YouSaid · the spoken record

Jake Carpenter

lines on the record: 74
first: 2017-10-23
most recent: 2017-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, that was my first. And then ultimately, you know, some surf shops. And it was in the beginning, skateboard shops, surf shops, ski shops, nobody wanted any part of it.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was, um... I mean, I was like Willie Lohman, and I was a traveling salesman, and I would load up my car. It was a Valvo wagon at the time. And I remember once going out with 38 snowboards and I drove around New York State and visited dealers, and I went out with 38 and I came home with 40. Because one guy had given me two back that he'd bought and said.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it wasn't people out for a walk and buying a snowboard and we didn't sell any, maybe a few t-shirts. But it was people that found out about us that would come there and people we would advertise on the skateboard magazines and a little bit in the ski magazines to spend some money there. I mean, because there were these pockets around the country in Michigan and Arizona, there were these places where people had snarfed and liked me and they'd sort of stuck with it and they got it. They understood it”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't I majored in economics at college. I had classes with Nobel Prize winners, but I don't know if I really understood supply and demand.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm hiking up there in Hillman's Highway was the trail, and I had the board where I was testing the final test, and it was horizontally laminated rock maple, very much like a skateboard, but thinner and more flexible. And I wrote down, you know, just hiking up a little bit and riding. It's like, okay, this is it. And then I've decided on the construction now. So I go out and I rent this place that's going to be this little sort of factory. And I hire two relatives and a friend to help me take these pieces of curved wood and shape them, drill them, paint them, put fins on them, put mat on them, put bindings on them. It was a long process. And we, as I said, my original plan was to make 50 boards a day. That was always sort of my goal.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hadn't thought about this in a long time, but I remember that specific moment on Mount Washington in June, and you could hike up Mount, you know, they had them. Would have been June of 78.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was to the point literally if I was on a plane, somebody would ask me what I did, I would make something up because it was just too embarrassing”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the snurfer, there was some awareness of it. It had been around. So I was telling them that I was making a modern rendition of that, and I always feared that the minute ski companies caught wind of this, that they would just jump on it and I'd be out of business in no time.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my first prototype was a piece of solid ash that was just put in this thing to curve the nose, and then I just start riding them on hills, and I literally made a hundred. But of those 100 prototypes, they weren't all solid wood. I got onto laminated wood, vertically laminated and horizontally laminated like plywood. I went to a friend who lived in California who had a surfboard company and they would let me make boards in their factory at night and I would take a surfboard blank, which is six or seven feet long and maybe three or four inches thick. By the morning I'd have whittled a thing down to a snowboard and they would just, these guys were so cool, but they laughed at me.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I went to this company called Shushin Bent Wood Company, and they made curved wood for people that made furniture out of solid ash.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just always had this interest in the guy I was named after John Houseburton and I thought that Burton was a cooler name and I wanted to name it boards. I mean boards was part of the name. It was Burton Boards. And then I drove down to Montpelier Vermont and Incorporated, went to the, what was so-called, did all the paperwork and everything was a big moment for me. And it started as a Burton Corporation. maybe Burton Boards, I sort of did some form of crude trademark or put DM next to it even though I didn't”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well my because my mother died at a young age when my grandmother died she had some dough and instead of going to my mother came to be my two sisters and so I inherited almost two hundred thousand dollars and I spent one hundred and fifty of it developing Burton.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I left my job in New York City in early December and I thought, well, winter's here. You know, I started landscaping business when it was spring and you start raking nuance. I had a car, Saishwagen I inherited from the family, I had a box of garbage bags and a couple of rakes, and that's what I started my landscape business with. Manufacturing is a lot tougher than mowing lawns. But I thought, okay, it's winter, now's the time to start the company. I almost missed the next winter. Literally, it took so long to develop a product.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheets of wood, yeah, out of wood. The very first I was modifying some snurfers that were around. And then I said I gotta move to Vermont to start this company. We not going to start a snowboard company and”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what? I was as clueless then as you are now. I did not know how to do it. I was a loser in shop class in school. Like my napkin holder was by far the ugliest or the worst. And so there I was with a sabre saw and in my apartment making them.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I really from the very beginning of snurfing for me, I saw it as something that could be developed, and I was sure that Brunswick was going to do it, or somebody was going to do it. Nothing happened. But in the back of my mind, I always knew it could be a sport. And I didn't have a business plan per se, but I did the math that If I could make fifty snowboards a day, I could make $100,000 a year, and that would be awesome.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way he did apply himself was by figuring out how to take what he was good at and make money out of it. So Jake's first venture was a small landscaping business. And then after college, he went to work for an investor in Manhattan. But in the back of his mind, he never forgot about the snurfer and about its potential to be something much, much bigger.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I was a wise ass, and when I was young and to a fault, and when I got kicked out of Brooks was a school, and I went up to see the headmaster who was a headmaster when my father was there, and when my brother was there, it was brutal. I mean, my dad made me get in the car, go five hours, see this guy for a five-minute conversation, and then a long drive home. And that is when I decided to turn my life around and start applying myself to whatever the hell I did.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, in a lot of ways, Jake's childhood was pretty great, even idyllic. But then when he was about thirteen, things started to unravel. Jake's older brother George was killed in battle in Vietnam, and a few years later his mother died as well. And for Jake, it was a pretty tough time. He even ended up getting expelled from his boarding school”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a four foot-long piece of wood that was about six or seven inches wide, and it had no edges. And you stood on it on these sort of staples. It gave you traction and you had a rope attached to the nose. It was a little bit like you were riding a fucking Bronco just getting down the hill. But it was fun. And Brunswick made them. They sold 800,000 or something like that. But it developed this sort of cult in a positive sense of the word. Friends, and we would do it together, and we would modify them. For me, a snurfer was the opportunity to serve.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One winter in 1966, there was a brief craze across parts of America for a novelty toy called The Snurfer, as in Snow Plus Surf. It was basically a stand up sled that you could ride down a hill. And Jay Carpenter was one of the thousands of kids who bought one for ten bucks.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dad sort of figured it might be something fun for a family to do. When I was around, I guess seven or eight, and he would take the whole family. I just always had this attachment to snow. I mean, I, to me, meant no school. And still my favorite thing to do in life is go up to my kids' rooms. And those days are behind me, but tell them to get up for school. And then after they get up, tell them it's a snow day”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But today it's hard to find one that doesn't. And the thing about Burton is it didn't just build snowboards. It built a culture around snowboarding. It was a culture that was inspired in part by family ski trips to Vermont when Jake was a kid.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I was like Willie Lohman, and I was a traveling salesman, and I would load up my car. There was a Valvo wagon at the time. And I remember once going out with 38 snowboards and I drove around New York State and visited dealers. And I went out with 38 and I came home with 40. Because one guy That he'd bought and said, This is a joke.”
2017-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT