Friends Said His Business Idea Was the 'Stupidest Thing.' Then He Sold Over 290 Million: 'I Watched Their Jaws Drop'

"I was often inventing products and making up businesses, always trying to make a buck. It was a small daily annoyance - tangled headphone cords in his pocket - that tugged him back to his entrepreneurial instincts. One day, frustrated by a knotted headphone cord, Barnett drove to a Joann Fabric store in Boulder and hacked together a solution just for himself."

"In his garage, he glued two clothing buttons, one-inch in diameter and spaced apart, on the back of his small iPhone 3. He then wrapped his headphone wire around the buttons to keep it from tangling. Voila, I had a solution for myself, but my friends and family, they all thought it was absurd and made fun of me."

"That skepticism pushed him to imagine a more refined version: buttons that could expand and collapse flush into a case while offering multiple functions as a stand, grip and clip. He got inspiration from collapsible colanders in his kitchen, usually made out of silicone. It turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined, miniaturizing that mechanism."

David Barnett, a 55-year-old tenured philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, created PopSocket by accident while solving a personal problem with tangled headphone cords. Despite his academic career, Barnett possessed entrepreneurial instincts from childhood. Frustrated by knotted headphone wires, he initially glued two one-inch buttons to his iPhone 3 back as a makeshift solution. Friends and family ridiculed the crude design, prompting Barnett to develop a refined version featuring expandable and collapsible buttons that function as a stand, grip, and clip. Inspired by collapsible kitchen colanders, he worked to miniaturize the accordion mechanism, discovering the engineering challenges involved in scaling down such a device.

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