James Park (entrepreneur)

James Park is a Korean American tech entrepreneur. He co-founded and is CEO of Fitbit. He was named in 2015 among Fortune magazine's 40 Under 40, an annual ranking of the most influential young people in business.^[1] With a net worth of $660 million estimated by Forbes, he is ranked #29 in the magazine's America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 in 2015.^[2]

Early life

Park is of South Korean descent.^[3] He attended high school at the prestigious all-boys University School in Cleveland, Ohio. He started undergraduate study at Harvard in computer science but dropped out.

Fitbit

He co-founded Fitbit with Eric Friedman in April 2007 after according to a Forbes profile " playing Nintendo Wii in his college dorm and realizing the potential of sensors on the Wii remote such as accelerometers paired with smaller and smaller devices".^[4] The co-founders started with an initial investment of $400,000 contributed by their parents but realized one year after starting that more funds would be needed for a product launch.^[4] They were able to get additional funding from SoftTech and True Ventures.^[4] Park found the initial stages of developing the product to be tough especially since he had no experience in finding a hardware manufacturer. He recalled the search for the right supplier and organizing the production line in Asia left the company "pretty close to being dead" as he almost gave up after spending a few hours researching on Alibaba.^[4]

References