Advice Line with Chet Pipkin of Belkin International

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.7 • 31.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chet Pipkin, former CEO and founder of the electronic goods company Belkin International, joins Guy on the Advice Line to answer questions from three early-stage entrepreneurs. Plus, Chet and Guy drill into why solving problems for consumers is the key to success.

First, we hear from Daniel in Toronto, who’s wondering how to educate customers about his company’s plastic-free, dissolvable shampoo and conditioner tablets. Then Meredith in Long Island asks how to manage inventory for her booming backpack organizer business that keeps selling out to female athletes. And Ryan in San Diego asks for strategies to grow the B2B side of his therapeutic massage tool company.

Thank you to the founders of EarthSuds, Sideline Bags and Rolflex for being a part of our show.

If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode, leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com or call 1-800-433-1298.

And be sure to listen to Belkin International’s founding story as told by Chet on the show in 2019.

This episode was produced by Katherine Sypher with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Andrea Bruce. Our audio engineer was Cena Loffredo.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderly Plus subscribers can listen to how I built this early and ad-free right now.
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0:40.7	off at Vanta.com slash hibt. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash h-I-B-T for $1,000 off.
1:05.0	Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab.
1:05.8	I'm Guy Raz.
1:09.6	This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges.
1:15.5	Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on this show, who will help me try to help you.
1:20.6	And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call, and you just might be the next guest on the show.
1:24.4	Our number is 1-800-433-1298.
1:31.7	Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you like help with. All right, let's get to it.
1:42.9	Joining me this week is Chet Pipkin. He's the founder of Belkin International. It's a name synonymous with computer cables, power banks, adapters, you name it.
1:44.3	Chet, it's great to have you back on the show.
2:18.4	Guy, it is so much fun to be here, looking forward to all this time together. So I think about you all the time. I mean, like even the back of my phone. I've got the Belkin magnet that I can connect to my laptop and use the back as a camera. I mean, it's unbelievable. all the things that Belkin makes, you were, of course, first on the show back in 2019. And as always, we will put a link to that in the show note. So check it out in that episode. We talked about how you first got started in the early 80s. You would hang out in like mom and pop computer shops. And you realize that computers could not talk to each other. It was really hard.
2:20.6	Actually, it's just so crazy we'd take ever granted.
2:25.7	You couldn't easily connect a computer to a printer, for example, or to another computer.
2:28.2	Cables didn't exist.
2:36.3	And so you started to solder cables and then sell them to shops and to people who needed them. And eventually that turned into a business. You were 21. You dropped out of college. You started Belkin. And if I remember,
	...

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