About this episode

Jason Ballard shares his deeply personal journey of love, loss, and the belief that fueled his entrepreneurial spirit.

Before Jason Ballard became the CEO of Icon, a groundbreaking company using 3D printing and robotics to revolutionize how humanity builds homes and even NASA-backed lunar habitats, he was a skinny kid from East Texas with big ideas and a wife who believed those ideas could change the world. In this deeply personal and unguarded conversation, the visionary entrepreneur sits down with David Begnaud to share the story of Jenny Yuri Ballard, the woman who believed in him when belief was the only thing they had. Jason opens up about meeting Jenny at a summer camp in Colorado, dancing with her all night in a barn, and writing a letter to her parents to introduce himself before driving 20 hours from Texas to South Dakota just to see her for less than a day. He talks about the moment she broke her neck in Nepal, how he bribed an official to get a visa and drove through the night searching hospital after hospital in New Delhi until he found her. He shares what it felt like to be married to someone who never counted the cost, who said let's move into my parents' basement so he could chase a dream, and who maxed out credit cards to buy concrete so they could finish printing the world's…

People in this episode

Host: David Begnaud

Guest: Jason Ballard

Topics covered

• grief
• purpose
• entrepreneurship
• 3D printing
• personal story
• belief

Keywords

• grief
• purpose
• 3D printing
• entrepreneur
• personal story
• belief
• ICON

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ICON

Books & works: 3D printed house

Places: East Texas, South Dakota, Nepal, New Delhi

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