YouSaid · the spoken record

Keith Alexander

lines on the record: 54
first: 2021-08-30
most recent: 2021-08-30
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

“It's both of those. Of course, it's both of those. I do feel very lucky to have met someone like Steve who's been prepared to be very persistent. One of the ways I like to think of it for me, the invention process is my part of it, is that it's like having a child. The moment of conception is quite exciting, and then you carry it and you feed it for years, and eventually it starts to meet people of its own, and then you get less control, less and less control. And who your child meets and where they go and how they grow up is not very much in your control at all. There's a lot of luck there. In that sense, I've been very lucky as Steve's taken over the part to get it to the customers, so I was doing pretty well.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Steve did give me warning. He said, would you like to be the Dyson of Springfree? I said, what on earth do you mean? Well, you know Dyson, Dyson, vacuum cleaners? So I went and had a look, and there's Dyson doing his thing. I thought, I suppose I could do that. I said yes to Steve, so then he says right, well, come to Toronto. We're going to have a week of And I'm thinking, right, this is a big deal. This is not just one or two little afternoons. So it was one of the scariest weeks of my life, really. So I end up in Toronto, and this big studio and find myself with three cameras there and lights, people all around and microphones in front of me and they say, right, we'll just talk.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm thinking, hey, this is really something we didn't expect. We've got a new play surface here that other trampolines don't have. We've made a rubber room now. This is way better than I expected. It's not just a safety net. This is another place surface.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Well, they need to be strong enough to hold this net up. So I thought, okay, we can try it. Had a postgrad student who needed some money, so he's working in our backyard. We got these 12 of these around the trampoline fitted on and tied the top of them together with some cord. Let's see what happens when we put a net on. So I said to this postgrad student, you've got to spend the next few days finding some sort of net. Talk to all the fishermen people around the place and see if we can get some net. And after about four days, he come back with some fishing net that he lashed on there at the top and the bottom so that it was more or less like an enclosure in a sense different than the ones that were out there. But it was this really flexible thing. And so then when I came home from university and the kids were still on it, they were bouncing off the walls. They were running into it and bouncing off.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Safe. So Steve said we've now got a relationship with the people who make the poultruded fiberglass. You've got to make the polls out of those same material.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That was a very sobering moment for me. And I thought, yeah, okay. I guess that's the way it is. I guess I can let it go now. I don't feel like it, but I guess that's the way it goes. There's a check coming and I've got to think of other things. And then Steve says I'm going to need a bit of a helping hand because I don't have any trampoline engineers. So do you mind giving me a hand with this? Give me some technical input. I said, yeah, yeah, fine. Okay.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the arrangement with the university was that whatever he paid would be split three ways. So I got a check. That was huge for me.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find it pretty hard to remember. I was really anxious about anything like that, that that core would have freaked me out And shipping something overseas. I don't even know that you had to dial zero zero one to get to America first. One of the things that did make an impression I'm sending you guys $10,000 so that you can do what needs to be done to get me information that I need and get me a trampoline. I didn't have that sort of money. So when someone says, please ship it to the other side of the world, it's a big deal. And when someone says, I'll give you $10,000, that was a big deal.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parents can't buy a safe trampoline. I've got to do something about this. I'll decide to keep going. Around this time, the commercial armor of the university hired another person and he'd actually taken product to market before. And he had a look around New Zealand trying to find if there were any investors in New Zealand that were interested. And in the end, he looked in Canada and found someone in Canada and said, Keith, we got someone in Canada. I'm going to send him a photo and we'll see where we go from here.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I thought so but I always just like challenges and my mother in law she'd ring up to talk to my wife and when she'd get me on the phone she'd say And Keith, how's that trampoline going? I hope you're still working on it. So this is a problem in the world that needed to be solved.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They owned it. I didn't have to do any more. I was doing all this work supervising this and trying to get the money to support making these customer trials.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I thought that was the end of it, really. I thought, I can't get $100,000 or $50,000. I thought it was market ready, but... I was very depressed”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was pretty pleased with it. I thought we were going to market at this stage because I had a commercial person. We had five products with customer trials. And the guys from the commercial arm of the university came along to have a look because there was a bit of terrar going on. They had a look at it and they said, This is not market ready. You need another $50,000, $100,000 to make it market ready. And then they went away.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They experienced that. So we started forming a relationship with them. So we formed a relationship with them and this company who were making 400 trampolines a year. And we started to build some prototypes for customer trials, five prototypes for customer trials.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, okay, there's a challenge. And we've got a company now that's interested, and I'll pay one of these students who was happy to work over summer to build this 10-foot version and see what we can do. So that's what we did over the next year. We had this student working away. He built up this 10-foot trampoline that was higher. We could test it, we could pull it apart, put it together again, put it all into boxes. We couldn't assemble it in half an hour. But all the other things we could do. And we found that there was another company in New Zealand that was quite specialist and pulled true to fiberglass. In fact. They had used it as a spring, and we were using it as a spring”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I always get people ringing me up on Christmas Eve saying, How do I assemble my trampoline? So you've got to sort that out. So if you can sort out those problems, I'll be interested.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He jumped on them. He said, Well, that inflatable one. I like that, but not as a trampling. I like it's a great pull toy. The one with the rods, yeah, that's got some promise, but it's too low. It's got to be high, it's got to be dangerous. It's got to make the kids think it's dangerous. It's got to be bigger. It's far too small. So I want something that's 10 feet diameter. And it's got to pack down so it can be shipped. So you have to be able to pull it all apart and assemble it. And it's got to be able to be assembled by our solo mother with no tools in half an hour on Christmas Eve after she's had a glass of wine.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I looked in the yellow pages. I found the biggest trampoline manufacturer in New Zealand. He was selling four hundred trampolines a year. I rang him up and he said yeah, I'm interested, send me some photos. I'll be in Christchurch. I'll come and have a look. So he came, and I had them all there for him to try and have a look at.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not paying attention that what they wanted is something that's going to make millions of dollars. They don't really want a child's toy.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not uncommon. So I went along with that. I'll let them have it. If they can commercialize it, great. So I took it to them, showed them. They said, Oh, that's fine. That's a kid's toy. See what we can do.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, well, I already thought of this. I've been doing this at home for a while, and now I've got a job at the university. Well, I can't commercialize it. I don't know how to do that. They say they know how to do it.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's exactly right. What I'm supposed to be doing is publishing papers. But they did have this new policy that just came in. Couple of months after I'd started, they said, if you come up with an idea that's commercialisable, you've got to tell this new commercialisation office that we've just developed, that you've done it because it belongs to the university.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you're right. I was thinking I need to get a commercial person involved at this stage. I don't know how to commercialize it. I don't know whether it's going to be commercial at all. I had no idea. Let's contact someone.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fiberglass rods that seem to work all right. That seemed to work alright. Certainly it was more bouncy than the inflatable one. So I was going in the right direction.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something like fiberglass, like a fishing rod material. I thought, well, if you stuck a fishing rod in the ground over there and you stuck another one over here and you tied something between them, you get the tension, but then they're sticking up, these things are sticking straight up. And if you are on a trampoline on the top and you fell on it because they're vertical, if you fell right on the edge, you can impale yourself on them. So, what if we laid them over so that they're forty-five degrees? Then if you landed on them, that bend out. So that was the idea.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started at university in 1996. I ran a couple of university projects in 96-97. And I gave them pretty close guidelines because I put a lot of thought into it. Here's a way I think we could do it. Could you build one? Could you do the analysis on it? And at that time, I had this idea in my mind, and I found it very difficult to imagine I'd never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a basket with these are things, say, like fishing rods. Obviously, if you caught a fish on the end of a fishing rod, that's going to bend. It'll keep some tension on it. It's flexible, it'll keep some tension on. Maybe I could make one like that.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I had a contract, only a contract that wasn't a full-time job, so I didn't have tenure. But I had a job there, and that meant that I could for educational purposes give students projects to do The final year of engineering, the students get an individual project that would go the whole year. So I put that up as a project. Here's an idea for making a trampoline completely differently with springs in a different way. What can you do as a student? What can you come up with?”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, around about that time I sat down and summarised all the sketches I'd gotten, all the ideas I got, because this is not bouncy. I've got to come up with other ways of doing it. And I went through a whole range of ideas and came up with a Several quite complicated ways of using springs. So at this stage I was working at the university”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Where you could get lots of air. You were getting, I am flying off the ground. Is pretty safe for kids. You don't really want when they're three years old, you don't want them jumping too high. It was great. It was great for the kids to have it”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was about eight feet across the mat, of course, was more like five feet because it was on the top of it. The big problem, or that, well, several big problems. Number one, the material cost for that was about eight hundred dollars. Back at that time, just the material costs. So there's no manufacturing in that at all. And it always leaked. There's always some way that. Air would come out? Yes, it was supposed to be airtight. It didn't matter how many times I pulled it apart and try to find the leak. So it was a problem, two problems there. Third problem.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So that's the first one. Then I thought, right, let's make a purpose built one. So the one that we formerly made, and I paid a couple of thousand dollars for, just had the mat sewn into the top edge of this big ring. And that was good for the kids at the time.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right, and you towed it behind the boat. That's what it was for. So I borrowed one of those from the Canvas company, actually, tried it out, and it seemed to work. At that time, my son was about two and a half years old, and he bounced on it, he could bounce on it, all right. It was only about the height of a chair. So if the kid fell off, they didn't have far to go, and the edge was inflatable and soft.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first, I thought right well put springs on. I mean, we can put rope around there to hold the springs and we could have the mat connected to the springs. So I sketched this up and I got a canvas company to make a mat for me and I got some trampoline springs and some rope. I borrowed, they called it a sea biscuit at the time, which is like a big inflatable.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They fall But the thing they'll probably hit first is the steel bar around the edge. That's the thing that impressed me most, I thought. That steel bar, that's not fair. Let's see if we can get rid of that steel bar. That's a good step. So I'm thinking, well, inflatable things are soft. What have we replaced this steel frame with an inflatable ring, just like a beginner tube, and then stretch the trampoline mat across the top of that? Would that work?”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what are the issues here that we have to solve? And the traditional trampolinas got a steel bar around the outside edge and springs right beside it and then the mat that you jump on in the middle. And I can see that it's dangerous because the accident rates have gone up and it's pretty obvious. You give this nice bouncy thing to kids and they'll bounce all over it and they'll lose control and they'll fall on the bar or they'll fall down the hole between the springs.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had to think of a way around that. So I thought right, well, if I can design one, I'm sure a trampoline's pretty simple. Surely I can design. I've got a PhD in engineering. And I love designing things like this. Surely I'll be able to do it. Let's design one that she'll accept. And maybe we could even sell it. I don't know.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is 1989 And she said trampolines are not safe. I think, all right, well, I'll just prove her wrong. I'll look at the research and see what I can find. So I looked at the research and sure enough, even in New Zealand, there'd been some research done on the increase in injuries from trampolines. And I thought, well, they really are dangerous. Maybe I can do something about it. I'm an engineer, I should be able to do something about this And that's when it started”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But let's start young. I'll be able to bounce on it too. And so I said to my wife, you know, we've got to get a trampoline for Katie. And she said, No, I take it a play center. They don't have a trampoline at Play Centre. They're just too dangerous.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that really frustrated me. So when they started to become available in the shops and I had a young child, I thought, right, we've got to get one of these.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when I was a kid, I'd love to trampoline. I just loved the idea of being in the air, but you couldn't buy a trampoline in those days unless it was a gymnastics trampoline. We had one at the school, and in the gym class you get 30 kids there, and we had to get on, jump three bounces, seat drop, get off the next person. That was it. That was my jumping. And you love this. And I love this thing.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's pretty good, yes. If other people haven't been able to solve it, I want to solve it. That's a real challenge for me. That's something that excites me. No one else has done this. I want to do this because no one else has done it.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the end, one of the best ideas would be to go to the South Magnetic Pole and put a big ring of conductor material around the magnetic field there and put a huge current through it and it would actually fly into space.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not all the time, not all the time. One of the early ones was a magnetic flying machine, which was supposed to use the Earth's magnetic field to fly, but... I was very proud of what I did, but it didn't work”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After two weeks, they found I could do other things as well. Working for a consultancy, you've got a variety of things. There was quite a bit of insurance work, there was crash investigations, there was a bit of court work as well. So it was quite a broad range of stuff. But I wasn't particularly happy with that because it all comes down to the money. In the end, it's all how much have you been able to invoice this week? And I really like spending time on things, putting more time into it and thinking it through properly.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew nothing about what valuation was. It was looking at a piece of machinery and working out how much it cost, how old it is. After two weeks, I was getting pretty good at it.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at first I thought if I want to come back into academic life, I really need some engineering. So I moved back to Auckland and got a job in an engineering consultancy.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for the art exhibition, there were quite a few there. One of my enduring experiences was having a haircut during my PhD at university, and this lady was giving me the haircut and she said, do you realise you're thinning on top? It was really embarrassing, so I thought that would be a good thing for young guys to have because you can never see the top of your head. So I made this.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, my father and I invented this. We had to make it fit the competition for that. So I flew back from Auckland where I'd gone to stay with my parents and I built these shoes to compete in this competition. And I managed to win the competition two years in a row. And then a third one in Auckland. And that helped fund my PhD.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solution is put your feet on the bottom. You cut a hole in it. And you put a bit of plywood on the bottom so your feet go right through to the bottom, and then it stays upright by sound.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, my father had been developing some walk on water shoes in Auckland. He and I had been playing around with it because we had a dinghy and we'd been figuring out how to do this. You need some flotation. The competition put limits on how big these flotation things could be. So it ended up being, you weren't allowed to have anything longer than one meter And it didn't take much for an engineer to work out how big the piece of polystyrene had to be so he could carry your whole weight.”
2021-08-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT