Jeremy FritzhandCrafting Impact
Crafting impact.
“Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves.’” — Lao Tzu
The first ventures were small. They were still ventures.
Both my parents are entrepreneurs. So are their parents. The first job came at four years old, and each one after it taught something the next one needed.
And then there was the goat farm.
JZN Goat Farm — J for Jeremy, Z for Zachary, N for Nicholas. Started with my mom, Gayla, in 2008: 138 acres in Adams County, Ohio, producing artisan goat cheese and meat. She held the only title that mattered — Chief Goat Officer — and I helped manage the entire property.
- Real animals, real chores, real customers — the same lesson as every venture after it.
- A ten-year run, and an exit — we sold the farm in 2018.
- A family venture, literally — the company was named after the founders' kids. Bagru Textiles would later be named after a village. Naming things for the people they belong to became a habit.
Stock photograph (Wikimedia Commons) — swap for a real JZN farm photo.
A NERF war, 28 teams, and my first website.
Wyoming Paranoia. A game we played in high school, run end to end from a free Angelfire page — rules, round-by-round brackets, entries to a Gmail address. My first interaction with a web interface, and it was a lot of fun.
- $5 a player, $25 a team — entry capped at the first 28 teams.
- Over $500 in prize money, plus bragging rights.
- Rounds, semi-finals, a rules page — and a deadline that held.
House rules, verbatim: “Remember you are playing this game at your own risk!!!” and “I will not be accepting calls past 9:00 pm. After that time please send me an email.”
Sold t-shirts. Bought turntables. Then something was missing.
The t-shirt money paid for the DJ equipment. None of it was really about making money — it was about making friends and getting to know people. That was the whole point.
- Then the gap opened up. I told a professor I didn't know what to do with my life, only that I wanted to make an impact and help people.
- She said: start volunteering. So I went to a hospice — end-of-life care — and sat with terminal patients, talking, and reading to them.
Same word, different work.
Hospice in America meant sitting with someone at the end of their life. Hospice in South Africa was mostly HIV/AIDS patients, and it meant going out into the field to deliver food and medicine.
- It was the trip that settled it. I want to help people. I didn't know what kind of help yet — I'd figure that out.
The second trip. The one where the light bulb went off.
The first was in 2000 — twelve years old, backpacking Karnataka with my parents and two brothers, Hampi and Bijapur, and I remember it vividly. I went back in my final year of college with an anthropology and economics professor who ran the social entrepreneurship programme. One day, travelling through Rajasthan, we stopped in a village called Bagru.
A $10,000 grant to go and start something.
Union College offers graduates $10,000 to move abroad and build some kind of hybrid business model. I applied to go and live there, work with the people, and share what I knew. I was awarded the grant. The other Minerva Fellows scattered across the world; I went to India.
We didn't buy coverage. We brought the journalists to Bagru.
Messages out to my network, to publishers, to journalists — then get them to the village to see the history for themselves.
The Ancient Art of Jaipur Block Printing
Women In India Are Putting A Face To Your Clothes
A designer's journey to India's ‘Mecca of printing’
Destinations that let you craft your own memento
How to spot a fake souvenir
The families keeping Rajasthani block printing alive
Ran it until the end of 2012. Then Thunderbird.
A $50,000 endowment to the college meant the grant kept sending fellows to Bagru after I left. I went back to the US for the MBA — and it was a second India, because most of the cohort were Indian and I got on with them immediately.
- President of the student body.
- QuZuu — my first digital product. A YouTube aggregator: queue up videos and it runs as a 24-hour channel. Twitch, or YouTube TV, before either existed. I didn't have the technical skill to push it and my studies took over, so I dropped it.
- ISB exchange — Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, January 2014.
Billions of dollars of supply chain — and my heart was still in India.
Hong Kong, China, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. Supply-chain management and optimisation for a company moving billions of dollars of US retail — Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie, Express. I learned an enormous amount. It was also the years the industry was forced to answer for itself.
Back to Bagru. Studio Bagru.
Founder and CEO. Kept telling the story, kept making product, shipped to over 50 countries — B2B the whole way, to hotels and fashion brands.
- It was never only our company. We introduced buyers to other family-owned workshops in Bagru, and showed them how we started and how we told the story.
- The goal was independence — better business owners, not better suppliers.
- Chhipa — the word means “to print”, and it is also the printers' surname.
nuno stories, “バグルー（インド）のブロックプリント” — youtube.com/watch?v=CR1gog3uRUk
Hand-blocked in Bagru. Shipped to fifty countries.
Cushions, quilts, robes, totes, tablecloths, shirting — made with designers and houses abroad, printed by the same families in the same village.
The airport opened. We flew to Mysore.
Covid hit. My fiancée — she's from Assam — said: why don't we go and do a yoga teacher training. So as soon as flights resumed we went down to Mysore and did one.
- The year the order book stopped turned into the year we learned something else.
Married.
Her parents wanted to invite two thousand people. Covid restrictions capped it at six hundred, which still didn't entirely make sense to me — I'm fairly sure it was a super-spreader event, just before the second wave.
Standard Textile, Cincinnati.
Back to Ohio and into supply chain again, at a big textile company — bath, bed, incontinence care, laundry and cleaning supplies, engineered for durability and sold to hospitals and hotels. A way to settle back into the US.
- Same material, other end of the market — village workshop to global manufacturer.
- Cincinnati again — the city the paper round was in.
Then I found my stride — at a top-10 incubator.
Hamilton County's development platform, run as one family of organisations rather than four separate programmes. I led the startups.
- Alloy Development Co. — the parent.
- Alloy Commercial Capital — the money.
- Alloy Economic Development — the place.
- Alloy Growth Lab — the founders.
Top-10 incubator ranking by UBI Global.
From ideating all the way up to establishing.
Coaching only works if it meets a company where it actually is. This was the shared language: six phases, each with its own validation gate, so everyone in the room agreed on the stage before arguing about the advice.
One startup. Fifty minutes. A room full of operators.
- 1 startup — one company gets the whole room.
- Mentor introductions — everyone says who they are and what they can open.
- 10-minute pitch — no longer, no slides required.
- 40-minute Q&A — the part that earns its keep.
- Scorecard and feedback — written, and it goes back to the founder.
The virtual mentoring programme I ran — morningmentoring.com
Then I built the platform.
“A marketplace for commercial capital, economic development, and startup growth — connecting communities and empowering innovation.” Member spaces, a library, events, direct messages: the room, on the days there is no room.
Ahmedabad — with the family this time.
Third continent, second country, same job description. Move the family, find the school run, start again on day one.
My GitHub: 2024, nothing. Then this.
I had never used GitHub before early 2025. One year later: 189 public repositories — built in the margins of a full-time CEO job, with an infant at home. No engineering degree. Just a decision to start, and a refusal to stop.
Three projects in one month. All public.
Plus AIDev — an open course teaching non-technical people to build websites with AI.
“Catalyzing individuals and organizations to create positive, long-lasting impact.”
Fifteen years and a lot of startups. What I actually love is the same every time: meeting people, understanding the challenge, understanding the strength — and then going at the opportunity.
