By Lilyann, GeekPark's Silicon Valley correspondent
Game consoles are a notoriously hard category to break into. Nintendo, Sony and Xbox have held the market for 25 years, and almost no fourth player has made it in. Put a camera on the console and place it in the middle of the living room, in front of families who guard their privacy closely, and the odds look even worse.
Nex broke through both.
"If you look at the market, nobody in their right mind would enter it," David Lee, Nex's cofounder and CEO, told GeekPark. When he started the company, a home console wasn't the plan. Six years and several pivots in, Nex found its way to one almost by accident.
That was 2023. Nex committed to the idea but could only afford to order its first 5,000 units, with no money left for another pivot.
Three years later, Nex Playground, a controller-free home console that tracks body movement with an AI camera, has sold more than one million units, and its subscribers will pass one million by year-end. Annual revenue has grown from $3 million to close to $200 million, a 60-fold increase, and the company is profitable. Playground has also sold out ahead of the holiday season three years running, in 2023, 2024 and 2025. "Never seen any sales in December," David says.
Nex Playground, a controller-free console that tracks body movement with a camera. Photo: Nex
The console's breakout is only part of the story. What the industry should study is how Nex found its product, and that is where GeekPark started.
David doesn't come from the games industry. He founded the collaboration software EditGrid, which Apple acquired at 2008, and then worked at Apple on iWork for iCloud. When he left Apple in 2017 to start Nex, he wasn't thinking about hardware.
He started with HomeCourt, a basketball training app. When downloads surged during the pandemic, the team dug into why and spun out Active Arcade, a game that captures full-body motion through a phone camera. It went viral and was downloaded millions of times. Then David found Active Arcade's weak spot and built Nex Playground, with the right users, the right screen, the right hardware and the right business model.
David has written that finding product-market fit matters less than continuing to improve it. Most teams get carried away when the numbers spike. David's rarer habit is to stop while the numbers still look good, look hard at what's wrong with the last product, and pull a real signal out of the noise, one that leads to a bigger market.
The Nex Team. Photo: Nex
In September, GeekPark sat down with David Lee to trace Nex's path from HomeCourt to Active Arcade to Playground, and how he thought, what he gave up, and how he found each stone and turned it along the way.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity by Zihua Su, Jingyu.
You cannot serve many people. Find the ones who need you most.
Editor's note: On September 17, 2026, Nex announced $150 million in equity and debt financing, including a Series E led by Baillie Gifford and BAI Capital.
GeekPark: David, could you share more about where the new capital is going specifically? What are the biggest priorities for Nex right now?
David: Nex already reached profitability last year. So this fundraise is really about allowing us to have more flexibility to grow.
The investment will be in content: making the product better. That is a continuous investment because we have a subscription model. We always work to make the library better, and it feels like we're improving every day.
Then international expansion. We are not just in the US. We are expanding to Europe and will expand to Asia next year. That requires us to invest in these markets. We want to enter every market with love and respect, meaning we are not just bringing our product in and expanding. We bring elements of each country into the product: local IP, local music. That makes the product better globally.
And working capital. We have a hardware component, so working capital is important for strategic investments in our supply chain. That continues to be an operational challenge, given the memory shortage.
We are patient. We're going to stay profitable. We are thinking about how we grow the right way. That's what we emphasize. We're not going for growth at all costs. With a hardware component, we can't afford to do that.
GeekPark: You went from HomeCourt to Active Arcade to Nex Playground, and each time you pivoted from something that was already working. On your Substack, you call these the "stones we turned along the way." What were the biggest ones with HomeCourt?
Editor's note: Nex launched HomeCourt in 2018, Active Arcade in 2021, and Nex Playground in 2023.
David: We are not creating something out of thin air. We ground a business in reality by having real paying customers. Having users, having paying customers. That's what grounds a business in a substantial way. We are not just dreaming or telling a story without anybody using it. Everything we do follows the lead of our customers. And that is an important element of all these pivots.
HomeCourt, Nex's first product, tracked basketball shots through a phone camera. Photo: HomeCourt
People don't understand: you started with HomeCourt, and now you have a game console. How does that happen? If you look at the journey, it's not that difficult to understand.
When we started, it was out of the love of basketball. We knew HomeCourt was a very niche product. We knew the audience from day one. The four co-founders were saying, "This is a very small problem." We came from productivity. We made one of the top three productivity suites for Apple, so we knew the scale of a big problem: millions and millions of users.
Who would put a phone on a tripod and track shots? That's a very small number of people. But we loved basketball. We knew it was small, and we sank so much of our time and energy into it to make something truly great.
But when we did that, we reminded ourselves: we come from the tool-making world. I'm a toolmaker at heart. People who make tools make them for somebody. A great tool has product-market fit because it solves a problem for people who have that problem.
And the problem we solved with HomeCourt was for people who want to play the next level of basketball. Who want to improve their skills. HomeCourt is about basketball training. Most of our users are middle school kids who want to play high school basketball. Then high school varsity players want to play Division I college basketball, and Division I players want to play in the NBA. So only the people who say, hey, I want to play the next level of basketball, I want something to help me train. Those are the dedicated people. Those are the people who say, you know what, I need to improve my percentage, I need to improve my shooting so that I have a chance to make the team and play the next level of basketball. Those are the people who would spend the time and money to do that.
How many people are there? A small number. We also knew there was a ceiling, and we said, hey, maybe we add ball handling, we add agility. We made a pretty good basketball training app. We haven't updated it for years, but people still find it organically. People still say, hey, I want to get better at basketball. HomeCourt had something like permanent product-market fit with a very small number of users.
Then the pandemic came. We saw many people downloading HomeCourt and asked why. These people weren't even into basketball. Everyone stayed home and thought, "I need to get active at home." So we created Active Arcade, and we went viral again.
But we also found Active Arcade, yeah, it's good, but it's not that great. The experience on a small screen is not that great. You live with it during the pandemic because you cannot go outside. Outside the pandemic, that's not an experience I would stick with.
Of all those millions of people downloading it, the people who liked it most were the ones who connected the phone to the TV. So we knew we had built Active Arcade for the wrong platform.
We said, hey, let's build for the big screen. I've been telling this joke for a long time: I want to find a 65-inch iPad to run our app. That means a TV, a camera, and all that. I couldn't find one good enough, so we ended up making one.
In year six, we said, "Let's make hardware." It's certainly crazy. But it was following what made the most sense for the customers we wanted to serve. And then Nex Playground was born: the accumulation of technology, the accumulation of content we created. If I had come out of Apple and said I was creating a game console, probably nobody would have invested in us.
But we kept following our customers' lead, and then we caught lightning in a bottle with Playground. We grew from $3 million in annual revenue to close to $200 million: 60 times in three years. That's the story. Those pivots are more like user-led or customer-led. Hey, we want to serve these people better, and just keep finding ways to serve these people better.
The only thing that has real product-market fit is when you have something so deep. That it just touches people's hearts: you know what, I cannot live without it.
A lot of entrepreneurs think, "I want to serve many people." No, you cannot serve many people. There will always be people who love the product first. Find those people, serve them, and serve them well. Then you have the opportunity to serve the people adjacent to them.
GeekPark: It's a really long journey, and not an easy one. Among all your users, how do you recognize which people have a real need for your product?
David: They show up first. They are the ones who use it the most. Honestly, it's obvious.
When you talk to them, they will tell you exactly why. It's taking the time to get to know them, understand who they are, understand why they like the product so much, and understand the role we play for them.
I would like to say, "This is rocket science. I have a secret formula." But no, I just talk to the users who love the product most, and they always show up first. It's a process of listening, talking, understanding.
Fun is the layer on top. The work is in problems that don't go away.
GeekPark: You often ask whether a game is "playable." Whether a game or a product is playable seems to matter a lot to you. How do you define that word?
David: We do research to understand the definition of fun. First, we want to build games with a purpose. The company orients itself around serving timeless family needs. We invest our time and resources in problems that are not going away. Whatever we build, it's oriented around understanding and serving certain needs, certain problems of families that are not going away. So that's number one.
Making things fun is creating a better solution. We make moving fun. We make connecting fun. We make growing fun. Fun is the layer we put on top of experiences. Because we're not just making games. We make games that actually have meaning. We make games that actually get you to move, games that get people to play together so they have a real connection, games that have a learning agenda, so you actually gain something after you play.
The definition of fun is around three things. First, autonomy. As a player, I feel like I'm making meaningful decisions. Not all games have a lot of autonomy, but we always keep in mind how we let people explore and form their own goals.
Second is mastery: you can get better. I know that I'm growing. I learn better, I play better. I put some time in, and now I get better. So we just demonstrate your growth. We visualize it, or we make you feel, wow, I'm actually getting better. Not that we take all the credit. Kids naturally grow. They jump higher, move faster, and become more accurate because their bodies grow. But creating games with real mastery is important. Growing is fun. I couldn't solve that challenge yesterday; I can solve it today. That is fun.
Third is connection: meaningfully connecting with either the player playing with you or the character in the game. So all our games think about these three elements a lot. As I said, we think about that and layer it into the game: make moving fun, make connecting fun, like multiplayer fun, make growing fun. That's how we think about our games.
Go deep enough to catch lightning in a bottle
GeekPark: Going from Active Arcade to Nex Playground meant becoming a hardware company. You mentioned talking to a lot of TV manufacturers, but the results weren't satisfactory, so you decided to make your own device. Knowing what you know now, would you still choose to build hardware yourself?
David: 100%.
There are a few things we know. We found that what we do matters for families. But for families, because of mobile, the relationship we had with them was shallow. It doesn't really matter much to them. And we looked at our own demos and public demos: we always connected to the TV. It's just naturally much better on a big screen. We knew that for a long, long time, and we tried.
We talked to every single TV manufacturer, everybody. "Can we do something?" We tried, but it was not satisfactory. The TV is not built with that use case in mind.
There was a time when TV makers thought adding a camera made sense and explored fitness use cases. A lot of manufacturers talked about that, even at CES. But it didn't reach real product-market fit. If it had, you'd see cameras on all TVs today. That's not the case. So something's wrong.
For our games to run well on the TV, the hardware requirements are real: a fast connection from the camera to the system-on-chip, or SoC, a good SoC, and low end-to-end latency. So much time goes into that. Without that use case, a TV is just not designed for it. Most people haven't even thought about those problems. That's why they're not prepared for it. When we got to control everything end to end, it was so liberating, because you can just design for the best experience.
At the end of the day, go back to where I started: the only thing that has product-market fit is going deep on one thing and controlling the experience. The experience has to be so good that everyone who hears about it says, oh, what is this? You need to reach that. Otherwise you don't really participate in the conversation at all. People say, ugh, it's not great, dude. So you need to be so good that when people see it, they say, wow, this is actually really, really good. You need to get the experience to that point.
It's all on us. We can't blame others. Before, I could blame Apple: "Your phone doesn't have a big screen. That's why my experience is bad." When the user goes back for the camera to see their whole body, they can't see the screen anymore. You could easily argue it's too small for a good experience.
Now we control every aspect: the SoC, the firmware, the operating system and APIs, and what we put on the platform. Then we can create the experience we desire, an experience that's truly great. That is something we can stand behind. And do it well enough: that's how we catch lightning in a bottle.
"It's just naturally much better on a big screen," David says. Photo: Nex
GeekPark: So if I understand right, you're saying those system-level problems need an end-to-end approach. You have to do that so you can make the user's experience good and make it a good product.
David: Yes, it's as simple as that. How the camera connects to the SoC: that connection matters. So it's all these small things that cumulatively create the best experience. If the platform doesn't even account for that, then by nature it would be bad, because they have not thought about it. We would not be able to build good experiences on top of a platform that's fundamentally not great.
A business model built to earn families' trust
GeekPark: Even with on-device AI moving this fast, you wouldn't hand any of that off?
David: At the moment, yes. In the future, could a TV get there? Maybe. If somebody gets there, we'd consider whether to partner. But at the moment, I'm thoroughly enjoying owning the platform end to end.
We found that we play a special role because families trust us. Why? Because we curate the content library, take full responsibility for what's on it, and give parents a lot of parental controls. But we also curate. We don't want to put content that's harmful to the family on the platform. Otherwise, okay, put YouTube on it, and then there's some harmful content there, for kids. Parents can see that.
We take the role that trust and safety is most important. We have a camera as well. Families trust us to have a camera in the center of the living room. All processing happens on-device. We curate the whole library and do everything to earn that trust.
Most platforms obviously do not have that trust. Other TV platforms are in the center of the living room, and they sell ads to me. That's the business model. We don't have ads or in-app purchases. We want to be very clean, so that, hey, we earn your family staying with us for another year. Our customers are real customers, not the product, so the relationship is built on trust. And that trust is very hard to earn. We are very careful about continuing to earn trust and doing the right thing for customers. That's also a very important Nex philosophy.
GeekPark: The subscription model seems to play an important role in that family trust. How is the subscription business doing right now?
David: We will cross a million subscribers by the end of this year, and our subscriber churn is very low. I think we have a world-class subscription business. Attach rate is very high, churn is low.
I would call our subscription model simple, honest, and sustainable. Simple is because subscription is the only business model. It's honest: because there are no other hidden fees, ads, or in-app purchase. It's sustainable too. We work our socks off, serve your family well, and you come back and subscribe for another year.
It's becoming a flywheel. We build a bigger subscriber base, customers stay with us another year, and we manage to increase our content production budget, more content investment. We've increased that for three years already. We can see that the games coming onto our platform are getting better. Bigger brands come online, get better at building games, and users just enjoy a better collection of content on the platform.
Breaking into consoles without becoming an AI company
GeekPark: Going back to when you decided to build Nex Playground: you were entering a market that already had a lot of major players. From the beginning, how did you decide what Nex Playground should and should not compete on?
David: One thing that's perfect about Nex is that we focus on our customers, not our competitors.
If you look at the market, nobody in their right mind would enter it. There's the big three: Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox. Nobody else has broken through in the last 25 years. It's littered with dead bodies. It's a notoriously hard category to get into. In the last 25 years, since the launch of Xbox, no one else has sold meaningful volume.
So, as I said, if I had gone out of Apple and said we're making a game console, nobody would have invested in us. Nobody would even believe that's possible. Because we know who these people are, what they want. We know we can be a meaningful product for them. So every time, we just take our customers' lead to play a bigger game. Your product serves those use cases better, and once you get that, it becomes natural. Very easy to say. Very hard to understand.
So many people are trying to replicate us but aren't going anywhere. Trust is very hard to build, with families and with brand partners.
We have Hasbro, Mattel, Spin Master, Universal, and BBC Studios. The world's IP owners trust Nex to do the right thing for customers. When they trust us, the distribution channels and retail partners trust Nex too. "Why would I carry five brands doing the same thing? People want to buy Nex."
So once we establish brand trust with IP partners, trust with the retail partners, we have something we can keep building on. And things just get harder and harder to replicate over time. So that's how we think about sustaining the momentum: something built on trust, by continuing to do the right thing. And I really enjoy making a game with Sonic, with Sega, or with our original IP. We're going to have a basketball game coming soon. It is so great.
GeekPark: Your nine-year journey seems less about "pivoting" and more about understanding your users more deeply, earning their trust, and building lasting relationships with them. There's something admirable about staying true to what you believe in and doing it the right way.
David: It's a major Steve Jobs teaching: know the problem you're solving and work backward to your technology. Don't start with your technology and figure out what problem it could solve. I enjoy saying it so many times: what's the problem you're solving? Work backward to the technologies, and then you unlock amazing things.
We are not an AI company. In the beginning, we needed to solve how we understand a basketball shot. We probably needed to do some recognition, and then we found, wow, it's amazing that we can do that. But it began with the problem: we wanted to track basketball shots. What is needed to do that? And we found that AI is a tool. AI has always been just a tool. Very important to understand that it's a tool. It's not like, I do AI because it would be great.
The problem comes first. Technology serves the problem you're solving.
GeekPark: So do you believe in "AI-native hardware"?
David: I don't know. There's always been "Web3-native," "AI-native," but what exactly is that? I don't think too much about it, because I don't think I understand it. I don't live in those worlds.
I believe in: who is my customer? What are they hiring us for? Why are they hiring us? What problem are we solving for them? How do we get better? The rest is the technology we use to unlock that. I'm a simple man. So many things in the world I don't understand, so I spend more time understanding my customers' problems.
The product that sells the product
GeekPark: Nex Playground moved into physical retail very early, with live demos in stores. Why?
David: We knew early on that people probably wouldn't understand what we were doing until they saw it. HomeCourt and Active Arcade became known through social media: someone does a session and shares their video, and people ask, oh, what is it? The equivalent for a hardware product is a demo in a retail store.
First of all, we were extremely lucky. We sold the first 5,000 units in 2023. Our friends in the industry said: if you want to get into retail, you'd have to wait until 2026, be in the market for a long time, serve customers for a long time, then we can go to retail.
And we said, well, let's go try. We sent samples to Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. It happened that the buyers all had young kids, and they said, "My kids love your product." There's nothing better than that: people actually see it and experience it. They say, you know what, I can stand behind it. That's how it happened: the buyers tried it and said, you know what, this product has a chance.
Right after we sold those 5,000 units, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy came back and said, "I can carry this product." In the first year. I did not expect that.
When we got that chance, the first thing I thought about was: I want to make sure we show up right in the retail store. I didn't want to just put it on the shelf. That doesn't work. I needed a retail fixture that could demo the product.
Nex Playground Demo at Sam's Club. Photo: Sam's Club
That is a product I'm very proud of, that we created over the summer. We call it "the product that sells the product." We basically deployed these salesmen to the retail stores, thousands of them out there. People can walk up, wonder what's going on, see the video, raise their hand, and they can start. That's a product I'm very proud of. I just want to share one number: in December last year, our retail fixtures in Target delivered one million demos.
The connection it builds: oh, I can actually try it. And I think it's interesting, because we have more users now. When our users go to the store and see the demo, what do they do? They stop and play. When they play, they're actually demoing it. They teach other people who don't know: okay, this is how to play.
People talk about word of mouth, and certainly a great product gets word of mouth. You need to invest in word of mouth. And the word of mouth here is: we have the retail demo, and then our users come in, play the demo and talk about the product. We give them a demo station, and they can talk about the product. Which, honestly, pays dividends.
I invested so much into the retail demo. And it's a really worthwhile investment. You just want to show up right. And you turn these stores into little arcades. And a lot of things about it are full of love, because it makes sense, and the people around bring their experience there, because it just makes sense.
GeekPark: Is that why Playground keeps selling out?
David: We've sold out three times: 2023, 2024, and 2025. We missed most of December. Because we sold out every year before December. In the beginning of December, or before. The first year, we sold out in early November. In 2024, in our first 1,000 stores, we sold out on the morning of Cyber Monday. The next year, we sold out the day after Cyber Monday. So hopefully we get to do some business this year in December.
GeekPark: So you must be really familiar with the feeling of selling out, right? It's not surprising anymore.
David: Yeah, I don't really like selling out. And I keep telling people, why sell out? Well, it's what we can afford to order. I ran out, I have no more, because I cannot afford to order more. So this year we have a little bit more runway, hopefully.
The first sign of PMF: customers defending us
GeekPark: When did you first think Nex Playground might actually work?
David: When we created the first 5,000 units. It was a real bet. Intuitively, we knew it was a much better product on the big screen. That was all we knew.
In 2023, we didn't have money left to pivot again. It was the last chance for the company. The accumulation of six years got us to that stage: this is our product that contains all our soul and heart and effort and tech and everything. One last product we could bet the company on. We could only afford 5,000. And the company got to the point where there was only one purpose in the company that year: to make the first 5,000 customers very happy.
We also did beta testing as well. We sent 20 beta testing units out, and people really seemed to be loving it. And we shipped those, and we saw a lot of people really love it, and people started sharing their stories. And then we had the next batch, and we took pre-orders for the next batch.
There's one moment I remember. It was after the first batch shipped, after Christmas. I think it was the day before New Year's Day. We had started preorders for the second batch.
People were attacking us: "Why would I trust this company?" And our customers came out and defended us: "Guys, I have the product, and it's awesome." They came out to defend us, saying it's great for the family.
I only remember my tears dropped. Your customers come out and defend you because they love the product so much. You don't get to see that often, right?
It means a deep relationship has been built. That was the beginning of us knowing that the relationship with our customers was real and that it mattered to their lives. They want to see us succeed. I only remember that moment: wow, I couldn't stop my tears dropping at that point. That was the moment product-market fit hit.
GeekPark: What happened after that?
David: I didn't know whether we could make it to another Christmas, honestly. The only proof point we had was that we had sold 5,000 units. Would more people want to come? Would more people want to buy? No retailers were carrying the product. We had a whole year of uncertainty ahead of us. Even though we hit product-market fit, was it enough to carry the momentum of the company forward?
And obviously, looking at it now, yes, we found a way out. In 2023, the whole company made $3 million, including roughly $1.5 million in Playground revenue, and other app revenue basically the other half. In 2024, revenue grew about 11x. We went from 5,000 units to 150,000 units. Suddenly, we launched in three major retailers and sold out for another year.
Things did not get easier. Last year, we had tariffs. This year, the memory shortage.
I tell the team, "Every year, there's always something. There are always challenges." As always, keep calm and carry on, knowing that if we do the right thing, our customers will also show up for us.
Editor's note: Nex raised Playground's U.S. suggested retail price to $299 on April 1, 2026, citing rising memory and storage costs. Play Pass pricing remained unchanged.
Know the problem, and you see the turning point first
GeekPark: This year, Nex Playground has released a lot of new things: the new firmware, the new PlayOS, Training Ground, and voice control. Among all of that, what makes you most excited, and why?
David: I'm very excited about the game starring BTS. BTS doesn't have other games, only one game, and that game is with us.
BTS Partners with Nex Playground in Major New Collaboration at June, 2026. Photo: Nex
What's more, I can't talk about other things that aren't announced yet, except Sonic. Sega has an internal game studio making a game for our platform. Oh my God, how could that happen? Sega, a tier-one publisher, standing behind us: you know what, you guys are good enough for Sega. With Sonic. On our platform. It's not us licensing the IP and doing it ourselves.
Once you get this, it becomes a magnet for talent and resources. People want it to be successful because they want something new, meaningful, and worthwhile. And we're kind of at the beginning of bringing the ecosystem together.
GeekPark: Writing about the new firmware on your Substack, you said it was what you wanted to build with HomeCourt six years ago, and you could finally build it on Nex Playground. What finally unlocked it? Was it better hardware, more compute, better algorithms, or something else?
David: There are always things we can't solve yet. We didn't control the underlying platform. We couldn't make the iPhone screen bigger.
The iPhone in 2018 unlocked edge AI computing, but on the highest-end phone, which cost $1,000. Everything needs to come together: the right price point, the right solution, the right time. We have the patience.
Now we have full control of the pipeline, and we get to solve those problems. The screen was too small; the basketball bounce was too loud. We created a silent basketball. I'd been monitoring the material used in quiet basketballs for two or three years.
And sometimes it's like that because we know the problem, because we care about the problem. So we'd also be the first to discover when technology is there to solve it. Because it pained us that we weren't able to solve it yet. So we keep watching out for things. Not like, oh, some technology came out, you heard about it, and then you're still finding a problem for it. We know the problem. The moment it clicks, we just adopt it right away to make it work.
Sometimes you need the cost to be right; sometimes you need a material to be available. That's the benefit of knowing the problem: you know where the turning points might be. When those things click, we have a solution before everybody else.
GeekPark: Moving to the motion AI system: you and your team spent roughly a year reducing latency so the device experience feels really close to an iPad. What system-level problems are you working on right now? And does AI development make those problems easier to solve?
David: AI needs data to get better. For a long time, we were collecting public data to train models to understand motion and what's in front of the screen. We had a lot of people label the images. The more data we get, the more accurate the model gets.
The wonderful thing about Playground is that we basically moved those into software. What used to be hardware: I have a sensor, or I have a depth camera. Now it's basically moved to software: I use a camera to capture the image, and we understand the image. The more accurately we understand the image, the better the tracking technology is. So we basically took those hardware, which cannot be modified, and now it becomes software. So over the last few years, we just keep shipping more accurate models into Playground, so the tracking has improved over the last few years.
This year, the new thing is generative AI. We can generate more data, and the models become much more accurate. It works so well. It's all the problems our customers let us know about: okay, we know we're pretty weak with strong backlight, weak with people wearing patterned clothes. We just create that data, feed it into AI, create a model. It gets more accurate. That is a real unlock.
So that's why, when new things happen, I can tell you exactly how they impact us, because this is what we're looking for.
What makes the journey worthwhile
GeekPark: What's still on the wish list that you want to make happen right now?
David: We want to connect families.
I live in the States, and my mom and dad live in Hong Kong. My kids see them maybe once a year, sometimes not even that.
How can we create something where trust is established between two devices? We're not putting people on the public internet. How do these two living rooms become one?
I don't want my parents to feel lonely because they don't have enough interaction with their grandkids. I want my kids to have a chance to play with my mom frequently. That is something I would dedicate my life to solving. I have that resolve. I would work till I die.
Editor's note: Nex has announced plans for Connected Play, a feature designed to let families play together across households and distances.
GeekPark: Looking back to 2003, when you built your first product, was that when you first wanted to be a founder?
David: When I can predict my future, I become very uncomfortable. I'm more thrilled by a little bit of the unknown. Otherwise, it's very boring.
I'm not saying I'm risk-seeking. I'm purpose-seeking. I don't want to settle into something I can already predict.
I don't regret leaving Apple. I don't regret giving up the Morgan Stanley internship that was waiting for me in 2003. I would always pick the path of minimizing regret.
Editor's note: David Lee began his entrepreneurial journey in 2003 while studying at the University of Hong Kong, co-founding Team and Concepts with fellow students. The team later developed EditGrid, an online collaborative spreadsheet service acquired by Apple in 2008. At Apple, Lee built and led the engineering team behind iWork for iCloud, the web versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. In 2017, he left to co-found Nex.
GeekPark: What kind of life philosophy has stayed with you through all of this?
David: Sometimes what makes me happiest is not the outcome. It's the journey. When you have a chance to work on something with people you appreciate, not necessarily your friends, but people you like and care about, it's so fulfilling. That's where the source of happiness comes from.
We accomplish great things together and we celebrate those great things. But also the process of finding the solution, the process of supporting each other, taking each other to higher ground: wow, I couldn't be here without you, David. Or I'd say, I couldn't be here without you, Tony.
It's just the happiness of exploring and adventuring into something unique, something we'd say minimizes our regret.
When the opportunity shows itself, when the chance to solve a bigger problem shows itself, I go there.
Always following our heart, always following our purpose. And it's important that we have a purpose that unites people. And we keep finding that bigger purpose.
One more thing i want to add is, when I decided to leave Apple, I texted my wife, "Hey, I'm leaving Apple." And she immediately texted back, very simple: "Let's celebrate."
She didn't ask me why. I knew she understood me.
I still have so much joy. Sometimes, when my wife is just around me, I'm happy. I'm a very simple person. And I'm still having a lot of fun with my two kids. They're now 15 and 10.
For an entrepreneur to sustain those challenges, it takes a huge amount of support. Sometimes just being there makes a difference.
Working with people who know and appreciate each other, and creating something more meaningful for more people: that's where my happiness comes from.
