I met Ben Kaufman at TED, when he was working on Kluster. It didn't impress me then and Quirky never really impressed me either.
Kluster itself was, well, a cluster* at TED. They didn't really have a good idea or execution, and his team was... well, more interested in taking in the sights than slamming to get the project done (with one exception, but that guy was going to be leaving the company). It felt like an extended college party rather than a company.
Sure, Kaufman started and sold Mophie. Not sure that puts him in 'visionary founder' territory, and raising $180m doesn't prove anything beyond your ability to raise money. That's a useful skill but clearly not enough.
Now, I don't know Kaufman personally, and only interacted with him at TED, so it's possible he's actually a visionary. And all startups come with uncertainty and risk; maybe this wasn't an execution problem, maybe the entire idea was never going to work, and it took someone trying it to find out. Because let's be honest, nothing guarantees a startup is going to work. That's sort of the essence of startups.
We see those ingredients adding up to a win all the time because of survivorship bias. So maybe it's good we see Quirky fail and talk about it, to remind ourselves that there are no guarantees when you're doing something brand new.
I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."
They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.
As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.
Kluster itself was, well, a cluster* at TED. They didn't really have a good idea or execution, and his team was... well, more interested in taking in the sights than slamming to get the project done (with one exception, but that guy was going to be leaving the company). It felt like an extended college party rather than a company.
Sure, Kaufman started and sold Mophie. Not sure that puts him in 'visionary founder' territory, and raising $180m doesn't prove anything beyond your ability to raise money. That's a useful skill but clearly not enough.
Now, I don't know Kaufman personally, and only interacted with him at TED, so it's possible he's actually a visionary. And all startups come with uncertainty and risk; maybe this wasn't an execution problem, maybe the entire idea was never going to work, and it took someone trying it to find out. Because let's be honest, nothing guarantees a startup is going to work. That's sort of the essence of startups.
We see those ingredients adding up to a win all the time because of survivorship bias. So maybe it's good we see Quirky fail and talk about it, to remind ourselves that there are no guarantees when you're doing something brand new.