For a few days this summer, the air in Chicago was the worst in the world as a great column of wildfire smoke from the northern forests of Manitoba drifted southeast across the continent. On most days, that distinction belongs to the megacities of Asia and Africa: Jakarta, Delhi, Kinshasa, and other cities regularly have air that for Americans and Canadians is intolerable, something we only experience during an outburst of nature. In the summer of 2021, San Francisco glowed a deep orange, besieged by smoke from the Sierras during a particularly nasty fire season. In a city whose summer is usually defined by the old joke, “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” it was a shocking scene.

Air pollution has steadily gone down in North America over the last few generations, but failure to contain wildfires in the West has introduced a totally new problem. “Growing up in Ontario, I'd never seen wildfire smoke before,” said Mike Feldstein, an entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Jaspr, which produces air scrubbers for homes and businesses. “Now it's an annual occurrence.”

Mike and I are talking in the upstairs living area of a sprawling house on the wooded shores of Lake Austin. In the middle of July, the Texas heat is brutal, but the air near the water is cooler. Most of the Jaspr team, including Mike, wear a simple company logo tee-shirt. Throughout the house, Jaspr units whir away; a sauna sits on the grass near the water, a weight set sits on the dock next to a cold plunge. The garage is full of air scrubbers waiting to be delivered. If you know anything about Austin, it’s the perfect town for this type of business. It has a large population with a significant contingent of affluent citizens concerned about health.

The Jaspr house office is the picture of comfort. But Jaspr was made from disaster; and Mike’s chops as an entrepreneur were, too.

As a teenager in Thornhill, Ontario, Mike Feldstein started selling iPod minis on eBay when he was 13, sourcing the hardware from a family friend. At 15, with $12,000 from his bar mitzvah as capital, he figured out how to import Lacoste shirts from China. He sold them for $40 to “cool kids” and more to others, earning $30,000 in a few months. Similar ventures with hats and sweaters failed. At the University of Guelph a few years later, he did cell phone repairs for a year, eventually dropping out.

In 2013 at the age 23, his focus took a dramatic turn. Historic floods inundated Calgary, Alberta. He flew from Toronto, and planned to distribute flyers from door to door advertising flood relief. He managed to get millions of dollars of contracts with hotels and apartment complexes. To remove water from one flooded hotel, Mike found a water pump used by Iowa hog farms, and had it trucked to Calgary. He hired landscaping crews for flood restoration labor and lived in a U-Haul. It was from-scratch entrepreneurship, but it worked wonders and Mike netted $350,000 Canadian in six weeks. Thus, a career in disaster relief was born.

In May 2016, a wildfire ripped through the northern Alberta oil town of Fort McMurray. Nearly a hundred thousand people were evacuated, and much of the city was destroyed: five-thousand homes were lost to fire. More than ten-thousand were damaged by smoke. Fort McMurray had been a quintessential boom-town. The Athabasca oil sands have among the largest proven reserves in the world. As the price of oil rallied from 2000 to 2008, workers poured in, chasing the opportunity. An oil worker could make six-figures in US dollars in a year or more. And then in just two days, it was a cataclysm. Mike, with one flood under his belt, made his way to Alberta. The Canadian news had indicated that the insurance companies were prepared to spend $10 billion, and he resolved to get in on some of that by figuring out how to help.

Entering Fort McMurray felt like crossing into a war zone. The contractors were allowed to enter before the homeowners. Military checkpoints were placed at all major roads, but Mike’s hastily printed Staples business cards for Alberta Fire Restoration granted access to restricted areas. He and his team crammed into a single hotel room, sleeping on air mattresses amid cardboard dividers, as most hotels remained unsafe. The whole town reeked of smoke. Furnace filters were caked in yellow, black, and green grime. Home walls had a thick layer of black ash.

Severe smoke damage required cleaning of the whole home, far beyond typical home fires caused by stoves and other appliances. And needless to say, there was no playbook for what to do when an entire city was covered in a thick layer of black ash. Mike learned on the fly.

To purify a home from mold or fire, you need an air scrubber. Inside a scrubber, a fan draws air across a series of dense filters, each layer trapping particles like mold spores, smoke residue, pollen, or dust. The machine’s pre-filter catches larger debris, while HEPA filters snare finer pollutants. The cleaned air is pushed out through a vent. “An air scrubber is just a badass air purifier. It has bigger everything, but it’s ugly and loud. So loud.”

By Autumn, months into the fire restoration effort, his team had restored 150 houses, and the insurance checks were adding up — almost $7 million Canadian by the time it was done. But clients soon called and were sick again. In severe cases, babies were in the hospital. Mike tested the air and found recontamination. The haze of the fire lingered over parts of Alberta for months. In most cases insurance companies wouldn’t pay for a second cleaning, so Mike left air scrubbers behind; within hours, the air was safe again. Eventually his team needed the machines for other jobs. As it turned out, the consumer air purifiers at the big- box stores were not effective at all compared to the heavy-duty scrubbers.

“Why don't people just have air scrubbers for their homes?” Mike recalls asking then. “Can't we just make a scrubber that's not ugly and not loud?”

“There was definitely a severe toll on my health spending six months in Fort McMurray, breathing in heavy metals and all that crap,” he said. And he resolved to not do the exact same type of work. His plan was to produce a high-quality air scrubber designed for wildfire smoke; he’d travel Canada during the season and sell a few thousand in bursts. Otherwise, he’d spend more time with his family, from whom he was separated during the Calgary and Fort McMurray periods.

He recalls travel in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, where he first encountered an air purifier store. “I was clear that I wanted to make this product. I had some capital to do it,” he said. The plan was to launch for the 2020 wildfire season.

Mike’s second child was born in February, 2020, just before everything changed. Jaspr launched six weeks later, and as a result of a conversation with a friend, the first customers were all dentists. The provincial government of Ontario was requiring dentists to put air purifiers in offices in order to re-open after the first pandemic lockdown. Fire season was months away, but all of a sudden Mike was selling out. “So that's why we were a need, not a want. There's nothing better than selling during a need.”

Jaspr originally launched as Jaspr Medical (“If you have a high price and ‘medical’ in your name, that’s all the trust you need to sell to doctors and dentists,’ he recalls his friend saying).

Jaspr Medical sold a million dollars Canadian worth of units in the first week in business, using a Webflow site with an Intercom chat feeding Shopify links to customers one by one. To air freight the units from China cost a few hundred dollars each (surface transport would be too slow). Mike’s wife, baby in tow, and their nanny helped him label the first fifty boxes, which were delivered around Ontario by couriers.

“If we didn't launch at that time, I would have given up on Jaspr a long time ago,” Mike said. It would be three years before Jaspr made sales available directly on their website. Buyers had to call, and Mike would discuss their issues — mold, pollen, whatever — with them. Why? I asked him.

“I was a big fan of Kevin Kelly's essay, A Thousand True Fans, and I wanted our first thousand customers to be our evangelists, our ambassadors, so that when the bad reviews or attacks started coming, we'd have a loyal army of supporters,” he answered. “I was hand delivering Jasprs, I was going to the dental clinic. I knew my customers and they knew us.”

When Mike activated the Shopify storefront in 2023, it took only a few moments for the first sale to come through. “The fact that we got a sale in our first few minutes was a bit of dopamine and a sign that I needed to know that people will buy an expensive air purifier online.”

Today, nearly 20,000 Jaspr units have been sold. Users subscribe to get two filter replacements every year, and there’s a lifetime warranty.

“Life in Canada during COVID sucked so hard,” Mike said. “We left Ontario, we moved to Kelowna, but it was so draconian. Texas is the total opposite of that. I remember we came in January of 2022 with our baby. I did not have it on our radar, like moving here, but my wife Rachel said she wasn’t surprised at all that we ended up living here.”

“The Canadians who come here are serious and kill it," he said of his home country. “We had nothing but headwinds before. So we're swimming like there's headwinds and now all of a sudden there's tailwinds.”

Over 95% of the revenue comes from the United States, a dramatic reversal from 99% Canadian revenue at one point.

“The US is so easy. There's no red tape, no regulations basically. There's risk capital. In Canada, if you want to do business with someone, they have these secretaries and gatekeepers, and there's no way you're meeting them. In the US, if you say you have a business opportunity, people invite you inside to discuss. There is an openness to talk about doing business together.”

“I'm a mold man who has a wife who likes interior design,” Mike says as a preamble to our discussion about why the Jaspr looks the way it does. The challenge, basically, was to use an effective industrial machine but give it a subtle appearance suitable for homes. “I knew I wanted it to be steel, not plastic. I knew I wanted it to be cylindrical.”

Along the way, the team has been inspired by the Elon Musk model of radically simplifying design in order to simplify manufacturing. “We are the taco truck of air filters. It's hard to be the Cheesecake Factory,” Mike says. By this he means that Jaspr is a single-SKU business. There is one Jaspr model for sale, and all efforts are oriented toward improving the Jaspr.

The early iterations led to a lot being taken away. The first Jasprs turned off at random times. It turned out the tilt sensor was vibrating, triggering a shutoff. It also turned out that for a unit in which the fan is fully enclosed, a tilt sensor isn’t required by law. Delete. Sometimes the units would power off in the dark. There was an unnecessary light sensor. Delete. “A lot of air purifiers have Wifi and Bluetooth and apps,” Mike said. “No. None of that shit.” Delete, delete, delete.

Mike is a bit of a wacky guy, to tell you the truth. In the time I’ve spent with him, he has usually lost his shoes. He marauds around the neighborhood in a golf cart, and has a funny way of saying things. He is a man full of energy and dreams; he's purchased more real estate in the neighborhood and plans to open a school, conceived as the healthiest school in the world. A good number of employees followed him from Canada to the States.

In all of Mike's episodes of disaster and adventure, it never occurred to him to not do anything. Pump water out of people’s houses? Sure. Learn how to use air scrubbers to repair smoke damage? Yes.

The word entrepreneur comes from French, entreprendre, to undertake [something]. And it captures something essential about a person like Mike: relentlessly action-oriented, never overthinking a problem, just figuring it out. Where would we be without people who run toward problems like this — because they can’t help but see them as an opportunity to do good by others and make money, too?

Or, as Gordon Gekko epically declared in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." If there were a better word in Mike's case, it might be restlessness. He is restlessly in search of problems to try solving, and mentally wired for action. Human health has got to be the biggest problem of all. Who is going to run toward it?