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

“And they just kept coming in. It was crazy. We're like, oh my God, now we gotta, it's not just dozens of these units we have to build. It's now thousands and more and more every day. And so we were still thinking Christmas of that year that we were going to start shipping out units. And it rapidly became clear to us that we weren't going to make Christmas. And so we're thinking, okay, how do we keep all these people happy while we pull this off? So this was before Kickstarter and Indiegogo and all that. So we kind of had to impromise. We're like, okay, why don't we just blog about the whole process and just be very open and transparent about it. So we started a blog and I wrote maybe weekly updates on how things were going, challenges and delays that we're facing. And I was really surprised actually, you know, it worked. It made people understand what we were going through. They were literally seeing”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So originally right before TechCrunch, Eric and I, we made just a verbal bet, how many pre-orders are we going to get after this conference and we announce and make the company public? And I think Eric said, oh, I think we'll get like five pre-orders. So it's like the device isn't even available. People are going to have to give us a credit card information. And I said, you know what? I'm not as pessimistic. I think there's going to be like 10, 15, 20. And so we got off stage. And by the end of the day, we had about 2,000 pre-orders.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, with box face. So we're just worried that the demo would just. Fail or crash. It worked. And actually, it did crash in the middle of the presentation because the whole demo was about me walking on stage. The device would be collecting stats. And at one point, I would turn to Eric and say, hey, Eric, why don't you refresh the page and show that all the stats have been uploaded magically do this wireless connection? And so the demo actually crashed while I was talking, and Eric was furiously trying to reboot his computer during this period. And I didn't even know anything about it. But ultimately, the demo did work. And so to many people, it seemed like magic. Literally, people started clapping. It was really amazing.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on stage because again it was it was a little sketchy it was still very early it wasn't it was still in the in the wooden box”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're both good in our different ways. It just fell upon me. I don't even know how we decide. those things but actually what was running through our minds was not what we were going to say and how we're going to say it but whether the demo would actually work”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So our pitch to the crowd at TechCrunch and ultimately to our consumers was that it was a product that would track your steps, distance, calories, and how much you slept and would answer some basic questions about your health. Was I active enough today? Did I get enough sleep? What do I need to do to lose weight, et cetera? And one of the more important aspects was this idea of a community as well. Join other people who own Fitbits, your friends and family. And you could compete with each other. And it was all wireless. Like, you don't really have to do anything. All you'd have to do is wear this device, don't even think about it, and all this magic would happen. So that was the promise of Fit at the time.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to go to a smaller place who'd be more nimble, more flexible, who'd want to take a financial risk. And we finally found a great manufacturer based in Singapore called Racer Technologies. And the good thing is actually it was the best of all worlds. The headquarters was in Singapore. Most of the management team and the engineering staff was in Singapore, but they had manufacturing facilities that were in Indonesia. So the labor there was going to be lower cost than in Singapore.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very good, very good question. So we obviously had zero connections. The challenge, though, was not actually the connections to the manufacturers, but finding a manufacturer who we could actually convince to build this product because we didn't have a background in hardware And so would they actually want to work with us? That was the biggest concern at the time.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's tens of thousands, naming consultants and focus groups. Sure. Trademark searches and all of that. So it's kind of funny.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ficado, yes, history might have turned out a lot differently for sure. So I was just taking a nap in my office one afternoon. I think I was actually napping on the rug because I was so tired. And I woke up and it just hit me. It was Fitbit. And the next challenge was actually the domain name. The domain name was not available. And it was owned by this guy in Russia. And we're like, oh my God, how are we going to get this domain name? We'll just email the guy and see what happens. And he said, well, how much are you willing to offer? I said, oh, God, I don't know. How about like a thousand bucks? And he's like, ooh, how about 10,000? And I said, oh, I don't know. That sounds like a lot. How about 2,000? And he's like, oh, okay, 2,000 deal. I think I was literally like two or three emails that we sent back and forth in this negotiation.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was, you know, it's never easy to name a company, and it's even more challenging just because of domain names, right? That's typically a lot of the limiting factor. In naming a great company. And so we would spend hours and hours and days just going through different permutations of names and some awful ones as well. Like at some point, we got onto a fruit theme. So we were thinking like Fitberry or Berry Fit or Fito or, you know, just some really awful names.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, something to clip to your clothing for men and then what we found out in talking to a lot of women was that they wanted to tuck it away somewhere, hidden. They didn't want people to see it. And we said, okay, where would you want to put it? And said, Well, a lot of our pants don't have pockets, so it can't be in our pocket. And so the preferred place was actually on their bra. So a lot of the physical design that we had to think about in the early days was how to come up with a product that would be very slim, slender, and clipped people's broad. hidden and clipped the bras pretty easily.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It was the fall of 2008 when we're trying to raise money. And one of the good and bad things about VCs is the good thing about VCs, they're incredibly healthy people. They're super fit. But it also made it difficult for a lot of them to understand the value of the product because what we're trying to do was it wasn't a product meant for super athletic people. It was really meant to help normal people become more active, become healthier, etc. And it was hard for a lot of them to grasp why that was valuable. They'd ask, well, did it do X or did it do Y and did it do Z and we'd say no it doesn't do any of that? And so it was very difficult for a lot of these super fit VCs to understand the value of the product, even though a lot of them claim they don't try to put their own bias on these products. It's naturally human to do that.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought we could do it. We thought we knew a little bit more about the hardware business. We put together another business plan budget. It was actually a pretty challenging time to raise money as well”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that was her big task was to find the right people who could help us. So I knew the founder of a really great industrial design firm in San Francisco called New Deal Design. His name's Gaudi Amitt. And then on the algorithm side, because it was going to take a lot of sophisticated algorithms to translate this motion data to actual data that users would be able to understand, I ended up asking my best friend from college, Ed, because he was in grad school at Harvard at the time. And he said, wait, I think I might know somebody. And it ended up being his teaching fellow. His name was Shelton. And we talked and was like, wow, this guy's super smart. We need to get him working on our algorithms. So he ended up working on the sidewall doing his PhD, helping us out with a lot of the software.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the prototype. And actually, that was what we had demoed when we first announced the company. That was the prototype. That was actually being used at the announcement.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was rectangular circuit board, a little bit smaller than your potential. It had a motion sensor, it had a radio, it had a microcontroller, which was the brain of the product. And it had a rudimentary case, which was a balsa wood box.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's totally non functional. We'd always have to tell people before this doesn't work Because they get all excited looking at the model. No, no, no, that doesn't work. The thing that actually worked looked like something that came out of, you know, a garage, literally.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It looked absolutely nothing like a Fitbit. So there are two things. There was an actual somewhat working prototype, and then there was an industrial design model”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you have this idea, and that means you have to raise money, and this is going to be the third time now that you've had to do that for a business. And I think I read that you raised $400,000 to launch this. I don't know a lot about hardware, but that doesn't seem like it was going to take you very far in building a physical product.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They weren't a very aspirational So, you know, it wasn't something that people were excited to use. And so I think that's why that whole category of device just never really had any innovation. And there were also much higher end devices. You could buy much fancier running watches, like GPS watches, et cetera. Those are really expensive for people. They're $300, $400 at the time.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pedometers were definitely around back then. Actually, they had been around for probably 100 years. One of the things, though, is that they weren't something that people would want to use or to wear They were very big. They were pretty ugly. They looked like medical devices.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the technology, I mean, pedometers have been around forever, right? Was that sort of where your head was going or thinking, okay, maybe we just create an electronic pedometer? But I think even electronic pedometers were around in 2007, right?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outside exactly So I couldn't let it go and I ultimately ended up calling up Eric and we started talking about this idea for hours and hours and we couldn't stop talking about it. It's like, how do we capture this magic and make it more portable? How do we give it to people 24-7? And that was really the genesis of Fitbit.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After using it, especially in WeFit, which was a sports scheme, I thought, wow, this is incredible. This is amazing. This is magical. You can use sensors in this way. You can use it to bring people together. And particularly for WeFit, it was a way of getting people active, of getting them moving together. And I was just blown away by this whole idea, really excited about it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. And after some time of playing WeaFIN and the We and a lot of other games, I thought, you know, this is great. It's in my living room. But what if I want to take this outside? The living room, and I kept thinking about that idea like,”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we left CNAT just because of, I guess you could call it a bolt of lightning in some ways. It was December of 2006, and Nintendo had just announced that Nintendo Wii. And I remember coming home, putting it together, you know, at the time Nintendo had come up with this really innovative control system using motion sensors, accelerometers to serve as inputs into a game.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a huge company, but I think the moment, at least for me, that I moved to San Francisco, I instantly fell in love with the city and seen it, even though it was a larger company, I actually found it to be an amazing time. I learned a lot. I got some management training. I ended up managing a small team of people, learned a lot about how technology scales to millions and millions of users, how you market products. So I really enjoyed my experience there. I think it was pretty formative.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was definitely a good acquisition for all of us at the time. Remember, there were three guys working out of our apartments. I was at the time about $40,000 in credit card debt as well. So we were down to some desperate times and we were negotiating numbers. And they threw out a number, which was their first offer was $4 million. Wow. Whoa. That's amazing. Like, God, I can't believe we built something that's worth this much at the time. We were just stunned.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. This is coming from their corporate development arms, which typically deals with M&A, with buying By companies, yeah, exactly We're like, whoa, this is magic. How did this happen?”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he said, you know what? Without getting the product known, how are we going to be successful? So we wrote up a press release and we put it out. And actually it was probably the most pivotal decision we ever made in that company's history. Yeah. First email came in a few hours later. I think the second one came in a day later, but we got two emails, one from CNET, which is a huge digital publishing company. And then we got another email from Yahoo saying, hey, we just heard about this launch of this software product. And we'd like to talk to you guys more about it.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, I guess what you call it, it would be called freemium software. So it would be free for a period of time and then the trial period would end, and then you'd have to submit your credit card information to continue losing the software. And so our primary goal was making sure that a lot of people knew about the software. So we put it on shareware sites, et cetera. And then we spent a lot of time debating, you know, should we send out a press release? And I remember it was a huge debate because sending out a press release was going to be about $300. That was a... That was the level of expense that required a vigorous debate at the time.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You pretty much nailed it. I mean, all we did was we would wake up in the morning, walk over to the third bedroom, and just start typing away for 12 hours. We'd take meal breaks. I'd remember. Eric did a lot of cooking, so we'd eat our dinners on some TV stands, watching TV. That was a good break for us, watching Seinfeld. And then go to bed and then repeat it the following day.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We ended up raising money primarily from one of my friends from middle school, who was a mutual fund manager in Boston. And so he put in a bit of money, not a lot. I think about, at least for him, it was about $100,000. And we had a bunch of savings ourselves that we were going to use. And in anticipation, I also opened up a few more credit cards as well.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are digital cameras were coming about back then. It still wasn't easy to connect them, upload photos. Like it was getting easier, but nowhere near what it is today, obviously. So the whole idea of electric shoebox was to make the whole process of getting photos off your camera a lot easier. And more importantly, we wanted to make the process of sharing these photos with your friends and family a lot easier”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company's name at the time was called HAPIX, and the product itself was called Electric Shoebox because, you know, a lot of people put their old photos in shoeboxes, and this was just going to be a digital.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just brainstorming. Yeah, it was, you know, we go into work during the daytime. And then we'd come home in the evenings, code different things, try different things out. So it was a pretty intense work. I think in terms of the numbers of hours, I don't think anything changed from our first startup to trying to figure this next one out.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we all ended up working at the same place, actually. It was a company, a pretty large company called Dun& Bradstreet at the time, very stable company. And we were all pretty fortunate to be able to find work there as engineers.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was a really challenging personal time for me towards the end of the company. We obviously had to lay off most of the company and trying to doing it in a way that was compassionate, was really, really difficult. I don't think the thought of entering school or going back to school popped back into my head at all. And I don't know why. I think it was because despite this very emotional failure, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I had a firm conviction about that. And so I knew I wasn't going to go back.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, about two years. And a lot of ups and downs during that period. And, you know, if I had to think back, I would attribute two-thirds of the challenges and problems we faced as a business to myself Just because I had never managed people, I didn't really know how to run a business even if it was only the technology side. And at some point the dot-com crash happened. And all of our potential customers, the whole industry, the whole economy started taking a downturn.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. And that's probably one of the more fortunate turns in my life, Eric. We didn't know each other at all before the company Epic. He was actually just graduating from Yale on computer science. And I interviewed him. I liked him a lot. And he ended up ultimately becoming the first employee of the company.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We ended up raising a few million dollars from some individuals and some from some venture capital firms as well. And we hired some people, we found a cool renovated firehouse. So that was nice. Really, really amazing place to hang out in for many, many, many hours of the day. And we hired up to, it was close to about 30 people.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Time of crazy names like Yahoo, et cetera, but we decided to change our name at some point and we changed it to Epicy, which was Sahili for And so that was the ultimate name of the company.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was interesting. We originally named it Kapoof. That was how it was incorporated until a lot of people said, you know, that might not be the best name for a company. Sounds like, you know, we called it Kapoof because it sounded like magic, et cetera. Kapof. Things were done, you know, your transaction was completed by Kab”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was not a groundbreaking thing at the time. Obviously, Amazon was around, et cetera. A lot of e-commerce startups. But settled on this idea of making e-commerce a lot more seamless and frictionless and came up with this idea of an electronic wallet that would automatically Make purchases for you. It could work with a lot of different e-commerce sites and the goal there was that we would take a cut of every transaction.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were understandably pretty upset, angry, even I'd say. And you know the irony is that they probably took way more incredible personal risk moving from Korea to the United States and running these series of businesses which Are commonly done but not easy in themselves and pretty high risk. But I do understand, obviously, the perspective at the time.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always had a little bit of a stubborn streak, and that was when I was trying to figure things out, try to think of ideas. I think there was a lot of opportunity, a lot of problems to be solved. And I was also looking for a co-founder at the time. So those were two critical ingredients, an idea and a co-founder.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“James did, in fact, meet his mom's expectations. He did go to Harvard. He put in three years studying computer science, but after his junior year, he got a summer internship at Morgan Stanley and then ended up deciding to start his own business. And though he had hoped to finish his college degree, he never went back.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they had incredibly high expectations, and as a kid, I think I remember my mom telling me when Yeah, I don't think I quite knew what that meant back then, but you could tell that their expectations were pretty high from the very beginning.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fubo and stuff like that. They sold Fubu jeans. Yep. I remember that. And they could switch from one genre or one type of business to another and really not skip a beat.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a way to earn a living and the typical immigrant story is you have friends who live in the country that you're immigrating to. And I think my dad had a friend who worked in wig wholesaling. So that's where he started out. They were selling wigs to people who lived in downtown Cleveland African Americans, mostly women. And I remember my mom, she'd spend a lot of time just looking through black fashion magazines, styling hair, beating them, etc. They had a wig shop, dry cleaners, a fish market. At one point, we moved to Atlanta and they ran an ice cream shop there. We sold track suits, starter jackets, fitted baseball caps, you know, thick gold chains.”
2020-04-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Fitbit: James Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT