning a tee shirt design contest on a short-lived online design forum. The idea of sharing designs and opening them up for fellow artists’ critiques appealed to him; he thought Threadless would be a way to give back to the community by creating actual goods out of the submitted designs.

He led the growth of Threadless, which has culminated in more than 900,000 online users and two physical retail stores in Chicago, and has a number of other projects in the works.