Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Collaboration: Ben Kaufman, Quirky”.
Hi guys I’m bad nice to meet you. I want to talk about one word: it’s its invention and it’s it’s. Why we’re all here? Humans are here to invent and leave the world a better place than we found it, but I want to show you a few examples. First of why I think we need to get back on the right side of invention. Do the right kind of attention rather most of the smart people in the world right now, in my opinion, we someone spoke about this little earlier they’re working on on uneasy stuff, but I come from New York and this building is the most beautiful building in the World it’s the Empire State Building. Does anyone know how long it took to build the empire state building? Someone does here some smarty pants huh. It took one year in 45 days to build the empire state building. Does anyone know how long it took to build this potato peeler anyone anyone it took over three years to build this potato peeler? Okay? So actually, so, if you want to do the math, it was 410 days for the Empire. State Building beautiful building still stands today.
Gorgeous this is the Freedom Tower. Just topped out last Monday, say won’t know how long it took to build this room tower. How many days in September 11, 4332 day, it’s actually the the building’s the same height in terms of number of floors. Then they just put this giant spire up to make it feel like it was higher the lockheed p-80, the first fighter jet, was built in 143 days.
This is still the fastest commercial jet in the world, but it was designed in the 50s was flown completely mechanically. With no onboard computers, we are all inventors, but for some reason this really smart people. Besides the people in this room, because your guys are doing really cool stuff taking on hard challenges, you know they’re taking on simpler stuff.
Now my story is: is 1 i’d like to tell you now I, when I was when I was in high school, I was a terrible student. Like the worst student in the world, I was sitting in the back of math class my senior year in high school, and I was trying to figure out a way to listen to my ipod shuffle without my teacher, realizing that I wasn’t listening to her and I Went home and I prototype, I cut some apple earbuds in half I had some ribbon and gift wrap and i soldered together. I created this lanyard keychain, so it would conceal the wires.
So your teacher wouldn’t realize that you were listening and – and so I went – and I thought the only thing standing in my way and most inventors think this. The only extending my way was a little bit of money. So I went and convinced my parents to remortgage their house and hand me 185 thousand dollars. They did that. I don’t know why, but they did. I got on the next flight to China before my high school graduation.
I landed in shenzhen and i quickly realized that all the things standing in my way had nothing to do with money. They had to do with the realities of the complexities of building a consumer product. All the different things that individual person or small group of people need to know in order to get through all of these different things, manufacturing design engineering. I don’t know what I have all these things are manufacturing design, martin marketing, merchandising retail, like it’s really hard to take it from the beginning and bring it all the way out to the end, and what that results in is the fact that the best ideas in The world are not in the world they’re locked in people’s heads and even if they are in the world in the form of one or two or a small batch they’re, not mass the world doesn’t know about all the good stuff happening.
I started quirky now four years ago, with a very simple mission statement to make invention accessible to make sure that all the great ideas in the world actually get out into the world. So how do we do it? We do a technology community and an expert team coming together to solve problems. It’S not the traditional form of crowdsourcing or ever I hate the word, but crowdsourcing is all pull it’s. The fact that the community are smarter than the experts well quirky is is just very simply it’s a conversation.
It doesn’t matter who’s right, there’s no egos right. All we want to do is make sure the best ideas in the world are surfaced and pushed out. So we have an expert product design, team of industrial designers, electrical engineers, chemical engineers, manufacturing people, etc. We have a community people around the world that that we’ve never met that are sharing their ideas and helping us refine ours.
And then we have a technology platform that powers all of it. An example you may be familiar with. Is this great story of a kid from Milwaukee Wisconsin who NASA came around accent came around on his high school and said we want to inspire the next generation of inventors? Why don’t you kids all make a product the Jake went home? Is God named Jake? He went home and he saw that its power strip was. It was only using three of the six outlets, because these big power bricks were getting in the way and he did this trifold board and submitted it to the NASA product design.
Competition. As a perfect example of why invention is inaccessible, he actually won the NASA product design competition. They gave him a t-shirt. I was it as a t-shirt.
They said good job, kid, follow your dreams and Jake. You know Jake’s kind of a goofy guys like a hi, bro and Jake, sat on the idea for three years, because he couldn’t commercialize a you know, articulating power strip with a t-shirt he need to get to the regulatory stuff, manufacturing, etc. It was fine for him to you know now, with the tools available. He probably could have built one or two, but he sat on the idea.
Until he heard about quirky came to quirky, the community came together, 709 people influence and impacted the creation of this product, which is known as the pivot power. Whereas am I have it in here? It’S a it’s a flexible power strip. There we go so it’s the first flexible power strip in the world, and so we’ve we’ve given Jake a little bit more than then a t-shirt at this point. Jake is probably made over a million bucks will make another million dollars this year, and this is just one product.
We actually commercialized three brand new consumer products every single week, and we do this through the help of again, all these three groups coming together, really smart people on our in-house team, random dreamers and inventors and craters out in the world and then sort of the beauty Of bringing all these things together at scale, so this is a group coming together to take on the right kind of invention to solve problems like we used to. Everyone asked me why quirky works well. Quirky works because of this quote from another awesome Benjamin, he said. Tell me and I’ll forget all right. If you tell me something it’s going to just it’s going to fade my memory and it might not stick. If you show me I might remember or I’ll make a visual connection to it.
It’Ll, be it’ll, be sweet, but if you involve me, then I’ll truly understand now we don’t listen to everything the community tells us to do. The community doesn’t listen to everything we tell them to do, but we involve each other in the creation of new things and because of the fact that we understand each other implicitly we’re building a brand around the fact that all of us are smarter than any one Of us, that’s Ben Franklin, so the first thing is taking on the right kind of invention, right, building real products and taking on real challenges: 100 years of progress, so everyone close your eyes for a second ditch, the iphones and so on, and imagine a world 100 Years from now, 100 years right, you got your jet pack on everything’s dope, so wait now we got to rewind, though a hundred years of progress, so this 1909 dudes name is Henry for right. It was the first commercially viable automobile was black and it only came in black. It was sort of SUV like it got 17 miles per gallon a hundred years in the future. Okay. 2009.
Anyone know what the best selling car in America was. All right. You guys are so smart, it was black, it was a Ford, it was SUV. I was a truck right.
It got 16 miles a gallon, so what happens to like all of us in the world of creation and invention and and product development is once we have something. Then we just become incremental and will become incremental. We don’t take on sort of the enormity of the challenges we do when we’re just trying to solve that initial problem, and I think the way we do that is by the way we start fixing, that is, by building an infrastructure around making it easy to always Take on the hardest problem that we have as a society and not sort of get mired in the details of well. How am I going to make this, or how am I going to get it into distribution? Just truly just run straight towards every single one of the big problems, so that’s the first.
You know key thing that that I wanted to talk about today. I got a hundred days of progress of quirky. If you want to see this real, quick Jenny, drinkard Atlanta, Georgia looked around her dorm room, she said that she was using a milk crate for everything, besides storing milk. Okay, so she wanted to create a beautiful milk crate because they’re fairly ugly, that would become a beautiful modular furniture system.
So this is actually a maker faire last year, but our community came together with our design team, etc. We built a hardened steel tool in New Jersey. We found a moulder in Vermont and within a hundred days we had built a beautiful modular furniture and storage system that shipped to target exactly a hundred days after Jenny submitted to the idea to the site. Now this isn’t a vehicle right, it’s not anything, but this one from zero to a million dollars in four days through distribution at a major national retailer.
This is what we can do by bringing together technology community, etc. So, oh, this is the second part. This is this thing I’m really excited about. So did I not senior senator the other okay so so first is the right kind of invention and the second is the right side of invention.
Invention is this weird thing: you know when you play that game and you say i’m going to say something. You say another word right that like reminds you of it when you say invention most of america would probably say patent right, invention, patent idea patent. No, we patent things that quirky, we we sort of we sort of do that, but but there’s this weird thing going on in the patent landscape.
You know the patent system was originally created to both protect inventors, but at the same time provide a blueprint for societal progress and to inspire future inventors, but right now we’re just seeing. I just said that sorry right now we’re just seeing a lot of this. They check this out everyone’s just suing. Each other right. Patents are on a source of inspiration, anymore they’re, not trying to move our society forward, they’re there a weapon of corporate warfare, but that’s not why the patent system was created. So is there a way that we could sort of put patents back in their place? I’M like way behind my slides okay.
So we want. We want to sort of be cognizant of the fact that, when you file a patent in you’re, an inventor, usually what you’re really focused on is trying to figure out how I can protect my invention in my domain right. So Apple wants to make sure that no one uses their patents for building smart phones.
You know GE wants to make sure no one uses their patents for building jet engines, but do they really care if someone create something using that same thing in another category, I don’t know what that’s about okay, that’s this is. This is Corky’s new thing. It’S an inspiration platform. What we want to create is we want to create this ecosystem of patents, where institutions and colleges and all these different places, big companies that are creating masses of intellectual property, basically say guys.
Here’S what you can’t use this patent for, but at the same time, what the hell else could you do with it? So we kick this off initially with G. This is like a this place. A giant GE, commercial and and GE is amazing. What they’re saying is we have one of the largest patent portfolios in the world? I think 30,000 plus patents, a big portion of those we’re just interested in making sure people don’t build MRI machines with, but at the same time there’s amazing imaging technology. There’S there’s an amazing sort of sound and and and light sensors etc, and we want to see what can be done with that in the consumer world. So what they’re doing is they’re putting these patents up, they’re, letting the world come up with consumer uses for these devices and then quirky will commercialize them and make them real products which basically benefits everyone involved from community to GE to quirky and everyone. I think this is a really big idea if you can take patents and without changing the entire patent landscape, which I think we can all agree needs to happen at some point. But if you can make an immediate change today and say how do we put patents in a place where they’re inspiring future generations of invention and not being competitive to existing inventors? That’S a that’s a pretty awesome thing.
So that’s my that’s my spiel! So here’s the thing about quirky: we started the company to make invention accessible to make sure that all the the best product ideas get it on into the world. But for four years now we’ve been known as a purveyor of fine plastic goods right and the people are laughing. No, our company now now that’s cool, but but the, but the mission is to make invention, accessible and invention comes in all sorts of different sizes, and what I want to show you is is well: the power strip is sort of on the more complicated into the Product portfolio we currently make, this is a fun little thing.
This is a soft good, but it’s a beach bag. And when you go to the beach, you get all sorts of sand in the back. So you open this up and there’s mesh at the bottom, so that sand comes out this cross, like whatever so I got so I got this whole demo here you want to see me crack an egg and suck the egg yolk out you into that know. You’Re, like it doesn’t, have a processor in it, but but check this out.
This is from a guy in the middle of Texas. It’S doctor told him to watch his cholesterol. He said I want to create this thing. That’Ll suck the egg yolk out of out of an egg, it’s actually quite cool. So that’s the white, that’s the yolk and boob! So listen! Oh, oh, wait! Wait! Wait! See! You didn’t want to see it, but now you wanted to see it.
Okay! So a there’s! One more this one’s cool is it from a guy in Michigan. He said I want to spray the juice out of my lemon to put it on salads and stuff like that, so you just spray it a few times and you have your images. No, I want to illustrate something a quirky. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to build this entire infrastructure around invention.
In order to do that, we need to take on rather simple challenges. First, build a manufacturing line set up the distribution you can find quirky products in, like thirty five thousand retail doors all around the world. Now that we have that we’re sort of slowly increasing the sophistication of stuff we’re working on also with GE we’re taking on an entire line of connected home devices, we’re taking on some really cool mechanical and electrical challenges. So the community, in the product line that we create, is, is up to you. What we hope to do is just provide the platform and the and the service to make sure that nothing stands in your way. That’S it that’s the majority what I got so.
Thank you. .