All right, Peter Dering, you are on Driven to Ride. Thank you so much for being here, sir. Pumped to be here.
Great to see you, Mark. I'm excited as well.
Um, I'm a big fan of your work, I guess we could say. But I don't want to steal your thunder. So, why don't we start by you telling me in your own words what people maybe most know you for or what you think your claim to fame is.
Oh, man. That's actually a doozy from the start because what I think I'm known for might not be the case. Look, Peak Design is a company that was born about 14 years ago when I put the first ever Kickstarter out. I had quit my job as a construction engineer and invented a gizmo for the world of photography. It was a mechanism, two metal plates that clamp on to a backpack strap and allow you to carry a camera on that backpack strap, hands-free, so you can be hiking or backcountry skiing and have a camera immediately accessible. I launched that product on May 2nd, 2011, and three days in it had already raised over $80,000. I had a profitable company because it was just me and I was making this thing for $13.54 and selling it for 50 bucks. I had recouped my whole investment after 15 months. I had no industrial design or mechanical engineering experience—I studied civil engineering, never used 3D modeling software, never manufactured a product before. It was a lot of feeling around in the dark until I stumbled across something that worked. But boy, did it work.
And now, 15 years later, I'm basically doing the same thing with a few more people—80 full-timers in the States and Europe, plus 60 in the Philippines for customer service, and manufacturing partners worldwide in the thousands. I'm still launching on Kickstarter; we just launched the Roller Pro, our first four-wheeled roller luggage, after eight years of development. We had conceived the idea alongside the travel line in 2018 but needed more engineering resources. The roller team formed in late 2020 and took four years to make it because we're trying to do genuine innovation. It's the difference between inventing stuff and just branding existing products. I think we're known for giving a solid rethink to existing products, focusing on real problems that we as users encounter, without being gimmicky.
That's very motorcycle of you. You talked about the camera clip—just tinker around, figure it out, and turn that into a wildly successful business. But the reason you're here is you're a motorcyclist, and your passion for motorcycles and entrepreneurship have combined. Before we get to that, how did you get into motorcycling? How long have you been a rider?
I'll pin it to two formative things. One, my dad rode a motorcycle—he was a firefighter with BMWs, always did things differently. He never taught me to ride. In college, my buddy Dave, three years older, was going to buy a one-way ticket to New Zealand and goof around. He had a motorcycle and taught me how to ride. A few years later, Dave came on board at Peak Design as employee number three and is still our CFO. So I learned to ride from my CFO. That's wild.
That's a long way from slinging drinks in Madison.
Totally. As far as life highlights go, being a bartender in college was as good as it gets—so much freedom and joy. I feel professionally fulfilled now, but it doesn't top that. I've had plenty of ups and downs, but life is relative. You don't need material success; I thought I was making good coin as a bartender, enough to afford hot dogs at the game. And motorcycles can be cheap—Dave was riding a 250 Nighthawk. Once you fire that puppy up with a clean carburetor, you unlock the most fun a human can have for pretty damn cheap.
It sounds like you were hooked from the start as soon as you threw a leg over a motorcycle.
Absolutely. After I graduated, I moved to San Francisco. I had studied abroad in Rome and was blown away—I'd never been out of the country. I grew up thinking America was exceptional, but in Rome I saw that those people know how to live. I had a borrowed Vespa there. As soon as I moved to SF, I used my first bonus to buy a Nighthawk 750 and rode it across the Bay Bridge every day to my construction project at UC Berkeley. Lane splitting in California is like a magic carpet—it's the key to my punctuality and as fun as downhill skiing. Riding with music is just joyful, like a soundtrack to your life, feeling the air and a little danger.
I remember when I first started riding, my dad showed me how he used a Walkman with earbuds taped to his helmet and a cassette tape on the gas tank. Now we have Bluetooth speakers and AirPods—we're spoiled. And now, thanks to Peak Design, you can put your supercomputer on your handlebars and charge it at 15 watts while you ride, running maps and Spotify. So the V2 motorcycle mount with charging—tell me about that. How did the idea for the phone mount come about, and how did you get to where it is now?
Sure. I was a Quad Lock user early days, around 2012-2013. I always had a gripe with the thickness of the case—it was about 7-12 millimeters bump off the back, and I'm very spatially minded, so that never sat well. But it was a good product. Then cameras got better, and in 2016 I got my first iPhone X. Portrait mode was the first time it mimicked bokeh, and I realized the phone had become the most important camera. So it became an imperative for Peak Design to make the most important case for the most important camera. I'm a cyclist—mountain biker, road biker, and motorcyclist. I thought everyone who rode two wheels would love a motorcycle if they got what's fun about cycling. I want my music, maps, and camera accessible. Road cycling and backcountry camping are the best idea generators; the uphills give you time to think, and being outdoors inspires innovation. The idea for the mount combined two things: thinness (to avoid the Quad Lock bulk) and magnetic capabilities for cars and other uses. We started investing in 2016, took a break to focus on the tripod, then returned in 2018. Just as we were about to launch, we caught rumors that Apple was putting MagSafe magnets in their phones. That locked the architecture magnetic array and created an ecosystem around wireless charging. We had to design our magnetic system to minimize interference with inductive charging, which was a huge technical challenge. Apple's MagSafe and the Qi2 standard allowed us to contort our system into the final product. The key is a zirconia insert—it's incredibly stiff so the phone doesn't jump out, and it allows charging to pass through since it's ceramic. We've got good patents around it. Now, with wireless charging upon us, Peak Design has a head-and-shoulders better system than anyone else.
