Sam Jactel and the Useful Art of Changing Your Mind

Sam Jactel went to business school to change careers. The company he was building changed along with him. During his time in Kellogg’s Zell Fellows program, Ayble went through multiple pivots. Jactel has described the program’s appeal in unusually personal terms: it invested in the person doing the building. The business could be revised. The founder had to become someone capable of doing the revising.

That distinction gives his story its shape. A young consultant notices that smaller companies are unsettling established ones. He decides he wants a seat on the smaller side of the table. He arrives at Northwestern, takes a class, finds mentors and starts assembling a venture. By September 2026, that venture has announced a $16 million Series A. The tidy version would make the intervening years sound inevitable. His account is full of adjustments.

A pivot is an awkward thing to put in a founder’s portrait. It suggests that an earlier version did not quite work. Yet it also supplies the action: someone had to notice, decide and change course. Jactel’s career is interesting in precisely those moments, when the attractive idea meets the inconvenient question. There are plenty of both in company building. Questions generally charge less for their services.

The small side of the table

Before Ayble, there was Accenture. Jactel worked in strategy consulting with large companies, where he saw established organizations paying attention to younger businesses. The interest ran in several directions: how to defend against them, work with them or learn from them. To a consultant considering his next move, the attention itself was informative. Size did not confer a monopoly on interesting ideas.

His decision to pursue an MBA at Kellogg was deliberate. He wanted to move from consulting into startups, and the school offered an overlap between his existing industry experience and entrepreneurship. The important movement here is from advising a business to being responsible for one. A recommendation can be delivered in a meeting. A company has to survive the following morning, and the morning after that.

Other parts of his résumé widened that view. Flare Capital Partners lists him in its 2020 Flare Scholar cohort. Ginkgo Bioworks gave him experience in growth and product strategy. Today Hypercell Technologies lists him as a co-founder and senior advisor, describing experience in commercialization, investor relations and helping Fortune 500 clients launch products internationally. These roles put him near several different decisions: what to build, who might buy it and who might finance it.

Those are related questions with different answers. An investor can like a market and decline a company. A customer can appreciate an idea and decline to pay. Working across those perspectives gives a founder more ways to be corrected. The useful question is whether he welcomes the correction early enough to act on it.

A family precedent, then a classroom

Jactel was born in France and grew up between Europe and the United States. He describes a family divided between creative and academic traditions: artists on his mother’s side, researchers on his father’s. He also credits his father’s move from corporate marketing and strategy into startups as an influence on his own career. He had worked alongside him in two ventures by the time he discussed that history in 2023.

A career change is easier to imagine when someone close to you has already made one. That does not make the practical work disappear. It makes the option visible. In Jactel’s telling, the family example sits beside formal education, rather than replacing it: Duke University for his undergraduate degree, then Kellogg, where he completed his MBA in 2021.

At Kellogg, Professor David Schonthal’s New Venture Discovery course supplied a place to work on Ayble. Its emphasis was customer discovery: learning enough about a problem before committing to a solution. Schonthal subsequently introduced him to Zell Fellows. For Jactel, the classroom and the company became connected activities. Ideas could be examined in one and tested in the other.

Who gets to question the founder?

The answer, in Jactel’s case, included Kate Wolin. He credits the entrepreneur, investor and Kellogg faculty member with direct guidance during Ayble’s early development. Her contribution included identifying pitfalls and opportunities he might otherwise have missed. Mentorship sounds pleasantly abstract until it requires someone to point out the weakness in the plan you have spent the weekend defending.

His description of Zell puts coaching and leadership development alongside the company’s successive revisions. There is a practical reason to connect them. A business can acquire a new product description in an afternoon. Its founder may need longer to abandon the assumptions behind the old one. The fellowship gave him a setting in which learning how to operate was part of the work.

Jactel’s published reflections also place value on being able to work through uncertainty. That is less glamorous than the popular picture of the founder who sees the entire road in advance. It is more useful when the road changes. Choosing to build a company means accepting decisions for which no one can hand over a complete answer sheet.

“Think like a scientist.”

Sam Jactel, on advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

The phrase has a demanding implication for a person running a business. An experiment needs the possibility of an unwelcome result. Otherwise it is a demonstration staged for an audience already expected to applaud. In a startup, the harder discipline can be deciding what evidence would cause the team to change its mind before the evidence arrives.

A philosopher enters the conversation

Jactel’s interest in philosophy occasionally surfaces in his business conversations. In a 2023 interview with Praveen Suthrum, he turned to Thomas Nagel and the question of what it is like to be a bat. The philosophical problem concerns the distance between knowing a great deal about another creature and knowing its experience from within. It is an unusual reference to encounter in a founder interview, which is part of its appeal.

For anyone trying to understand a customer, that distance is worth considering. A spreadsheet can collect descriptions of behavior without giving its reader the experience behind them. Interviews have limits too. The point is to keep asking, and to leave room for answers that do not fit the founder’s own experience. Jactel has explicitly warned against assuming that every customer resembles the person building the product.

He can discuss ambition in similarly personal terms. Asked which traits had helped him progress, he named empathy, creativity and stubbornness. He also resisted declaring himself an accomplished leader, presenting that as work still underway. The combination makes for a useful tension. Stubbornness helps someone continue. Empathy gives that person a reason to adjust where they are going.

The figure with eight digits

On September 16, 2026, Ayble announced a $16 million Series A led by Neon. Participants included Unum Ventures, Upfront Ventures, M13, Cleveland Clinic Ventures, DigiTx and Accomplice. The announcement put total capital raised above $27 million. Wilson Sonsini, which advised Ayble on the transaction, confirmed the financing in its own account a week later.

For Jactel, the round marked a further stage in the move he had begun at business school. He was now leading a company backed by a group of institutional investors, with a commercial operation to expand and a team to support. Financing gives a business resources to make its next decisions. The decisions still have to be made well.

There is an organizational challenge inside that transition. In the early days, a founder can explain the idea directly to almost everyone involved. As the operation grows, the explanation has to travel through other people. Product choices, hiring and commercial conversations need enough shared purpose to hold together. The leader who once had to understand every question increasingly has to make room for colleagues who understand particular questions better. Seen that way, developing the founder is a task that continues long after business school ends.

The company’s current leadership roster makes the distribution of work visible. Alongside Jactel are people responsible for commercial operations, product, operations and marketing. That is a different picture from the lone founder with an idea. It is also the ordinary reality of getting a company beyond its earliest version: expertise has to spread across an organization.

The round provides a date and a number. The more revealing part of the story remains the preparation behind them: a change in career, a class chosen for a purpose, mentors invited into the process and revisions made before the company arrived at this stage. Those details explain more about Jactel than a fundraising figure can carry on its own.

The photograph after the pitch

There is another image from his Kellogg years: a group beneath the stars in Chile’s Atacama Desert, wearing an assortment of costumes. Jactel shared it alongside his reflections on building Ayble. It gives those years some texture. An MBA involves people and places as well as courses; a founder’s education can include a night that has very little use for a pitch deck.

That is a fitting place to leave him. Jactel’s story contains the familiar ingredients of a startup profile: the degree, the mentors, the investors, the latest round. The distinctive thread is his willingness to describe becoming a founder as a process of learning. He set out to change his career. Along the way, he made room for the company, and its builder, to change too.