I’m an only child who grew up moving around a lot, which is probably where I picked up the habit of reading a new room fast. In high school I ran debate and played football, two things that sound unrelated until you notice both are preparation followed by execution under pressure. Debate is where it really started for me. You get handed a position, sometimes one you don’t personally agree with, and you have to find the load-bearing argument inside it and hold it against someone whose whole job is taking it apart. That teaches you early that most arguments are structural rather than emotional, and that whoever understands the structure best usually carries the room. That thread runs straight through my political science degree and through every political and civic table I’ve sat at since. I still play video games, mostly the strategy and city-building kind, and I’d argue that’s the same instinct in a different container. I came to San Diego a little over a year ago, and this is where I decided to launch The WAS Collective in earnest. The border region put me in rooms with the industries this place actually runs on, cross-border trade and manufacturing, defense, the blue economy, and once I saw how they connected to each other, I couldn’t unsee it.
About Jakobi Lundy-Bass
Q: Please tell us a little bit about your family.
My mom is my favorite person in the world. She raised me frank. She never spoke down to me and never softened a subject because I was young, but she also never let me sit at the kids’ level of a conversation. If something was happening in the world, she expected me to come to her with an actual position on it, and then she’d challenge that position until I could hold it. Looking back, that was the training. She’s retired now, and we stay in close contact even with me out on the coast. Back home in Detroit I’ve also got two dogs I’m ridiculous about, an English Mastiff and an American Eskimo, which is a size range most people don’t believe until they see the two of them in the same room.
Q: Please tell us about your current, past, or future career. What do you love most about what you do?
I came up through government and defense contracting, and that world shapes how I work even now. It’s high-stakes and unforgiving of sloppiness, and it teaches you to think in systems and second-order consequences rather than good intentions. Today I run The WAS Collective, a strategy consulting firm and venture studio. We advise organizations on how to build, and we build ventures of our own, because I’ve never fully trusted advice that stops at the deck. What I love most is the range. In a given month I’m working across completely different industries, and each one demands a different kind of creative problem-solving. You can’t run the same play twice. But the real thing is the people. This work puts me across the table from genuinely sharp people operating in their element, and there is nothing better than watching someone who is the best in the world at their narrow thing walk you through it. I learn constantly. That’s the part I’d have a hard time giving up.
Q: What advice would you give to people?
Face the world head on and scared.
Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 to 10 years?
n five to ten years I want to be doing this same work at a scale where it shows up in the numbers. Practically, that means two things running in parallel. The first is The WAS Collective operating as a genuine bridge between San Diego and Detroit. People rarely put those two cities in the same sentence, but they’re working versions of the same problem: how a region builds wealth that actually stays in it. San Diego has the cross-border corridor, the defense base, the blue economy. Detroit has the manufacturing bones and a generation of people ready to own something. I want to be one of the few people who can move capital, talent, and strategy between those two places fluently.
Jakobi Lundy-Bass & Our Community
Q: What are a few of your favorite restaurants in our community?
It barely qualifies as a restaurant, but I’d have to say Stella Jean’s.
Q: How long have you lived or worked in our community?
1.5 years
Q: What current or former local business makes you the most nostalgic about our community?
Stella Jean’s ice cream shop
Q: What is your favorite thing or something unique about our community?
What I love is how many people here are from somewhere else. You end up talking to someone from a town on the other side of the country you’ve never heard of, and twenty minutes later you understand how life actually works there. What people do for a living, what they worry about, what a good year looks like. You get a real education in the rest of the country without ever leaving the city. For someone who thinks about local economies for a living, that’s not a small thing. San Diego is one of the few places where the whole country shows up and stays long enough to actually talk.
Q: If you could choose anyone alive today and not a relative, with whom would you love to have lunch? Why? And where locally would you meet for this lunch?
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill. I’d take him to The Mental Bar on Imperial Avenue, which is exactly where that conversation should happen. Black-owned, community-anchored, in a part of San Diego that most people writing about this city never bother to mention. What pulls me toward his work is the method more than any particular conclusion. He’s a cultural anthropologist and critical policy scholar whose work runs through race, education, citizenship, and state violence, and that means he starts on the ground with how people actually live and then works outward to the structures that put them there. He doesn’t treat the person in front of him as a case study. He treats them as someone who already understands their own situation better than any framework does. That’s a discipline I try to hold onto in economic development, where it is very easy to show up with a model and never actually ask anyone anything. So that’s what I’d want to get into. Where the philosophy meets the practice. How you keep a critical mindset without sliding into cynicism. How you talk honestly about structural problems without making people feel like scenery in their own lives. And what he thinks a scholar owes the work when the analysis is right and nothing changes anyway. I’d get more out of that lunch than most conferences I could attend.
For Fun
Q: What is one of your favorite movies? TV shows?
My favorite movie is There Will Be Blood. It’s the most honest thing I’ve seen about what ambition actually costs. Daniel Plainview gets every single thing he set out to get, and by the end there’s no one left to enjoy it with. I rewatch it every so often as a check on myself. Television goes back and forth. Boston Legal is one, mostly for the arguing. The whole show is built around closing arguments and two people who genuinely like each other holding opposite positions and taking each other seriously. That’s the debate kid in me. The other is an anime called Code Geass, which surprises people. It’s about someone who decides an entire political order is illegitimate and sets out to break it and build something better, and the show never lets him off the hook for what that costs. Strategy, persuasion, and the ends-versus-means question all in one place. That’s roughly the question I’m sitting with most weeks anyway.
Q: (Even for friends or family), what is something interesting that most people don’t know about you?
I design game systems. Not video games, the logic underneath them. Rules, incentives, how one choice cascades into six others, what makes a system feel fair versus what makes it feel rigged. I’ve been building one for a while now. I also play D&D, which people don’t expect from someone who spends his days in strategy work, though it’s the same muscle. A good game system and a good economic model are the same problem. You’re designing the conditions people make decisions inside of, and then you find out what they actually do with them.
Q: What would you rate a 10 out of 10?
medium rare steak
Q: Who inspires you to be better?
My friends, honestly. My inner circle is made up of people who are serious about their craft, and watching someone work at that level up close does something to you. Not motivational in the cheap sense. It’s more that being around people who go deep makes shallow feel unacceptable. And my mother, for the reasons I already gave. Between all of them, what I ended up with was curiosity as a default setting, and then the harder half of it, which is that curiosity is worthless if it stays a mood. You have to push it into action. Those are the people who taught me the difference.
Q: What community organizations and/or local nonprofits do you admire/support?
The National Urban League, the San Diego LGBT Community Center, and the NAACP. Those are the three I keep coming back to. All of them have been doing this work for a long time and are still doing it, which carries more weight with me than whatever happens to be new and well funded this year. The Urban League one isn’t abstract for me either. I serve as Chair of Personal and Professional Development for the San Diego Urban League Young Professionals, so I’m in the building.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Stop fearing the possibilities. Embrace them as you move through life. That sounds simple until you’re standing in front of a decision where every path is genuinely open, and you catch yourself treating that openness as a threat instead of as room to move. Most people don’t stall out because they’re short on options. They stall because the options are wide open and that’s uncomfortable. Once I started reading uncertainty as space rather than risk, I started deciding faster and better.’
Q: What Neighborhood do you live in?
Misson Hills
What I love about my Neighborhood:
Its incredibly walk-able, quiet, and near the costco
Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend:
Quiet walk in university park, or hiking in a park
Q: Finally, what three words or phrases come to mind when you think of the word HOME?
Phrase: a place where I can let my guard down
Website:https://www.wascollectivesolutions.com
