Belkin International: Chet Pipkin

How I Built This with Guy Raz

• Episode: Belkin International: Chet Pipkin
• Website: How I Built This with Guy Raz
• Feed URL: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510313
• Duration: 00:54:56
• Published: 2019-05-13 06:01

Chet Pipkin was the kind of kid who loved to take things apart and put them back together. As a young man in the early 1980s, he started hanging out in mom-and-pop computer shops, where he realized he could meet a growing need by selling the cables that connect computers to printers. That simple idea became the main ingredient in Chet's secret sauce: instead of making his own computers, he would make the accessories needed to make them work. Belkin International eventually grew into a massive manufacturer of electronic goods — last year, it sold to a subsidiary of Foxconn for more than $800 million. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Clay McCabe decided to rebrand his dad's zipper repair business into Zipper Rescue, a repair kit that helps people fix their broken zippers at home.