Truly. Many of his best friends are artists he met through Kidrobot. Six of them will be illustrating his books, which of course aren't just good-looking, clever books (though they are that). In the e-book era, Budnitz says, characters can be so much more than two-dimensional.
"The e-book format doesn't work," Budnitz says—doesn't work yet, he means. "I wanted to do interactive children's books. They would move around, sing, and talk to you." He has already recruited friends to chase funding for his solution. "The idea is to be a boutique children's publishing company," he says, "but the business model is that you start out on the iPad, but you own and control the intellectual property, so then you can go from iPad to paper, from iPad to TV, from iPad to toys for licensing. But the only thing you produce yourself is the digital version, and then you license out the rest of it. It's like Kidrobot, but we're creating characters for children."
Yes, it's an ambitious undertaking. But so are the bikes. And that's part of the fun. "I don't know what I'm doing," Budnitz says. "I don't have any experience. Will it be successful? I don't know. I didn't know how to do ringtones. I didn't know how to make movies. I didn't know how to make toys."
And Maybe in the End the Snake Swallows Its Tail
It's certainly possible that Budnitz's excessively promiscuous entrepreneurial streak in the months since his move West is just a cathartic outburst resulting from a sense of freedom, and that he might again latch on to a favorite idea—or even fall back in love with Kidrobot—once he has had time to screw around. Certainly there are things about the company that intrigue him still. Making very expensive wooden toys sold in minute numbers, for one thing. As well as the complete opposite, helping the new management figure out how to make Kidrobot balance the competing forces of expansion and credibility. He doesn't dismiss the idea of producing a line for Target, which might seem surprising until you consider the company it would put him in: Philippe Starck, Marcel Wanders, Jean Paul Gaultier. Strange but true: Selling at Target now confirms a designer as an aesthetic elite.
"I don't have a problem selling anything anywhere with the caveat that the thing is awesome," Budnitz says. "I am not going to make anything that sucks."
Budnitz calls this "basically one of the mission statements of Kidrobot," but it is also a pretty tidy summation of all of his work. He senses the faintest pulse of cultural change long before the rest of us, like one of those dogs that move to the basement two days before an earthquake.
And indeed, as Budnitz and I were warming up over bowls of Chinese noodles on one of the coldest days of the year, nearly every conversation led to an idea. Somehow, discussion over a book I'm writing led to a dissection of Google, a company Budnitz feels is deeply flawed. He had an idea for what he considered a far more useful brand of search that would tap only a very specific network of people whose opinions you most value. If you want to know, for instance, what hotel to choose in New York City, would you rather ask the entire Internet or the 500 people who share your demographic sphere? He thinks this is a great idea—potentially a many-billion-dollar idea—but it's also one that would require far more of his attention than he can spare. Maybe all of it.
It seemed possible that he might never again get as into one thing as he was into Kidrobot. Maybe Paul Budnitz needs five or 13 or 20 projects to be happy. He puzzled over that a minute. "The more I look into myself, that seems to be who I am," he said. "Maybe my life has always been like this anyway: that there are always a few or several different threads running at the same time. I think that is likely to continue to happen. I'll continue to write kids' books while I'm making bicycles, while I'm doing something else."
What he loves is the creation, and the execution, but not so much the other, equally important, parts of a successful business. "What I don't miss is the hours poring over spreadsheets," he said. Or sitting through meetings with investors, pondering why "this sector of stuff is selling, and this isn't selling."
He can recognize that it would hurt if somehow his investors were to stop listening to him and run the company into the ground. They could even sell it against his wishes, though he doesn't think they would. "Would I be upset? Yes, I would be very sad," he said, "but it's not going to change who I am."
What if they wanted to sell to a huge company, I asked. Would you talk to Hasbro?
"I'll talk to anybody," he said.
But it seems almost certain that Hasbro—or any major toymaker accustomed to cheaply made volumes of millions—would ruin the brand.
"If I thought they would, I probably wouldn't sell the company," Budnitz said.
Maybe you wouldn't have a choice, I suggested.
He thought about that. "That might happen," he said. "Or maybe some little company will come over and set up and kill us. If there is a niche of beautiful, gorgeous, amazing art toys, and we proved it, and we stopped doing that…"
Somebody will fill it, I said.
I'd barely finished the line before Budnitz stepped on it.
"Maybe it would be me," he said.
Josh Dean is a regular contributor to Inc. He is writing a book about show dogs, to be published by HarperCollins next February.
