He's in Costco, Scheels, and Walmart. He's Also Almost Out of Money.

Scott Jensen made $20 an hour as a nine-year-old selling snow cones. He saved $500 of it to upgrade from a hand-cranked machine to an electric one. Fifteen flavors. Set up at events around the Phoenix Valley. He had no idea what payroll was until he was 23 years old.

By his mid-30s he was a director at a multibillion-dollar company, living in China as an expat with five kids, fluent in Mandarin, auditing factories, climbing the corporate ladder fast enough that Honeywell paid his way through Thunderbird — the number one international business school in the world.

Then Covid hit, he evacuated China, and he quit.

Six years later, his 401k is gone. The HELOC is tapped. His wife is terrified. His product is in Costco, Scheels, Walmart, Macy's, Amazon, and the Boy Scouts of America. And he's still figuring out the cash flow.

This is what it actually looks like to build something real.

The Kid Who Never Got a Paycheck

Before any of the corporate chapter, Scott Jensen was a serial kid entrepreneur in a way that reads less like a résumé line and more like a personality trait that couldn't be contained.

Snow cones at eight. Balloon animals at fifteen — he learned after a classmate in geometry class mentioned he was pulling $30 an hour on weekends from tips. Scott picked it up, started working restaurants across the Phoenix Valley, and was making $50 to $100 an hour. Then palm tree trimming. Then a vending machine business. Then five years of wedding videos.

He got his first actual paycheck at 23. He didn't know what payroll meant.

The family moved to Mexico when he was young, so he grew up speaking Spanish. When it came time to serve a mission for his church, he assumed he'd go Spanish-speaking. His assignment came back: Mandarin Chinese, Taiwan. He was devastated. Learning Chinese was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.

He came home two years later in love with the language, the culture, and the Chinese business mindset. It changed the entire direction of his life.

"Go Work for Corporate First"

When Scott got home from Taiwan, he knew what he wanted: run his own import-export sourcing business, use the Mandarin, build something. He went to a friend who was doing exactly that — a middleman connecting US companies with Chinese factories. He asked to be hired. He offered to work for free.

The friend, a father figure to him, said no. Not yet. His advice was clear: go work for a big company first. Learn how they do business overseas. Then come back.

So Scott went corporate. Fifteen years at Honeywell, Tyco Electronics, and Carlisle — all multibillion-dollar companies. He led a team of 11 engineers doing new product development and value engineering, redesigning medical and aerospace components to meet FDA and ISO requirements. He was the liaison between engineers and Chinese factories. He learned to build tech packs. He learned to manage iteration cycles. He learned what it takes to take a product from concept to qualified manufacturing.

He hated most of it. Monday mornings, often in tears. The red tape. The fixed salary. The promotions that kept coming but never changed the fundamental fact that he was working for someone else.

In 2021, two years after evacuating China with his family when Covid hit, he finally quit.

The Dean Backpack and 11 Prototypes

Near Zero exists because backpacking is one of those things people think about for years before ever doing it. The barrier isn't desire. It's complexity. Which tent. Which sleeping bag. Which pad. Which cook system. Which stove. Which pack. And will any of it actually fit together once you buy it?

Scott's answer is the Dean — a clam-shell backpack that opens like a suitcase, labeled inside so you know exactly where your tent goes, where your sleep system goes, where your cook kit goes. Everything organized. Everything tested together. Ship it to your door and you're trail-ready in 30 minutes.

He named it after his dad, who first took him backpacking.

The tech pack for the Dean is 80 pages. The first version went through 11 prototypes. Scott was hiking the Grand Canyon with early versions, making notes, going back to the factory, tweaking, iterating. It took three years of development before the first unit ever sold. Before that, he'd already built out over 100 SKUs — titanium cookware, tents, sleep systems, stoves — everything that goes in the pack.

The whole thing is now patented. A second patent is pending.

When Stu called it the first-aid kit of backpacking — everything you need in one place, quality you can trust when you're 20 miles from anyone — Scott nodded. That's exactly what it is. And you can't fake that in lightweight gear. Cheap tents fail in the field. Sleep systems that don't work at altitude mean a very long night. The kit has to be right or the whole promise falls apart.

In Costco. Almost Out of Cash.

Here's the part most founder stories skip over.

Near Zero is in Scheels. In Walmart. In Macy's. In Amazon. In the Boy Scouts of America. They got into Costco. They're doubling sales year over year. And Scott Jensen is burning through the last of his personal savings to stay alive.

The problem is structural. Retail is brutal on cash. When you sell direct-to-consumer, you collect money per sale. When you go into Scheels or Costco, they want to start online, which means drop ship, which means you're holding the inventory and fronting the capital while waiting for individual orders to trickle in. Net 60, net 90 payment terms are standard. You need purchase order financing to bridge the gap, and you only get that once the POs are large enough to matter.

Scott raised $100,000 through a SAFE — a simple agreement for future equity — on WeFunder. The minimum investment is $100, which means anyone who wants to own a piece of a backpacking company they believe in can get in for less than a tank of gas. There are perks: invest enough and you get a backpacking trip to Arizona with Scott and the team. Everyone who invests gets regular financial updates.

He's done the SEC filings. He's finishing the audit process. He's building the cap table properly. He's doing it right. He's also doing it while nearly out of runway, which is just the reality of what it looks like to build a product business the hard way.

Barriers Nobody Wants to Build

Stu made a point in this conversation worth repeating. Every hard thing Scott has done — learning Mandarin, spending 15 years in corporate supply chain, living in a factory town in China for two years, building an 80-page tech pack, running 11 prototype cycles, managing a 100+ SKU line — is a barrier.

Not a problem. A barrier to entry.

The large outdoor brands could look at what Near Zero has built and theoretically copy it. But they'd have to do all of it: find the factories, develop the relationships, build the supply chain, iterate the product, prove the bundle concept, get the patent. They won't. It's too much work for something unproven. But once it's proven, the easier path is acquisition. Buy Near Zero. Sell the Dean under their existing brand.

Scott knows this. He built the business with it in mind. The complexity that's currently killing his cash flow is the same complexity that makes the business worth something real to a strategic buyer someday.

What Stuck With Me

There's a version of Scott Jensen's story that looks like a disaster in progress. Depleted savings. Terrified spouse. Cash runway measured in months. Doubling revenue at a rate that still isn't fast enough.

But that's not actually what it looks like. What it looks like is someone who was built for exactly this. A kid who ran five businesses before he ever had a corporate job. A guy who worked for free for a mentor who told him to go get prepared first. A man who moved his whole family to China for two years and spent every day of it learning something that would later make his business possible.

The snow cone machine upgrade at nine years old — saving $500 to get to the next level of his own operation — is the same instinct as the 11 prototype cycles on the Dean. The same instinct as the 80-page tech pack. He's always been iterating toward something better. That doesn't stop when the savings run out.

The cash problem is real. But it's the last problem.