Jack O'Sullivan — Founder & Builder

Three places.

Dublin

At 16 I designed and produced a single-speed bike with a Chinese factory and founded Vital Fixies. On my 17th birthday, 165 bikes arrived in a shipping container at my uncle's house, for storage in his basement. I undercut every shop in the city and ran it solo for five years, producing thousands of them — eventually across several factories in China and Taiwan — until I finished school and was ready to take the business up a notch.

The Modmo team at the villa-HQ gates in Ho Chi Minh City

Saigon

After a few months in uni I was bored, and thought my time would be better spent on the ground in Asia working on product development and manufacturing. I left Dublin for Shenzhen, then ended up in Vietnam, where I found a motorbike factory. We made a prototype, shot a video on my iPhone in a car park, and 90 days later we had €2,000,000 of pre-orders from 27 countries. Within a few years we had a 65-person team across Vietnam, Dublin and Germany, had raised $10M, and had thousands of bikes shipped across the world.

Singapore

After 30,000km of motorbike-camping across Southeast Asia — the best reset I've ever had — I'm building baz: an AI engine that turns one idea into a week of motion-graphics video. Back to first principles. Make the hard thing effortless.