Daniel Kane on the Rise of the Skinny Wallet and How to Build a Moat Around Your Business

Daniel Kane was a 19-year-old student at UC Santa Barbara when he launched the skinny wallet company, The Ridge.

In 2013, he prototyped the first version of what would become one of the best-selling direct-to-consumer wallets, scraping together $1,500 to get a Kickstarter campaign going.

When he started, the ecommerce landscape had yet to be flooded with hundreds of copycat products. Advertising campaigns for the Ridge were much more cost-effective, at times almost 8x cheaper than today.