Founder of the Month: November 2026
In November 2023, Jones put its first nicotine mints on the market. This November, the company turns three, and its co-founder and Co-CEO, Caroline Vasquez Huber (Stern ‘23), is our Founder of the Month.
Jones makes nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) that people actually want to carry: mint lozenges in a design-forward tin, paired with an app and community built around the habits that keep people hooked.
Caroline and her co-founder, Hilary Dubin, built it after struggling to quit vaping themselves. Here is how a pajama company turned into one of the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute's standout startups.
"I cannot leave the house without my Juul"
Caroline and Hilary met at age seven on a soccer field. They played on the same club and travel teams, went to high school together, and both ended up at UPenn, where they shared a house with seven people for all of college.
After graduation, Caroline went into politics, then joined a New York data startup in 2017 where the CEO vaped openly and so did everyone else. “It started out casually,” she says. Almost immediately she couldn’t leave home without her Juul, and every attempt to quit ended with her buying another one.
In 2020 she moved back in with her parents during COVID and finally came clean to her mother, a family physician. Her mom’s first question was how much nicotine she was using: about the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day. Cold turkey was out, but NRT at the dose Caroline actually needed was the way through.
It worked, but buying and using it still felt bad. People brag about Pilates or running while quitting nicotine came wrapped in shame, even though it’s a healthy choice.
Out of Pajamas, Into Nicotine Mints
Caroline started at NYU Stern in 2021, after founding a data-targeting nonprofit for progressive groups in red states. At the same time, she and Hilary were working on a sustainable loungewear brand and began working with the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute through Bootcamp and the Startup Sprint.
During the Startup Sprint, the questions were relentless. What’s the use case? When do people actually need this? Is it a problem worth solving? For loungewear, the honest answer was no. Pajamas, Caroline says, are something people buy for group vacations and otherwise skip. But the same questions pointed somewhere else. Both founders had lived with a much bigger problem, and nobody had invented anything new in the category.
So they asked to switch. They offered to run 100 customer interviews and built pitch decks to make the case. "We were dealing with a much bigger problem in our own lives," Caroline says, "one that was so much more worthwhile to solve." Jones became their project for Summer Launchpad.
Hilary quit a great job in San Francisco before it began. "The second she quit, I knew we were committed to Jones longterm”
Half Chemistry, Half Habit
Two lessons from that summer at the Leslie eLab shaped the company.
Nicotine addiction is half chemistry and half habit. Existing products only treated the physical half. But the coffee-after-a-meal, cigarette-after-coffee loop is a habit, and breaking it takes tracking, community and behavioral tools. "It also has to be built around community and habits," Caroline says, "because that's going to set people up for maximum success." That insight became the Jones app and community.
Find the holes in your knowledge, fast. The founders won the Launchpad pitch competition, raised their pre-seed in September 2022, and spent the next year working out how to make and sell a pharmaceutical-grade product.
Caroline's advice to any founder: "Look for your holes in knowledge and experience and fill out a suite of advisors pretty immediately." Jones brought on a former VP of Hims & Hers (brought on with an equity stake), an inventor with 17 years in next-generation nicotine products, and a Google engineer to check their code.
Good Things Take a Minute
Jones launched in November 2023, after almost a year and a half of building. Launch day didn't go the way their financial model said it would. "It took a few months to catch up to our goal for month one," Caroline recalls. By January and February, traction arrived.
She is candid about what comes next. This year has been a transition: the early team that got Jones from zero to one isn't necessarily the team that scales it. "If I knew it wasn't going to get slightly easier until year five, I think no one would do it," she says. "I'm glad I went in blind and was convinced that, this is going to pop off."
Stay Minty
Caroline still loves the work: the team, the customer messages, and the small product wins that regulation made slow to reach. A new flavor launches in February, and Jones's own proprietary flavors follow at the end of next year. Her favorite today is mint.
Follow Jones's third-anniversary month and see what's launching next at quitwithjones.com.
