This article appears in the inaugural issue of BetaKit Most Ambitious. Go here to read more stories of bold ambition in Canadian tech.
Most founders are taught that startups are designed to grow fast, and growing fast requires making something for a big market.
A decade ago, Eric Migicovsky followed that path to pursue his ambition: defining the smartwatch category. He launched his company, Pebble, to incredible heights. It came crashing down just as fast.
Years later, his ambition hasn’t changed. Migicovsky has started a new company to make smartwatches again. This is the story of why Pebble died and how this time will be different.
Born in Vancouver, Migicovsky moved to Southern Ontario in the mid-2000s to study Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He was attracted by the university’s approach to intellectual property–policies that leave the IP generated by its students to its students, making it an outlier in Canada.
“I really wanted a Pebble. It didn’t exist. No one was building anything remotely like it. So I decided to go and make it.”
Eric Migicovsky
Core Devices
At school, Migicovsky started a company and joined the university’s nascent Velocity accelerator. Its first product, a smartwatch, had a local bent: it connected with BlackBerry smartphones, made by hometown tech hero Research In Motion. Called the inPulse, the watch displayed messages and alerts so Migicovsky could read a text while riding his bike without breaking his neck. Most of the initial batch of devices broke in shipping.
“Looking back, it was not the most beautiful product in the world,” he said. “But we shipped it.”
Migicovsky was undeterred. He was driven to build the smartwatch he’d been dreaming of: one that showed the time, basic message notifications, and not much else. Its battery would last forever, because it wasn’t trying to be a smartphone on your wrist.
“I really wanted a Pebble,” he said. “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.”
Migicovsky’s ambition took him from Waterloo to Silicon Valley, after Pebble was accepted into world-renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2011. There, he was taught that startups are designed to grow fast.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham gave him an offhanded piece of advice that stuck: don’t fundraise, crowdfund. From then on, Pebble would raise money directly from its customers for its products, using a new platform called Kickstarter.
The result? Almost 70,000 backers collectively pledged over $10 million USD for the first Pebble smartwatch in 2012. Powered by three of the 15 most-funded Kickstarter projects of all time, the company sold more than 2 million smartwatches in a five-year period. Pebble was growing fast.
But by 2015, smartwatches were no longer a novelty, and Pebble was facing tough competition from Samsung and Apple, which had begun offering watches focused on productivity and fitness. Pebble was originally a product built for an audience of one; to compete, Migicovsky felt he now had to build Pebbles for everyone. The company started rolling out a range of watches with comparable features.
Migicovsky now thinks Pebble lost its North Star trying to chase a bigger market. “I got pulled in a direction towards something that I didn’t even really care about,” he said. “We were like, ‘Okay, this seems to be working for Fitbit. This seems to be working for Apple. Maybe we could do that, but make it a bit more affordable, make it a bit more Pebble-y.’”
The decision had disastrous results. Pebble missed sales targets by $20 million in 2015 after the productivity and fitness pitch failed to connect with its core user base, leaving the company with a warehouse full of costly unsold inventory. By the end of 2016, Pebble was effectively insolvent, and the team and IP were sold to Fitbit for less than $40 million USD. Migicovksy ended up joining Y Combinator.
“I had built the thing that I wanted, and there wasn’t like a grand master plan in my mind of where this was going,” Migicovsky said. “We should have just stuck to what we knew best and continued to build quirky, fun smartwatches for hackers.”
Migicovsky is clear-eyed about Pebble’s past failures, which is a mark of a good entrepreneur. But so is persistence. Eight years later, with some incredible luck, Migicovsky found a way to bring Pebble back.
Image courtesy Core Devices.
In 2021, Fitbit was sold to Google. Last year, Migicovsky began working back channels within the company to get access to the old Pebble IP. The charm offensive worked, and earlier this year, Google open-sourced the PebbleOS—a very rare decision. Without access to his old work, Migicovsky would have lost the chance to rebuild his dream device.
It will be through a new company, Core Devices, and the smartwatches won’t be called Pebble, but they’ll use PebbleOS. Amazingly, they’ll also contain leftover parts for the original devices after Migicovsky found a supplier selling a warehouse full of them on AliExpress.
The feature set should sound familiar: the smartwatches will show the time, basic message notifications, and not much else—with batteries that last forever, because they aren’t trying to be a smartphone on your wrist.
Why launch a new company just to remake a device that’s more than a decade old? “I tried every other smartwatch,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I can’t stop using it. I love my Pebble.”
This time, Migicovsky will apply the lessons he learned with Pebble: the Core Devices team will be kept small and won’t crowdfund or fundraise or do anything else to chase scale. He’s confident there’s still a modest market of nerdy hackers who love their Pebble, too, but the goal is to break even.
Migicovsky doesn’t dream of selling millions of smartwatches anymore—he’s back to building for himself.
“I am more of an inventor, I think, than a startup founder. A company, to me, is a means to an end,” he added. “I build things that I want and I tend to not let anything get in my way.”
Feature image courtesy Core Devices.
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