Breaking The Mold

With his standout upstart brand Corvid Cycles, Chad Corbin finds himself on a new and rewarding path

- Betsy Welch

In the late ’90s, when Chad Corbin was a young programmer wrapped up in the dot-com boom, his garage easily could have played a part in one of those origin stories. Instead, he’s using the 200 square feet attached to his modest Boulder, Colorado, home to create something much more tangible than code.

Corbin’s Corvid Cycles turned a year old in September, and he couldn’t be happier with his decision to leave the dot-com world behind. In fact, he left a slew of successful career endeavors to pursue framebuilding, and rather than jump directly into the deep end, he took the slow, methodical approach of an engineer to get there.

There’s this typical guy-with-an-engineering-background-who-has-always-loved-bikes-becomes-framebuilder trope, and Corbin agrees that a lot of builders share those attributes—they’re mechanically inclined or have an engineering background. For him, however, the decision to commit to building a bike brand was more about breaking a mold than fitting inside one.

“I feel like when you’re growing up and you go to school and high school and the next thing is college and then a lot of people are encouraged to go to grad school,” says Corbin, 42. “Then you buy a house, get married, have a kid—it’s this cookie-cutter path. And a lot of people just don’t fit into that mold.”