In a white-walled room tucked behind the garage in one of those unremarkable houses, Sonny Vu sits at a folding-leg table, the kind you might see in a church basement. He’s convincing a banker he doesn’t need any money.
The banker is dressed in northern California business attire””tailored suit, no tie, a nice watch peeking out from beneath his sleeve. Vu is dressed in a black knit T-shirt, jeans, and indoor flip-flops. He opens a MacBook Pro and talks through a presentation about the company he founded, Misfit Wearables.
There’s no watch on Vu’s wrist. Instead he wears a thin wristband that holds a tapered, dark-gray aluminum disk about the size of a quarter. This is Misfit’s first product, Shine. It’s a device that attracted 127 online articles about Misfit in the tech press, everywhere from Wired to Mashable to TechCrunch”””without anyone knowing what it did,” Vu says, grinning. He pops it out of its holder and sets it on the screen of his iPhone. “This has been tracking my activity for the past week. I just set it here, and it uploads all my data. No cable, no Bluetooth,” he explains as tiny lights blink around the circumference of the disk.