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So he started taxiing on the runway pretty rapidly because I think he want to beat the typhoon.
So I was on a plane I was sitting at a number of, I think 22.
I requested siege, nobody was next to me so I was watching People magazine and we hit But the lift off speed, 165 mph, my portion of the plane was up in the air.
And then I hear this noise that somebody knocking on the door.
I say, what the heck is that?
Obviously, something really bad happened.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how William Wong lost his first business, almost lost his life, and then built one of the best selling television brands in the country, Vizio.
There are a number of ways to break into a crowded market.
One of them is through branding.
You differentiate by creating a culture around the product, kind of like how Liquid Death managed to break into the $300 billion bottled water category.
Another way is to just price your product so comparatively low that consumers notice.
So, for example, Harry's razors, which were designed to compete against more expensive brands like Gillette.
And this is the playbook that William Wong used, not once, but twice.
The first time was in the 1990s when he built a company that made cheap, high -quality computer monitors.
Even Even though big players like IBM dominated the category, William managed to undercut their price and build a pretty significant business.
That is, until the bottom fell out and the company went broke.
But that didn't stop him from trying again.
The next time was with flat screen TVs. In the early 2000s, a flat screen TV would set you back $13 ,000 to $15 ,000!
But William believed that with the right efficiencies, he could build a flat screen TV and sell it for under $3 ,000.
His brand was called Vizio.
And within just a few years, he built it into a massive business that now sells smart TVs, soundbars and targeted ads on its own platform.
In 2024, Vizio was acquired by Walmart for $2 .3 billion.
dollars, and if all of that weren't enough of a story?
As you will hear, when William was already reeling from debt incurred when his first business failed, he experienced something even more catastrophic – a plane crash.
In the year 2000, he survived a horrific accident during a typhoon, which killed scores of his fellow passengers.
He flew safely home a few days later, and then started the company that would become Visio.
William Wong was born in the early 1960s in Taiwan.
When he was fourteen, his family settled in southern California, where adjusting to American life was hard. For starters, William barely spoke any English.
It's hard. No friend, and don't know anybody.
It's tough as a kid.
You know, I want to try out sports.
I had no idea how to do it, and of course, I failed.
Just difficult. Were there a lot of Chinese kids around when you were growing up?
No, no. I was 78 and came to Huntington Beach, a little upscale neighborhood.
Now very upscale, but back in 78, it was I think middle -class.
But you grow up a complete outsider, but I imagine that your parents had high expectations for you because they made a big sacrifice to come to the United States and to start over, is that fair to say that they expected a lot out of you?
Well, having a good, you know, Chinese parents, of course, they want me to go get a PhD or something, so there's always the expectation, so in high school, because of disconnect, you know, couple years my GPA was okay.
My math is pretty good, of course my English was poor.
I think my GPA in high school was like 3 .3, but...
Respectable? Respectable, yeah.
So my GPA wasn't good enough for UCLA, it wasn't good enough for Stanford, Berkeley.
But somehow I got into USC.
And my mom, she highly recommended I want to become an engineer because the high -paid jobs are all engineers.
And, like, $30 ,000 a year.
So, I got into Electrical Engineering at USC, which is kind of not my personal favorite.
I want to be – I like art.
I want to be an architect.
But it's all right.
I think I don't know any better too than to just follow my mom's guidance.
Advice. And by the way, I mean, today at 3 .3 you would not get into USC, right?
Much harder to get into.
I don't even think you got get into USC at 4 .3, no. No, it's very hard. It's completely changed.
But a wise decision you made because you've got a USC degree, which is a very prestigious degree.
And from what I understand, out of college you get a job working for a company that made computer monitors, I guess.
You were, it was like a sales job.
Is that right? Yeah, no technical support, answering phone calls.
Technical support. Okay.
There's a Taiwanese company, it's called Da Tong.
It's the biggest consumer electronic company in Taiwan.
Yeah Da Tong, I remember.
They're famous for rice cookers.
Didn't they have a commercial, dah, dah, dah, dong?
Didn't they have that commercial on TV?
Yeah. I remember that commercial.
Amazing. Yeah, we grew up with that commercial.
and so I was hired as the first technical support slash customer service because it's a first of all I was born in Taiwan so I know their culture I speak the language so they hired I heard me pretty cheap I mean it wasn't $30 ,000 year was my salary was 1 ,750 bucks a month and my boss say yeah you're pretty good at telling the story of why the computer monitor should be better, why is our monitor better, why don't you try sales?
So I say, okay, I'll give it a shot.
So you're, you're really focused on now in sales, selling DoTung computer monitors.
But I guess around four years into it, you're 25, 26, maybe 27 I don't know, you get frustrated there and you decide to leave and start your own monitor company, tell me the story about that, what was going on?
Yeah, there were multiple reasons.
I was 26 years old, and, uh, I was so jealous.
Every Saturday, when they had this management class, only the senior manager can attend.
I say how come I wasn't invited.
I want to, I want to know more.
So I went to my boss, say, can I go, can I do that?
He said, no, no, you're too young.
I already got promoted fun, like nobody to the director of sales marketing at that time.
I say, okay, but you guys know nothing about this business.
So I know better than all of you.
I should be the nice in line to be a VP. And then my boss's boss say, no, you need more time.
And, when my previous VP left and I saw definitely I'm And he went to do something else on his own.
All of a sudden he dropped somebody else to replace him, who know nothing about computer monitor.
And I just think he's – it was a wimp.
A wimp. And I say, I can't work for this guy.
At the same time, I really fell in love with the computer monitor industry.
And I know this industry very well.
I know the problem with industry at that time the computer monitor The spec of the monitor was fully controlled by IBM, right based on their specs because it's dominated the PC market Yeah, exactly or our IBM clones.
Yeah. Yeah. Everything is called IBM compatible compatible Yes, they use the TV interlacing technology to do a computer monitor.
I look at it and say You're gonna this is not good for a consumer.
The resolution is too low.
Are you gonna kill people's eyes?
I look at it as it's flickering, right?
It's refreshing at 30 hertz, meaning 30 times a second.
Just for simplicity reasons here, this is the frequency that powers the cycles, right?
Yeah. Right. And so 60 hertz would mean a better quality monitor, essentially.
60 hertz meaning just for every second, each screen refresh 60 times.
Right. There's less lag.
there's no lag. Yeah, exactly.
So I couldn't take it.
I say, there's a golden opportunity to build something a little bit better.
You can easily turn into 60 hertz.
It's not hard. You just spend a little bit more money.
So I went all the way out to the chairman of the company, Datong.
He told me, who's your customer?
I'll say, we'll build it.
The customer will come.
And he said, no, we're IBM.
and everybody else is now our customer.
We don't want to build it.
So he shut me down, so that's one of the main reasons.
Again, I left, I say, I'm going to build it myself.
If IBM want to build this, my company would build that.
This is the classic story, you know, the young upstart has an idea.
They bring it to the boss.
The boss says no, and the upstart gets frustrated and they leave. And that's basically what happened, right?
And you said, all right, I'm going to try to figure this out myself.
This is 1990. What is that?
I mean, first of all, how did you even get the money to start a computer monitor?
I guess you had experience now, you knew where the factories were in Taiwan, you knew, kind of had an understanding of how they were manufactured, but you still needed money.
And in 1990, you know, to raise the money wasn't easy.
Who did you go to? At the time, Datong was also buying from other suppliers.
So, I got pretty lucky, because I know other factories.
And, so, one of the suppliers we built for Datong, which I know very well, they're hungry like me.
And they're pretty much of similar age.
And he raised a lot of money to do their own computer monitor manufacturing.
So wait. So this person you're talking about, this person you pitched your idea to, he was like a supplier or a factory owner in China?
Yeah. So the opportunity I presented, they say, God, we want to do that.
So they're very entrepreneurial in spirit.
And they say, oh, yeah.
If you if you do this, I'll give you $150 ,000.
Right. So you gave me a hundred fifty thousand dollars.
So I went to my dad and I put together fifty thousand dollars someone from my dad, someone from my own saving after four years of working then after I told my boss and my bosses I'm leaving the funny part was My boss's boss, the chairman of the company of DatongUS you say oh, yeah, we really like you I think you definitely worthwhile So, he gave me $150 ,000.
Wow. So, you know, I was 27 years old.
I found $350 ,000. And I just started the business.
I don't understand balance sheet, don't understand income statement, never run a company in my life.
Wow. All right. So, you start your business to make competing monitors, better monitors.
this is called, you call it mag -innovision, I think.
And this is, I mean, it's kind of a fortuitous time because 1990, I mean, this is, people think of the eighties as a time when the PC boom really happened, but it was really the nineties when so many more people brought personal computers into their homes in part because the internet was coming and Windows made it easier to use PCs.
before, in the 80s, it was DOS, you know.
And so, now, in the 90s, ordinary people without a lot of skills could figure out how to use a Windows PC, meaning lots of people needed monitors.
So, if, you know, there was one standard, which was the IBM specs, and you could improve on it, you could stand out, I guess, right?
Yes, absolutely. That was the crazy time in this industry.
I mean, back then, if you can't build a can monitor, you will sell them out.
You'd be selling out.
Oh guys, the PC, the personal computer, was in great demand.
Yeah. And they were getting cheaper, and so all things were happening.
Cheaper and cheaper, you can't get enough monitor, you can't get enough memory chips.
And the technology was growing at such a rapid speed, the speed.
You went from the hard drive, went from 10 meg to 20 meg to 50 to just non -stop innovations from in the 90s for personal computers and this whole industry was on fire.
In your case, where were you selling the monitors?
Were you selling them through retail stores or were you selling them to PC makers as a bundle?
Like where they would just sell it with their computers.
I found a really key customer, called Gateway.
Gateway. Yeah, sure.
Yeah. Of course. Gave me $2 ,000 back then, Scott, because we're the same age.
And I used to go visit with them a lot.
And we think alike.
We say, better technology, lower price.
Better technology, lower price.
And they were able to make PC cheaper by Sony Direct because they were mail order.
There was no e -commerce back then, But they were mail order.
So they bypassed everybody by making the computer so much cheaper.
So they became one of my biggest customers and whatever I made, they sold.
So all right. So Gateway is your biggest customer?
Like 80 percent of your sales?
Yeah, I would say 70, 80 percent.
Wow, okay. This is key because I think within six years, you guys are doing $600 million in revenue.
So you really like caught a wave here.
I mean, this was massively growing, massively fast. You had 400 employees for MAG Innovation.
Just very briefly, William, how were you able to make a cheaper product that was better quality?
Was it, I mean, A, I'm assuming you were making these in China, so that lowered costs.
But how else were you able to really compete against these much bigger companies like Tatung?
Yeah, in the very beginning, we're just making it better.
My customer made it cheaper, like A -way, and I just—I keep on—again, in the early 90s, the technology shifts so fast, we have 14 -inch computer screen, 15 -inch computer screen, 17 -inch computer screen.
This is all happening three or four years.
It has 60 hertz, we have 70 hertz.
So, my engineering background, I keep on pushing the technology envelope.
So, in the first four years, when it grew so far fast, I just focused on technology advancement.
And I found a factory to do it.
That was a key. I mean, we're building everything offshore, So, time was pretty efficient back then.
I mean, to go from 0 to 600 million within six years is mind -blowing.
I mean, the pace of growth was probably so fast that you had no—I mean, I don't even know how you were able to handle that, because—and by the way, not always a good thing, right?
because it can lead to huge challenges.
Very fast explosive growth like this must have been quite overwhelming.
Yeah, it was way too overwhelming.
All right, it was a disaster later on.
I mean, let's talk about this because obviously there's a wave. Gateway, 80%, 70, 80 % of your business is coming from Gateway, which on the one hand is amazing, on the other hand is a little scary because you're dependent on Gateway, right?
By 1998, your revenue drops to 470 million, and then it really starts to drop further and further from there.
Tell me what happens.
Is it just competition enters the space of many more companies are like, wait a minute, we can compute against these guys?
Yeah, exactly. It's a combination of problems, right?
The market got so much bigger, so efficiency became a key ingredient for success, and the competitors are coming in like crazy.
We're still focused too much on technology, and they were focused on efficiency, so their costs were more competitive.
I was the only supplier for them, and they want to diversify also.
Gateway started to buy from other people.
Because we grew so fast, I mean, we couldn't control our quality, but most importantly, I've literally all grew myself in management capability.
I'm still a kid who thinks technology would dominate everything.
So I wasn't a great manager.
My management team is not strong enough because I didn't hire good enough.
Also I was into too many sectors of the business where I was in the service business, service computer monitor, had an engineering lab designing smart TV in 98.
Already 98. Way before its time.
Way before its time when Internet was still going through modem and I sunk a lot of money in there so I wasn't good enough to make it to the next level.
The management team was still challenged by me, by the dominance of an entrepreneur like me.
You were a micromanager.
I was a micromanager, oh yeah, yeah.
But you couldn't see it at that time because you were young and learning, but obviously on reflection, you realize that because you were involved in every, I mean, look, there's different arguments that people make about this.
Some people say, you have to be involved in every detail of the business.
Some people say, no, you really have to delegate and trust your people.
Sounds like that's where you landed eventually.
Yeah. Well, I learned the hard way because it's – I mean I was 30 years old.
I don't know what management means and I don't know how to manage my finance because I was – I thought money would come easily, but money didn't come.
And I learned the hard way, paid my tuition.
It was tough. When we come back in just a moment.
William faces something even scarier than massive debt.
A catastrophic plane crash.
Stay with us. I'm Kai Raz and you're listening to how I built this.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, I'm Guy Raz.
So it's 1998 and Williams' first company, MagInnovision, has gone from $600 million in revenue to being buried in debt, and William, looking for a way out, decides to sell the business.
I wanna pay out my debt.
I couldn't, and I sold companies to the factory under the arrest. How much debt did you have at the time?
I think we had $25, $30 million of debts.
And obviously you had some investors who you wanted to pay back, I guess.
Yeah, well the investor lost some money.
They lost, including myself, putting in another money.
So the shareholder values disappeared and it was tough.
So under duress, we had to start a VC supplier.
I tried to fund 98, 99 until 2001.
I did nothing but selling desk.
So I tried to make money, paying, make money.
So three years, I didn't do anything but bring in suppliers.
Just to understand, you sell it under dress.
It's amazing because a lot of people from the outside would think, wait, you were doing 600 million in sales just two years earlier.
This is an incredible success story.
And yet it just shows you how tough that business was that the bottom fell out and you had to sell it and you were left with nothing.
Like you were broke.
Yeah. Nothing. And you had to pay back the people you owed money to.
I mean, couldn't, here's just a weird question, couldn't you declare bankruptcy and have those debts forgiven, I guess?
I could, but I don't, I mean, that's not my motivation, right?
I believe I want to do better for them.
You know, we looked at bankruptcy, but I just don't want to do it.
So what was your plan to pay back the debtors, the people that had, you know, that you owed money to?
How are you gonna pay them back?
I was making, I became like, for example, I know what's a new product, so instead of going through me, I say you pay me 2 % commission, I use that 2 % commission to pay you.
So you were doing consulting work for some of the people you owed money to, basically, for free.
Yeah, for free, to pay enough, because I want to pay that off.
And again, I know a lot of suppliers, and they know I didn't do anything wrong.
I didn't take the money or anything, and they still trust me.
You know, just know that during that time, there was a major transition and it was just poor management on my behalf, so they allowed me to give me some time to use my talent to make some money for them to pay all my debts.
Steve McLaughlin Wow.
Okay, so this is – I think this is like a period of four – at least four years of trying to – doing consulting work in part to try and pay back debts, and I think one One of the things you got involved with was helping one of these companies try and figure out a smart TV and also plasma screen televisions, right?
Yeah. Back then, the plasma TV started to emerge, and it was very expensive.
They were like $20 ,000, I think.
Today, they cost nothing.
But back then, they were super expensive.
Meanwhile, I want to talk about smart TVs for a moment because, I mean, this is the late 90s.
And I mean, no one was really interested in them yet, right?
But I guess you were, right?
You wanted to sort of make them or something that will resemble them, right?
Well, yeah, I just built it.
I say, hey, TVs should be connected to the internet.
I actually had a whole design lab, we lay out a board. We found a software company in Boston to do Linux -based software for us.
I found the chip supplier, I put a CPU in the TV, and I connected to the internet.
And when you turn on that TV, first page was apps.
Back then, we didn't call it apps.
Back then, we called it widgets.
This was way before iPhone.
The TV worked great.
But the problem was the internet connectivity was rather slow.
So it takes five minutes to warm out a TV because a motor needs to connect.
And again, I was 98 and lost all my money.
Wow. That's part of the...
Part of why your first business went under.
Yeah. So, all right.
Let me kind of set the context here because you are financially in crisis at this time.
Trying to figure out how to pay back debt and also trying to figure out how to make money.
I guess both of them are connected.
And you are going back and forth between Asia and Southern California to do consulting work and to try and figure out different ideas that you could generate income from, and innovation, but none of them really work.
and you get on a flight October 31st, the Halloween 2000.
You're about to fly back, Singapore Airlines flight.
You're in Taiwan and you're gonna fly back to Los Angeles.
Tell me what happens.
Yeah, so the reason I wanna get back that evening was because it was my daughter's first trigger tree.
Halloween. You were gonna get, even though you were leaving on the 31st by the time you get back to LA it was still the 31st. if I leave like 1130 I'll get back here like 630 I barely make it I can still see my daughter in her costume and customs yeah so I real want she's like four years so three years old so so I say okay let's do that and by the time I finished my meeting at five o 'clock I came out of the office saw the ring I don't know what's going on in Taipei the weather I didn't pay attention but a typhoon hit It was very stormy that night.
Very stormy that night.
By the time I got to the airport, Singapore Airlines's terminal is kind of creepy.
There's nobody around.
Most people are not in the airport because I think most people in Taipei don't want to take the flight because of the typhoon.
They don't even think, they don't even know that the plane is going to take off or not.
but I asked Singapore if you're taking off, I'm going to be on a plane.
