Belkin International: Chet Pipkin

So before we start the show, I just want to let you know that we've just released a bunch more tickets for our live show in Portland on Thursday, May 16th. I'll be joined live on stage by Seth Tibbett, the creator of Toeferky. So if you haven't gotten tickets, there is still a chance to grab some. Our live show with Seth is supported by American Express, and to get tickets, go to nprpresents.org and hope to see you in Portland. Oh. There were days when I thought nothing could stop us that uh this was gonna work and uh this is gonna be the most brilliant thing ever.

And there were other days that were really, really dark. And um I just would hold my head and my hands and and say, wow, this is never gonna work. From MPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Roz and on today's show, how a kid in California watched the PC revolution unfold in front of him. and saw the chance to make his fortune.

with computer cables. So, if you're a regular listener, you know how much I love the Gold Rush story, because there's a simple elegance to it. All those people going to mine for gold needed tents and jeans and pickaxes and shovels. They needed food supplies and lodging and transportation. Entire industries were built around the rush. And people who had nothing to do with gold? made a lot of money.

Which can sometimes be the smartest way to think about a business. Especially if you're Chet Pipkin. No. I'm gonna guess you've never heard of Chad Pipkin. He doesn't do a whole lot of interviews, and he generally keeps a low profile.

but there is a good chance that you've heard of the company he founded. It's called Belkin, and if you own a computer or a smartphone or a tablet, you very likely use a Belkin product. because Belkin makes all of the accessories you need to make your tech devices work. Things like cables and surge protectors, keyboards and mice, networking devices, you know, that kind of stuff. It's a company that was built around the PC boom. And then later, the smartphone boom.

Now if you think of launching a business as a marathon, Where the starting line is the ID. And the finish line is a successful company? I think we can all agree that not everyone starts that race in the same position. I mean, some of the founders we've talked to, they clearly start out with certain advantages.

Maybe they've got money in the bank, or they know people who have lots of money because they went to a top business school, or They just start with valuable experience in a certain industry. But in Chet Pipkin's case? Chet launched Felcon when he was just 21 years old. He didn't have any money, he had dropped out of college, and he certainly didn't have a clear idea of how business even worked.

But he did have one really important advantage. A good childhood and a stable family life. His parents were both blue collar workers who moved to Hawthorne, California, from the farms in the Mid West. The uh second world war brought them both West. My mom doing um work in support of the war effort. My dad also

and then eventually he was uh drafted in to the Army Air Corps. And then they both settled in uh southern California after that. Were your parents educated beyond High school. Very little formal education. So I think my dad made it um

A little bit past the eighth grade. And the same was true for my mom. I think Partially because my mom didn't have the benefit of a lot of formal education. It was really key to her. She was definitely a lifelong learner.

She's the best speller that I've ever met in my whole life. Um how she got there with that limited education, I uh don't know Um My dad was a machinist. He worked on a lot of uh defense and aerospace uh work. What he could create out of metal with uh his hands was um

Really inspiring. But yeah, they both had very, very f little formal education. Now besides having a great family The other advantage Chet had was the time and the place he grew up.

Time because he finished high school in the late 1970s, when personal computers were just starting to become a thing. And the place because Hawthorne was a hub for aerospace and defense contracting, so there were lots of engineers in town. Anyway, after high school, Chad started classes at UCLA. He was still living with his parents and working a few different jobs for money.

But he didn't even make it through a year of college, because instead, He was spending all of his time just hanging out at all these different computer shops close to his house. A lot of these engineers had set up these um shops. They were kind of hobby shops or small mom and pop style stores selling these uh early models of PCs and printers and modems and um

Yeah, more of them than not were on Hawthorne Boulevard. So it was a very rich place to uh be able to go from shop to shop and just kind of walk in Ask a bunch of questions, observe, and um that's precisely what I did. But were you into computers? Was that I mean were you like trying to program computers or or was it something different?

It was definitely Interested in how things work. So part of what is I did as a kid was I took things apart just to kinda see how they worked and every so often I was able to to um successfully put them back together. And I had a lot of ideas about how to make things better. I imagined creating a different kind of

shower head that would maintain a constant. temperature. Um I thought about putting little metal strips in the road to uh be able to to allow cars to kind of drive themselves down the road and different kinds of things. So I didn't know anything about computers per se. But

it looked like it was going to be This next huge generation of transformational change for um how people might live. And I wanted to learn as much as I could. So you

You are A student At U C L A. Hangin' out. Around these like

early PC kind of I don't know, enthusiast. Shops. Did you eventually go like try to get a job at one of these places? So there was a bunch of things going on for me all at once. I was um Working at the YMCA as a day camp counselor. Uh

most of these kids were kids that had had negative um encounters with uh society or people of the law or something. I was also working for an electronic components um manufacturer. I remember I was um counting some of these things and I asked someone I go, What do they do? And the person says, Doesn't matter what they do, you just count them and uh so I just sort of smiled and got a catalog and figured out what it is they uh did do and Yeah, I I was going to class. I should have been doing my um homework and uh I was learning as much as I could about P C so so instead of spending time on my studies and my homework

I finally just said, why don't I just m give it a go and then it's either gonna work or I'll get it out of my system and then I will take it from there. But This is just something that I had to go do. And what what what was it? I mean what was I mean, did you have an idea of what that thing was going to be? Or you just thought I'm going to do something in computers. Yeah, so the early thought was I'm gonna

understand this and it's going to be inevitable that uh there are gonna be gaps that uh there are gonna be things that people want to do that um other people are not thinking about so I didn't know exactly what that was but I knew the kinds of things that I was looking for And then as I began to hang out in these stores and Most of the folks seemed to enjoy having me around. I just watched. And One of the things that uh was an impossible situation to miss almost from day one was

this PC and and a printer, and then they would say How do I make this work? Well you just Plug it in. Okay, well, can I have the thing to plug it in with?

And because these computers were being made by all these different manufacturers. they had different connectors on them, and the printers had different connectors on them. And it's not like the way that it works today, that there's a relatively small number of interfaces to get things to work together. It was almost unlimited in that day and age. It was an absolute nightmare for folks who were just trying to get the stuff to work for them. This sounds like the early days of the railroad, like they had different gauges on the rail line. So like when one railroad would try to connect with another one, they wouldn't connect because they were different sizes. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And there was no reason for things to work across these platforms Until there uh was. And um yeah.

In some ways things have really evolved and gotten better, and in other ways we're in exactly the same spot, aren't we? So um so take me into one of these PC shops in nineteen Eighty one, right, or eighty two. Uh What does it look like inside? Is it like a shelves stocked with all kinds of different accessories and

you know, different kinds of computers or d or or was it more like a I don't know like a Soviet supermarket in nineteen eighty five. So they um all looked very, very similar. The proprietor was almost always doing it on a part time basis. It would be people walking in saying

Hey, I've uh heard that I can do word processing, that I do not need to use my typewriter anymore. Can you help me with that? So Uh this was unbelievably explosive. It was so exciting. It was so much fun.'Cause this was transformational change. And of course it was changing so so quickly. So walking into these places and um Talking to folks was uh one of the primary ways that people were able to learn and to to be aware of things.

Alright, so you are this young guy and you're watching this explosion of all these different small companies Trying to get into this PC thing.'Cause they clearly see where this is heading. It might be word processing and, you know, some spreadsheet stuff now, but it's gonna be something much, much bigger. What I wonder is Why at that point didn't you think, hey, I wanna be a PC maker. I wanna get into the PC thing and start making personal computers. D did you even think about that? It definitely crossed my mind.

But it was pretty quickly dismissed. The amount of capital that it would have taken To do that in a many meaningful way would have been more than I could have imagined being able to kind of muster and and uh do. And secondly, there seemed to be a lot of people going after that space, and the void I saw looked even more compelling and more exciting to me than making the other hardware. And that would the void that you saw was the cables to connect these things.

Yeah. I mean there is no No missing it that Wow, the big void here is providing This uh elegant tool to a folks to make this stuff.

work together the way that it should be able to. So the path we took Yeah, we're just overwhelmingly obvious to me. So it sounds like you saw the PC revolution happening. That was the gold rush. That was where all the people were rushing into, and you're thinking...

I'm gonna sell pickaxes and shovels. Yeah, I think that that's a really good way to phrase it. Um we uh didn't have the capital to uh do the stake in the in the mine itself. But there were definitely things that people needed that was a perfect fit for us. Okay, so here's what I'm tr I'm trying to figure this out. You're like mm twenty, twenty one You realize that the connectors, the cables, that was an opportunity.

Like where do you get the wires? Where do you get the The plastic To cover the cables. Where do you get the the pin connector thingies? So I've been taking this stuff apart and putting it back together. Um, I've been wiring up things on my own, kinda like Cannibalizing

some of the things for other things. So I had hands on experience from tinkering and and building. And uh yeah, just kinda dive in and So I went off and and bought some cable and bought the wires and bought the um connectors and

And then I started putting them all together. I think you are still living with your parents at this point, right? That is right. And uh I had I had been in the same house my entire life. Um So this first started to happen on my parents' dining room tables where I was building the stuff at

Night. And after a couple of days my uh mom goes Chet, I love you very, very much. You're you're gonna get this stuff off of this table. So our first big move was from there to the garage and uh we uh were there until we moved again. So Um

Yeah. When you say we Was it was there a we or was it just you? Yeah, it was just me. Uh you was you at that point. There was no we. Yeah. Yeah, but um it's just really hard for me to use an I or a me. And so

I'm trying to picture this. You had like a like a soldering iron and you know, what's that metal that you used for soldering iron? I've I can't remember I used to do when I was a kid. Solder, yeah, which is tin and lead, yep. Uhhuh. The very first things that I made I used my dad's tools. And then he was very Curious he was very supportive.

Um he was never in my hair, but he wasn't far away and um he would watch me work And then he would actually machine other little tools and things saying Hey, do you want to give this a try? I think that this might be. helpful. And he didn't understand anything about the electronics. But boy, that guy was really good at making stuff.

Yeah, so I'm trying to imagine like you were You know, it wasn't that expensive. You're buying some wires and cables and and then the different connectors and then just soldering them together. Did they look like home spun, like Frankenstein? Wires d do they actually look professional. I think we're made to that Uh the first stuff we uh made was really bad. So it was really Frankenstein stuff.

And it functioned. Yeah. And you would just walk into these computer shops where you've been kinda hanging out and and knew the owners probably do you just say, Hey, I'm I'm making these cables, do you want to sell them to your customers? Like was that your pitch? That is exactly right. I said, Hey, I can build these for you. Would you like for me to um do that and the uh answer was almost always yes. And then the next question from them would be, how much do you want for them? And uh as a boy I

Don't know what do you usually pay. And then in those early days. The cost that I was paying for the components wasn't competitive. Some of the times I was buying it at a place like a radio shack or an electronic store or something. But my labor was, you know.

Free. And um there was no doubt in my mind that I didn't have to worry about that. I just started to make it work and just get a little bit of scale. And then I'd figure out how to get the costs right later. All right, so you uh This is like what, eighty two?

Mm around then. And did you think this is it, this is my business, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna incorporate a business and make a go of it. Yeah, so I first started getting going probably would have been around nineteen eighty ish or or so And then in October of nineteen eighty two, it was uh either go back to school, uh get another job, or dive into Belkin.

on a full time basis and uh I chose the latter. Alright, your name is Chet Pipkin. And the company is called Belkin. So I think the Kin comes from the Pipkin, but why isn't it called Pipkin? What's the what's the story? Yeah, so I didn't want to use Pipkin because I didn't want people to see that uh hey, I'm Chet Pipkin and the name of the company is Pipkin.

Seem to a small. And again, at this time in in my life, there's a lot going on and uh a friend of mine He and I were gonna start a different business, not Belkin, but um something else. And because he and I were uh gonna do that, I had bought letterhead and business cards that had said Belkin, his last uh name be again with B E L And so then when we went to begin Belkin, I called him up. He was doing other stuff than uh I said, Hey, do you care if I uh

Use this uh letterhead and business cards that um say uh Belkin and he said, No, go right ahead. And um yeah, it's how we got our start. Um Yeah. So all right, and was it still just you in nineteen eighty two? Yeah, so I drafted my brother, who was working for me for free.

My dad was helping out, like making the uh tools and being able to make things uh easier. My friends would just kinda come by to see me'cause I didn't have a lot of time for for any kind of social time then. Yeah. So they would come, hang out with me. make things with me while they were there and then they would leave. They would go off and do um other things. So and then hired the first person on a full time basis And then hired the second and hired the third and

We all worked around this big table I had built. It was a four by eight. piece of plywood that I put a piece of laminate on you sit around the table and make cables of the the three of them. Correct. Yeah. Yeah and then I would I would go out and sell it, so then I got our own separate phone line that we put up in the Garage and still in the garage. You're still in your parents garage. Still in the garage. Yeah. Yeah. And we had cables, long, long lengths of cable literally going up and down the um sidewalk. Neighbors would come out and say, What are you guys doing?

We would explain it and they'd chuckle or shrug or or something. And then as more and more was taking place there, you know, bigger and bigger trucks were coming out delivering goods and there was simply just too much going on for the um garage to um hold us. So then we moved to our first building over the holiday um nineteen eighty two and We've always called our official start date January one of nineteen eighty three, but uh the actual work started a couple of years prior. So w what I'm trying to figure out is how did you how are you growing? I mean, y presumably you started out by just selling these to these shops on Hawthorne Boulevard. Were you driving?

all over LA and going to different shops or were different shops finding out about the cables just through the grapevine? Yeah, in the uh earliest days it It was all outbound. And uh almost immediately our constraint was um our ability to make the stuff quickly enough. So we actually didn't have any trouble getting orders.

We had trouble keeping up. And then as we increased our um capacity, then I would hit a couple more Yeah. And then I think we ran our first ad in computer dealer magazine. And we got an order for a hundred pieces. It was one of our bigger biggest orders ever for cables that went from the parallel port from an IBM P C to a

To an Epsom. Printer. and they bought a hundred of these things. It was the um student store From Carnegie Mellon University. Oh wow. So why wouldn't a computer company

like IBM or Apple at the time. have just made their own to connect to their own products or Another product and just said

Uh you can't make these. We are going to patent this technology, and nobody else can do this. Yeah, so I think that there were a lot of reasons that it didn't One was IBM had their hands full just making enough PCs. And it feels like it was probably years. There were just not enough of them getting built. And they had no idea what printer any given small business or consumer was going to choose

And most of those printers had different connectors on them so they wouldn't even know which one thing to make. There really wouldn't be such a thing. So I think um a little bit too small. And too much work for them and for us. You hit one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in sales that year. Was it just the like four or five people making Every cable.

Yeah, let me think about the number of people. So at the end of nineteen eighty three we probably We must have been in like in the twenty five range or or something. Yeah. Shit in nineteen eighty three If I have my math right, you are twenty-three years old. You got twenty five employees.

You're doing one hundred eighty thousand dollars in sales. you are running a business. I mean that must have been like how did you know what to pay people? How did you know how to manage people? How to do the accounting? Like did you eat w were you overwhelmed with all those things? Yeah, so that's a really good question. I remember saying to my Dad, as this was just scaling up at the house, I go Dad, I don't know anything about accounting. Um, I don't know anything about like

being able to run a run a business, I got business licenses, all that stuff. Exactly. And he looked at me straight in the eye. And he said You don't worry about that one bit. You're gonna figure All that stuff out. You just stay focused on creating things that people want. And if you get that part right.

The rest of it's all gonna work. But there's a lot of funny Funny things happened along the way from me not knowing And then there were moments when when things happened. There's a bunch of those. So So in October of eighty two, I was actually twenty one. I was almost twenty two years old. So I was twenty one when I I embarked onto this So I knew very, very little when we moved in of to that building, I didn't realize we had to turn the electricity on. So it had power.

But then the guy came to turn the power off because it was from the old And so we're literally in there working, this guy shows up from Southern California, Edison, he walks to the back of the building and and he turns our power off, right? And so I I look out the back door and I go, Are you gonna turn the power?

And he basically says, Hey, you idiot, you have to call in and actually establish Service. Um, and then somebody came from the city and said, Hey, do you have a business license? And I go, What is that? How do you get one? And uh so y you know, there must have been fifty of these moments where I just did not No. And somebody eventually asked or came um calling and then, you know, we just took care of it then. But

You know, I didn't know how to do the books. Um Yeah, how were you like collecting, you know, billing people and and accounts receivable and payable, like did you just have papers all over the place just to jumble? Yeah, so you know, we created a purchase order form to kinda buy things off of, but it didn't have like purchase order numbers. We just went like one, two, three, you know. Really, really crude stuff. We didn't have a lot of money always. The cash flow was very, very tight, so if it was a bill, um I often just stuck it in a desk drawer and just said, you know, I'll deal with it later. My girlfriend at the time, she's now my wife, Jan.

Worked in a family business in Northern California. And she knew how to do all this stuff. And so then she would come down for the weekend and she would dig out all of these old bills and get them taken care of and kinda show me how to do the books and It took a little while for me to get that um concept, but uh she was a really really big help. So she actually saved your butt in the early days. She did, yeah. And then after we um got married she um came to work at Belkin. And um I remember I got a call from a guy.

He worked at a place called Computer Stop, one of our bigger accounts. He said uh Hey, this new collections person UM have is an absolute, and I won't use the word, but it was not a very polite word. And uh I said, oh, you've you've met my wife Janne. And uh Yeah, so uh everything everything worked much, much better. And she was

unbelievably brilliant and awesome. So the quality went up, the production efficiency went up. our uh receivables went down. I I was not always really pleasant to work with. She was very, very patient with me, though. But I mean Did you feel any stress about all of those?

Those things. the incoming and the mail and the letters from the IRS or whatever it might be, did did it ever stress you out? Oh, it was a nightmare. There were days when I thought nothing could stop us that uh this is gonna work and uh this is gonna be the most brilliant thing ever. And there were other days that were really, really dark. And um I just would hold my head in my hands and and say, Wow, this is never gonna work. We had a customer file for

chapter eleven and we didn't have the money to um cover the money that we uh weren't gonna get from them and uh I went to uh my dad to uh borrow money and my mom and dad didn't have a lot of money. And he took a loan out on the um house, the very house that Belkin had gotten at um Star. Yep. How much money did he take out? I think I first got seven thousand ish and then I think it was twenty some odd thousand ish. Wow. Yeah, that was a lot of money for them and I remember my uh mom

looking really, really scared and saying, you know, what if you don't pay me back? And I said, Mom I will. When we come back. Just a moment.

How Chet paid back that loan to his parents? And now Belkin grew into a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Stay with us. Guy Rise and you're listening to how I built this.

From M PR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this from NPR. So the early days of Belkin were up and down financially. Especially because the entire operation was self financed. But after a few years in business, by nineteen eighty five

things were looking pretty good. Chet had moved the company into a bigger building, and at this point there were about 50 employees, and they were still making all of their own products. But Chet started to realize that if they wanted to scale up, they would have to start doing things a little differently. There was a moment, I think around NT Five. when the person who was working in reception came and said, Hey, there's somebody here to see you.

And um the person was coming to see us from a manufacturing company in Taiwan. And it was the first product we saw that was being built in Asia. And uh It looked pretty good.

It was a parallel printer cable to go from the IBM PC to a parallel printer. And um I asked him What it would uh cost to buy. And the price he quoted was less expensive than what it

cost us to build that same item ourselves. So that moment was a pretty scary moment. Scary because you thought Wait a minute, these people can crush us. That is exactly right.

And it appeared to me just instantly in that moment that we were gonna have to start thinking more globally about how we would Manufacture things. And I didn't know if I had permission to do that. So I'd grown up in this household that um had appreciated things being made in the US

And so I went to see my dad, I brought this uh cable. to sort of explain to him what we just talked about. And I just kinda paused. And he said, Yeah, you need to explore it and if it makes sense You've gotta do it. Why why did you think you needed his permission? It sounds like w was it that you needed his sort of approval that you were

gonna make it outside the US?'Cause it permission, I mean it was your company. Yeah, yeah. So it it would be an emotional or spiritual permission that um I wasn't violating um Anything that my mom or he had stood for and uh that it was just gonna be okay with them. You needed his stamp of approval to say it's okay. I did. I did. I certainly wanted it. It was certainly easier with it.

You know, I remember this as as a kid, it's hard to believe now, but like, made in Taiwan. meant you to mean that it was cheap. And and now of course Taiwan, Japan, Korea, you know, you you think of very, very high quality. And now of course that's happening with China and and Vietnam and other countries in Asia. So did you Like, did you fly to Taiwan and find a factory to work with there? Yeah, so I think the phenomenon you speak of happened, you know, very, very rapidly, um, at least from a US perspective. I mean all that It's part of what we were living in real a time.

And uh yeah, I did exactly what it is you said. I just hopped on a plane, so I went to three places to explore. What might be taking place in the developing world. Um so I went to Taiwan.

I went to China and I went to India. and what did you settle on? So we were still manufacturing most of our things in the US. It was very critical to us that we maintain all of our innovation, our invention, our design, so So the bulk of what it is we do is still done in the US, but we began to learn about extending some of our global manufacturing in China. And um yeah, I uh

I literally physically helped to set up some of our initial manufacturing lines there. So what did that mean for I mean Did that. Decision. Result in like explosive growth for Belkin?

It put us in a really envable place. By that. Point. Um We were still doing the bulk of the manufacturing in the US and that gave us very rapid turnaround.

But now we could also do high volume things at as low a cost as uh anyone else was doing Anywhere. So Because we we were a little bit early there, it was an advantage that uh everybody else didn't have and uh yeah, those were very, very good growth years for us. So n by nineteen ninety One.

You move Belkin headquarters to Compton, California. This is um at sort of the the kind of the height of the gang wars um Compton was course popularized in in hip hop and and rap and A year later you've got the LA riots, um in south central mainly in south central LA. Tell me why you had decided in ninety one to

To content. Yeah. There were a few motivating factors. One was we were moving to bigger and bigger buildings and there simply weren't that many of them available.

Uh Two real estate was less expensive. Um I had spent and continued to spend a lot of time doing community service work. And that was mostly with youth and it was mostly

with at risk youth. So I was very comfortable in these communities. And in addition to being comfortable. Felt a reward. from being able to invest in these areas.

And yeah, it worked out very, very well for us. When you had the Upheavals and and the anger, um, connected to the verdict over Rodney King and And it results in a lot of

uh anger and and obviously violence. Um What do you remember about that time where you Were you at work that day? Were you in Compton? Yeah, I have so many memories of that day. Um I remember as the civil unrest started to um accelerate, I was at work.

And on the drive home from the freeway, we could see the uh fires across south um LA And then the next day, uh there was a little bit of thought and discussion about whether or not we should be open and uh go to work and and we chose to be open. We're in very close contact with the Compton police department saying, Hey, we think it's important for us to be here and and just promote normalcy.

And we'd call into the police department every hour, and now we could start to see fires out the back door of uh Belkin. And first the feedback was, hey, it's all fine. You don't have anything to worry about. Um Hey, it's getting pretty active around here to hey, you guys should think about what you're doing to the last call we made. I think the quote from the

Get the hell out of Dodge. And uh I think that that was probably about two in the afternoon or something like that. So we worked with all of our people on safest ways to get home. And that night I'm at home, I'm watching the news and uh more and more buildings are burning and I feel this overwhelming desire to go to work to make sure that things are okay. My wife uh convinced me that that was probably not a smart thing to uh do.

Um So, yeah, you know, it was a really scary time. I Had a lot of mixed emotions. I could really feel for people that felt that they were being marginalized and didn't feel a part of the system and not being heard.

And um The very next day or the day after that I was at um One of the branches of the LAYMCA and Very active with the Y um both as a volunteer staff. person and a board member and um

right in the heart of that community at uh Weingart, yeah, we just immediately started uh leaning in and Reinvesting and and doing everything we uh could to um start building bridges again. Did you ever Have any any problems like convincing people

with you at Balkan because You know, because Compton kinda had a reputation as as a as sort of a tough Um, so I was always super comfortable there. Um anybody that was working there, I think was

Comfortable there too. I started to get an increasing amount of feedback from the organization that When we are recruiting people Some of the people have got Some um concern about

Will they be able to get To and from work. Safely and are the amenities around there. um safe and my early attitude was you know All of this works. The more that we're completely integrated in every way that we can imagine, the better off all of us are gonna be.

We did eventually choose to move. We're in a very established tech hub. at the western end of town, the LA mayor at the time there also as a part of getting us to move. He was just trying to get us in into LA. But uh

There's a big big piece of me that um misses being there in Compton. I think you guys moved out of Compton in two thousand ten, so you were there for quite a while. We were. So just just packing up then a bit, um Th I I've rather think that the first time Belkin took outside financing was like Two thousand two. And up until that point it was entirely self financed. I mean, y you had started it in the garage and

You know, you never took any money. except for the loan from your mom and dad when when you almost went under Why did you take outside financing at at that point? Did I mean, did you need it to grow and to scale? Yeah, so we were beginning to see around that time that while

At that time, uh we were extremely well capitalized. Our balance sheet was great. We could start to see a time in the future to get to a bigger scale that um We would absolutely need outside capital. So we made a conscious choice on that day because we didn't need it. But we figured that the day would come that we

would need it and uh that uh that would be a great time to kinda kinda start to learn. At this point, like by the time we hit the turn of the millennium, Belkin You know, you guys start to move, of course, you've moved out of just cables, you've move into a huge product line of mouses, keyboards, laptop cases, surge protectors, power supplies, uh all kinds of USB products. You go on your website today and there's tons and tons and tons of things you make. How how are you able to Kind of stay ahead of

competitors because I can go on uh Amazon today and buy the same cable made by Amazon or you know there's a hundred different companies that are offering very similar cables. How are you guys able to stay ahead of those competitors? Yeah, so We're really fortunate in that our reason for being just as we were first. imagining what this organization and this brand could be is almost exactly the same as our reason for being now. So it's doing the hard complicated innovation and engineering work that allows these interfaces to work together with um one another.

For thirty some odd years, um More often than not, we've been able to do that. in a little bit better or more elegant way than um other folks. And As long as we're able

To keep doing it? We're gonna do okay. But We are only as good as as how well we are doing things this morning, so. there's a lot of positive pressure on us because the moment we are not best is is the day that um

We will be at greater risk. So I guess in in the past year, um in twenty eighteen, um Falcon sold to a a subsidiary of of Foxconn, a company called FIT. For uh reportedly more than eight hundred million dollars. Um I at that point I think you were the primary owner and shareholder of Belkin.

But But I don't know, was it was a part of you reluctant? Uh I have to assume that

That would mean the end of your time at Belkin, which was your entire identity. By the way, do you have a role in the company today? Yeah, so um still um Running Belkin. And uh the folks at F I T have been um kind and gracious enough to allow me to um have an expanded role inside of FIT. combination of fit and uh Belkin has created a company doing

four and a half billion dollars of revenue a year. So This is nothing about Ending any kind of As um all of our chapters has been

What are the actions we take? What do we do to put us in the best possible place to do our best work going forward? That is what this is uh all about. This is This is an enabler. Yeah. You know

I remember a conversation I had with Haim Saban. a couple years ago and I asked him about wealth and I said, Was it important to you early on. to become wealthy. And his answer was interesting. He said it was, but not because of the

But the the m the money was a marker of success for me. So I wanted to make more because to me that was a marker of success. He grew up Very poor. Um

Was was earning money a lot of money. important to you as a marker in that way, especially given how you grew up. Yeah, I I can really relate to that. So definitely an important thing that that what it is we're doing matters.

But another measurement of success is how many people want this. And um And so yeah, financial results out of an organization is is one way to sort of measure whether or not you're um being successful. I think also for me as a kid. I had this experience with my

Wasn't sure if they had a lot kinda set aside to give them a little bit of uh wiggle room when things got a little leaner. So I think I did set out to make sure that um That was less likely to be the case for me, but that particular issue probably got solved um a little while ago. Your mom and dad lived no longer alive, um, I think that that's correct, right? Right, yes, both of them have passed.

They did live long enough to see you become quite successful, very successful in fact. Um obviously you paid their loan back. Uh what do they what do they make of it? Did they ever talk to you about it or reflect on it with you?

They really felt I think a lot of ownership because they were able to per participate in various ways. In those early days my mom was making you know breakfast, lunch, or dinner for everybody that was working there. Um, they lent money to the business. My dad helped to build so much of the tooling. He um hung out there. Um

And so yeah, I think that they felt um But they are They uh always worried. So I would hear feedback from my friends uh and people that worked at Belkin

Where both my mom and my dad would pull people off to the side and say Hey. Is Chet doing okay? And uh they say, Yeah, yeah, I think he's doing okay. So they felt a lot of pride, a lot of re award, but um but I think they I'm always worried and and maybe that's just a little bit of what mom and dad do. Chet, how much of your success do you attribute to luck and how much do you attribute to

Your intelligence and skill and hard work. I attribute it to uh mostly other people. There's nothing that I could have accomplished with them out a bunch of other people making great things happen. If it wasn't for my teachers, I wouldn't be here.

If it wasn't for my mom and dad, I wouldn't be here. My brother and my wife I don't think I'd be here. A thousand people at Belkin, thousands of people inside of FIT. It's each and every one of them, y you know, making things happen every day and You know, more than anything else it's because of of the work of uh other people that um I have been able to do what little that I've done.

That's Chet Pipkin, founder of Belkin. The official name of the company is Belkin International Incorporated. And it also sells networking products under the Lynxis brand, which Belkin acquired in 2013. By the way, we didn't get into this during our interview, but the first really successful product Chet had back in 1983. was a connector called the Belkin Hamlet. It was for connecting the Apple II C computer to different types of printers.

And the name Hamlet? It actually came from a bad Shakespeare joke about the cable. You see? Or not to see. Thanks around because it's time now for how you built that. And this is a story about something we almost never think about.

Until it breaks. The common everyday zipper. The moment of Oh my god, my backpack just split open on me and I'm on a trip in Central America. This is Clay McKay, man, he's kind of an expert on broken zippers because he's got hundreds of stories. I had a a musician that was getting ready for a show and his zipper had blown out on his pants, you know, and he was I mean who wants to go play a show in front of thousands of people with your pants unzipped? And when those zippers break, lots of people just throw the item away in the trash. even if it's your favorite pair of jeans or the backpack that's been everywhere with you.

But this is not the way clay was raised. When he was a kid in McCall, Idaho, His dad had a repair shop and he would fix everything. every day there was somebody who'd come into the shop. And have a broken zipper.

And he'd fix it in about five minutes. And eventually Clay's dad built a spin-off business. He made a kit for people so they could repair their zippers at home. So it was just kind of a full do-it-yourself kit that had handful of different sliders in them, which are the that's the little metal piece that you grab onto. And the slider is the thing that can break or fall off a zipper. So this repair kit was like a little bag that had a bunch of different types of these sliders. And it also had these little staply things for attaching the slider back to the zipper's teeth. Anyway, all this is happening back in the early nineteen nineties. Clay's dad put the repair kits on a very basic website and started to sell them in a few chain stores. So that was kind of like supporting our whole family pr pretty much, you know, it was a it was a meager living, but it was enough to get us by. But things got harder after Clay's dad died.

His mom took over the business, but she had a hard time keeping it up. So about five years ago, Clay decided to take it over. Because it didn't feel finished to me. You know, it felt like there was a lot more potential in what he had started than what was currently there. But in order to tap into that potential, Clay decided the whole look and feel of the business. had to change. I mean the old website was like it was straight out of the 90s. And it hadn't been changed since. You know, it almost got to the point where it was like so retro it was cool again. So Clay did a complete rebranding of his dad's zipper rescue kit. updated the website, designed a new logo, and then he started to, you know, go out and shake the trees a little. You know, things started happening immediately. It was like, okay, I landed us a new account here and started to kinda

get a handle on what was going on with Amazon and how all you know how it all worked. Actually once he got the kid on Amazon Clay had to deal with a wave of knockoffs. But he says one thing he offers that the other guys don't customer service. In fact, he takes a lot of the calls. and helping other people repair their own zippers.

it's become one of his favorite parts of the job. It becomes so meaningful when you're helping somebody fix something that's just literally irreplaceable. You know, it kinda gets me through my days. Like if I'm having a hard day and I get that call of some cute old lady. You know, I've had a southern lady be like, you walk on water, and you know, she they're just so happy to have this little thing working again in their lives. Meanwhile, Clay is pretty happy that the money side of the business is looking good too. You know, I'm getting to the point where like a six figure profit margin is like in sight.

Which is You know, it's pretty exciting. That's Clay McCabe of Portland, Oregon. His company is called Zipper Rescue. If you want to find out more about Clay or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howIbuiltThis.npr.org, and of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you are there, please do give us a review.

You can also write to us at hibt at nbr.org. And if you want to send a tweet It's at how I built this. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. Thanks also to Candice Lim, Julia Carney, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Sanas Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening?

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