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His house burned down. He used the insurance money to build PopSockets.

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Does a consumer hardware company need to get on the VC treadmill to succeed? Eleven years and 290 million products sold across 115 countries later, PopSockets has proven that the bootstrapped, low-dilution path more viable than the industry gives it credit for. The global consumer hardware brand was built on less than $500k, no institutional capital, and a philosophy professor’s determination.

Watch as founder and former CEO of PopSockets David Barnett joins Equity to talk about how he scaled from a Boulder garage, stood up to Amazon at a $10–20 million cost, and eventually handed off the CEO role to someone who’d grown up inside the company.

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