NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod the New York Press Club award winning podcast highlighting new startups businesses and opening in the New York City area. I’m Hal Coopersmith. In this episode we speak to David Hall and Jordan Klein co-founders of a company called Park and Diamond which reinvented the bicycle helmet. You know the bicycle helmet, that goofy looking, large piece hard plastic that no one wants to carry around. Well these two entrepreneurs thought a lot about why bicycle helmets were so bad and invented a helmet that looks cool and actually folds up to the size of a water bottle. And a water bottle, unlike a helmet is something that almost everyone carries around. Here’s Jordan Klein.
Jordan: We’re not out here just trying to push product and sell some units, we’re selling for usage, we want somebody to buy this, we want them to use it
NYLP: Having people wear bicycle helmets is personally important to Jordan and David. So let’s go to the interview and my first question to David Hall, about just how and why they got started.
David: For us it all started about three years ago with my sister Rachel and she was riding her bike through the intersection Park and Diamond, now the namesake of the company, Park and Diamond, and she was actually hit by car and when she spent the next four months in a coma and then was recovering and now continues to recover, we are really left with the question why wouldn’t you wear a bike helmet and with that question in mind we just re-thought a helmet from the ground up.
Jordan: Considering the fact that we were two engineering students at the time and you know myself wanting to work in the automotive industry designing safety sales for cars, Dave in the defense industry. I kind of figured that we had the skill set to bring something to market and so very early on we started leveraging all the research capability that Virginia Tech had, as well as you’d be surprised the amount of things you can get done when you call companies and say you’re a student. They will tell you anything in the world and so we were able to really rapidly iterate early on and had the fortune of winning a lot of pitch competitions which gave us a decent amount of seed funding which allowed us to continue that research and development.
NYLP: I definitely want to go into the story and the meaning of why wearing a helmet is very important to you David, but what fascinates me about all this is that just like I started off, everyone has wanted a collapsible bike helmet and I feel like people have been kind of trying to do this for ages. You said you reinvented the bicycle helmet from the ground-up why are you guys the ones that were able to do it or able to do this in very elegant way, as opposed to other big companies.
David: Yeah that really came down to the first step we took and it started with, at the time, over 300 interviews, now at this point well over thousands of customer interviews and the pain points that really stop people from wearing helmets are kind of intuitive, it’s really three points of, the inconvenience of the big bulky helmet carrying it around, it’s the aesthetics of big black foam on your head and then it’s the comfortability of bulky rigid foam, so there are some people out there who’ve tried to take a step to solve this problem. The challenges they might solve, one of the pain points, they might try to address one of the pain points at the cost of the other pain points, so they might have something that collapses as well, but doesn’t look good and something that looks good but doesn’t feel good, any one of those combinations, there really hasn’t been a solution that solves all of the problems.
Jordan: I think the answer to why us is that we were outsiders to this industry. We weren’t beholden to any one particular technology or process or supply chain and we didn’t have a couple hundred employees that had enjoyed their life for the past 25 years and wanted to continue that.
NYLP: You’re not a part of big bicycle.
Jordan: We’re not a part of big bicycle, right. Definitely not something you’ve heard talked about a lot because we are outsiders and because we came from the background, particularly of automotive crash test safety, which has been under a huge area for improvement, you just look even five or ten years ago, and the difference between fatality rates 5 to 10 years ago for new cars sold versus today is huge, particularly there used to be a socio-economic boundary or barrier to automotive safety so your high-end Mercedes-Benz S-Class 7 Series, things like that have the safety features that your Toyota Camrys didn’t have and what you’ve seen is that that has moved down market as those technologies have become cheaper and more ubiquitous in cars which is to really save vehicles. Things like that haven’t happened in the bicycle helmet industry. There’s been no carryover of that type of technology and technical innovation, into personal safety devices. So we essentially kind of had the opportunity to look at that space and figure out can we use this as a model for what we can do in really frankly the personal protective space. Our passion and our initial reason for starting the company was a bicycle helmet and that’s why the first product really looks like that, but that’s essentially what it is really. Our engineering thesis was what happens if you’re willing to spend a little bit more money on bomb cost and the physical product itself, research and development and you take the engineering methods from the automotive industry and aerospace industry and apply it for the head to basically do this as a safety cell of a car just on somebody’s head.
NYLP: And you were thinking about all this as college students.
Jordan: Absolutely.
NYLP: So you came across this problem, figured out this problem, say we want to design a bicycle helmet from the ground up, do these interviews. Where do you start after the interviews in terms of materials, everything else – what was that like?
David: We actually met in a material science class where I think our professor legitimately got paid $1 every single time he said CSIG Pack which is a material selection software so essentially for engineers it condenses different material properties and allows you to do a more efficient method of selecting materials for any given engineering problem.
NYLP: Everyone in that class is loving that joke right now.
Jordan: Exactly, shout out to Dr. Clarks in the MSE 234 class. At the time, we were seniors in college, both of us had worked in the industry, had internships at Co-oped, and so were pretty familiar with that product development timeline and in terms of where do we start, really you just kind of have to think about what are the fundamental, criteria, for what we were trying to do and we got that from these customer discovery interviews, a lot of just feasibility analysis at the get go, you know the concept of putting it in a water bottle came from the Japanese manufacturing principles of Kaizen which is, if you think about quality, in the sense of getting the intended use done every single time, rather than just fit and finish on a car for example, but in terms of manufacturing, in terms of process, the correct tool has to be within arm’s reach of
whatever action is going to be performed, otherwise the action won’t get done correctly. If you don’t have the right wrench or a worker is using the wrong wrench, rather than using the correct one makes the bolt not being tightened correctly things like that lead to mechanical failure in the future. If you kind of think about the sense of really what that means is the intended use for the intended action every single time you have to have the right tool at point of use and that’s really fundaments of it we thought was broken with the bicycle helmet was that it was almost never at point of use. Everything back to you know why we started the company Rachel for example owned a bicycle helmet and it was sitting in her dorm room when she was riding through the intersection of Park and Diamond because it wasn’t available at the point of use. We kind of thought where can we put a bicycle helmet that is on every single bicycle, that’s on every single bag and something what’s a form factor that intuitive that we’re used to really just carrying around with us and that was a water bottle. The first thing we did, was just did basic math, can we fit enough protective material in the shape of a water bottle and we decided, we found yes you could, until we knew what we were solving for volume efficiency problem, which was a problem that nobody else really ever had an inclination to solve for in a bicycle helmet space, and that’s really kind of where we started. Once you’ve defined the problem, it’s really just kind of iteration at that point.
NYLP: For people like me who do not know what volume efficiency problems are, what is that exactly?
Jordan: Well it’s not a specific type of problem. Essentially we’re solving for efficiency, we want to build the most efficient design and how do you define that. Was a bicycle helmet that can collapse into the minimum amount of volume above all other challenges in terms of that pure technical sense of it fitting in the shape of a water bottle? That was the idea.
NYLP: But people have thought about that must be for ages, everyone who’s put on a helmet has thought about that and everyone else who’s designed a helmet just thought about that, how do we collapse it down? I feel like there are there lots of different iterations and you guys cracked it.
Jordan: And that’s totally true. That came from being outside and being flexible as a business of being able to look at materials that were outside of the materials typically used in the helmet industry We weren’t beholden to, using these legacy materials and we were able to build IP and transition technology from other industries and really generate our own material which is significantly more efficient and talking to a technical thing you mean just from having something retain elastic strain energy is really inefficient for mitigating impacts. Essentially not only is it not helping, it’s actually counterproductive in terms of volume efficiency. That’s really what it comes down to because you’ve got this material that’s retaining and then releasing energy during an impact so not only is it not helping, but it’s actually been counterproductive to the rest of the material that’s being deformed. So if you can create a material that doesn’t do that, you pick up efficiency right away.
NYLP: I’ll take your word for that, but let’s talk about the material a little bit more in-depth. What is it and how did you find it?
David: So really the material and we’re asked all the time what is the actual material and it is our proprietary composite. It’s our secret sauce if you will, but as Jordan mentioned it has been adapted from the aerospace industry, and one of the questions we get is how is it actually safer because sure it’s thinner, sure it’s lighter, sure it looks better, but how does it actually work? It does come down to the helmet during the impact. One of the ways is we reduce the bounce so it’s kind of like the catchphrase of it doesn’t bounce as much, but what that comes down to is say your head hits the ground, conventional material your head would actually bounce back up, there would be some as Jordan said earlier strain energy, elastic strain energy that then is returned to your head, causes more acceleration more movement, corresponds to more injury. So by being able to absorb that impact energy in more of a permanent manner and in a plastic manner, it allows for what could be greater protection less injury so that’s really the mechanics behind how the composite works.
NYLP: How did you come up with the design for the composite? How many iterations did you go through? I know it’s a secret sauce so we won’t have to go into it, but how did you know all right this is the material?
Jordan: Don’t let our casual New York style here fool you, we enjoy technical conversations.
NYLP: Your Brooklyn style.
Jordan: Yeah whatever this counts for. But essentially, we spent a lot of time iterating so we formed partnerships with companies like ANSIS, which is one of the industry leaders for simulation software, so we are able to do this because we came around in the confluence of a couple things so, (1) HPC time is significantly cheaper than it used to be, you can leverage simulation software on a scale that was previously not possible, so that allowed us to non-destructively iterate and design things very early on, very cost-efficiently and build a knowledge base on these relatively difficult to model and understand phenomena materials so that for one allowed us to make a lot of progress where traditional companies’ in the space might not have a core competency. That was definitely very helpful and it was a direct application of some of the previous work that we have done in their lives. Through partnerships with these companies so they gave us hundreds of thousands of dollars in software for example as an early stage startup because they believed in what we were doing and wanted to support us. So you’ll leverage things like that early on and that allowed us to really go through a lot of iterations, finding suppliers and things like that, as well as that we could leverage, and then really just a lot of sleeves up work doing destructive testing and trying to get an agreement between what you predicted and what actually physically happened.
NYLP: What are the materials that go into the composite?
Jordan: The ingredients are also part of the secret sauce thing. From a design standpoint though kind of what’s important is how much improvement we’ve made and it’s really actually remarkable when we were just thinking, as I’m sure a lot of people were reflecting upon 2018 this past week, just in the past year the amount of improvement we’ve been able to make on the product itself has been awesome and it’s really something that we’re really happy about because at the end of the day we’re solving for a problem harder than just the sale of a product. We’re not out here just trying to push product and sell some units, we’re selling for usage, we want somebody to buy this, we want them to use it and that’s actually a magnitude harder, and so for every small incremental of gain, we get in the product, we feel like we’re getting a slightly higher usage rate out of it and I think one of the things that we’re most excited about is when this product starts shipping is seeing kind of what that usage rate really looks like, were we right, that this form factor was good enough to really create this paradigm shift in helmet usage or this isn’t just getting left on a shelf or a drawer for example.
NYLP: Do you have a patent on your secret sauce?
David: We have everything from international patents to U.S. patents to trademarks and design patents, luckily that whole side’s been buttoned-up and what’s really valuable about it is, since it’s not just a little tweak on a conventional helmet or just a new mouse trap, it’s really a product platform so that’s why having an IP platform, that really encapsulates the entire product, really lends to future innovation and being protected with that innovation.
NYLP: And how long did it take to develop this?
Jordan: 3 years pretty much.
NYLP: 3 years. So back to the story. A lot of people have this idea, I want to do something. David obviously you had a tragedy in your family, had a big impact on your life, people deal with grief in different ways, and say you know what, I want to do something, but kind of lose that motivation even in the darkest times, what made you guys push through 3 years, which is a very long time in product development to say, you know what, we are going to be the ones that cracked the egg that no one else has, that big bicycle has not using Legacy materials everything else like that, obviously I’m sure things didn’t go as planned all the way through, what made you push through?
David: It really came down to not only the mission, but everybody who supported us with the mission, whether it was our friends and families, my sister’s professors at school, my sister’s friends, just the idea of we’re going to solve this problem, and I know for a fact if Jordan and I even thought about the idea of quitting, finding something else to do, I’m pretty sure everybody would have had us by the collar and made us stick to this, because it really comes down to what we’re trying to solve just isn’t about us 2 in this room, it isn’t about my sister and us 3, it’s really bigger than that, it encapsulates a lot of people.
NYLP: What was one of the darkest days in terms of, thinking you know what, we aren’t going to be the ones that do this – did you have one of those moments?
Jordan: It’s a good question. The darkest day.
David: That is a good question.
Jordan: We don’t get asked that a lot. There were a lot of times when we were iterating something or couldn’t explain why things were happening, but as a business, I think there are two separate parts to this. There’s the part development, there’s the engineering, there’s the nerd, there’s the science and there’s that and that’s definitely one bucket, but that’s actually nothing but a barrier to entry of running the business. The business itself doesn’t actually care about any of that. It’s kind of binary almost, either it will work and you can ship it or it won’t work and you can’t ship it. You know when and how much it costs and unit economics, that matters, but certainly to a lesser extent very early stage. As a business, I think we were really efficient about how we were able to get where we are. In terms of product development, I don’t think we’re very efficient. We definitely spent a lot of time and effort on things that ended up not working out. In terms of the darkest days, I think really at the end of the day there were times where we could have come back that the particular materials we wanted to use or processes we wanted to use were too expensive. We had a situation where some of our tooling was going to be 5x what we thought it was going to be, and we would have found a way to power through that, but it’s hard because at the end of the day, we really want this to be an accessible product and we want to be able to deliver this for the lowest possible price so we can grow this and then protect as many people as possible. It is really not lost on us that if we made this for example a $300 product, for the sake of margin, that there would be people that could have bought this at a hundred bucks or at $80 at $79 that didn’t because of price and what was the point of the exercise then we didn’t really achieve our mission if that’s what we had done. I think that’s probably the darkest day that I can think of right now other than the pitch competition.
David: That’s what came to mind.
Jordan: The first pitch competition I ever did live, I completely word vomited. I looked at Dave and said “take the microphone”. We won the next seven in a row for $200,000 so it’s okay but that was rough.
NYLP: And now you guys have this great dynamic between the two of you. You’re very eloquent in talking about the product and we’re certainly going to get into the business side. I definitely want to go into that, obviously you touched on that there are two parts. We talked a lot about the manufacturing and then there’s the business side. Where is the product going to be manufactured?
David: When it comes to the manufacturing side of it, it’s something we’re we have suppliers on the West Coast of the U.S., we have suppliers in Europe, suppliers as well as final assembly in Southeast Asia, so needless to say we both have status on airlines and fly far too much, but that’s been one of the biggest obstacles to tackle is the supply chain, the manufacturing, the distribution, really the backend work behind making a product that’s taking the last six months of full-time effort.
Jordan: I’ll amend that to the darkest time. The darkest time was the beginning of 2018 when we were what I would describe as just trudging through the mud.
David: Start of 2018?
Jordan: Yeah started 2018. We were talking about this last week. Essentially when you talk about these manufacturing and supply chain things, all this kind of back-office stuff that doesn’t look sexy in media, that you can’t go to a bar and talk about with your friends because they’re totally not going to get it. That’s actually really hard to motivate yourself to go to work and frankly we working like seven days a week and at that point we didn’t have any of the external validation that we have today, we hadn’t launched the product, we didn’t even know if people really wanted this thing, we just knew that we needed to push the needle forward to get the opportunity to share this with the world and we felt that since we’re really asking people to trust us with their safety, that when it came time to launch the product, it needed to be the absolute final version. A lot of crowdfunding projects throw out this prototype that is super early and then they run into all the problems that we already solved a year ago, where they go to the manufacturer and the manufacturer looks at them like yeah that’s not going to work or you can’t do this process or that process, it costs too much money, or it’s too labor-intensive or you can’t scale it to about 5,000 units a year, things like this. I would say we probably spent about a good two months where it felt like, no probably actually three months, no progress was being made and then one week, everything happened, everything went well and we got into this accelerator which is funded by BMW called URBAN-X, that was an amazing experience for 6 months. Definitely did a lot to push the business for it, we got back from Asia, we did a trip to Asia which was really productive and that’s when we really started getting our first inkling of what we could do on a cost perspective and I came back so that we could offer the price that we can right now which is really exciting because it could have completely been a thing where the unit economics would have only worked out, at 250 plus dollars because we’ve been using materials that are significantly more expensive than any other helmet company and we’re not selling it for the high end of the market we’re selling it priced very competitively compared to a lot of these other companies that are out there and we really needed to be tight and efficient about how we’re doing things in a manufacturing context to be able to do that.
NYLP: And then where did you ultimately choose the place to manufacture and how did you choose that?
David: That selection process, which lasted at that point, months because it involved going there, screening the companies in person,
Jordan: Like nine months.
David: Yeah nine months from starting the process to finally walking the factory floor with them. It took easily nine months and it’s a game of specifically hardware manufacturer is, it’s a game of you have to go there, you have to meet the person, you have to do a sample, you do another sample, see what they’re about, they see what you’re about, it’s very much it’s a commitment, both monetarily and time wise for both sides of the party, so it’s really a commitment. Then at that point it takes months to figure that out, find the right person, but was really encouraging and maybe this consoles other hardware companies, once you do have that team in place you have a factory, you have the supply chain, it’s really rewarding to get a sample bag and be able to play with the product in your hands.
NYLP: Well we have a product here. Let’s talk about that. You brought it in and I’m very excited to see it, I’ve seen it on the video. Can you describe what it looks like for people who have not seen it, people are in their cars listening to this on their headphones, what does this thing look like before I put it on my head with the headphones on?
Jordan: It looks like a baseball hat.
NYLP: It looks like a baseball hat, I agree with that.
Jordan: The product is composed of three layers. There’s the outer layer of the skin, as we call it, there’s a core layer and then there’s the inner liner which is really there for comfort. The inner and the outer layer are both machine washable. The headphones fit well.
NYLP: I want to talk about that.
Jordan: Yeah we’ve actually thought about that particular use case if somebody wears noise cancelling headphones over their helmet and whether or not we recommend doing that.
NYLP: Well I’m just wondering if the ears are protected, you know if you fall on your side are you going to get scrapes on your ears? You could say what you will about Legacy bicycle helmets but they do protect your ears.
Jordan: This helmet protects the same coverage area as a traditional helmet so it would, given any impact, perform just as well for protecting the head in terms of a coverage area perspective. I want to get back to what the product looks like per se. Is that really what we focused on was making something that was indistinguishable from normal headwear at 5 or 10 ft and we thought a lot about in terms of user-interaction with the product that to know that this thing is a safety product in your hands. It has to have a certain amount of physical rigidity to it, we didn’t want it to be very soft, so you notice when you unfold it, it sits unfolded on the table so that was a design change that we made. That doesn’t make a difference from a safety perspective per se but it makes a difference from user experience and what the product really feels like to have in your hand. So that was a really important thing I think that we had changed about the product about a year ago and from that perspective, I think we are incredibly proud of where we have come, from the price product standpoint and I think what you’ll notice, actually one of the things we wanted to change that was really, that what dropped out of all this was that we didn’t really prioritize, was how breathable it was. Our material is more breathable than traditional Legacy materials so the entire helmet itself is ventilation and when we shot the video that you’re talking about it was like a 98/99 degree, hot humid August summer day in Brooklyn over in Cobble Hill and both of the actors and actress that were riding a bike, both were blown away by how comfortable and how cool it was despite the fact that it was 90-plus degrees to the point where the makeup artist barely had to do any touch up on their forehead.
NYLP: It’s very thin and light. It’s kind of hard for me to believe that this is going to protect me if I fall. I believe you guys, but for someone who’s just wearing this, it just feels like an old school leather football helmet with your secret sauce composite materials.
David: Really for the design approach to the helmet, the outside is supposed to be inconspicuous, supposed to be a hat, you wouldn’t think twice about it, but what’s fun is the inside if you take the top layer off, that’s we’re we can really let the engineering show and kind of show the engine underneath the hood and once you take that off, you can see the tessellation, you can see kind of the mosaic of the rigid tiles and in there you can feel that there is thin fabric that allows for ventilation and critically designed areas so that’s really where we can convey the engineering to it, and what’s been fun is some people have even said they like that design so much they want to show it off without the hat.
Jordan: An important note about the hats too is something that was really important to us was to have this match people’s outfits and we wanted the outer layer to be interchangeable so that you can get a second skin and let’s say you want to go all maroon, to support Virginia Tech even though we lost a bowl game, you know you can do that and that’s something that we’re kind of delivering to the space that really hasn’t existed in the mainstream at all and that’s something that we’re really excited about. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback in our product and with crowdfunding we sold a lot a lot of these skins, which was great feedback.
NYLP: You sold a lot of skins, you sold a lot of helmets. I took off the skin and it looks like you have a lot of triangles here like a geodesic dome. How did you..
Jordan: We actually created our own software more or less to optimize this. Actually the equation for how the helmet behaves is relatively simple. If you understand how your materials are going to behave, you understand the area and volume engagement, you basically control everything and so the design for us, is all about control, but essentially that’s kind of what enabled the specific design that you see here and how we know how well we’re doing in terms of optimization which is important from a product standpoint.
NYLP: Can you optimize and control for helmet hair? Are people still going to get helmet hair?
Jordan: I think helmet hair actually, to be frank about it, it has a lot to do with moisture build-up as well so theoretically, this is going to be as good for helmet hair as you can possibly get. It’s something that we can look into in the future as a product improvement and that’s why we love the fact that the product is modular. Those inner liners, take it out, throw it in the washer and we’ll sell replacements as well. If, for example, we find in future product testing that having a specific anti-static coating on that fabric liner really makes a difference for helmet hair, then that’ll be like a $10 or $15 accessory you’ll be able to buy for the product if it’s a problem or maybe you just dig the helmet hair look.
NYLP: I feel like no one digs the helmet hair look.
Jordan: You know what’s worse? The headphone hair. Seriously this is the bane of my existence.
NYLP: Are you just saying that because you’re wearing headphones right now?
Jordan: Seriously. I really think about my headphone choice in the morning whether I’m going to go with in-ear headphones or over-the-ear headphones, based on whether or not we’re going to be doing something on camera or to go out after, because you’ll get this little indent on your head from your headphones through the entire day which I think is totally worse than helmet hair, to be totally honest.
NYLP: So you just put on your helmet and then put the headphones over which you’ve apparently solved for as well because I was able to do that.
Jordan: Exactly.
NYLP: Problem solved. I didn’t need to work for your company. So why did you choose the crowdfunding model as your initial distribution?
Jordan: Crowdfunding is a really interesting space to be in. One of the things that’s really awesome is you get feedback in a way that you can’t get doing almost anything else. When you have a mission-driven company and a story like we do and a product that really resonates, crowdfunding is a very efficient tool for you and we’re really grateful to all the people that believed in us. There’s this emotional attachment beyond just the transaction, of physically pre-ordering a product and from a business standpoint, we’re really looking for validation.
We were looking for the signal that this product itself was really what people wanted and the only way you can do that is by offering somebody the opportunity to buy it and we were in high-level partnership conversations with a lot of different micro ability companies, so bike sharesscooter shares, things like that, and the piece of data that we were really missing was well do people actually like this? Everybody we talked to says it’s awesome. If we poll people, if we do surveys, if we do focus groups, if we do everything we did great feedback, but nobody’s physically purchased the product from us yet and so we decided that we needed to prove that this was really something that people wanted to not just have it, but physically pay for, which purely in a business sense is obviously critically important.
NYLP: What is the expected delivery date?
David: We’re shooting for the February-March time frame for shipment delivery.
NYLP: February, March 2019.
David: Correct.
NYLP: And are you going to actually be able to deliver the products because that happens on crowdfunding. You know you talked about how crowdfunding is great to generate momentum, but sometimes products are delayed or not shipped at all.
Jordan: Yeah absolutely. We’re at the moment on time to ship the product within that time frame. Of course things can happen and you can’t say with 100% certainty, but essentially we are kind of in a different position. We had already raised you over $1,000,000 of venture capital and we already had a team, we already had patents, we had everything done. We’ve been working with our manufacturer for nearly a year when we launched the crowdfunding process and that really allowed us to use it more as a function of being able to fund the purchase orders and things like that without having to dilute the company to do that. When you’re an early-stage business started by two college students who don’t have a nice mug to put or even own Scotch, banks are not going to give you money, venture debts, is not an option, things like that so you have to find a way to actually fund the purchase order. That’s really where we used in-leverage crowdfunding effectively, we’re in a different spot. A lot of other companies just put an idea out there and then they go to develop the product after the fact.
NYLP: You led me to my next question. You’re two college students, people are investing millions of dollars, you’re obviously very smart, you spend a lot of time developing this product, but business savvy, it’s a crazy world out there, how are you going to navigate the business world? I’m not saying it’s not impossible, people have done it, but other people you know there are challenges and I think a lot of people even veteran entrepreneurs struggle with that.
David: We are first time founders, we are recent engineering graduates to the world of entrepreneurship, business development, where do we have to stand. I think the tone that Jordan and I have always tried to emulate is we might not have all the answers, we might not know everything, but we’re willing to learn it and that’s really resonated well with advisors, friends, experienced entrepreneurs who, whether it’s on the board of advisers or board of directors, investors or even just friends who will answer an emergency phone call in the middle of night about a problem, they really respond to not only our mission but who we are as entrepreneurs, who we are as a company, that we will learn, we want their advice and we want to learn from it.
NYLP: And how big is the team right now?
Jordan: Our full-time staff right now is about 7 and between all of our vendors and agencies and what not, have probably about 50 people across that space part-time working. There are a lot of things we don’t need full-time. We don’t need a full-time graphic designer, what we definitely do need is a full-time photographer for our Instagram account. We were joking about it earlier. Our Instagram account needs to improve his because this is what happens when you’re talking about business. You’re going to come naturally with some strengths and some weaknesses. David and mine weaknesses is 100% Instagram. Dave’s rockin’ like 98 friends on Facebook so it’s a strong 98 friends.
NYLP: Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not quantity it’s quality David.
Jordan: Don’t worry, I make fun of him all the time. Essentially, there are things you’re intuitively going to be good at, there are things that you’re going to struggle with and really at the end of the day, nobody’s born anything. Nobody woke up one morning and became a successful CEO or a successful CTO or was able to start a business It’s all about whether or not you can leverage what is around you and for that Dave and I are incredibly grateful to really the core network that we are able to leverage through Virginia Tech’s program and then as we started to grow through URBAN-X, the other accelerators. There is an advantage to when you are doing something passionate, genuine from the heart to make the world a better place, people want to help in any way they can and will go above and beyond somebody who’s just trying to make a quick buck and I think that there’s this misconception that entrepreneurship has this huge financial upside and there’s this whole money thing around it when there really isn’t. It’s really not about that and if it is, it’s not going to work. First of all you’re going to eat Ramen noodles for 3 years, so your opportunity costs on that basis is huge. There certainly are situations where you can be efficient and make a couple of bucks early on, but it’s significantly more difficult in the hardware space, particularly a regulated hardware space where you have to produce a product that will pass regulatory compliance. That’s going to inherently have a significant lead time before you’re actually able to drive revenue.
NYLP: Well you certainly touched on, Jordan, that entrepreneurship isn’t necessarily glamorous, it doesn’t have to be money focused and I think that your mission certainly, really comes through, particularly because it affects you guys and affects a lot of people in this world. But money is also important. It helps you get off the ground, helps you develop all these things, how much money did you guys need to raise to develop this product?
Jordan: We raised a seed round of about a million dollars in 2017. We closed that in October and we actually needed more than that. Really at the end of the day and we did our accelerator which helped in that context, but actually what it’s about, I think our viewpoint on this, is something that I’m actually genuinely really grateful for and I think that is a really powerful thing is when, you can create a system where what’s good for you and what’s good for your investors is also good for the world, that’s very powerful so creating this what is innately capitalist, but at the same point has this social, wellness component to it, investors that decide to invest us and join our team are going to do very well and they’re also going to know that, at the end of the day they’ve saved somebody’s life and that has value beyond money, but at the same time we still have to hold ourselves to the standard of delivering as good or if not better returns than any other competitive company that’s out there. I was competing for their time and resources.
NYLP: How much more than a million dollars did you need to raise?
Jordan: We definitely were in a situation where we could have leveraged more resources. We were able to basically secure some credit and whatnot. We were able to get through it, but you know there’s a cash crunch. Running a crowdfunding campaign is expensive. There are a lot of things that you need to do. Content is expensive, Facebook ads are expensive, all that stuff is expensive and you have to pay for it with investment capital upfront. You don’t get that upfront unlike traditional e-commerce where you might get, you order the product and then the payment is processed at the end of the day you get the cash in the bank you don’t get it for 60 days.
NYLP: You guys certainly developed a collapsible helmet that is revolutionary, but I searched on Amazon and there are other collapsible helmets. Obviously they’re not as cool as yours or as great, but it’s certainly a space that people are looking at it would seem. Companies Morpher Overade, how are you going to navigate this more crowded space?
Jordan: I think really for us at the end of the day we are focused on consumer experience in a way that no other company is. We care so deeply about the product and usage like I was talking about earlier in a way that very few other companies have spent as much time on, and at the end of the day it’s our belief that when you take technically brilliant teams and create an
environment where they can be obsessed with consumer experience and product experience, that’s when you get really great products. I think that’s something that some of these other companies in the space haven’t done and I think that consumers really spoke to that. We sold like three or four times as many helmets as any other one specific company in crowdfunding. I think we sold nearly 20,000 helmets in our crowdfunding period. We represented I think 50% of every dollar raised for bicycle helmets across both crowdfunding platforms even though we were only on one. We’re incredibly grateful for the response that we got and I think that’s because we really deeply cared and we took the time to say, hey what does somebody actually want, not what do Dave and I want, not what does our team want, but what do people really want? What are they telling us that they need in their daily life to live a safer life and this is really the product of that and I think it spoke very loudly that we had done a good job of answering that call.
NYLP: So usage, obviously a big theme to your mission. I want to give you guys a couple numbers. 2017 there were 24 cyclist deaths in New York City here in New York and in 2016 nationally there were 840 cyclist deaths. I don’t know the international figures, but what does this product, what is your mission mean to New York and cities around the world because I know personally I’m not riding a Citibike because I’m not carrying around a helmet and I feel like there are a lot of people probably in the same way and people who have obviously been tragically struck. What do you think that means for cities?
Jordan: I think from a city perspective we really care about system-level safety. How do we think about safety as a whole and it’s not just fatalities, it’s traumatic brain injuries, it’s concussions so bicycle helmets are very effective at reducing the probability of getting a traumatic brain injury. TBIs are serious, it’s worse than a concussion, it can have lifelong injuries. It’s not like breaking an arm, where it heals and life goes back to normal and even if it doesn’t set correctly maybe there’s some phantom pain every once in a while, life goes on and you’re still you. Traumatic brain injuries have the potential to take away who you are as a person which is very different than almost anything out there and of course fatalities are the ultimate worst case outcome. So for us, it’s really reducing that in cities, but it doesn’t just have to be Citibike, it could be dockless bikes, it could be scooters, it could be any of these platforms where you’re riding 15 miles an hour, you fall off and you might hit your head on the fire hydrant or a curb or something like that, and that’s really what we want to do is create something that you can just throw into your bag the same way you would take an umbrella when you think it might rain that day, throw your helmet into a bag because you think you might want to ride between a meeting or to a coffee shop or to meet a friend and you can just throw this and make it seamless in your day-to-day life.
NYLP: What’s it like been working together? You guys have known each other in college and any funny stories being just college buds now starting a business?
Jordan: I think too many funny stories.
David: I’ll hold back from sharing the funny stories from the past. I would say that to quickly glance over the first question, of funny stories, but I would say the biggest thing for us working together is the friendship or the relationship matured from college friends to start-up to running a business together. I think one of the keys is we’re making decisions about $100,000 in tooling and some big decisions we can still laugh about, what happened with him on New Year’s Eve and you can still have that aspect of the two co-founders still having that kind of escape from the stresses of the start-up.
Jordan: Yeah I think I should go in a different direction.
NYLP: I think Jordan’s going away from New Year’s Eve as quickly as possible.
David: It worked out in the end for him.
Jordan: You may make me regret saying what I’m about to say. But I think that we’re young, we’re both 24 years old, turning 25, it’s kind of that quarter life crisis, but one of the things I’m most grateful for is experiencing a level of commitment to something that you’re passionate about this young has been interesting. You don’t really know going into starting a company who your co-founder is as a person and you’re going to experience things that you could never imagine, you’re going to be tested as an individual on so many levels. You could just never plan for and to go through that and find out the person that you decided to start a company with, is not only someone that you’re incredibly compatible with in terms of running a business together, but it’s somebody that can be that support structure, and that you were innately trust to always be looking out for your best interest I think it’s so powerful, and enables so much and it’s definitely not something that you can take for granted. Now of course they’re still going to make fun of you when you do dumb stuff.
NYLP: How do you divide the responsibilities between the two of you?
David: That was something that to a large extent kind of divided rather naturally where Jordan’s father is an attorney and my dad handles logistics and shipping, so to a large extent when it comes to say legal employee, all that kind of stuff it divided naturally. Both of us having an engineering background was invaluable to start, but then as a company grows and roles progress, fortunately in that sense, it kind of divided naturally between say product development and business development.
NYLP: Well David Hall, Jordan Klein thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us. You have a wonderful mission. I certainly hope you have much success and how do people find out more about you and Park and Diamond and get one of those helmets and check out that Instagram account?
Jordan: Go to our website, it’s parkanddiamond.com and from there you’ll be able to pre-order the products. Definitely follow us on our social media channels @parkanddiamond and I promise the social media content will get better. We really appreciate all the support that we’ve had also to everybody that backed the campaign on Indiegogo. You really can’t do this without such a viral and loyal customer base and for that Dave and I are really eternally grateful for that,
and where we just can’t wait until we delight everybody with the product in a couple months.
NYLP: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod you can visit us at NY Launchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one, and if you are a super fan. David and Jordan are you guys super fans?
David: Yes.
Jordan: Absolutely, thanks for having us here.
NYLP: If you are super fans like David and Jordan, please leave a review on iTunes and Apple Podcasts, it is greatly appreciated and it does help people discover the show.
SHARE THIS:
