埃里克·米吉科夫斯基，Pebble与Beeper创始人

我是杰西卡·利文斯顿，我和卡罗琳·利维是社交雷达。在这个播客中，我们与硅谷一些最成功的创始人畅谈他们的创业历程。近二十年来，卡罗琳和我一直在Y Combinator携手帮助数千家初创公司。请随我们一同聆听创始人的真实故事。卡罗琳，我今天特别兴奋。

I'm Jessica Livingston, and Carolyn Levy and I are the social radars. In this podcast, we talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it. Carolyn and I have been working together to help thousands of startups at Y Combinator for almost twenty years. Come be a fly on the wall as we talk to founders and learn their true stories. Carolyn, I am so excited today.

今天我们重逢了一位YC元老级创始人——Pebble智能手表创始人埃里克·米吉科夫斯基。相信大家都记得这款开创性的智能手表。后来他创立的万能聊天应用Beeper今年早些时候被Automatic收购。欢迎你，埃里克。

We are catching up with an old school YC founder. Today, we have Eric Midgekovsky, who is the founder of the Pebble Watch. I'm sure you all remember the first smartwatch out there. And then he was the founder of Beeper, which is the universal chat app that was acquired earlier this year by Automatic. Welcome, Eric.

见到二位真好，这感觉就像回到了最初的YC时代。

Good to see you both. This feels this feels like OGYC.

太棒了。确实好久不见，我迫不及待想叙旧。带我们回到滑铁卢时期吧——2011年冬季我们投资了你。记得那时加拿大滑铁卢大学涌现了很多优秀初创企业和创始人。

This is great. I know. I haven't seen you in ages, so I'm so excited to catch up. I want you to take me back to Waterloo because we funded you in winter twenty eleven. And I remember around that time, there were a lot of good startups and founders coming out of the Canadian University of Waterloo.

我们应该是YC投资的第一家加拿大公司。

I think we were the first Canadian corporation that YC invested in.

等等，我们当时没要求你们改制吗？

Wait. We we did? We didn't make you flip?

没有，我们确实是第一家。

No. I think we were the first one.

天啊。

Oh, boy.

这件事让克里斯蒂从此看我的眼神都不一样了。

And I think that for forever made Kirsty look at me in a different way.

当然记得。我清晰记得我们的CFO克里斯蒂和纳图因为你们的加拿大公司架构愁白了头——当时投资流程异常艰难。而且资金到账是不是拖延了特别久？

Oh, of course. I was just gonna say, I have a very clear memory of Kirsty, Nathu, our CFO, getting gray hairs over your Canadian corporation and it was a very difficult thing for us to invest in. And didn't it take a really long time until we were able to give you your money?

是的，我想是这样。但我们挺过来了。最初几周，我们住在山景城的一间合租屋里。

Yes. I think so. But we got by. I think in the the first few weeks Yeah. We like we were living in this shared house in Mountain View.

我记得，我们知道自己会从YC拿到2.1万美元，现在听起来不算多，但当时感觉是笔巨款——首先那是美元，其次我们之前没融过资。我们本应该...

And I remember, you know, we we knew that we were getting I think $21,000 from YC, which doesn't sound like that much now, but it sounded like a lot at that time because first of all, they were US dollars. Second of all, we had not raised any money. We should

给他加元才对。

have given him Canadian dollars.

所以我...

And so I

没错，该为这个惩罚他。等等，你们申请YC前不是活下来了吗？你们不是靠各种比赛奖金维持的吗？

Yes. We should have punished him for that. Wait. Didn't you didn't you survive before you applied to YC? You had the idea and weren't you surviving on all sorts of like competition prizes?

对，我参加那些路演比赛，要做60秒电梯演讲，赢过些巨型支票——就是那种超大尺寸的纪念支票。

Yeah. I would do those pitch competitions, where you had to, you know, do your sixty second elevator pitch and I would win those novelty sized checks. You know, those like really large checks.

是的。

Yes.

但没法兑现

Which you can't cash

在...怎么

at the of How

兑现那些支票？

do you cash those?

比看起来要难得多。

Harder harder than it looks.

这些要怎么兑现？还是说它们只是摆设，实际上...

How do you even cash those? Or do they are those just, for show and then they actually

直接转账给你？他们会拍一张

wire you in? They take a photo of

你和那些东西的合照。

you with those.

我觉得那些只是做做样子。

I think those are just for show.

对，好吧。我想聊聊Pebble，因为它是智能手表还没流行时的第一款智能手表。你们几乎是开创了这个产品类别。给我们讲讲这个点子的由来吧。

Yeah. Okay. I wanna talk about Pebble because it was the first smartwatch back when smartwatches weren't even a thing. You were, like, invented this whole product category. So tell us the story about how you came up with that idea.

2008年我在荷兰代尔夫特大学留学时想到了Pebble。我祖父当年也在那里读书，所以六十年后能回到这座古老美丽的城市生活，感觉特别棒。

I thought of Pebble, in 2008 while I was studying overseas, at the University of Delft in The Netherlands. My grandfather actually went to school there, and so it was really cool to be able to do kind of like sixty years later have, you know, come back and and and live in this really old beautiful town.

确实

That is

在荷兰期间，我每天都骑自行车上学、到处逛。那时我刚买了第一代iPhone 2G，可能是我买过最贵的东西，大概700美元。我总做噩梦梦见骑车时把手机掉进运河里。

so while I was there, given that it's The Netherlands, I was bicycling every single day, to school, all all around. And I had just bought, an iPhone two g, the first generation iPhone. And so it was this it was the most expensive thing that I'd, you know, probably ever purchased. It was like $700 or something. And I kept having a nightmare that I would drop my iPhone into the canal as I was biking around.

没错，完全可以理解。

Right. Legit.

因为我想看看是谁在发短信或打电话，而我经常骑自行车。于是我就有了这个想法，想做一个自行车电脑，就是那种可以装在车把上的小长方形设备。我想，如果我有一个这样的设备，它能显示谁在发短信或打电话，就像在自行车上有个提醒装置。我开始用旧智能手机的屏幕捣鼓，用Arduino拼凑东西。后来我的一个朋友，我想是他的朋友告诉我，嘿，你为什么不把这个做成手表而不是自行车电脑呢？这样你不骑车的时候也能用。

Because I wanted to see, you know, who was texting or calling, and I was constantly on the bike. And so I had this idea to build a bike computer, you know, those little kind of rectangles that you would put on the handlebars of the I thought, like, what if I had one of those and it could show me who was texting or calling or, you know, just kind of like a heads up thing on on the bike. I started playing around with screens from old smartphones and hacking things together with Arduino. And then a friend of mine, I I think his friend told me like, hey, you know, what if you made this a watch instead of a bike computer? Because then you could use it when you aren't on your bike.

好主意。毕竟人不会一直骑车，对吧。就这样它变成了智能手表。我用Arduino和这个旧屏幕拼出了第一个原型。

People Good idea. You know, don't bike all the time. Right. And that's when it became, you know, a smart watch. And I put the first prototype together, yeah, using Arduino and this old screen.

对我来说不幸的是，2008年2月这个最早最早最早的原型视频还在YouTube上。

Unfortunately for me, the YouTube video is still online of this very, very, very first prototype in 02/2008.

真的吗？顺便问下它有多大？

Really? How big was it, by the way? Yeah. Like, how

很大。

It was big.

嗯，我猜也是。

Yeah. I bet.

大概有信用卡那么大。嗯。而且第一个版本我其实从没戴在手腕上，实在太大了。

It was probably the size of a credit card. Uh-huh. And it never actually like, that first version, I never actually mounted on on my wrist. It was way too big. Right.

但至少它让我明白了原理，而且这是个超级有趣的项目。我不是个很厉害的工程师，虽然技术上算工程师，但我学的是系统设计工程，就是当你不知道该选哪个具体工程专业时选的那个。我们教授常说，系统设计工程师不一定知道怎么造东西，但他们绝对知道该刷什么颜色。

But, you know, it got got the point across at least to me, and it was a it was a hell of a fun project. Like, I'm not a great engineer. I'm technically an engineer, but I studied this thing called systems design engineering, which is, kind of what you pick when you can't decide which actual engineering program you wanna do. And the motto or at least the the the line that our professors would tell us is that systems design engineers, they don't exactly know how to build it, but they sure as hell know which color to paint

扎心了。

Burn.

所以...哦不。这就是我当时拿的工程学位。我编程不怎么样，工程学的各个具体学科也都不太行。但我很自豪自己能拼凑出电路板、Arduino和屏幕，还写了代码，我非常骄傲。

And so Oh, no. That was that was my engineering kind of degree at the time. I couldn't really code that well. Couldn't really do any of the individual disciplines in engineering that well. But I was really proud of myself that I could put together, like, you know, a circuit board here and an Arduino here and a screen, and I wrote the code for it, and I was I was very proud.

顺便说一句，加拿大式的谦逊此刻正展现得淋漓尽致。我其实并不擅长什么，只是碰巧做出了这个东西。

The Canadian humility is emerging right now, by the way. I wasn't really good at anything. I just built this thing.

我知道。我只是做出了第一块智能手表。好吧。那么你是在申请Y Combinator之前就完成了那个项目？

I know. I just built the first smartwatch. Okay. So then so but you built that before you applied to Y Combinator.

早在那之前很久。

A long time before.

你申请Y Combinator时项目进展到什么阶段了？为什么决定申请？

At what point were you when you applied to Y Combinator? Why did you decide to apply to Y Combinator?

那是两年后的事了。我们从2008年开始做这个项目，直到2010年才申请YC。期间我持续开发着，没有融资，只赢得过几次创业竞赛。

That was two years later. So we I started working on this in the 2008, and we didn't apply to YC until 2010. And so I had been I had continued to work on it. We hadn't raised any money. We had, you know, won a couple of these pitch competitions.

我无法说服任何真正的工程师朋友全职加入，他们只是用业余时间帮忙。说实话，我必须承认——单凭我自己根本做不到，需要朋友们协助，因为我缺乏完成整个拼图所需的全部技能。

I couldn't convince any of my friends to actually join full time, like people who are real engineers. So they were helping me kind of on the side from their actual jobs. And, yeah, it's hard. Like, I I I wanna underemphasize, like, I really couldn't do it myself. I needed to have my friends help me because I I didn't have the skills to be able to do the whole kind of puzzle.

那时候你毕业了吗？

Had you graduated at this point?

2009年毕业的。我决定不去找正经工作，继续捣鼓这个项目。后来从滑铁卢大学雇了个实习生科里，1月3日那天他出现在我们合租的学生公寓——是的我还住那儿——敲门说'嗨，我来实习了'。

I graduated in 2,009. So I decided not to go and get a real job. I decided to just keep working on this. Hired an intern from the University of Waterloo, a co op student named Corey, who I think on January 3 showed up to our, like, shared student house that I was still living in and knocked on the door and said, like, hey. I'm here for my internship.

我当时就懵了，赶紧去车库里给他腾地方...

And I was like, oh, shit. I had to go and, like, clear off space in the garage for him to

等等...这是无薪实习吗？就为了刷简历？

I don't know, like Was this unpaid internship? Resume?

是的。他确实拿到了报酬，但当时滑铁卢大学的运作方式是，他们会补贴实习生大约75%的工资。所以我想，总共花费2000加元就能让科里工作四个月。因此，他成为了第一个真正的员工和工程师，而且他还是个一年级实习生。

Yeah. He he was paid, but the way that the University of Waterloo worked, at least at that time, is they subsidized something like 75% of your intern's salary. So I think for the total cost of $2,000 for a four month work term, I could pay, you know, Corey to work. And so he was the first he was the first real real employee and real engineer, and he was a first year co op.

不错。现在我想指出的是，你们在滑铁卢，这里以黑莓总部闻名。你们当时开发这个是为了与黑莓同步，对吧？难道不是这样吗？

Nice. Now, I'd like to point out that you are in Waterloo, which is famous for the headquarters of BlackBerry. So you were building this, weren't you, to to sync up with BlackBerry. Is that not true?

是的。最初的原型是与iPhone配合使用的，但iPhone实际上没有API可以让应用通过蓝牙与其他设备通信。所以我做了一个适配器，插在iPhone底部，让它能通过蓝牙与手机通信。但这根本行不通。我是说，可能技术上可行，但当时黑莓确实有蓝牙配件的API。

Yeah. So the first prototype worked with an iPhone, but iPhone didn't actually have an API that would allow apps to talk via Bluetooth to other devices. So I had built a dongle that you would put into the bottom of the iPhone that would give it full Bluetooth access to be able to talk to a phone. That was never gonna work. We were never gonna I mean, it might have worked, but at the time, BlackBerry actually had a API for Bluetooth accessories.

所以在RIM（黑莓母公司）的大本营，我决定从iPhone转向黑莓。2008年2月做出这个决定可真是够大胆的。

And so being in the home of research and motion, I decided to kind of pivot from iPhone to BlackBerry. Quite a decision to make in 02/2008.

但是

But

嘿，我们

hey, we

我们当时在这个地方

we were in this place

我喜欢这样。

I love that.

那时候几乎人手一部黑莓，BBM（黑莓信使）如日中天，可以说是世界之王。所以当时觉得这个转向很自然。

Where there's like everyone had a BlackBerry, BBM was Right. Top of the, you know, king of the world. And, yeah, it it felt somewhat natural at the time.

别忘了，虽然感觉是很久以前的事了，但黑莓曾经非常强大。就在iPhone问世之前，绝对是巨头。所以这个选择也情有可原。

And let's not forget, it seems like a long time ago, but BlackBerry was huge Yeah. You know, right before the iPhone came out. Absolutely huge. Yeah. So can't blame me for that.

所以你的手表是叫Impulse对吧？

So your your watch was called wasn't it called Impulse?

是叫Impulse。没错。但公司名字是另一个。

It was called Impulse. Yes. And the company was called something different.

哦，公司叫什么来着？

Oh, what was the company called?

你们投资的公司叫Alerta。所以我们当时

You invested in a company called Alerta. So we had

Alerta。

Alerta.

公司名取这个因为像警报(alerts)的谐音，Alerta。对。

Company name there because it was like alerts, Alerta. Yeah.

嗯哼。

Uh-huh.

我们当时有.ca域名，没有.com的。然后给产品随便起了个名字

And we had the .ca domain, didn't have the .com. And then we named the product something Just

哎呀，真是乱七八糟的。

Oh, gosh. Piling up the ass. Here.

你能想象我和PG的第一次办公时间有多尴尬。我们当然坐着

You can imagine what my first office hour with PG was. Of course, we sat

倒下然后

down and

他说，好吧，得给你找个新名字。所以当然。二十分钟后

he was like, well, gotta find you a new name. So Of course. After twenty minutes

看到一个域名。名字。

of seeing a domain. Name.

还有一个新域名。对。所以挑了二十分钟域名后，他说，我们应该叫它Device Lit。我记得这个。他说，你可以买下这个域名。

And a new domain. Yeah. So after twenty minutes of picking out domains, he was like, we should call it device lit. I remember that. He was like, you can buy the domain.

Devicelet。就像手环一样。

Devicelet. It's like a bracelet.

那个域名？还记得吗？

Was the domain? Do remember?

我想我们花了10美元买了Devicelet。如你所见，我们最终没有用Devicelet作为公司名。

I think we bought Devicelet for $10. As you as you can as you can see, we did not end up calling the company Devicelet.

那真是抱歉。

That's Sorry.

对。对。对。然后发生了什么？

Right. Right. Right. So then what happened?

嗯，我们申请了YC，然后出于某种疯狂的原因，你决定投资。我想我们是YC投资的第二或第三家硬件公司，之前是WakeMade。嗯。那家公司做的那些平板或挂在墙上的屏幕，用来展示网站分析数据。

Well, we applied to YC, and then for some crazy reason, you decided to, invest. I think we were the second or third hardware company YC had invested in before was WakeMade. And Mhmm. The company that made those tablets that sat on or like screens that sat on walls, to show you analytics for your website.

Leftronics。我们有过这家公司。就是Leftronics。对，就是那个。天啊，真是往事如烟。

Leftronics. That we have It was Leftronics. One of those yeah. Oh my gosh. Blast from the past.

所以我们投资了你们，你们是我们投资的第三家硬件公司。2011年做硬件公司是什么感觉？那时候几乎没人涉足这个领域。

So we funded you were the third hardware company we funded. What was it like doing a hardware company back in 2011 when no one really was doing them?

如你所料，融资并不容易。演示日之后，我们算是靠着投资人的怜悯才筹到钱。我们只有两位投资者。

It wasn't easy to raise money, as you can imagine. And so after demo day, we raised from people who took pity on us, I would say. We we had two two investors.

你还记得是谁吗？

Do you remember?

蒂姆·德雷珀和保罗·布赫海特。就这两位。

Tim Draper and Paul Buchheit. Those are the only two

那个...我想说的是PB（保罗·布赫海特）。

that and and I think gonna say PB.

没错。我们很幸运赶上了YC第一轮，尤里·米尔纳给所有公司盲投了15万美元。他根本不知道自己投的是一家疯狂的硬件初创公司。这笔钱对我们至关重要，至少让我们在YC之后还能有几十万美元运作。

Yes. And so we were we were lucky that we were in the first batch of YC where Yuri Milner invested a $150,000 in all companies sight unseen. So he didn't know he was Yeah. Investing in a crazy hardware startup. And so that was critical to us being able to at least, you know, have I think a couple $100,000 after YC.

不过...

Yeah. Though

是啊。

Yeah.

那笔钱立刻让我做出了些糟糕决定。有时候融资成功反而会助长错误冲动。我们东拼西凑在演示日后筹到几十万，当时正在开发第一款产品Impulse——这款手表只能配合黑莓手机使用，比我们后来推出Pebble早了两年。我当时还觉得这主意棒极了。

That money drove me immediately to make some terrible decisions. And I will say that, like, it's sometimes when you do raise money, it can it can fuel some bad impulses. And so what happened was we scratched together, you know, a couple $100,000 after demo day, and I made the we we were making our first product called Impulse, which was this watch that only worked with BlackBerry. And this was about a couple years before we actually launched Pebble. And I was like, oh, great.

我们手头有这笔钱。该怎么处理它呢？当时我们库存不多，基本上是在车库里制造这些手表。真的，我们在滑铁卢有个车库，两名高中生负责组装线，他们会在电路板上安装软件，然后装进我们在滑铁卢另一家工厂制作的金属表壳里。

We have this money. What what should we do with it? And at the time, we didn't have much inventory. We were basically manufacturing these watches in the garage. Like, literally, we had a garage in Waterloo where two high school students would kind of man the assembly line and they would take circuit boards, they would put software onto the circuit boards, and then put them into this metal case that we had made at another facility in Waterloo.

顺便问下，你后来回加拿大了对吧？YC结束后你就回去了。

And So you by the way, you went back to Canada. After YC, you went back.

没有。我不在的时候那些高中生仍在运营组装线

No. The high school students were still running the assembly line while I was

啊？你当时甚至都不在场？

Oh, and you weren't even there?

但我有个朋友在那边监督他们，确保

There. But a friend of mine was kind of over overseeing them and making sure that

明白了。

Okay.

流程正常运转。他们会从加拿大给我寄来成箱的手表，我贴上标签再发给购买者。当时我们拿着这笔钱就在想：不如找个圣何塞的制造商来生产？何必在车库里自己折腾？

Things worked. So they would ship me these boxes of watches from Canada, and I would put labels on them and send them out to people that had, bought them. And at the time, we had this money and we were like, okay. What would we what do we do? Well, why don't we, you know, find instead of manufacturing these at our garage, why don't we find a manufacturer, you know, in San Jose to to build these?

美国本土有很多专门接小批量订单的代工厂。我实地考察了几家后签了约，用筹集资金的大部分——不是全部——生产了约一两千只手表。这是为了降低成本，因为我们基本是亏本或持平销售。如果能提高些产量，就能摊薄成本赚点利润。

There's tons of these contract manufacturers that specialize in doing kind of small production runs here in The US. And so I drove around to a couple of these facilities, found one, and signed a contract to build maybe a thousand or 2,000 of these watches that cost not the entire amount of money, but a large percentage of the money that we had just raised. And it was in the interest of driving down the cost because we were selling these watches basically at a loss or break even. And if we could Right. Buy them in a little bit more volume, we could we could bring the average cost down and we could make a little bit of money.

你大概能猜到后续了。我们订了一两千只表，消耗了大量现金。结果首先交货比预期慢得多——我们原以为手工都能做，工厂肯定能量产。

You can kind of see where the story is going. So we bought a couple we bought about a thousand or 2,000 of these watches, used up quite a bit of cash. And then in September first of all, it took longer to get the watches than we had thought. Like, we were making these kind of one by one and we said, oh, well, we're already making them. This factory should be able to kind of spit them out.

硬件行业就是这样：耗时总是预期的三倍，成本也是三倍。等到九十月终于收到新货（之前断货很久），我们看着邮件等候列表里的两三千用户，还觉得胜券在握。

You know, everything takes three times as long as you you think. It is three times more expensive in hardware. And so by September, October, when we finally got the first, you know, new watches after having been out of stock for a while. We're like, great. We have 2,000, 3,000 people on our email wait list.

我们发邮件告诉大家，产品已经准备好了。你想买吗？

Let's email everyone and say, it's ready. Do you wanna buy it?

是啊，毫无反应。你这么做的时候发生了什么？一片寂静。对。

Yeah. Crickets. What happened when you did that? Crickets. Yeah.

我们大概只卖出了...呃...可能100或200个左右，之后每周零星卖出几个。但我们积压了大量库存，真的是一箱箱手表堆在那里卖不出去。

We sold like Crickets. Yeah. Maybe a 100 or 200 or something, and then slowly kind of maybe sold another couple per week. But we were sitting on like, literally sitting on. We had boxes of these watches that we couldn't sell.

当时你们积压这么多库存却没人愿意预订，这个产品还叫

At this point, when you had all this inventory and nobody wanted to buy the preorders, this was still called

Impulse（冲动）。对。

Impulse. Yeah.

与黑莓手机兼容的。

Working with the BlackBerry.

与黑莓手机兼容的。

Working with the BlackBerry.

哦，还是和黑莓...

Oh, still working with the Black We

当时只支持安卓系统。虽然开始兼容安卓了，但硬件层面绝对无法支持iPhone，因为缺少苹果要求的特定芯片——MFI认证芯片。那时已是2011年2月，iPhone正变得越来越流行。

had just Android support at this time. So it it started to work with Android, but there was no way that this hardware could work with iPhone because it didn't have a specific chip that Apple required, something called an MFI chip. And so there was no way that it could could work with iPhone, and iPhone was getting pretty popular. Now we're into 02/2011.

哦对了，话说你们是怎么...

Oh, yeah. By way, how did you get

所有这些预先注册的人，你们肯定制造了足够的轰动效应，让至少两三千人即使从未购买也注册了。你们是怎么制造这种轰动的？

all those pre signed like, you must have got enough buzz that people at least two couple thousand people signed up even though they never bought it, they signed up for it. How did you get that buzz?

我们始于2008年2月。我们在2009年2月就早早发布了产品，远在硬件准备就绪之前。当时我对产品发布一窍不通，但记得有句格言说'尽早且频繁发布'或'尽可能多发布'。我凭直觉就这么做了，其实并不清楚具体该怎么做。

We started, in 02/2008. We launched or 02/2009, launched quite early, way before the hardware was ready. And the way that I launched was I didn't know anything about launching. But I think there's an adage like launch early and often or launch as many times as you can. And I certainly did that kind of intuitively without really knowing what I was doing.

当我们首次宣布Impulse智能手表时，消息在传播过程中出现了偏差。几个博主听说后，没有称我们是制造智能手表的初创公司，而是称之为'黑莓手表'——因为这是唯一兼容黑莓的设备。结果这个误会愈演愈烈，人们真以为黑莓要推出智能手表了。

The first time that we announced Impulse, the the smartwatch, there was a kind of broken telephone game that got it got picked up by the press. A couple, bloggers kind of heard about it. But instead of instead of referring to it as, you know, a startup that was manufacturing a smartwatch, they called it the BlackBerry watch because, you know, it was the only watch that worked with BlackBerry. But it kind of Right. It took on its own took on a life of its own where people thought that BlackBerry was actually making a smartwatch.

这个误会当时成了大新闻，导致消息病毒式传播。我记得有记者直接把话筒怼到黑莓CEO吉姆·巴尔西利或迈克·拉扎里迪斯面前问：'您对黑莓手表有何评论？'他只能回答'无可奉告'，这很有趣。最终当我们正式发布时，所有报道过'黑莓手表'的媒体都转而报道了我们这个小初创公司的发布会，并分享了我们的网站。

And so it went viral because that was, you know, big news at the time. And we hadn't fully launched, like, it wasn't there there was a lot of miscommunication at that time, and it went viral and it peaked with I remember some reporter, like, putting a microphone in the face of Jim Balcilli or, Mike Lazaridis, the the CEO of of BlackBerry saying, what's your what's your comment on the BlackBerry watch? And he had to say, like, no comment, which was pretty funny. But it caused us to And go so when we ended up launching and and sharing all of the press all of the press outlets that covered the BlackBerry watch that was this kind of leak from BlackBerry, they ended up covering our tiny little startup launch and sharing our website.

干得漂亮。这效果太棒了。

Nice. Which was great.

因此我们获得了数千名真正感兴趣用户的注册。

And so we got thousands of sign ups from people who actually were interested.

为什么人们最终没购买？只是因为等待时间太长吗？

Why didn't people actually buy it? Just too much time

整整三年。我们花了三年才开始发货，而那时用户全都用上iPhone了。他们都从黑莓转投了苹果。

three years. It took us three years to start shipping and they all got iPhones. They all switched from

他们早就不再用黑莓了。

they weren't using they weren't using Blackberry anymore.

确实。他们都换了iPhone。好了，现在说说你们如何转向iPhone平台，以及那个著名的Kickstarter故事吧。

Of course. They got iPhones. Okay. So now, tell us about how you switched gears and went to the iPhone and the famous Kickstarter story.

如今我们创业已五年，这是2012年，Demo Day过去一年后。我们银行账户里剩下的资金正逐渐减少，来自我们那次非常非常小的融资，加上我手头积压的大量库存。大概还剩五万到六万美元，听起来不少，但其实并不算多。

So we're now five years into doing my startup. It's it's the 2012, and it's one year after demo day. We had a dwindling amount of money left in our bank account from the very, very small fundraise that we did, combined with the large amount of inventory that I was sitting on. We had probably like $50.60 k left in the bank, which sounds like a lot, but it's not that much money.

不，听起来并不多，Eric。

No. It doesn't, Eric.

不，听起来根本不算多。

No. It doesn't sound like a lot.

对我们来说那笔钱感觉挺多的。因为我们几乎没有运营成本——除了实习生外没有雇佣员工，每月房租也就几千美元。那六万美元本可以支撑我们运作好一阵子。

I mean, it sounded to us like a lot. Like, we weren't we weren't just wanted like, there was no because we didn't have any burn. Like, I didn't have any employees except for the interns. And, you know, I I think we're spending a couple thousand dollars on rent. So, like, that 60 k probably would have let us work for a while.

现在回想起来很奇妙，如今我会考虑资金耗尽日期之类的问题。但说实话，当时我们根本没想到这些——至少我记忆中没有丝毫恐惧。作为如今这个白发苍苍的老创业者，我经常反思那段日子。

Right. And it's really weird because nowadays I think about, like, what's your, you know, burnout date and, you know, all that stuff. Honestly, like, we didn't even think about that. There was no, like, fear in our there's no fear in my mind at least, you know, with retrospect here. And I think I think about that often, like, as of now as a, you know, gray haired old, you know, entrepreneur.

二十岁出头那种不虑将来的天真反而帮了大忙。如果我们当时看清未来，绝对会吓破胆：作为硬件公司，账上只有五万美金，还囤积着大量库存。

That naivete of being 20, you know, something and not really worrying about the future was super helpful. Because if we were worried about the future, we would have objectively been scared shitless. Like, we're a hardware company. We have $50,000 in the bank. We have all this inventory.

按常理我们早该转型或考虑其他点子，但不知为何我们坚持了原定路线。我想着：这可比我们最初的钱多多了。当时已卖出几千台产品，于是决定：不如去融资吧？

Like, we would have started pivoting and thinking about all these other ideas and all this other but but for some reason, like, I just we just stayed the course. We're like, hey. You know, this is more money than we used to have. And so I was like, okay. You know, we've sold a couple thousand units at this point.

大多数YC公司不都这样吗？有点收入、有些用户、想开发新产品时就去融种子轮。但Demo Day后我始终没行动，还有个重要原因——我的联合创始人在Demo Day前两周退出了。

What if we went and raised money? You know? That's what most YC companies do is they, you know, get a bit of revenue and get some users, and, you know, they have new products that they wanna work on. They go and they raise a seed round. And so I never really tried to do this after Demo Day, because I knew at the time that oh, I guess another important thing is my cofounder quit two weeks before Demo Day.

所以

And so

天啊，这也太糟了。

Oh, no. Oh my gosh.

记住那个

Remember that

故事。我也不记得了。是啊。

story. Don't either. Yeah.

为什么？为什么？

Why? Why?

原因多种多样。有些理由充分，有些则不那么充分。所以Demo Day之后我其实没怎么出去融资，因为我觉得，你知道，我刚失去了联合创始人。我们...当时我并不觉得自己有个特别有说服力的故事。

A variety of reasons. Some well founded, some less well founded. And so that that I I never really went out and raised money after Demo Day because I was like, I'm a, you know, I just lost my cofounder. We, you know, I didn't feel like I was I was had a really strong story at the time.

你现在看起来不像是个热门项目了是吧，埃里克？

You're not looking that you're not looking like the hot deal, are you, Eric, at this point?

确实。所以我想，一年后再试试吧。于是我联系了YC合伙人，梳理了所有可能在Demo Day投资的投资人。我做了那种调研——看看哪些投资人对这个领域感兴趣，发现他们投过些硬件项目。

No. And so I was like, well, one year later, let's try again. And so I asked, you know, the YC Partners. I, you know, looked at all the investors that would invest in companies at Demo Day. I did the thing where you look up investors that kind of invested in this area, and you said, oh, they they kind of invested hardware.

就这样我见了二三十个投资人，约到几次会面。当然，最后没融到钱。连第二次会议的机会都没有——印象中一个都没有。

And so I, you know, I went and talked to 20 or 30 investors and got a couple meetings. Oh. Couldn't raise any money, of course. Not a single I don't I don't think I did a single second meeting.

你当时在会上还在讲兼容黑莓的设备吗？还是说

Were you at those meetings, were you talking about a device that works with BlackBerry still? Was that

我那时在推Pedal项目。我在推销的是

still I was pitching pedal. I was pitching what

我要做个新东西。对。我要开发一款兼容iPhone的手表。

would I have a new thing. Yes. I'm gonna build a watch that works with the iPhone.

是的。我们最终...我终于想明白了如何制作一款兼容iPhone和Android的手表，而黑莓则被我们暂时搁置一旁。我们说，看，我们有了这第一个产品。它取得了一点小成功，而我们又有了下一个产品的构想，准备着手打造。

Yes. We had finally I I finally figured out how to make a watch that worked with the iPhone and Android, and we were kind of jettisoning BlackBerry to the side. And we said, look. We had this first product. It was, you know, a we had a little bit of success, and we have this idea for this next product, and we're gonna go and build this.

但我们需要筹集资金。需要一百万美元来完成工程设计和生产制造，让这个新产品面世。

But we need to raise money. We need to raise a million dollars in order to do the engineering work and the kind of manufacturing work to get this new product out the door.

我能为听众插问一句吗？因为这是很久以前的事了，现在智能手表已很普遍。但当时，用户喜欢它什么？你是第一个用户，比如只是接收提醒吗？

Can I interrupt for one second just for our listeners? Because this is a long time ago, and smartwatches are such a big thing now. But back then, tell us, like, what did the users love about it? You were your first user. Like, was it just getting alerts?

因为我记得你在一次采访中提到，初代Impulse手表甚至没有时间显示功能，它不显示时间。

Because I I think you said in an interview, like, the first version of the Impulse watch didn't even have the time on it. It didn't keep the time.

它每分钟会从手机接收一次新的时间信息。

It would receive a message from the phone every minute with the new time.

为什么我觉得这特别好笑？因为作为手表，这太逊了。用最费劲的方式获取时间。

Why is that so funny to me? Because it's so lame. For a watch. Get the time in the hardest way possible.

嗯，我们这么做是有原因的。这其实能回答Jessica的问题。当我开始研发时，我真正想要的是不用掏手机就能知道来电、短信或邮件。最初是为骑车设计，但很快演变成——我们总在频繁掏手机。

Well, here's here's why we did that. We and and I think this this helps answer answer Jessica's question. So I when I when I when I started working on this, I really wanted something that would tell me if I was getting a call or a text or an email without having to take my phone out of my pocket. Right? It started with the bike, but it quickly evolved to the fact that, you know, we're constantly taking our phones out of our pocket.

手腕上有个东西能轻微震动提醒，那是2010年。当时我没那么多邮件和短信，一天就几条。我讨厌手机震动，所以从不设铃声。

And having something on your wrist that would just have a little vibration, buzz, and it would show you and this was back in 2010. I wasn't get I wasn't getting that many emails. I wasn't getting that many texts. It was like, you know, a couple per day. And I hated having a buzz on my phone, and so I never really had a ringtone.

Pebble手表让我能感知来电、短信或邮件。最早的用户是黑莓用户，他们喜欢BBM和邮件提醒，这是新消息的提前预警。2010年中旬我戴上第一块Impulse手表，可能是全球首个戴智能手表的人，至今仍戴着——核心原因是我喜欢短信震动提醒。并非所有通知都推送到手腕。

So the Pebble, the watch, would let me feel physically when I was getting a call or a text or an email. And, I mean, the first users were BlackBerry users who loved BBM and loved, you know, getting emails, and this would be just early warning that you had a new message that that popped up. And so I put I put Impulse, the my first watch on my wrist in mid twenty ten. I was probably the first person in the world who wore a smartwatch, and I've been wearing one ever since then for the core reason that I like, you know, getting a little buzz when someone texts me. I don't get every single notification pushed to my wrist.

对。我喜欢低头就能看到妻子的短信、重要消息或来电显示——尤其当手机不在手边时。这就是核心理念。实际上...

Right. But I love looking down and seeing, you know, a text from my wife or an important message or seeing who's calling without, you know, if your phone's sitting over there. That was the core premise. It was actually

好的。

Okay.

几乎全靠运气，第一个应用场景对人们来说竟成了如此强烈的体验。当然并非人人如此，不是每个人都想在手腕上感受震动，这很合理。但对需要的人来说，它确实奏效了。尽管这个疯狂拼凑的初代版本存在我之前提到的所有问题，但它精准提供了用户渴望的体验。

Almost pure luck that that that first use case was such a powerful experience for people. And when and it wasn't for everyone. Not every single person, you know, wanted a buzz on their wrist, and and that makes sense. But the people that did want it, they it worked. Like, it delivered that exact experience that they wanted even though it was this crazy hacked together first version that, you know, had all those problems that I that I told you about.

当年你带着Pebble智能手表创意寻求风投时，他们拒绝你的正当理由是什么？

What are the legitimate reasons why VCs turned you down when you went out shopping the Apple phone watch, the pebble idea?

我是说

I mean

我猜他们给的都是借口。但真正的原因究竟是什么？

I mean, I'm sure they gave you BS reasons. But what were what were the real reasons?

是啊，换作是我可能也不会投资自己。

Yeah. Like, why wouldn't I have invested in myself?

嗯...不，其实更应该说...

Yeah. Well, no. It's more I mean,

你刚解释过喜爱它的人有多狂热，这个用户基数也足够大。为什么这没能打动公开市场的投资者？你认为融资困难的根本原因是什么？

you just explained like how like, people who loved it loved it. Right? And there was enough of them. Why was that not compelling to the the why couldn't you raise money, do you think, for the public?

现在回想起来，当初的天真反而帮了大忙。当我们通过众筹获得资金后，真正开始量产这些手表时，才发现年轻初创团队做硬件有太多现实难题。不妨补充个背景：在Pebble众筹成功后五年间，湾区涌现过许多大型消费电子硬件初创公司，其中不乏YC投资的，但最终都黯然收场。如今反思，消费电子本就是初创企业的艰难赛道——尤其对那些追求硅谷式高速增长的传统初创公司而言。

I think so knowing now again, that naivete helped me a lot because once we ended up raising money on Kickstarter and having to go and build all of these watches, there were a lot of very good reasons why it's harder for a young first time founder to build a new hardware startup. And, you know Yeah. We could we could also do a little bit of post, postscript on the five years of really big consumer electronic hardware startups in the Bay Area. Some of them funded by YC as well that all kind of blew up after Pebble, you know, went on Kickstarter. And I think that, you know, now having the time to reflect on it, it is consumer electronics is a very hard category for a start up, a kind of traditional Silicon Valley start up, a company that's designed to grow quickly.

难点在于硬件研发周期远比软件漫长。正如我的经历所示，这并非不可逾越，但额外阻力使得硬件初创公司难以套用标准运营模式。当时消费硬件领域几乎没有标杆性的成功案例——我甚至想不出任何先例。

It's difficult because the time frames of building hardware are longer than pushing software. It's Yeah. You know, as I as I think I've shown with my history, it's not so it's not impossible and it's not super hard, but it's this added friction that makes it harder to run the same kind of standard business process that startups use in that kind of hardware sense. And I, you know, I think that that there hadn't been many critical successes for consumer hardware. I can't actually think of any at that time.

Fitbit刚刚起步，GoPro也是刚开始。那时还没有人能明确指出成功的典范。没有Reddit，完全没有Reddit的存在。

Fitbit was just starting. GoPro was just starting. And so there there was no there were no clear stories that people could point to. There's no Reddit. There's no Reddit.

当时也没有像YC那样明显的成功案例供人们参考，比如Dropbox——那种典型的YC初创企业，开发产品、推向市场后，就像火上浇油般迅猛发展。

There was no, you know, very clear kind of YC success where people could point at and say, like, here's an here's an example of a or or Dropbox. Like, here's an example of kind of the prototypical YC startup that that did its thing, created its product, got it out there, and then you pour oil in the fire, and it just grows.

没错。那么当风投拒绝你后，你萌生了Kickstarter的创意。跟我们讲讲这个吧。

Right. Yeah. So VCs turn you down, then you come up with the idea for Kickstarter. Tell us about that.

Kickstarter当时还处于非常早期的阶段。只有几个项目上线，其中最成功的是一个将iPod Nano变成手表的外壳配件——就是那个小腕带。还记得iPod Nano吗？

So Kickstarter was a very early was at its very early stages. There had been a couple projects. One of the most successful Kickstarters was actually this case that you would put on an iPod Nano that would turn it into a watch. A little strap. Do you remember the iPod Nano?

哦，我

Oh, I

记得iPod Nano。当然。

remember the iPod Nano. Yeah.

嗯。

Yeah.

那正是当时Kickstarter上最火爆的项目，巧合的是也是个手表类产品。那时平台上还没多少硬件电子产品项目。但我资助过几个项目后，四月份时——尽管我仍抱有一丝希望，期待投资者能醒悟过来，意识到我在做有趣的东西——真正让我清醒的是和PG的一次办公室谈话。

So that was the biggest Kickstarter at the time, which coincidentally was another watch. And there hadn't been that many projects that had launched kind of hardware electronics on it. But I saw it I I had funded a couple projects. And in April, after I realized well, I I I guess I had still held that hope that investors would come to their senses and realize that, you know, I was building something interesting. And what really brought me down to Earth was an office hour with PG.

按照YC合伙人谈话的传统，你本来带着某个话题去，但他们总会立刻发现你不想面对的关键问题。我想讨论别的事，但PG让我直面现实：我融不到资。他让我思考其他获取资金的途径，因为初创企业不能断粮。第一个提议是：你们开发的智能手表操作系统能不能卖给其他厂商？

So I went to him and, you know, in normal kind of YC partner office hour traditions, you come in with one thing that you wanna talk about, but immediately they realize there's some critical problem with your startup that you don't wanna talk about and switch the conversation to that. And so I think I wanted to talk about something, and PG centered me back on the fact that I was not gonna raise money from investors. And he wanted to think of were there any other mechanisms that I could use to get funding because you need money as a start up. You can't run out of money. And, you know, the first idea was, hey.

我回答：恐怕不行。

Is there any software that you've built that we could actually sell? You know, you built this operating system that powers the smartwatch. You know, could you sell it to other people that are building smartwatches? And I was like, no. Not exactly.

而且，你知道，我真的非常想做这个。就像，我自己也想要。这差不多是核心原因。

Plus, you know, I I really wanted to make this. Like, I I wanted it myself. Like, that that that's kind of the core reason.

对。

Right.

所以在二十分钟快结束时，我们在街上来回走了大概二十次，PG开始看表，我就说，其实我还有另一个想法，是关于一个叫Kickstarter的网站。那是个筹款平台，但不是通过出让股权来融资，而是通过预售产品。他听后说这主意很棒，建议我们直接去做。

And so towards the end of the twenty minutes, after we had walked up and down the street, you know, 20 times and PG was, you know, beginning to look at his watch, I was like, well, there's one other thing that I was thinking about, and it was going on this website called Kickstarter. And it was this fundraising platform where you wouldn't actually fundraise for equity in your startup. You would be selling preorders or or to the product. And he was like, that sounds like a great idea. You should just do that.

就接下来的三周内，看你能多快完成？几周时间，直接去干吧。就这样，我们有了明确目标。从那次办公时间算起三周后，我们就在Kickstarter上线了，现在回想起来很疯狂，但显然那是天时地利。

Just in the next three weeks, just you know, how fast could how fast could you do? A couple weeks, just go and do that. And that was it. That was you know, we we had a mission. Three weeks from, I think, that office hour, we launched on Kickstarter, which is crazy to think about now because, obviously, it was the right place at the right time.

那就像一场完美风暴——Kickstarter的理念与我们的产品契合，项目迅速走红。但我们没用两个月，甚至不到三周就搞定了。拍了视频，直接行动。

It was it was kind of like the perfect storm of of of the product of Kickstarter as an idea that went viral. But we also, like we didn't do it in two months. We did do didn't do it in three two we did in, like, a couple weeks. We filmed the video. We just did it.

我们根本没多想。是的。我特别喜欢YC带来的这种认知：事情可能需要很长时间，但未必非得如此。

Like, we didn't think about it. Yeah. And Yeah. I I really like that coming out of, you know, YC. There's this sense that things could take a long time, but they don't have to take a long time.

如果你真正清空日程，告诉自己‘这就是我们要完成的唯一目标’——这种情况发生过几次，都是通过与PG和其他合伙人的对话促成的。在YC期间，PG曾挑战我们：‘你们最快能用多久为手表开发出SDK，让开发者能编写应用？’我们当时觉得大概要几周。

And if you really kind of clear your schedule and say, this is the one thing that we're gonna accomplish. This is that this happened a couple times, all prompted through conversations with, I think, PG and other partners. During YC, we actually PG challenged us. He was like, how how quickly could you write an SDK for the watch to get developers to write apps for it? And, you know, being, you know, we were like, oh, you know, I think I think we could do it in, a couple weeks.

他说：‘这就是你们的许可，只管去做。别碰其他事，就花这两周完成它。’有外人帮我们意识到‘有权不做其他事’，这点非常令人清醒。

He's like, this is your permission. Just go and do that. Like, don't work on anything else. Just spend the two weeks and go and launch that. And it was very clarifying to have, I think, someone else, like, help tell us that we had the power to not do other things.

我们可以只专注做这一件事。

We could just focus on doing one thing.

当时Kickstarter还很新，众筹目标设了10万美元对吧？后来怎么样了？

So Kickstarter, which is pretty new at the time, you know, crowdfunding, a $100,000 was your goal. Right? Yeah. What happened?

嗯，发布前一晚，当时确实有一位同事安德鲁和我一起工作，还有我的朋友拉胡尔以及另外两名实习生。所以我们有

Well, the night before we posted so at the time, I did have one colleague working with me, a guy named Andrew, and a friend of mine named Rahul and two more interns. And so we had

到处都是实习生。

Interns everywhere.

是的，我们有很多实习生。我们大致思考过，怎样才算成功？显然，我们希望能筹集到10万美元，但这不可能立即实现。

Yeah. We we had a lot of interns. We had kind of, like, thought about what a good like, what would success look like? Obviously, we wanted to raise a $100,100 k. That wasn't gonna happen immediately.

但我们在白板上写下各自认为第一天能筹到的金额。我记得最高预估是4000或5000美元。

But we kind of wrote on the whiteboard how much each of us thought we would get after the first day. And I think the highest bet was $4,000 or $5,000.

单价是多少？

What was the unit price?

初始定价100美元。我记得也有125美元的选项。

100 That'd price. Dollars at the start. And I think we also have $125. Yeah.

明白了。

Okay.

所以第一天就卖出了几百只手表。我们筹集了60万美元。哇，太棒了。

So a couple 100 watches. Yeah. In the first day, we raised $600,000. Wow. Amazing.

这太不可思议了。

That's amazing.

看来市场需求非常旺盛。

So there was a huge appetite for this.

它迅速走红了。

It went viral.

是啊，哇哦。不过总共你们筹到了1000万美元对吧？

Yeah. Wow. And then in total, you raised $10,000,000, though. Did you not?

对，我们本可以筹更多，但当我们预售出8.5万只手表、达到1000万美元后，我们实际上暂停了筹款，觉得目前这样就足够了。

Yeah. We we probably could have raised more, but after I think we had 85,000 watches presold at $10,000,000, we actually put a we kind of paused it, we said that's that's that's enough for now.

没错没错，那时候它叫Pebble。你们当时在卖的就是Pebble。

Yeah. Yeah. And it was called the Pebble at this point. You were selling the Pebble on Yeah.

我们把它改名为Pebble了。

We renamed it to Pebble.

好的，嗯嗯，明白了。

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

那你们接下来做了什么？

So what'd you guys do next?

对了，你们成功交付这些订单了吗？

Yeah. Did you successfully fulfill this these orders?

再说一次，公司一半员工是实习生，然后我

So, again, half the company was interns, and then I

接手了

had my

朋友Rahul和Andrew知道我们挖到宝了。我们获得了这个绝佳的机会。记得第一晚在酒吧喝了几杯庆祝后，凌晨两点我又和另一位YC创始人、来自Ilacarte的Rajat去买奶昔和汉堡。他告诉我——那时距离我们人生最大转折才过去十二小时——

friend Rahul and Andrew. Knew that we, you know, we had struck gold. We had, you know, we we had gotten this amazing opportunity. And I remembered after the first night, you know, after we had a couple drinks at the bar and celebrated, I ended up going out for a smoothie or a burger at 2AM with another YC founder, Rajat from Ilacarte. And he told me, you know, again, this is like twelve hours after we basically had the biggest change to our lives ever.

我清楚记得他的建议：'你有机会抓住天时地利，利用周围所有这些不可思议的助力'。众筹期间，我的第一反应是'天啊！我们得立刻飞中国找工厂'

And I remember the conversation with him. He said, you have you have a chance to kind of bottle lightning and take advantage of this incredible kind of series of forces that are all around you. And during the campaign, you could either like, my my first inclination was like, holy shit. We need to go and fly to China. We need to find a factory.

'必须马上开始生产'。但当时Rajat建议：'何不先把声势造大？你们首日成绩这么亮眼，多做些公关宣传，把故事热度推得更高如何？'

We need to, like, start making this. And Rajat's advice at the time was, what if you just got it a little bit bigger? Like, you have all these like, you have this, you know, amazing first day. What if you did a bunch of PR? What if you tried to, like, pump the story up even more?

这个建议很关键——我最终没直飞中国量产，而是去了纽约雇公关公司。我们做了巡回宣传，成功为Kickstarter和Pebble带来大量媒体关注，这才推动众筹金额从百万飙升至惊人的千万级。

And that helped because that, like, I ended up instead of immediately flying to China and start starting to mass produce these, I flew to New York, and I hired a PR firm. And we did, like, a circuit and a tour, and we actually drove a ton of PR interest in Kickstarter, in Pebble, and that's really what helped drive, you know, the campaign from, you know, a million bucks to just this crazy $10,000,000 run that we had.

那时候你会不会焦虑'完了，这些产品还得做出来'？对了，Kickstarter当时有交付期限吗？必须在几个月内完成？

And during that time, were you nervous like, oh, crap. I I gotta build these. And by the way, what was the what was the I don't remember how Kickstarter worked, but, like, did you have to deliver within x number of months or what?

预计交付期是九月份，而当时才四月。

Yeah. We had an estimated, delivery date of September and it was April.

天啊！所以你们跟着纽约公关团队巡演时，心里其实在打鼓：'建议虽好，但现在得回去造产品了'？

Oh my. So Oh my. So as you're touring around with your fancy New York PR firm, are you like, okay. This is great. That was great advice, but now I gotta go build these things.

这要怎么实现啊？

And how is that gonna happen?

说来惭愧，我当时很天真。我妈总问：'你怎么睡得着？压力这么大'。我说：'我睡得很好啊，妈你说什么呢？'

I, again, was pretty naive. I like, people I I think my mom would ask, like, how how are you sleeping? How can you possibly be sleep isn't the stress, like, incredible? I said I was sleeping fine. I What are talking about, mom?

现在回想，正是这种天真帮了我们。客观来看太疯狂了——8.5万只手表！我从没做过消费电子产品，最多就在车库组装过。这完全是破天荒头一遭。

Yeah. Like, I I think, like, again, it really helped that we were a bit naive because, objectively, this is crazy. 85,000 watches. We'd I'd never built a consumer product, you know, beyond just assembling it in the garage. We had never done this before.

我从未去过中国，也从未参与过大规模生产。现在回想起来，这段经历反而帮了我们大忙——它让我们不必整天纠结于那些复杂棘手、看似无解的问题。我们就是直接动手干了。当然，我们对外宣布九月份无法出货了。

We'd I'd never been to China. I'd never mass produced something. And, again, like, I think about how much that helped us because it allowed us to just kind of not spend our whole whole day kind of thinking about these complex, hard, in in impossible problems. And we just we just did it. So, obviously, we told people we weren't gonna ship in September.

我做的第一件事就是快刀斩乱麻，直接告诉大家我们赶不上九月期限，甚至不会给出新的日期。我算是豁出去了，只说：相信我，产品一定会面世。

So the first thing I did was I ripped the Band Aid off, and I said, we're not gonna make the September date. You know, we're not even gonna give you another date. I I I kind of went out on a limb. I said, trust me. We're gonna ship Yeah.

但我不会告诉你们具体时间，因为我知道任何承诺的日期都会立刻沦为泡影。

But I'm not gonna tell you when we shipped because I knew that any date that we gave people would be immediately, you know, ruined.

明白，确实。

Yep. Yeah.

于是我和安德鲁，还有负责工业设计的朋友飞往深圳，接下来的八个月里，我有一半时间都住在深圳或东莞的酒店——那些中国著名的制造业城市。凭着死磕精神和不接受拒绝的态度，八个月后的2035年1月，我们终于交付了首批Pebble产品。

So me, Andrew, and my friend who had been doing industrial design with us got on a plane to Shenzhen and flew there and spent I think off and on for the next eight months, I spent half my time living out of a hotel room in Shenzhen or Dongguan in these, you know, kind of factory cities in China. And, you know, through a lot of perseverance and not taking no for an answer, we started shipping the first pebbles just eight months later in January 2035.

厉害。用户反馈如何？

Nice. And how were they received by the users?

说来有趣，不知道你关注没有——今年有好几家做AI穿戴设备的硬件初创公司发布产品，比如Rabbit...

Wow. So I was actually looking so I don't I'm not sure if you've been you followed. There's this there was there was a bunch of hardware startups that launched this year with AI wearable devices. There was Rabbit.

嗯。

Mhmm.

还有Humane等品牌。这些产品都遭遇了媒体铺天盖地的负面评价，像MKBHD频道就对它们进行了犀利抨击。由于无法满足被过分吹捧的期待值，它们很容易就成为众矢之的。

There's Humane. There was bunch of different products that launched. And they all faced a lot of kind of negativity from the press, like MKBHD did his famous takedown of both of them, and it became really easy for them to be punching bags because they didn't live up to these inflated gigantic, you know, expectations that

毕竟苹果是标杆嘛，完美无瑕的苹果设计成了所有人的期待标准。

Because apple is the bar, like beautiful perfect apple design is everybody's expectation.

确实如此。第一代Pebble客观上并不出色。它虽然能正常工作，完成了基本功能，但存在大量粗糙之处。嗯。

Exactly. Yeah. And so objectively, the first version of Pebble was not great. It did work and it did the exact thing that it had to do, but there were a ton of rough edges. And Mhmm.

它实在太糟糕了。硬件本身就有问题——电路板与屏幕之间的连接器会移位，天啊，导致静电问题。最终我们不得不更换了约5%到10%的第一代产品。

It was so it was so bad. There were some problems with the hardware itself. We had an issue where the connector between the circuit board and the screen would kind of shift or move, and it would Oh, boy. Cause this static issue. We ended up having to replace, I think, five to 10% of all of the first generation pebbles.

嗯。这是个...这是个非常严重的问题。但我们通过客服支持来解决：明知无法通过结构调整彻底修复，就组建了庞大的客服团队。

And Mhmm. That was a that was a big that was a that was a big problem. But the way that we approached it and the way that we solved it was just by providing we knew that we knew that we had this problem. There was no structural way that we were gonna be able to fix it without kind of dramatically changing how the product was built. And so instead, we fixed it with with customer support.

后来甚至发展到有人钻空子——只要用户投诉，我们就直接寄新表带。虽然维修更换花了些钱，但赢得了'产品负责'的口碑。可惜有时替换件也有同样问题...不过长远来看，这些根本不算什么。

We hired a big customer support team, and if anyone ever like, it was getting to the point where people were kind of scamming us. Like, if anyone ever complained that there would be a problem, we would just ship them a new pedal. And it cost us a little bit of money in those repairs and replacements, but it earned us the goodwill with the community to say that they were standing behind their product. Now, unfortunately, sometimes the replacements that we shipped to them also had the same problem. So but but, like, looking back, like, we had so many problems and in the long in the grand scheme of things, didn't actually matter.

我们还克服了许多其他奇葩问题，比如当时iPhone的蓝牙API在通知传输上很糟糕——超出范围再回来时，必须进设置菜单重新开关蓝牙才能恢复通知，这被Pebble社区称为...

Like, we managed to pull pull past a lot of these another crazy bug that we had was the Bluetooth APIs for iOS for iPhone at the time were not great for sending notifications. Like, if you walked out of range and then came back into range, the watch would not receive notifications until you went into the settings menu and toggled Bluetooth off and on again.

噢，太糟了。

Oh, no. Ouch.

...'手指舞'。没错。

And it became known in the Pebble community as the finger dance. And so The finger dance. Yes.

手指舞。

The finger dance.

听起来真糟糕。

No. Sounds bad.

现在回想，我在Kickstarter融资1000万美元时公司只有三四个人，传统做法可能是立即扩张团队，但...

Looking back with hindsight, that was another great decision that I made. When we raised $10,000,000 on Kickstarter, we had three or four people at the company. A kind of traditional approach to this might have been to say, hey. We have this. We have now funding.

我们基本上有花不完的钱。不如直接去雇一个之前做过这类事情的团队，这样我们就不必从零开始自己开发一个全新的消费产品。我不记得这是否是别人给我的建议——很可能是——但那人说：听着，你不可能同时开发新产品和组建团队。

We basically have infinite money. Let's go and hire a team of people that have done this before so that we're not, you know, starting from scratch building a new consumer product by ourselves. And I can't remember if this was advice. It probably was someone who told me this, but they were like, look. You can't build a new product and hire out a team at the same time.

这两件事根本不可能兼顾。我仔细想过，如果我们要去招募一支乐队成员般的团队，做面试等等，组建团队并让他们磨合协作需要很长时间。所以我说去他的，我直接打电话给我在滑铁卢大学最好的朋友们，告诉他们必须来为我工作——反正我早就了解他们。

There's just no way that you can do both. And I was thinking about it, that if we had to go and hire a team of, you know, people in the band, do interviews, and all this stuff, like, it takes a while to build a team and to get them to jail and to work together. And so I said, screw that. I'm just gonna phone my best friends from Waterloo and say that they have to come and work for me. And I already knew them.

我知道他们都很优秀。虽然我们谁都没做过类似的项目，完全不知道自己在干什么。但我了解他们，也热爱和他们共事。这些人都是我最好的朋友。在Kickstarter众筹期间的某个周三，我打电话说：伙计们，你们必须立刻来加州。

I knew that they were great. None of us had ever built anything like this before, so we had no idea what we were doing. But I I knew them, and I I loved working with them. These are, like, you know, some of my best friends. And I phoned them up on a Wednesday during the Kickstarter campaign, and I said, you guys you guys need to come and just come to California.

我记得当时联系了八个人，两天后这八个人全都坐上飞机来到了加州。

And I think I I was eight for eight in terms of people getting on a plane two days later and coming to California.

还都辞职了？

And Like quitting their jobs.

辞掉了工作。

Quitting their jobs.

然后赶来。

And coming.

其实没全搬来——只有两个人真正搬家。但所有人都在一两天内辞职飞过来了。三天后的周五，我们就在加州召开了启动会议，在白板上列出'这是我们必须完成的事项'。最妙的是，有些公司总在纠结要开发什么产品。

None of them. Two of them moved. Not not many of them moved, but, they all quit their jobs within a day or two and flew down. And we had our kickoff meeting literally three days later on a on, like, a Friday in California where we said on the whiteboard, like, here's what we have to do. Oh, and one of the other really beautiful things about this was some companies wonder what they're gonna make.

比如产品定位是什么？首批功能有哪些？而我们当时有那个Kickstarter页面，它完美阐明了我们需要构建的一切。那就是一份行军指令：首先做这个，

Like, what is the product gonna be? What are the first features that they're gonna have? In our case, we had this Kickstarter page that was this perfect elucidation of everything that we had to build. It was just a march it was a list of marching orders. Like, first, we have to do this.

接着做那个。上面列明了用户想要的所有功能。我们把它们贴到白板地图上，然后自问：到底要怎么实现这些？整个周末我们都在激烈讨论方案。

First, then we have to do that. Like, here's the features that people want. So we put those up on the whiteboard map. And we said, how in the world are we gonna build this? And we, you know, hashed it out over the weekend.

于是我雇了八个人，其中八位是我的挚友，还有一位素未谋面的陌生人。他从荷兰乘飞机赶来，成为了我们的iOS工程师。他从未见过我们任何人，但有人对他说‘你应该去为这个人工作’，而我心想‘太棒了’，连面试流程都省了。

And so I hired eight people, eight of my really good friends, plus someone that I had never met before. He got into an airplane from The Netherlands as well to to fly, and he became our iOS engineer. He'd never met any of us, but someone was like, you should go and work for this guy. And I was like, great. No interview process.

是的，我当场就给了他这份工作，而他——你也猜到了——接受了。

Yeah. He I just offered him the job immediately and he, you know, took it.

他表现不错？这赌注押对了？他可是个绝顶聪明的人啊。

And he was good? He was that paid off? He's he's one the smartest people ever.

但在那个关键抉择点——我们本可以组建专业团队，花上数周数月进行面试和团队建设——我却选择了截然不同的路：直接雇佣八个人，之后十个月不再扩招。从朋友们集体飞来的那个疯狂周末，到我们在Kickstarter上发货期间，我没做过一次招聘、一场面试，也没搞过团队建设。当我们交付85,000只智能手表时，团队只有11人。

So but but that that decision, that fork in the road where we could have gone and hired a professional team and spent like weeks and months doing interviews and team building, I just decided to do the other thing, which is, like, do none of that, hire eight people immediately, and not hire any more people for another ten months. So between the between that kind of mega weekend where all of my friends flew in and when we started shipping on Kickstarter, I did zero recruiting, zero interviews. We did no team building. So we were 11 people when we shipped 85,000 smartwatches.

这实在太惊人了。真的难以置信。

That's amazing actually. That's Word. So surprising.

哇，明白了。所以这是你的高光时刻：新产品Pebble手表研发完成，全部发货。

Wow. Okay. So you're at your high now. You've built this new product, the Pebble watches. You've shipped them all.

你集结了认识的最聪明团队，但Pebble最终未能成功。来谈谈它的衰落吧。

You've hired your smartest people you know, but Pebble doesn't ultimately work out. Yeah. Tell us about its decline.

那是2012年的事。后来...公司撑到2016年，被Fitbit拆分收购后就不复存在了。这期间发生了什么？我们出货了超过200万只智能手表，

So that was we we kind of that's that's 2012. And then Yeah. The company lasted until 2016 when we sold to Fitbit, kind of for for pieces, and the company ceased to exist. So what happened in those intervening years? Well, we shipped over 2,000,000 smartwatches.

创造了2.5亿美元销售额，巅峰时期团队扩大到180人。

We did a quarter billion dollars worth of sales and grew to a 180 people at our peak.

哦，哇，你们最终还是招人了啊。

Oh, wow. You eventually hired people.

最终

Eventually

在帕洛阿尔托？在帕洛阿尔托？是的。

In Palo Alto? In Palo Alto? Yeah.

哦，看。红木城。

Oh, see. Redwood City.

卡罗琳，我很喜欢请埃里克上节目，因为你知道我的梦想是让帕洛阿尔托重新变得超级酷。埃里克一直觉得那里很酷。

Caroline, I love having Eric on the show because you know my dream of, like, making Palo Alto super cool again. Eric's always thought it's super cool.

杰西卡，我们是仅有的几个人。

We're the only people, Jessica.

我们必须增加用户数量。好吧。所以你们公司现在有180人了。听起来一切都很顺利。

We have to grow our users. Okay. So you're you have a 180 people at the company now. Okay. This is all sounding so good.

听起来很棒，对吧？一切都在向好的方向发展，Pebble。现在我有后见之明，可以回顾过去。我认为主要原因在于，Pebble长期未能成功是因为我迷失了愿景。

It sounds great. Right? Everything's everything's coming up, Pebble. So I've had the benefit of hindsight now, and I can look back. And I think there were some well, the primary reason why Pebble didn't succeed in the long term was I lost sight of the vision.

我失去了那种驱动力。记得我之前描述的那个Kickstarter页面吗？那时很容易知道该做什么，因为我们只需看那个网站，然后说这就是我们要开发的下一个功能。但后来，我们完成了页面上所有的功能，我开始思考接下来该做什么？下一个产品是什么？下一个要开发的功能是什么？

I lost I lost the kind of carrying force. Remember how I was describing this Kickstarter page where it was so easy to know what to work on because we just looked at this website and we said, here's the next feature that we're gonna build. Well, at some point, we'd finished all of the features on that page, and we were thinking I was thinking, like, what's next? What's the next product that we build? What are the next features that we work on?

这家公司要成为什么？我们从未真正超越那个最初的Kickstarter页面。我们最终开发了新产品，做了更多的Kickstarter项目，但我从未明确回答过：这家公司长期存在的理由是什么？我们的使命是什么？我们对未来的愿景是什么？

What is this company going to be? And we never really I never really got past that first kind of Kickstarter page. Like, we ended up building new products and more products and and did a couple more Kickstarters, but I never clearly identified, you know, what is the long term reason why this company exists? What's our mission? What's our vision for the future?

除了制造一款能显示通知的酷炫手表，我们还将扮演什么角色？我脑海中有几个相互竞争的想法。比如，我对人机交互有着宏大的愿景，我热爱那种科幻般的世界愿景，在那里我们与计算机融合，以某种方式与计算机交互。而这还是在人工智能之前。

Like, what role will we play beyond just making a cool, you know, watch that shows you notifications? There were a couple competing ideas in my mind. Like, I, you know, have this kind of grand vision for human computer interfaces. Like, I love the sci fi vision of the world where we kind of mesh with computers and kind of interface, you know, in some way with with computers. And this was before AI.

对。对。

Right. Right.

所以你知道，这个想法一直在我脑海里酝酿，但我从未有足够的信心彻底让公司围绕这个方向转型。我们从未将其明确设定为愿景、目标或北极星。相反，我总是绕着问题打转，每隔六个月或一年就换个重点。比如我们做过一款女性手表，设计得非常精美小巧，是款微型智能手表。

And so I you know, that that was kind of simmering in my mind, but I never had the confidence to really pivot the company all around that. Like, we I I I never set that out as the vision, the goalpost, the the kind of, like, north star. Instead, I kind of tiptoed around the problem. I kind of made certain things the focus for six months or for a year. We did a woman's watch where we made this really beautiful, small, tiny, tiny smartwatch.

我们还推出过彩色手表。最初版本是黑白的，想着做彩色款可能会很酷。后来我们发现运动和健康追踪是很多用户的需求。对吧？用户调研时他们说想要心率监测功能。

We did a color watch. Maybe that would, you know, be the when the first version was black and white, maybe it would be cool to do a color one. We ended up identifying kind of sports and fitness as something that a lot of people wanted. Right? We talked to our users, and they were like, oh, we want a heart rate monitor.

他们想记录跑步之类的活动。于是在2015年底2016年初，我们开始加入心率监测——毕竟Apple Watch和Fitbit都有这功能。某种程度上我们是在跟随他们。现在回想起来，当时可能还觉得自己在做英明决策。

We want to track, you know, our runs and that kind of thing. And so in late twenty twenty fifteen, early twenty sixteen, we started adding heart rate monitors, and that's what Apple Watch had, and that's what Fitbit had. And so we kind of, you know, followed followed them. Again, this is all with hindsight. Like, at the time, I probably was, like, thinking that I was making great decisions.

但后见之明让我看清了：这根本不符合我的本质。骨子里我是个黑客，热爱打造产品，享受参与创造的事物诞生的喜悦。

But with hindsight, like, it's it was it's so clear to me. Like, that wasn't, you know, who I was or who I am at my core. At the core, I'm a hacker. I love building products. I love the the joy of kind of seeing something that I helped build come to life.

Pebble经历中最让我珍视的，是围绕它形成的开发者社区。有三万人为Pebble制作表盘、开发应用，在Reddit上分享他们做的酷炫改装。

I loved my favorite part some of my favorite parts of the Pebble experience was this community of developers that built up around Pebble. We have 30,000 people who are building watch faces and watch apps and just posting on Reddit and posting cool hacks that they did with Pebble.

是啊，我记得以前人们为这款手表开发过很多应用。

Yeah. People used to I remember people used to build a lot of apps for the watch.

那些作品纯粹有趣。不是那种'我要创业做新产品'的严肃项目。比如我妻子就是通过编写抽认卡应用学会编程的。

And they were just fun. Right. They weren't real. Like, they weren't like, oh, I'm gonna go and launch a new startup or product or whatever. It was, you know, my my wife learned how to code by writing a flashcard app.

她是生物化学老师，做了个通过转动手腕学习氨基酸的应用——会测试你'这是什么氨基酸？有什么功能？'。我每天最爱刷Reddit看大家又创造了什么。这才是我真正的核心，至今仍是。我最爱新产品发布时看到人们如何玩转它的初始阶段。

So she she's a biochemistry teacher, and so she wrote this app that would you could learn your amino acids by flicking your wrist and seeing, like it would it would it would test you, like, what which amino acid is this and what does it do? And so it was just a bunch of really fun kind of I just loved signing on to Reddit every every day and seeing, like, what had people built. And those were like, that was my core. Like, that and it still is. Like, that's what I love about building new products is that kind of that initial experience of launching it and seeing, like, what people do with it.

但当时我没对自己诚实，总想着要成为我们本不是的样子。这导致2015年圣诞季遭遇灾难——我们又囤积了过多库存。最终那年我们预测营收1亿美元，实际只有8200万，差额全是积压在仓库的存货。这让我们陷入混乱，不得不几乎亏本清仓。

And I I guess I wasn't really honest with myself. I I was thinking that we needed to be someone that we weren't, and that led us me to a really disastrous Christmas season in 2015 where yet again, we bought too much inventory. And at the end of, you know, when all the dust settled, we, you know, we had projected we had projected a $100,000,000 in revenue that year, but we only only we only did 82,000,000. And the delta was inventory that was stuck and left at our warehouse. That put us into a bit of a tailspin where we needed to clear that inventory and and sell it mostly, like, at at almost breakeven or a loss.

我们需要着手开发下一款产品。为了缩减庞大的员工规模，我们不得不进行裁员。这让我们陷入了困境。我想，如果我当时有一个清晰的愿景，确切知道公司未来的方向，或许我就能带领大家摆脱困境，为未来制定一个可执行的规划。但我觉得自己那时已经失去了内在的动力。

We needed to work on the next product. We needed to do a layoff in order to bring the massive number of employees that we had down. And it, you know, put us into a tailspin where you know, I guess if I had a vision, if I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this company, I might have been able to, you know, help us pull out of that tailspin and and kind of craft a vision for the future that we would have been able to execute on. But I think I had lost I had lost the steam internally.

你知道吗，这个回答最让我印象深刻的是，问题并非来自竞争。对吧？原本很容易就可以说，随着Fitbit和Apple Watch等产品的崛起，我们无法生存。但你却给出了这个非常深刻的个人化答案，关乎你的愿景和使命。这真的很有意思。

You you know what's really notable about this answer to me is that it isn't because of competition. Right? And it could have easily, I think, been like, oh, well, with the rise of Fitbit and the rise of the Apple Watch and all these other things, we just weren't gonna make it. But instead, you have this really insightful answer that's really personal to you and your, you know, your vision and your mission and all that. I think that's really interesting.

我认为竞争确实将我引向了错误的方向。看到Garmin和Fitbit专注健康健身领域时，我就想我们也应该跟进。这种不断推出新产品、追求增长数字的驱动力，正是初创公司必须面对的生存压力。

I think the the competition helped lead me to a bad path. Right? Like, looked at Garmin and Fitbit, and I saw them doing health and fitness. I was like, we should do that as well. So I think, you know, it was also it was also, I think, this drive to grow and to to kind of constantly have the next product and and constantly, like, get that number to go up, which is kind of what you have to do as a start up.

一旦踏上这种风投支持的创业轨道，就没办法说'我们对现状很满意，对现有产品和成就很满足，想暂停发展'。这种想法甚至从未在我脑海中出现过，我从未考虑过不应该寻求增长。

Right? Once you get onto that track, once you get onto the train tracks of this kind of venture backed startup, there's no way to kind of say, well, we're happy with the state that we're in right now. We're really happy with the product that we built and the kind of success that we've had. Like, we wanna kind of just pause things there. And that never, like, even came across my mind as an like, I I wasn't thinking that, you know, we shouldn't figure out a way to grow this.

那么你们最终确实接受了风险投资？

And So you you did eventually raise venture money?

是的。2020年我们从CRV融资了1500万美元，然后

We did. We raised $15,000,000 from CRV in '20 And then

明白了。

Okay.

真正让我们陷入债务漩涡的，是从硅谷银行获得的2000万美元风险债务。

More even the thing that actually really put us into this kind of debt spiral was raising $20,000,000 of venture debt from SVB.

确实。

Right.

就是这样。

Which was Yeah.

好的。

Okay.

你

You

知道吗？哇哦。哇哦。哇哦。哇哦。

know? Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.

你们从硅谷银行筹集了多少风险债务？

You raised how much in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank?

2000万。是的。

20,000,000. Yeah.

那他们有没有...你知道具体金额吗？

And did they You you know how much it?

对，没错。这就是典型的例子，也是为什么我...

Yeah. Exactly. So this is the this is the classic example, and it's why I

建议...我想听这个故事，埃里克。

recommend I want the story, Eric.

这就是为什么我总是说...我们就是活生生的例子，说明公司通常不应该接受风险债务，或者只能在非常特定的情况下接受。我知道PG最近在推特上对此大发议论，他说得完全正确。风险债务并不适合高速增长的初创企业用来融资。风险债务适合那些有可重复商业模式的人——投入资金就能获得更多回报。如果我们当初用风险债务来扩展业务线之类的，而不是用来支付工资和薪酬...

This is why I always you know, the we we are the we are the the example of why companies generally should not take venture debt or or take it only only under very specific circumstances. And I know that PG has kind of been going on a tirade on this on Twitter, and he's totally right. Like, venture debt is not the right vehicle for fast growing startups to kind of fund their business. Venture debt is for people who have a repeatable process of you put money in one side and you get more money out the other side. If we had used our venture debt to fund, you know, growth of, you know, a business line or something like that, instead we paid salaries and payroll and stuff with venture debt.

我当时并没有真正理解风险债务与投资者资金完全不同。所以在2015年遇到库存问题后陷入困境时，我们在2016年开始动用风险债务来维持业务运营，但没有收入来偿还这笔债务。嗯...风险债务有所谓的Caroline条款，你可能还记得这些SEC...

And did I didn't I didn't viscerally understand that that venture debt is very different from dollars that come in from investors. So when we got into a tight spot after that inventory problem in 2015, in 2016, we started pulling down our venture debt and using it to fund, you know, continued operation of the business, but we didn't have revenue coming in to kind of pay off that deadline. And so Mhmm. Debt, venture debt has these things called Caroline, you probably remember these sec.

消极与积极条款？

Negative and positive covenants?

对，条款。就是那个。我们当时

Yeah. Covenants. That's what was yes. We had

嗯，没错。

Yeah. Mhmm.

我们当时必须遵守一些条款。条款意味着你得在银行账户里保持一定数额的现金，否则银行就会开始给你的首席财务官打电话，先是每周，然后每天，最后每隔几小时就问，计划是什么？懂吗？接下来怎么办？

We had covenants that we had to meet. And covenants mean you have to maintain a certain amount of cash in your bank account, or else the bank starts phoning your CFO, like, every every week and then every day and then every couple hours to say, like, what's the plan? You know? What's next?

他们掌控了你。

They own you.

对，对，完全正确。

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

那他们当时是说现在就贱卖还是怎么着？

So then did they say sell for scraps now or what?

我觉得他们其实给了我们不少时间去犯错，给自己制造更多麻烦。我不记得接到过必须立刻出售的通知。但到了2016年左右，我知道我们面临一个非常复杂的局面。那一年真的很艰难。

So I think they actually gave us quite a bit of time to make mistakes and to make more problems for ourselves. I don't think I got the call. You must sell it at at any point. But towards the 2016, like, I knew we had a really complicated kind of 2016. It was a very it was a very rough year.

一开始就是裁员，我们不得不缩减规模，让支出回归正轨。还得清空所有库存，处理掉积压的存货。接着必须开发新产品，因为在硬件行业，只有推出新品时才能赚钱，靠新产品发布带来的热度。2016年我们确实遭遇了很多问题。但这些并不是公司最终倒闭的原因。

You know, it started with a layoff, where we had to kind of downsize and and, you know, get the burn back on track. We had to empty all this inventory or kind of, like, sell sell all this extra inventory that we had. And then we had to create a new product because in hardware, you only really make money when you launch a new product and kind of get the get this kind of bubble of enthusiasm from the launch of a new product. And, yeah, there are a lot of there are a lot of problems that hit us in 2016. And but, again, like, I don't think those were the reasons why, you know, the company is no longer around.

我真心认为，我们本可以找到出路。或许能和硅谷银行达成协议，或许能筹集更多资金——只要当时有某种力量支撑着我。但作为独自创业的创始人，如果我无法代表公司发声，无法激励团队继续前进，那这个项目就真的没有未来了。

I I I really do think that, you know, we probably could have figured out a course through. I think we could have, you know, figured out a deal with SVB, Could have maybe could have raised more money if I just had something that was, like, pulling me through this. Yeah. Like, as a solo founder, like, if I couldn't speak on behalf of the company and couldn't, you know, motivate people to to to do this, like, there's just no future for it.

你完蛋了。是啊。我现在有点泄气，埃里克。

You're doomed. Yeah. I'm sort of deflated now, Eric.

让我们需要更多正能量，我们需要转向积极的事情。但是

Let this we need some more we need to move on to something positive. But

这非常...首先我想感谢你敞开心扉分享这些，因为创始人能回顾失败原因并坦诚相待的情况非常罕见。通常人们很容易归咎于外部因素。但你说自己迷失了初心，可能还有些精疲力竭，我欣赏你的坦诚。不过结局还算圆满，你在出售Pebble后，来YC做了四年合伙人。

it's very I wanted I first of all, thank you for opening up about all of this because it's very rare that founders can look back and be share why they failed and be honest about it. Usually, it's easy to blame these outside forces. But I think you saying you, you know, lost track of your North Star and were maybe a little burnt out. I appreciate your openness. There is a bit of a happy ending though, because after you sold Pebble, you came to work at YC as a partner for four years.

我知道。那个...我...我想感谢你、PG和迈克尔给我这个机会，因为2016年时我情绪很低落。不知道你是否记得，有次我来吃晚饭，我们在图书馆聊未来，当时我觉得自己毫无市场竞争力。我...我这辈子从没上过正经班。

I know. Well, I I I, you know, wanna thank you and PG and Michael and everyone for giving me the chance to do that because I was feeling pretty down at the 2016. I don't know if you remember it, but I came over for dinner once and we sat in the library and, talked about the future and I felt like I had zero marketable skills. I I I had never had a real job.

我...我想说的是，你从滑铁卢大学辍学创业，一直经营这家公司。所以你真正的雇主只有你自己。没错。这其实很了不起。

I I still I was just gonna make the point, like, had left Waterloo, started your own company, and ran it for all that. So you never actually had a an employer that wasn't yourself. Correct. That's kind of remarkable.

我当时想：我能做什么？去别处当产品经理？可我刚把公司搞垮，还是场人尽皆知的失败。我完全不知道还能干什么。然后你和PG说：'该来YC工作'。

And I was like, what can I do? Like, could I be a product manager somewhere? Like, what what I just kind of like, you know, drove this company into the ground, which was a very public, you know, failure. And I was like, what what in the world could I actually do with myself? And I think you were PG were like, well, should come and work in YC.

那感觉太棒了。真的太好了。

And that felt amazing. That felt amazing.

我们知道你聪明能干，即便公司最终失败了。

We knew you were smart and talented even if your company ultimately failed.

这...我非常感激。

That I appreciate that a lot.

创业失败绝不会否定一个人的价值。对吧？我觉得从失败中学到的东西反而更多。

Failure of your startup does not disqualify anybody in any way. Right? There's like I don't I think that's almost like you almost learn more lessons from that.

是的。

Yeah.

所以你在YC担任初创公司顾问有四年时间。但为了让听众了解，后来你又创办了另一家叫Beeper的初创公司——虽然今天我们没时间细聊——那是个万能聊天应用。你在2021年夏季再次通过YC孵化，那时还是因为疫情采用线上形式吗？

And so you were at YC advising startups for four years. But then, just so our listeners know, you went on to start another startup called Beeper, which we're not gonna have time to talk about today, but it was the universal chat app. And you went through YC again in summer twenty one. Was that still virtual YC because of COVID? Yeah.

对。

Yeah.

我想是的。

I think so.

哦，真遗憾。

Oh, bummer.

我认为YC的合伙人分两种类型。一种是像Michael那样已经完成第二次创业的人，他们很乐意退居二线，专注于咨询和投资；另一种则是我和Adora这样的，虽然乐于在YC帮忙，但内心始终渴望开启下一个创业项目。所以我——

I think there's there's two types of partners at YC. There were, partners that had done their second startup, like Michael and and were kind of, like, very happy to to be past their second startup and advising companies and investing. And then there were there were people like me and Adora who were there and happy to help and and work at YC, but were, you know, itching to do the next one. And so I

依然充满渴望。

Still hungry.

没错。在YC的四年非常精彩，但我知道自己还有新产品要创造。疫情期间我一直在兼职开发这个万能聊天应用，初衷是想解决个人痛点——由于Pebble的经历和欧洲求学背景，我的好友分散在各个聊天平台上。

Yes. Spent four years at YC, had, you know, an amazing time, but I knew that there was another product in me. And so towards, you know, during COVID, I was just working on the side project of building a universal chat app, one app that I could use to chat with anyone on any chat network. And, it was to solve a personal problem. Like, I through, you know, Pebble and having gone to school in Europe, I've kind of collected friends on each individual chat network.

想想很荒谬，明明15个应用都在做同一件事——给朋友发信息。而我只需要一个能联系所有人的应用。

And it's crazy when you think about it that there's 15 different apps that all do the exact same thing, you know, send text messages to your friend. And I just wanted one single app that I could use to chat with everyone.

你现在在做什么？

What are you doing now?