May 13, 2019 · 52m · how-i-built-this
Belkin International: Chet Pipkin
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Guy Raz explores the entrepreneurial journey of Belkin International founder Chet Pipkin, tracing how he turned a garage-based cable assembly project into a multi-billion-dollar global technology accessory brand by solving early PC interoperability challenges.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 35.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.4 Guest teaching 1.8 Guest disagreement 0.4 Guy pushing back 0.8
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 42:34 Pipkin correcting Raz's assumption about leaving Belkin
Pipkin explicitly rejects Raz's premise that selling to Foxconn subsidiary FIT marked the end of his career and identity at the company, noting he continues to run the business.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 31:20 Raz pressing on needing father's permissionRaz directly challenges Pipkin's phrasing about needing his father's permission to offshore manufacturing, pointing out that Belkin was Pipkin's own enterprise.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 21:52 Pipkin schooling Raz on PC hardware fragmentationPipkin clarifies why tech giants like IBM did not monopolize cables, explaining that unpredictable third-party peripheral pairings created a custom cable market too fragmented for giant firms to service.
Guy holds their own ▶ 9:45 Raz connecting PC connectors to railroad gauge historyRaz immediately synthesizes Pipkin's technical description of 1980s peripheral incompatibility with the historical parallel of mismatched railroad track gauges.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live Tour Announcement in Portland | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Guy Raz introduces the episode with a live show announcement and an intro monologue setting up the gold rush analogy for Belkin's origins. Host monologue and housekeeping dictate zero across the board. | |
| Chet Pipkin's Family Roots and Blue-Collar Heritage | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Raz asks basic biographical questions about Chet Pipkin's upbringing and parents' education level. Pipkin warmly shares memories of his machinist father and lifelong-learner mother in Hawthorne. | |
| Spotting the Interoperability Problem in Early Computer Shops | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Pipkin describes the early days of personal computer shops and the lack of standard interfaces. Raz demonstrates quick conceptual grasp by offering the historical analogy of differing railroad gauges and modern calendar sync issues. | |
| Choosing Cable Solutions over PC Manufacturing | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Raz presses Pipkin on why he chose making cables rather than trying to build full personal computers. Pipkin explains that hardware manufacturing was capital prohibitive while accessory gaps were immediately addressable. | |
| Soldering Frankenstein Wires in the Garage | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Raz questions the crude beginnings of soldering wires at home, teasing about Frankenstein wires. Pipkin readily confirms how amateurish the first cables looked and describes his father's custom metal tools. | |
| Founding Belkin and Assembling Cables around a Table | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Raz inquires about the Belkin name origin and how Pipkin transitioned from solo work to hiring employees around a plywood table. Pipkin reveals Belkin came from repurposing unused stationery originally printed with a friend. | |
| Early Market Demand and the IBM-Epson University Breakthrough | 3 | 4 | 0 | 2 | Raz asks why giants like IBM or Apple didn't monopolize and patent printer cables themselves. Pipkin educates Raz on the market realities: IBM had supply crunches and could not foresee which diverse printers customers would pair with PCs. | |
| Navigating Startup Growing Pains and Jan's Vital Role | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Raz probes the chaotic early administrative setup as sales hit $180k. Pipkin candidly shares embarrassing startup missteps like forgetting electricity hookups and having his future wife Jan rescue accounting. | |
| Surviving Financial Crisis with a Family Home Loan | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | When Pipkin mentions needing his father's permission to outsource manufacturing to Asia, Raz pushes back, clarifying that it was Pipkin's company. Pipkin clarifies that he sought moral and spiritual alignment with his blue-collar family values. | |
| Relocating to Compton and Enduring the 1992 Riots | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Raz asks about relocating Belkin to Compton during the era of gang tensions and the 1992 Rodney King unrest. Pipkin shares a vivid story of maintaining operations until police advised immediate evacuation. | |
| Moving to West LA Tech Hub and Strategic Outside Funding | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Raz checks why Belkin took outside institutional financing in 2002 despite being self-funded and profitable. Pipkin explains they intentionally raised money while their balance sheet was healthy to learn before facing critical needs. | |
| Diversifying Tech Accessories and Beating Competitors | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Raz asks about competing with cheap Amazon clones and presumes the 2018 Foxconn sale meant the end of Pipkin's identity at Belkin. Pipkin directly reframes, noting he still leads Belkin with an expanded corporate role inside FIT. | |
| Reflections on Success, Family Pride, and Crediting Others | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Raz quotes Haim Saban on money as a scoreboard and asks the signature luck versus skill question. Pipkin deflects individual credit, attributing his achievements almost entirely to colleagues, family, and mentors. | |
| Belkin's Legacy, Linksys Acquisition, and the Hamlet Cable | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Raz provides closing remarks on Belkin's early Hamlet cable and transitions to the How You Built That segment featuring Clay McCabe of Zipper Rescue. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Pipkin's parents had minimal formal education beyond eighth grade
“Very little formal education, so I think my dad made it a little bit past the eighth grade, And the same was true for my mom.”
Early PCs and printers had vast arrays of incompatible connectors
“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…”
Pipkin avoided manufacturing PCs due to capital constraints and intense competition
“It definitely crossed my mind, but it was pretty quickly dismissed. The amount of capital that it would have taken to do that in any meaningful way would have been more than I could have imagined being able to kind of muster and do. And secondly, there seemed …”
Pipkin initially bought Belkin components at retail, relying on unpaid labor
“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 there was no doubt in my mind that…”
Pipkin named Belkin to reuse business cards from an abandoned venture
“A friend of mine, he and I were going to start a different business, not Belkin, but something else, and because he and I were going to do that, I had bought letterhead and business cards that had said Belkin. His last name began with B-E-L, and so then when w…”
Belkin's first breakthrough order was 100 printer cables for Carnegie Mellon
“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 PC to a, to an Epson printer, and they bought a hu…”
IBM ignored peripheral cables due to production limits and printer fragmentation
“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 pr…”
Pipkin's father mortgaged the family home to survive a customer's bankruptcy
“We had a customer file for chapter 11, and we didn't have the money to uncover the money that we weren't gonna get from them, and I went to my dad to borrow money, and my mom and dad didn't have a lot of money. And he took a loan out on the house, the very hou…”
Pipkin borrowed nearly $30,000 against his parents' home to fund Belkin
“I think I first got seven thousand-ish, and then I think it was twenty-some-odd thousand-ish.”
A Taiwanese manufacturer offered printer cables cheaper than Belkin's production cost
“It was a parallel printer cable to go from the IBM PC to a parallel printer, and I asked him what it would cost to buy, and the price he quoted was less expensive than what it cost us to build that same item ourselves.”
Pairing domestic and offshore manufacturing gave Belkin an early competitive advantage
“We were still doing the bulk of the manufacturing in the U.S., and that gave us very rapid turnaround, but now we could also do high volume things at as low a cost as anyone else was doing anywhere. So, because we were a little bit early there, it was an advan…”
Belkin moved to Compton in 1991 for larger facilities and community impact
“One was we were moving to bigger and bigger buildings, and there simply weren't that many of them available. Two, real estate was less expensive. I had spent and continued to spend a lot of time doing community service work, and that was mostly with youth, and…”
Belkin kept its Compton headquarters open during the 1992 LA riots
“There was a little bit of thought and discussion about whether or not we should be open and go to work, 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 just prom…”
The Los Angeles mayor encouraged Belkin to relocate from Compton to LA
“The L.A. Mayor at the time there also was a part of getting us to move. He was just trying to get us in, into L.A.”
Belkin raised outside funding before it needed capital to learn the process
“We could start to see a time in the future to get to a bigger scale that 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 that, that…”