She Sold Her Startup for $500 Million, Here’s Her Next Idea
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
This episode features Brynn Putnam, founder and CEO of Board, discussing her journey from professional ballerina to serial entrepreneur. (01:35) Brynn previously founded Mirror, which she sold to Lululemon for approximately $500 million before launching her new company, Board - the world's first face-to-face game console that combines physical game pieces with digital technology. (47:54) Throughout the conversation, Brynn shares insights on building hardware companies, navigating personal problems as business opportunities, and the challenges of transitioning from startup founder to working within a large corporation.
• Main themes: Entrepreneurial journey from dance to fitness to gaming, hardware-software integration challenges, building companies around personal needs, and the intersection of physical and digital experiences.Speakers
Brynn Putnam
Brynn Putnam is the founder and CEO of Board, a face-to-face game console company. She previously founded Mirror, the at-home fitness company she sold to Lululemon for approximately $500 million in 2020. Before her entrepreneurial career, Brynn was a professional ballerina with the New York City Ballet, starting at age 16, and later attended Harvard University where she balanced academics with dance.
Joubin Mirzadegan
Joubin Mirzadegan is a partner at Kleiner Perkins and host of the GRIT podcast. He focuses on investing in early-stage companies and interviewing founders about their entrepreneurial journeys and the challenges of building history-making companies.
Key Takeaways
Build Around Personal Problems That Truly Annoy You
Brynn's approach to entrepreneurship consistently starts with solving her own frustrations. (33:00) When she couldn't find effective fitness solutions post-ballet, she created her studios. When pregnant and unable to attend group classes, she conceived Mirror. Now with five kids struggling to connect over games, she built Board. This personal problem-first approach ensures genuine market need and authentic passion for the solution, rather than chasing trends or market opportunities without deep understanding.
Strip Ideas Down to What Actually Matters
As a non-technical founder, Brynn leverages her limitation as a strength. (12:51) She explains that incredible engineers often build more because they can, while her technical constraints force disciplined focus on customer needs. Her approach involves creating "a single napkin with a few bullets about what the product had to accomplish" and constantly returning to that core vision, hacking away anything unessential. This methodology enabled faster hardware execution with fewer errors.
Focus on Experience Before Functionality
Brynn deliberately built Mirror's prototype backwards from typical hardware development. (17:18) Instead of creating functional hardware first, she spent time building "an animated explainer video behind a piece of one way glass" that showed the experience even though it wasn't functional. This approach helped secure seed funding by demonstrating the vision clearly, then using that capital to build actual functionality. The lesson: sometimes showing the dream is more important than proving technical feasibility early.
Confidence Builds Through Daily Achievement
Brynn describes confidence as "waking up each day, setting a high bar for yourself, accomplishing it, and then trying something harder." (22:17) Her progression from opening one studio to designing equipment to launching tech products happened incrementally. Each success provided foundation for the next challenge. This iterative approach to building confidence suggests that ambitious goals are achieved through consistent daily progress rather than dramatic leaps.
Use Commodity Hardware with Innovative Software
Rather than reinventing hardware, Brynn focuses on "commodity hardware and building incredible software experiences on top of commodity hardware." (13:41) This de-risks hardware execution while creating competitive advantages in software and user experience. With Board, she uses mature touchscreen technology but innovates in the software layer to recognize physical pieces - enabling cost efficiency while building defensible intellectual property where it matters most.
Statistics & Facts
- Mirror had approximately 200 employees when Brynn left Lululemon in 2021. (43:24) This shows the scale the company reached during its rapid growth phase.
- Brynn's first fitness studio was only 500 square feet and accommodated 14 people per class, running 7-8 classes daily. (05:36) Despite the tiny space, it was consistently full and generated enough revenue to bootstrap subsequent locations.
- Board comes with 12 games at launch and uses 49 original game pieces, all tracked in real time by the device. (55:56) This demonstrates the complexity of the hardware-software integration required for the product.
