Insight
Pipkin: Overfunding Is One of the Best Ways to Kill a Startup
“So I think one of the best ways to kill a startup is to overfund it. So not having enough cash isn't always a bad thing. Makes us really, really get to the essence of what it is we need to do.”
Insight
Pipkin: Belkin's Biggest Errors Came From Listening to Outside Pros
“The systems and the approaches that we invented were really appropriate and good for our business, and some of the biggest errors we made Was listening to so-called pros tell us at a future point in time that the right way to run a business is, you know, fill …”
Insight
Pipkin: Green products face steep resistance if they cost more or add friction
“Most of the research I've seen seems to say that people clamor to be able to use an environmentally friendly replacement if it doesn't cost them any more. And it doesn't inconvenience them in any way. As soon as it does cost more, or the inconvenience is there…”
Insight
Pipkin: B2B Sales Win Through Internal Evangelists, Not Direct Cold Pitches
“The problem with you doing it, even with the data and everything, there's too many people trying to sell too much stuff and everybody's got all these claims. They don't know who is credible and who is not. For me, you have to get the inside voice. Whatever it …”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
Pipkin: Belkin Solved Cash Flow by Having Manufacturers Hold Inventory
“We had the same problem at Belkin. Not enough cash. No working capital to invest in goods. So the way we solved that issue was we formed a very tight alliance with the person that was manufacturing our stuff. And we built a lot of trust with them. And so it wa…”
Disclosure
Pipkin: Belkin's B2B Business Was Often Nearly as Large as Consumer
“So our B to B business was often almost as big as the business on the consumer side.”
Disclosure
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 …”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Partly supported
The combined FIT and Belkin business generates $4.5 billion in annual revenue
“Combination of FIT, and Belkin has created a company doing four and a half billion dollars of revenue a year,”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
