James Park (entrepreneur)

James Park
Residence San Francisco
Education Harvard College (drop out)

James Park is a Korean-American technology 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 Korean descent.[3] He attended high school at the prestigious all-boys University School in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard but dropped out.

Fitbit

He co-founded Fitbit with Eric Friedman in April 2007 after according to a Forbes profile "realizing the potential of sensors on the Wii remote such as accelerometers paired with smaller and smaller devices".[4] Fitbit is the third startup that he has founded.[5] The co-founders started with an initial investment of $400,000 contributed by themselves and others 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 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".[4]

References

  1. ↑ "40 Under 40". Fortune.
  2. ↑ "#29 James Park". Forbes.
  3. ↑ Moon, Gwang-Lip (January 23, 2014). "Fitbit's launch in Korea a big step for company".
  4. 1 2 3 4 Hof, Robert. "How Fitbit Survived As A Hardware Startup". Forbes.
  5. ↑ "James Park - CEO and Co-Founder @ Fitbit | Crunchbase". Crunchbase. Retrieved 2018-09-15.
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