Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the app today.

New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

Hey, it's Guy here, and before we start this brand new episode of How I Built This, I just wanted to let you know that we started a regular video conversation every week with different founders to talk about the creative ways that they're building resiliency in the midst of this crisis.

Last week, I talked to six incredible chefs from Daniel Whom of 11 Madison Park to Alice Waters of Shapanese and Jose Andress, who's been donating meals through his nonprofit World Central Kitchen.

You can join the conversation and ask your questions by going to Facebook.com slash How I Built This, and you don't need a Facebook account to watch.

This week, I'll be talking to Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger, the founders of Allbirds, and also to Stuart Butterfield, the founder of Slack.

You can join me on Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern 9 a.m. Pacific by going to Facebook.com slash How I Built This, and hope to see you there.

I was sitting in my hotel room in Singapore, and I was testing out one of the prototype builds, and the radio range was not good at all.

It was supposed to have a range of 10 feet or 15 feet. That was the hope, though, to have 15 to 20 feet range, but the range was actually like two inches.

Oh God, we've got to ship this holiday season. Like I've got tens of thousands of these people waiting, and I'm thinking, wow, this is it. We're done.

The Rom NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

On the show today, how the Nintendo Wii inspired James Park to build a device, and then a company that would have a huge and lasting influence on the health and fitness industry, Fitbit.

So it's taken me a few weeks to get motivated about exercise. This whole pandemic thing just had me in a state of anxiety in it, messed with my routine.

But I was inspired to jump back into it about two weeks ago, after watching my 11-year-old proudly announces daily step count recorded on his Fitbit.

Now, fitness isn't all that important to him. He's 11, but the gamification of fitness, the idea that it could be fun to hit 5000 or 10,000 steps a day, that's what matters.

This is the stroke of insight James Park had soon after he stood in line at the Best Buy in San Francisco to buy the brand new video game system called Nintendo Wii.

And you'll hear James explain the story a bit later, but what he realized by playing the Wii is that you could actually change human behavior around exercise if you turned it into a game.

And the thing is, up until James Park and his co-founder Eric Friedman founded Fitbit in 2007, there really weren't any digital fitness trackers that were designed that way.

...