Behind the Design: Jack Duffy-Protentis, “I Didn’t Like Having Fun at a Cost”
Jack Duffy-Protentis is, and always has been a gearhead. At the age of ten, he began restoring a 1964.5 Fastback Mustang (you’ll have to ask him why there’s a half-year in there). He loved recreational vehicles — ATVs, snowmobiles, dirt bikes, jet skis – especially when they broke, and he got to fix them again. In fact, most of the time, he’d get them broken to begin with.
At the age of eight, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called Stargardt, a degenerative disease that caused him to lose his central vision. Imagine telling a gearhead he would never be able to drive a car.
“But I always liked working on these things,” Jack says of his passion for recreational activities, “And so I just kind of stuck with it.”
He makes what must have been an enormous force of spirit and motivation seem simple. But maybe to him, it was simple – as in, he simply wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of his passions.
Jack had to bring about some modifications, of course. He has an adorable guide dog named Adonis. While he can’t drive a car, he can drive jet skis with a passenger behind him. He still has peripheral vision, so he can see the edges of the pond, just not things that are right in front of him.
As for ATVs, Jack explains that he initially goes down a trail slowly to make sure there are no obstacles before retracing his steps faster and faster each time – a technique he also applies to skiing. He laughs when he tells me about a spot in his hometown in eastern Massachusetts where everyone uses ATVs, even though it’s “a bit frowned upon.”
For his mechanic work, he stopped wearing gloves and began relying more on his sense of touch. He tells me that some of his car friends sometimes call him for help because Jack can visualize some internal car parts by touch better than they can see them.
When it came time to decide his college major, it wasn’t much of a question. Childhood dreams of becoming an inventor – or, very specifically, the person who designs and builds roller coasters – led to his presidency of the high school robotics team and then a mechanical engineering degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). It was at WPI that he took a class on SOLIDWORKS.
“There’s something about 3D modeling that itched a part of my brain that I didn’t know existed,” he laughs. “SOLIDWORKS was my favorite class because of that.” Jack tells me that he loves how everyone can build the same product in different ways, as well as the “dance” he does in his brain to figure out what the right steps are.
The first thing he ever designed with SOLIDWORKS was a small cube with a hex extrusion on one side and a cylinder extrusion on the other. It’s a far cry from what he designs now: fully-fledged electric jet skis for his startup company, eSki.
It all started with his thesis project.
“The idea came from loving recreational vehicles,” he explains. “They brought me to a lot of truly beautiful places in nature. The tops of mountains in the winter, hundreds of miles into the woods. But I started realizing that they do a lot of damage to the environment, which I didn’t care for. I didn’t like having fun at a cost.”
Through research, Jack understood that jet skis were the best place to start electrifying recreational vehicles. Since then, he hasn’t stopped, not even when COVID prevented him from completing his thesis.
When it came time to look for a job post-graduation, Jack told himself: “Man, somebody is going to do this. I’d like to be the one to do it, and for the right reasons.” Not because it was trendy, but because Jack wanted to find a different way to pursue his passions.
If you’re getting a sense of deja vu, you’re not alone. Once again, Jack was confronted with a situation in which things could not continue as they were. And so, once again, he found a different way.
While researching how to get a SOLIDWORKS license as an individual, Jack stumbled upon a SOLIDWORKS form for startups. He filled it out and sent it in, and before he knew it, he’d gotten three free licenses. That was before he’d even put a team together.
“Okay, I got this,” Jack remembers thinking, “now I just need people to use it!”
That doesn’t mean things have been easy, however. Jack majored in engineering, not business, so it took him a while to wrap his head around everything from investment styles to entrepreneurial lingo. The zooming software he usually uses also doesn’t work well with SOLIDWORKS, so Jack compensates with a dual-screen setup and the built-in Windows magnifier.
But he might not have to do that for long. At an event demoing SOLIDWORKS 2025, part of the SOLIDWORKS development team asked Jack to work with them to make the software more accessible.
“I’m changing SOLIDWORKS not just for me but for everybody who needs assistive technology. It’s awesome.”
Now, Jack’s most significant difficulty is one that most entrepreneurs can relate to: funding. With a recently awarded MassCEC Grant under his belt, however, Jack hopes to continue to drive eSki’s technology forward, refine a prototype, and attract more investors.
“I decided, hey, I’ve been eating ramen for four years,” he jokes, “what’s another couple?”
