This week, we have a doozy of an interview, speaking with Eric Migicovsky, creator of the Pebble smartwatch.
Migicovsky recently announced Pebble’s dramatic return in 2025, almost 10 years after its demise in 2016, when the company was sold to Fitbit (which was later sold to Google).
It will be through a new company, Core Devices, and the smartwatches won’t be called Pebbles, but they’ll use recently open-sourced PebbleOS, and—as Migicovsky explains on the podcast—leftover parts from the original Pebble devices.
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“ At the end of the day, I really wanted a Pebble. It didn’t exist. No one was building anything remotely like it. So I, without really knowing what I was doing, decided to go and make it.”
Look, sometimes I do a lot of blah blah upfront to hype the episode, but there are few Canadians who can say they built a hardware company out of the University of Waterloo’s Velocity garage, resulting in three of the 15 most-funded Kickstarters of all time, selling over 2 million smartwatches before ultimately shutting down. I can think of only one Canadian who convinced Google to open-source the IP of their dream device a decade after it was sold twice, following stints at one of the world’s best tech accelerators and selling their other tech company, messaging app Beeper, to the makers of WordPress.
On the podcast, Migicovsky covers how the first iteration of Pebble came to be (shoutout to the BlackBerry smartphone-connecting InPulse, which came before), why Pebble failed (and how much Apple had to do with it), his crazy journey to RePebble, and the lessons he learned along the way. If you care at all about the founder journey, or want to understand why hardware startups are… harder, you will enjoy this episode.
The once and future king of wearables is back with the smartwatch he built for himself. How did that happen?
Let’s dig in.
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The BetaKit Podcast is edited by Darian MacDonald. Feature image courtesy Core Devices.