Jake Jolis
Founder, Answering Machine

📍 Current City: Los Angeles, CA
🎓 Education: Stanford (Dropped Out After Sophomore Year) & Y Combinator Alum
📞 Claim to Fame: Building an AI phone receptionist for small businesses with Answering Machine
🚀 Entrepreneurial Journey: Dropped out of Stanford to start Verbling, raised from Y Combinator & Sam Altman
💡 Superpower: Turning overlooked problems into game-changing startups
🏆 Fun Fact: Accidentally leaked his phone number in an SEC filing—leading to the idea for his current company, Answering Machine

For Jake Jolis, the best startup ideas don’t always come from boardrooms—they come from real life problems. His latest venture, Answering Machine, was sparked by an accident: years ago, he mistakenly listed his personal phone number in an SEC filing. The number got picked up by Google, and soon, he was flooded with scam calls and customer inquiries for his old company, Verbling. As an investor at Matrix Partners, he was funding AI startups while also dealing with an endless stream of missed calls—until he saw an opportunity.

That “aha” moment led him to launch Answering Machine, an AI-powered phone receptionist that picks up calls for small business owners like plumbers and electricians when they’re too busy to answer. “Missed calls mean missed revenue,” Jake told Forbes, which recently covered Answering Machine’s rise. The startup, still bootstrapped, has already handled thousands of calls and is pioneering AI for Main Street businesses—a space largely ignored by Silicon Valley.

But Jake isn’t new to the startup grind. He dropped out of Stanford after his sophomore year to start Verbling, a video chat-based language learning platform that scaled to millions of users and 10,000+ teachers. Y Combinator backed him, Sam Altman invested, and the company was eventually acquired. First by Busuu in 2020, then as part of a $436M all-cash acquisition by Chegg.

After Verbling, Jake spent six years as a Partner at Matrix Partners. Now, he’s back in the founder seat, proving once again that the best businesses don’t just chase trends—they solve real problems.

For Jake, entrepreneurship isn’t just about starting companies—it’s about finding the invisible opportunities hiding in plain sight.