april 20 2011151 what if it were your job to spend 100 days out of the year goofing off with your friends on a snowdusted mountain traveling to the most exotic winter resorts in the world for research making tons of money and getting treated like a rock star you might think its too good to be true but this is the life of jake burton at 57 years old the widely successful snowboard tycoon is rarely seen without his signature ski uniform a skull cap boots and his board that all bear his last name burton has created an entire lifestyle an olympic sport and a multibilliondollar industry almost entirely by himself it all started with a 10 toy his parents bought him when he was a kid it was called a snurfer a wood plank with a rope attached to one end that riders could use to surf downhill on land watch a classic snurfer video featuring howard sorensen jake was inspired from the minute i got on it i was into it he said i always thought that there was a sport there it was made by a bowling company brunswick and it was not marketed as a sport it was sort of like the hula hoop the snurfer was a passing fad in the 1960s to nearly everyone except burton and his hobby soon grew into an obsession so i graduate from college in 77 and i had a pretty good job in new york city he said i guess you could call it investment banking it was a little different back then but i wasnt very happy and that idea was still that there was a sport there that year burton dropped everything moved to londonderry vt and blew his 100000 inheritance to create his first crude snowboard and found his own company just one problem he had no idea what he was doing i can remember sort of developing a board and trying to figure out how to make them burton said i had this little woodworking shop and i had developed this really small router to make boards twice the router shot boards out and they went into a wall i was sort of like a fish out of water his goal was to sell 50 snowboards a day in that first year but at the end of it he had sold only 300 but the following year sales doubled and a craze was born three decades later burton now helms a snowboarding megabrand in 1981 a wooden burton back hill board sold for around 115 today burton snowboards still have a hardwood core but are coated in laters of fibreglass and finished off with steel edges and acrylic graphics boards come with such names as bullet joystick and meateaters road soda and retail from around 300 to 1500 for custom boards his name is now synonymous with some of the most popular events at the winter olympics and xgames his