New Beginnings: Creating Companies, Raising Children, and Building a Life Worth Living (Dare to Be Great: A Life in Five Acts)

From the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute to the startup trenches — and home by bedtime.

After helping build the technology behind modern self-driving cars, Todd Jochem faced a harder challenge: turning research into real companies while raising three kids with his wife, Barb.

New Beginnings follows the founding of AssistWare Technology and Applied Perception — two ventures born from cutting-edge autonomous navigation and computer vision research — through the brutal translation from prototype to product to successful exit. But this isn't a startup playbook. It's an honest account of what entrepreneurship actually costs when the stakes include mortgages, sleepless toddlers, and a marriage that has to survive the chaos.

Told with warmth, humor, and Midwestern restraint, this memoir captures the years when everything happened at once: first customers and first steps, investor pitches and preschool pickups, the weight of other people's livelihoods and the sound of three kids cheering for each other in the front yard.

Book Three in the Dare to Be Great series — a five-volume memoir that weaves family, grit, innovation, and the pursuit of excellence into the arc of one life lived on purpose.

Written first for family. Shared for anyone who's ever tried to build something that matters — at work and at home.