Alex Reznik

Norweigan Magnus Wanberg founded reMarkable upon a conviction that the visceral, haptic experience of pressing a pen into worn notebook paper is superior to tapping around on iPad glass or the keys of a laptop keyboard. The focus, satisfaction, clarity and sense of rightness that pad and pencil evoke drew Wanberg. A sensation unique as the byproduct of five millenia of domestication to the analogue. Four years later and reMarkable, the producer of e-ink writing tablets, sped past a highway sign reading “Welcome to Global Relevancy: One Million Units Sold”. For an enterprise to sell more three hundred dollar devices than there are people in Estonia is notable in and of itself. Further, to do so in a tablet market written off as an oversaturated, uninspired race to the bottom is antithetical to rote business standard. Executing the vision required continued origination of a novel product category outside the sphere of the convergent touchscreen tablet aisle. Wanberg worked from first principles up: he wanted to mark down his ideas in a visceral manner unavailable on offer. A salient Elon Musk principle is modeled in this approach. Regardless of setting - whether that be a SpaceX engineering meeting or a senate hearing on the proliferation of artificial intelligence - Musk cautions logical reasoning via analogy. Original thought sprouts from fertile ground upward; breaking down the root and expanding outwards from the seed. To speak of reMarkable, innovation came as the result of honing a core tenant, not from looking outward for comparison. Comparison that’s akin to analogous reasoning. Wanberg’s team chase a feeling to a polished design. “Competition” is rendered ineffectual by this approach. There’s no value in market analysis when the experiential component doesn’t exist elsewhere. reMarkable molded the vision of merging the emotion of paper with digital enablement. Game. Set. Match.

In the rearview, Wanberg and co’s approach draws likeness to the founder and titan of the very company whose market share he now pockets. A man named Jobs. Ben Thompson of Stratechery frames Jobs as the foremost model of a Talebian Black Swan business: One whose founding father is free of the shackles of domain specificity. “Nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility” defines the outlier. Once established, however, the trajectory towards the product appears obvious. It’s clear to a hiker that a boulder was rolling down the mountain once his leg is broken by it but not before. Jobs founded Apple on a fierce obsession with perfection and capturing a distinct feeling not presented by over-corporatized business machines on the market. Wanberg follows in these footsteps, though in a smaller potential domain, and together they provide a bit of lineage for the innovation of physical products today.

As an aside on the use of the Musk quote earlier, at what point does an individual become too famous to quote? It’s a bit like the experience of your local cafe going corporate. When its small, niche and interesting - you can’t stop talking about it. It captures something different, cool even. Then the cafe starts to open more locations and all your friends talk about it. You don’t feel particularly insightful for having found it - you don’t distinguish yourself in mentioning it. The same is true of quoting Elon. He’s such a ubiquitous figure that to quote him is to pick low hanging fruit in a sense. That said, cliches are oft oversimplifed truths and your favorite coffee from that cafe still tastes good whether there’s one location or one hunded. I digress.