Eric Migicovsky on Pebble's origin, smartwatch philosophy and what's wrong with the competition

Pebble is an unequivocal success story thus far -- setting Kickstarter funding records and making its way to retail outlets. However, the road it's taken hasn't been been all smooth, and at TechCrunch Disrupt today, company CEO Eric Migicovsky spoke about Pebble's beginnings and some of the challenges it faced as a hardware startup. Migicovsky said that he first started working on Pebble's precursor five years ago, not because he thought it would become a business but because "it was something I wanted to have," he said. That first prototype was essentially an hacked Arduino strapped to his wrist, and while it "didn't work too well as a watch" due to poor battery life and performance, he got a lot of positive feedback from other folks who saw it. Those folks geeking out over that prototype is what convinced him to enter the smartwach business.

Comments