Jamie Ducharme - Big Vape

My name is James Monsees, he began, glancing up from his page of notes to look Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi in the eye. Adam Bowen and I founded Juul Labs, and I now serve as the chief product officer of that company. Im really quite grateful for the opportunity to be here today and address you all. From the moment Adam and I began the journey that would lead to the Juul system, we were clear on our goalto help improve the lives of adult smokers.

Despite the oppressive July heat in Washington, DC, James wore a dark suit and tie. A scruffy beard dotted his chin, and dark circles had settled into caverns under his eyes. His voice was gravelly. He looked and sounded like he hadnt slept much the night before, which he probably hadnt. He was seated at a long table positioned before eleven of the most powerful lawmakers in the United States, his voice echoing through the congressional chamber where he would fight for the reputation of the e-cigarette company he and Adam Bowen had dreamed up almost fifteen years earlier as graduate students who just wanted to quit smoking.

By that day in the summer of 2019, everything had changed. Juul, the device James and Adam had built to help them quit smoking, had helped lots of other people stop, tooby internal company estimates, more than a million people had switched from the cigarettes that were killing them to the supposed safety of Juuls sleek electronic vaporizer, which heated but never burned flavored nicotine e-liquids. After only four years on the market, the device had become one of the most successful consumer products in recent memory. And their companys staff of twenty, who created the Juul vaporizer on a $2 million budget, had ballooned to more than three thousand, all working for a company that had reached a $10 billion valuation faster than any other in history. As James sat in that chamber on Capitol Hill, Juul was a $38 billion empire, worth more than start-ups like Airbnb or SpaceXand he and his old friend and cofounder, Adam Bowen, had gone from rumpled graduate students to billionaires.

But as with so many Silicon Valley success stories, the road to riches hadnt been smooth. Much of the public health community had turned against Juul, questioning whether its product was in fact safer than smokingand whether its potential benefit for adults who wanted to stop smoking outweighed the staggering data around youth vaping. By the end of 2019, federal data would show that 27.5 percent of the nations high school students and 10.5 percent of its middle school students had used e-cigarettes in the past thirty days, with Juul the most commonly cited brand among them. Nearly every day, more news stories suggested that Juul had torn a page from the Big Tobacco playbook and purposely hooked teenage customers for profita narrative that had only grown stronger after James and Adam accepted a $12.8 billion investment from Altria, the parent company of brands like Marlboro and Virginia Slims. Now the din had grown loud enough that Congress was investigating how Juul had developed and marketed its products, and James had been forced to salvage what was left of his reputation.

We never wanted any non-nicotine user, and certainly nobody underage, to ever use Juul products, he continued. Yet the data clearly shows a significant number of underage Americans are doing so. This is a serious problem. Our company has no higher priority than fighting it.

It wasnt supposed to be this waycocky, charismatic James reduced to groveling before an unsmiling congressional subcommittee, at least half of whose members seemed already to think him culpable. He and Adam had founded this company to do something good with their lives. Theyd wanted to give adult smokers, people like them, a better choice. Somehow, theyd ended up here instead. Or, at least, James hadAdam was conspicuously absent, not just from the congressional hearing but also from the company hed helped build. By the time things really started to go downhill, he had one foot out the door, leaving James alone to explain away the companys mistakes.

What if theyd designed the product differently, so everyone would stop comparing it to a flash drive? What if theyd swallowed their pride in the beginning and hired some former tobacco executives, people who actually knew how to handle a heavily regulated product, instead of pretending they were just another work-hard, play-hard Silicon Valley start-up? What if theyd taken a different direction for Juuls launch campaign, the one the press loved to compare to old cigarette ads? What if theyd never posted a single photo on Instagram? What if James hadnt been quite so smug during all those interviews, and what if Adam had come out of his shell to explain why hed made Juuls nicotine formula so strong? What if theyd listened when experts warned them that those educational classroom visits were a bad idea? What if the emphasis on growth hadnt been quite so strong? What if the company said no when Altria came calling? What if Juul hadnt made an enemy of the Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb? How might things have gone? All those questions were rhetorical now.