Thirty years ago, my business partners and I were handed the prototype for a toy plane called the Sky Shark. It ran on compressed air. You pumped it up, let it fly, and it just…took off. Like magic.
At the time, we were barely in our mid-20s, and had started our own toy company, Spin Master, a few years before. We’d enjoyed some modest success, but we were looking for a new signature product, and the Sky Shark was the coolest thing we’d ever seen. Going purely on gut instinct, we bought it on the spot.
In that moment, we thought the Sky Shark was a new idea that we were lucky to snag before anyone else, which in itself is proof of how naive we were about the industry we’d just entered. The reality was that the prototype had already been shown it to every toy company in the world, and they’d all turned it down. Hasbro, Mattel, and all the others had passed because they had the experience to see all the risks and setbacks and headaches that lay in waiting. What goes up must come down, and when it does there’s a good chance it’ll break—or hit a kid in the face. And building a product that can actually fly is an engineering nightmare. All the established players had passed for one simple reason: they knew it couldn’t be done. But Ben, Anton and I, not knowing what couldn’t be done, decided that three guys in their mid-twenties with no engineering background to speak of would be the ones to get this thing off the ground.
