Estou Buckyballs Inventor Craig Zucker, E é assim que eu trabalho

Serial entrepreneur Craig Zucker is best known for creating buckyballs, the most famous brand of rare-earth magnet toys that users can stack into geometric shapes, or mash around like a modular metal stress ball.

As a pre-spinner fidget device, Buckyballs have gotten many adults through a long conference call. They’re definitely not for children—swallowing two Buckyballs is like shooting yourself slowly from the inside. A safety scare led to a long legal fight with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Buckyballs shut down in 2012. But eventually the U.S. government loosened its regulations on magnet toys, and Zucker is back with a Buckyball sequel called Speks.

We talked to Craig about the history of his controversial toys, how he manages a remote team, and what it’s like to work in an office full of little magnets.

First of all, tell us a little about your background and how you got to where you are today.

I can tell you this, as a kid I didn’t dream of selling desk toys—or of most of the other things I’ve worked on over the years. I’m just a Cleveland kid who moved to New York City after college at Miami of Ohio and then leapt at pretty much every opportunity or weird inspiration that came my way. I’ve had a few entrepreneurial ventures in my time here, one of which was bottling, branding and selling NYC tap water. You can imagine how that turned out … (But what I can say? We have great tap that doesn’t need to come from Fiji.)

After several of those ventures, I joined up with another guy to start Buckyballs, a desktoy made of rare-earth magnets, and man, was it something to watch Buckyballs take off. All of our efforts and growth were organic. There was no strategic marketing firm or PR team behind it. It was truly unbelievable—people latched onto our balls and we just kind of blew up. We rode that for a bit and then got hit with some serious regulatory issues on the federal level. We put up a great fight and stuck it out for a long time, but eventually we had to close the business at its height of $25 million per year in sales.

Four years later, the legal decision against Buckyballs was overturned. With a former competitor (the guy behind Zen Magnets), I launched a new evolution of the rare-earth magnet desk toy: Speks. Speks is a set of smaller magnets than Buckyballs that are 100% compliant and meet all safety regulations no matter how you slice it.