You really have to understand the product. You roll up your sleeves and if there’s something you don’t know you just have to unpack and get into the weeds. I’d say in the beginning it was a lot about execution. Especially from my background coming from finance, manufacturing and operations, as the CFO and COO of the company. In the very beginning, as a founder you’re doing everything. How has your day to day role evolved over these 3 years? And we’re super excited about continuing to build the brand and see where we can take it We’ve extended our product line from just mattresses to foundations and pillows, sheets. Over the past three years we’ve grown it from 3 founders to a team of 25. In school we did a friends and family round and built the initial website, worked with a supplier, and launched in August 2015. People are different and they deserve different products. We have different needs and preferences, and that’s what is so fundamental to the Helix brand and mission. You may like something soft, someone may like something more firm, I like memory foam, some may like latex. What we realized was everybody was doing the same thing which was making one mattress and marketing it as “hey this is the best mattress for everybody”.īut you and I know that’s not the case. And thus Helix was born.Īs we went through the program and worked on the business, there were competitors that came to market doing what we were thinking about doing. These mattresses only cost a couple of hundreds of dollars to make why does it cost the consumer thousands of dollars? I met two other colleagues of mine who were also interested in this idea and question, and also had a similarly bad buying experience. I didn’t understand why the process had to be so confusing, inconvenient and expensive. When I moved to Philly, I had a bad experience in buying a mattress for my apartment. It started with shoes, clothes, eyewear, then moved to razors. The founders of Warby Parker and Harry’s also came from that program, and as a result there’s a lot of discussion around what e-commerce is doing to disrupt all these different product categories. It’s one of the great things of that program as there’s a good foundation for people who want to get into startups. Through this I realized I wanted to further my education and decided to apply to business school and thankfully got into Wharton.Īt Wharton I threw myself into the entrepreneurial environment. When running operations in manufacturing, you’re making those numbers come to life. Through this experience, I got to see what it’s like running a business, working with suppliers, hard machinery, and tangible products, versus finance where you’re sitting behind a spreadsheet punching in numbers. It’s super random, but someone’s gotta make them. We make paper bags for industrial products, such as dog food bags, flour bags, and salt bags. My family is in the packaging industry – not the sexiest business you’ve ever heard of. When I joined the company it was a great opportunity to see what he’d built. He started a company when he was very young and built it from nothing. He and my mom came over in the early 80s from Taiwan and began by running a motel in Torrance. So like a good eldest Asian son, I moved back home to Portland and took up the opportunity to help my dad. After 2 years I got tired of the finance rat race and wanted to get my hands dirty with investments and operations, so I landed a job at a small private equity fund back in LA and moved back to the west coast.Īfter a few years, my dad gave me a call and told me, “It’s about time you come back home, help with the family business and repay some of your college tuition.” I’m originally from Portland, Oregon, studied Economics and Finance in college in Los Angeles, and after wanted to do the whole banking thing so I got a job at Goldman here in New York. Jerry, can you tell us the long version of how Helix Sleep got started? Now in its third year of operation, we learned how his background has played a role in the company’s founding and subsequent growth. TAP-NY paid a visit to the Helix Sleep showroom and headquarters in New York’s Flatiron district to meet with Taiwanese American co-founder, CFO and COO Jerry Lin. Helix Sleep is an e-commerce startup that sells individually personalized, custom-made mattresses.
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