YouSaid · the spoken record

James Park

lines on the record: 106
first: 2020-04-27
most recent: 2020-04-27
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

“Know just grinding away at things that at the time seem kind of unpleasant. So I think those are good traits and very fortunate to have parents like that who sacrificed a lot to put me in some great schools over time, even though they started from some humble beginnings. But also have learned a lot of ways, gotten some lucky breaks where things have could have gone the wrong way very, very quickly. You know, ultimately I attributed to a little bit of all of that. I think it's not fair to say that everything is luck because then I think you start to discount the actual things, actions that you can take on your own to affect the future. And that's really important.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, that's always a tricky question to answer. You know, I think very fortunate to have grown up with my parents, just having seen them persevere through life. You know, you get the realization that nothing really comes easy, that it does take a lot of...”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about all of the things that you have done professionally and your successes and... You made a lot of money. I mean, you're extremely wealthy. You're wealthier than your parents could have ever imagined you would be or they would be. They took a huge risk to come to the US and had all these little mom and pop storers. How much of that do you think is because of your intelligence and skill and how much do you tribute to luck?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And if during these telemedicine visits, if they have a snapshot and summary of what you've been up to and what your health has been outside of that visit and almost be predictive in that way, I mean, I think that can be really groundbreaking in terms of the way that's being medicine gets practiced. And this whole time period is merely accelerating that transition.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think everyone's thinking towards the long term, fingers crossed, is that we do find ourselves through this COVID-19 situation and that there is life beyond that. Maybe it comes back slowly. But, you know, I think everyone is thinking, what is this whole category look like in time span of years out? And I think what one of the things that COVID-19 has shown is that especially if you look at healthcare, this idea of remote healthcare, remote monitoring, keep people healthy outside of a hospital setting is actually really important”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and it's because sometimes the press does like to sensationalize things, but the process that we're undergoing right now with the Department of Justice and also with the EU and some other countries around the world is pretty normal for acquisitions of the size. In fact, it's required. Really, you know, the whole review is about the anti-competitive element and especially around the wearable market share. So that's just something that we have to convince regulators that this doesn't reduce competition in the marketplace.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I imagine that there are some details you can't talk about for obvious reasons, but as of this recording, we're talking in mid-April, there is a hold on the Google acquisition. The Department of Justice is doing an investigation because there's some interest groups who have said, hey, we don't think that Google should have access to all this data that Fitbit has 28 million users. There's this incredible trove of health data. Is that causing you stress right now that there is this Justice Department holdup on the acquisition?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very complicated and kind of emotionally fraught question. Last year, our board met, and it was pretty There was a lot of competition out there from the likes of Apple, from Samsung, some emerging Chinese competitors. But there was a lot of just great things going on in the company. Like I was so excited about our product roadmap, about something, you know, things that were in our pipeline, all the advanced research that we're doing around health and sensors. Like, I would look at our product roadmap every day and just come away super excited about that and then also be confronted with a lot of the business challenges as well. And for me, most importantly, it was about a legacy. And I wanted the Fitbit brand and what we did to continue onwards for a very, very long time. And we just had to figure out the best way to do it, whether it was as an independent company or within a larger company. That was really what was most important.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we get to the end of last year where Google announces that they were going to buy Fitbit two point one billion dollars. We shouldn't mention that at the time of this recording it hasn't closed yet. To me it makes perfect sense. If I'm you or Eric, I would have done it. I would have said 2.1 billion dollars. That's a very, that's great. That's a great outcome because now with Google we've got access to their dollars and their research labs and all the people who work there and the analytics and our ability to really go to the next level. Why did it make sense from your perspective to sell to Google?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's fair. I think we stopped thinking of ourselves as a device company and more of us a behavior change company because that's effectively what people were buying our products and services to do was to change their behavior in a really positive way. And not only individual people, but companies as well, companies who in the US especially bear the direct costs of the healthcare of their employees. So we started thinking about ourselves as a behavior change company and figuring out what are the products and services that really deliver that both to people and to businesses.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As many, many companies find themselves in a successful companies that have a successful legacy product as crazy talking about a legacy product for your company, which is only 10 years old or 12 years old. But you can argue that the Fitbit product is your legacy product, right? And that as any company with a legacy product realizes, they've got to make a pivot. Like for American Express, it was traveler's checks for 100 years, right? That's how they made their money. And they had to pivot into other things, travel services, credit cards, and so on. It sounds like in 2019, you really made a pivot into thinking about Fitbit not as a hardware company that makes like a tracker watch or device, right, smartwatch, but a company that really is about healthcare and is designed to kind of pivot into more into”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. We were so focused on growing our hardware business because that was what was bringing in the money. That was what the retailers wanted. And you know, one of the mistakes I made was not setting enough time, enough focus to building this subscription part of the business that actually answered those pivotal questions for our users.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that. Competitive to Apple. Yeah. It was clear that the industry, consumers were moving to that category, and we were seeing that in our sales. So in a very short period of time, our tracker business fell by $800 million in revenue at the time, at our peak, we were doing about 2.1 billion. In revenue. So we had a $800 million hole. And we finally launch our smartwatch, but it was only sufficient to fill that hole very barely. You know, we hadn't transformed our software into giving people guidance and advice. And it also ties to our failure at the time to quickly diversify a revenue stream beyond just hardware to a services business.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there are ultimately kind of two big things that were driving the headwinds in the business. First of all, I think we were really behind in launching a competitive smartwatch at the time. Like people were transitioning.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had, there was a quote from somebody in an article, it was an anonymous quote, said, you know, we were focused on, at a certain point, we were focused on the right things. We had the ability and have the ability to know a lot about our users, which you do, but our users don't want to be told what they did. In other words, they don't want to be told, hey, you exercise, you did 10 steps today. They want to be told what to do, like how to get better. And the quote was this was the greatest missed opportunity. I know you've made a pivot since then, but was that a fair assessment at the time in 2017 that you were too focused on telling people what they've accomplished rather than telling them what they need to do?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't know if I heard that particular feedback directly, but clearly the survey results were not great. You know, I kind of have jokingly think, you know, probably used to hearing very critical feedback because of my parents. I don't think there was a moment where they were truly happy with anything that I did. I remember even when I took the SETs and I got my score back. It was a pretty good score, but my dad just honed in on clearly the areas that had not done well. So I don't think I have a huge ego. I mean, I do have an ego. I think it's human to have one. But my primary focus was how do I get things back on track?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even though you are introducing new products, revenue was declining every year from the time you went public, and I read an article about something that you did in 2017. I'm really just curious to get your take on it because I actually think it's really Courageous, but also probably super stressful and difficult, which is you ask your employees to submit an evaluation of the company and of you, and then you sat in front of them to hear the results of this evaluation, and it wasn't good. You even had some employees who wrote letters to the board asking that you be removed as CEO. I can't imagine that was easy for you to hear.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was a very challenging period because as a private company, despite challenges, your valuation doesn't change very often. It only changes when you raise money, which could happen once a year, once every two years. So if you hit a bump in the road, your employees don't really feel it. We had a product recall where if we had been a public company, our valuation would have plummeted immediately. But at the time we're private. So we just told the employees, hey, look, this is the challenge. It's pretty serious. But here are the steps that we're going to take to get through it. And everyone kind of rallied together. But when you're being measured every day in real time.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was definitely a stressful period. And you could argue, well, maybe we shouldn't have been valued at $10 billion in the first place. And I think a lot of times it's a question of perception, right? If we had never hit that $10 billion and we had steadily grown into the $2 billion, I think people's perceptions and just psychology about the whole situation would have been different than going to 10 and falling to two.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, but eventually the industry did change, right? I mean, Apple Watch got really popular, and I think by 2016 Fitbit's stock had dropped by 75% over the course of a year. You and Eric were running a publicly traded company, and the stock was just tumbling. So what did you think? I mean, I can't imagine that was pleasant for you.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we're definitely concerned with Apple. I mean, this was the preeminent technology and especially hardware company at the time with an amazing brand. We had faced off Philips and Nike and Jawbone. Which were in their rights very big competitors, especially Nike. We did feel very strongly that our product had very clear advantages. It was a simpler product. If you looked at the Apple Watch that was announced at that time, I think everyone will admit maybe even Apple that it was a product that didn't quite know what it was supposed to be used for. With the launch of the first Apple Watch, I don't really think that that had an actual impact on the trajectory of the business. It wasn't the product that it would later become. And the industry wasn't where it would eventually evolve either.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2015 was a huge turning point for you in many ways. You go public, I think your market cap had read at a certain point reached $10 billion. That year, 2015, Apple watches released and they stop selling Fitbit in their stores. At the time you were quoted as saying, you know, I don't really worried about this because it's a huge market. It's a $200 billion market. You know, the Apple Watch is just crammed with a bunch of stuff or smartwatches are crammed with a bunch of stuff. And what we're doing is something simpler. Was that what you were saying publicly? Because, I don't know, did you felt like you should be saying that or did you really think that was true? That the Apple Watch wouldn't actually have much of an impact.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're still pretty, I don't know if scared is the right word, I think, still very, very cautious. Nothing was guaranteed. There was a lot of competition that was emerging. We still had a lot of internal challenges in the business, you know, scaling production, scaling the company, et cetera. So again, a lot of fires for us to be solving on a day-to-day basis. And I remember occasionally we'd always check in and say, hey, When do you think we'll know we're gonna make it? We'd say, I think we'll know in six months. And we kept saying that every six months. So it was pretty much an ongoing thing, pretty much up to the IPO.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yet, by 2014, you had 67% of the activity tracking marketplace, right? I mean, Fitbit was just totally dominating the marketplace. I mean, were you and Eric doing victory labs high-fiving each other and thinking back to all those doubters? I mean, what was going on?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, Nike, obviously, it's a multi-billion dollar. multinational company with a lot of media dollars. I remember when they announced the fuel ban, you know, they had all these celebrity athletes at the announcement and we're like, oh God. That's insane.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at that time, I think people were looking at the success and there was even a name coin for the whole category, which is quantified self. How do I use sensors, et cetera, to measure everything that I'm doing in my entire life? And so that attracted a lot of competition, as you said. And I'd have to say the competitive aspect was definitely worrying at the time, especially with Nike and JobWall.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think by 2013, you had some competitors coming in, the Nike was making one and Jawbone was making one. I remember going to the TED conference in 2013 and getting a jawbone in my gift bag. Were you worried about the competition at that point or not really?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the primary reason is because we had baked in this social element, this community element into it from the very beginning. It ended up being a very viral, very viral product. So one family member would get it. And to really realize the potential, the community aspect and the competitive aspect, you had to have someone else as well. So they'd either buy it. their spouse or their parents and they would start competing and then they'd buy it for their friends and they'd try to get their friends to buy the product so”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Fitbit for the first couple years was A, still a clip, mainly a clip, and then I think really 2011, you released the first product Christmas of 2009, you've got 2010 by 2011. I read just, this is exploded, like 5x growth from 2011-2012. You went from $15 million in revenue to $76 million in revenue. What was going on? Was it just this self generating phenomenon? Like, were you surprised by it? Were you investing in marketing? Was it just unearned media? Just people reporting on it? What was going on?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were naive. We were like, okay, this is this government database of activities. It must be fine. That was quite a shock and a wake-up call for us.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a category, but it wasn't something that we had realized. So we use this database from the government that was like thousands of different activities that people would do”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we made a lot of things private by default, so we made sure that people's weight was private because we thought that would be sensitive. But we didn't think that. Oh, people's activities, you know, there wasn't any harm in doing that and we just didn't realize that people would start to walk.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think this was still kind of the early days of sharing things like that. And I found out about it because I saw this tweet about some going, hey, if you do this Google search, you'll see, because Google is indexing all our public pages where people are logging things that people have made public, you could find out all the sexual activities that people are logging on Fitbit. And I saw that. I'm like, oh my God, this is not good. So that ended up being the first real PR crisis for the company, and it was happening over the 4th of July weekend. So I had to call an emergency board. Oh, man. We had a scramble to delete all that stuff, turn everything private.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were. We did that after with the round that was right after our first $2 million institutional round. Hired a bunch of customer support personnel, interviewed and hired our first head of sales. I interviewed and hired someone to finally run all of our manufacturing and operations, which is still a job that I was doing. Like I was still issuing all the POs and managing the inventory And I think we're really fortunate because the early management team that we hired in those days pretty much made it up to and past our IPO, which I think rarely happens.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so eventually the 40th investor does decide to give you some money. I think you raised about $8 million. And at this point, were you able to then have a proper office and a staff? Were you able to kind of begin to recruit real full-time engineers and developers and people like that”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same pitch driving, you know, we're in San Francisco driving down 101 to Sand Hill Road, constantly giving the same pitch to 40 VCs. That's probably the one thing I didn't like about that whole time period was I hit giving the same pitch over and over and hearing the same questions and same objections, et cetera. So that was not a fun or stimulating time for me.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was still a challenge. And at the time, it wasn't, you know, okay, I guess you guys are having some success. Like consumers are buying the product, et cetera. It's like, and they congratulated us on that. But they were very scared of hardware businesses. I think there had been a lot of really high profile failures in the consumer electronics industry. And so it was very difficult for us to raise money. I remember we had a spreadsheet of target VCs. I think there are 40 names that we put on that list. And literally we went to number 40 before we were able to raise money.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you guys launch this product in Christmas of 2009, and it was a pretty successful product launch. You had $25,000, and sounds like you're off to the races, but I guess even with this success when you went out to raise money, this is 2010, were investors more excited, or was it still a challenge to get more investors in?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Toilet paper, yeah, that was it. And I still couldn't sleep. So the next, as early as possible the following morning, I raced into our manufacturing and said, okay, I think I found a problem. But obviously a toilet paper is not a scalable high volume situation. So they went back and figured out how they could make this manufactureable. So they ended up creating these little tiny die-cut pieces of rubber that they would glue onto the circuit board to keep the antenna away from the display cable.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creating interference. And I could kind of see that when you put the whole thing together that it might droop down. And I thought, okay. How do I create a shim that would prop the antenna? So I went to the bathroom, grabbed some toilet paper, rolled a little bit of it in a ball, and stuffed it between the antenna and the display cable. The device back together. It started working like wow.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. It's like. So I couldn't sleep that night, obviously, and I took the unit apart. Like I had a multimeter and I was measuring different voltages and currents. And what I realized was, huh, the cable for the display was kind of flexible and long enough that maybe it was actually drooping down and touching the antenna. And that was causing.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it would only work at two inches. And I'm thinking We've got a ship this holiday season. I've got tens of thousands of these people waiting. And so I'm just freaking out in my hotel.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's some pretty dark times right before we shipped. I remember we were months before we thought we could finally get the first unit off to production line and I was sitting in my hotel room in Singapore and I was testing out one of the prototype builds that racer had produced. And the radio range was not good at all. It was supposed to have a range.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I don't think there was that much tension. I mean, a lot of stress, but not tension. I think we trust in our ability to help each other out. And there are periods when either of us would be pretty down on the company and the product. And luckily, we weren't down both at the same time. And that's why it helps, I think, to have a co-founder.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a sense of the Bill of Materials. I think we were trying to shoot for a gross margin of about 50%. So we're targeting the full cost of the product, including shipping, et cetera, being no more than $50. So that's what we're targeting.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had no doubt because we were getting proof every day that this was something. Was going to be big. And I think the first evidence of that was at TechCrunch, where we had 2,000 pre orders and we're getting pre-orders every day. I think by the summertime we had about 25,000 pre-orders at $100 per unit. That's a fair amount of revenue if we could ship these units.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we wouldn't wait for them to send it. I mean, either myself or Eric would be in Indonesia or Singapore at any given time. We'd trade off different weeks. And we were out there on the production lines pretty much inspecting every part of the process.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fits that thing or something that's very similar to something that they've built before. That's a different story than this thing that. This manufacturer never had built before.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways, a lot of people, I think, when you think about hardware, it's like, oh, I'll find a manufacturer in China. I'll throw over a design They'll just run with it, you know. And then they'll just get.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thing being made, the sausage being made behind the scenes. And I think that kept people really engaged throughout the process.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT