The Idea

In 2010, David Barnett was a tenured philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, far more interested in consciousness and the nature of reality than in consumer gadgets. He had one nagging, deeply unphilosophical problem: the cord on his iPhone earbuds kept knotting itself into a ball in his pocket.

His fix was ugly. He bought two large clothing buttons from a craft shop, glued them to the back of his phone, and wrapped the cord around them. It worked. It also looked ridiculous, and his friends told him so, repeatedly. Within weeks he was obsessing over how to make the buttons collapse flat.

That tinkering produced an accordion-style disc that stuck to any phone with a reusable gel pad. It solved the cord problem almost by accident, then did something better: it gave people a grip and a kickstand. Barnett, a self-described childhood hustler once nicknamed "H. Ross Perot", had no background in manufacturing, tax or finance. He had a philosophy salary and a widget nobody had asked for. This was the beginning of PopSockets.

The Execution

• January 2012: Barnett launched a Kickstarter campaign for an iPhone case with two grips built in. It funded, giving him proof that strangers actually wanted the thing.
• 2014: He launched the business properly from his Boulder garage and sold roughly 30,000 grips in year one. He was also more than $40,000 in debt, and the shipment meant to save him arrived defective beyond repair.
• 2014, the lucky disaster: Barnett's house burned down in a wildfire. Instead of replacing his belongings, he poured most of the insurance payout, plus about $500,000 from local investors, straight into making more product. He never took a cent of venture capital.
• 2015: PopSockets signed its first major retail partner in T-Mobile, pushing the grip beyond direct online sales.
• 2017: Revenue hit $169 million, an absurd 17,423% jump since 2014, on around 35 million grips sold.
• August 2018: PopSockets ranked No. 2 on the Inc. 5000 with 71,424% three-year growth, clearing $90 million in profit on north of $200 million in revenue.
• January 2020: Barnett went to Congress and accused Amazon of bullying its small sellers, testifying that Amazon only cracked down on counterfeits after he agreed to a roughly $2 million marketing deal, and that Google wanted $2 million just to keep his own brand at the top of a "PopSockets" search. The Amazon standoff cost him $10 to $20 million.
• September 2024: Barnett stepped back as CEO, handing the job to Jiayu Lin, who had driven 200% growth across APAC from inside the company, while he moved to Founder and Chairman.
• Today: PopSockets has sold over 290 million products across 70-plus countries, with MagSafe accessories now outselling the classic adhesive grip that started it all.

The lesson?

Barnett built a nine-figure brand from two craft-shop buttons, a house fire, and a flat refusal to take venture money. Every near-death moment (the defective shipment, the $40,000 debt, the wildfire, the Amazon shakedown) became fuel instead of an ending, because he kept validating on nights and weekends before betting big. The most-handled accessory of the smartphone era wasn't dreamt up in a design lab. It was glued to the back of a phone to stop an earbud cord from tangling.