Juul was the fastest-growing company in history. Now, they’re a cautionary tale. Based on the book Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul by TIME Health Correspondent Jamie Ducharme, and directed by R.J. Cutler (Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry; Belushi), this four-part doc-series unpacks twenty years of Silicon Valley innovation, influence, and insanity to explain the spectacular flameout of the vaping device that almost changed everything.
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00:00 We were primed to be the next Apple.
00:02 The limit does not exist.
00:04 We couldn't grow fast enough,
00:06 couldn't open up enough offices.
00:07 It was crazy.
00:09 It felt like the rocket ship was taking off.
00:12 Juul Labs has been able to achieve something
00:19 no other startup has done in such little time.
00:22 The e-cigarette maker has crossed the
00:24 Deca-Corin threshold, which is evaluation.
00:27 In the crazy, fast-moving world of tech,
00:30 being a unicorn, a company that's worth $1 billion,
00:33 is now totally commonplace.
00:35 So now $10 billion needed its own name,
00:37 and so it became the Deca-Corin.
00:39 Juul always used to talk about,
00:41 "We don't want to just own the e-cig market,
00:42 we want the entire smoking market,"
00:44 which is enormous.
00:46 And so of course there's a $10 billion company in that.
00:48 It's probably worth much more than that,
00:50 if that's what it can pull off.
00:51 It was super exciting.
00:54 We had all this growth,
00:56 and we were flush with cash.
00:58 The reason that everyone was really grinding so hard,
01:02 working insane hours,
01:03 moving these literal mountains,
01:06 was that this was going to mean something as well.
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