Wink founder Nathan Smith reflects on the sale of the smart home platform to Flex, the future of the hub, and more
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Nathan Smith's reflection lands mid-arc for Wink: the smart home platform was spun out of crowdsourced hardware maker Quirky, whose Chapter 11 bankruptcy forced a fire sale of Wink to manufacturing giant Flex for a reported $15M. The sale ended Wink's run as an independent startup, and it came after reviewers had already concluded that Wink's simple-affordable-smart-home pitch failed in practice, with products not working as advertised out of the box.
The interview is a founder's accounting of what happens when a consumer hardware platform becomes a line item inside a contract manufacturer's portfolio — a question that stayed open until i.am+ bought the Wink hub from Flex the following year, while rivals like Nest kept widening their own integration lists.
First-order effects
- Smith is speaking as a founder whose company now lives inside Flex, a manufacturer with no consumer-brand track record, making his reflection effectively a public assessment of whether the hub survives outside its original team.
- Flex inherits both the Wink product and its reputation problem: the platform's early reliability failures are part of what it bought for $15M.
Second-order effects
- Competing ecosystems feel no urgency to accommodate Wink — Nest's steady addition of third-party integrations shows the integration war being fought by platforms with far deeper pockets than a rescued $15M asset.
- Flex's ownership sets up the hub as a divestible asset rather than a strategic priority, which is exactly how the i.am+ sale a year later plays out.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone smart home hubs consolidate into the portfolios of larger manufacturers or celebrity-branded ventures rather than surviving as independent startups — the hub becomes an asset passed between owners instead of a company that compounds value.
- The Quirky-to-Flex-to-i.am+ sequence suggests hardware platforms born from crowdfunding-era parents face a structural ceiling: without an ecosystem or recurring revenue story, they end up priced near liquidation value.
The trend: Standalone smart home hubs are drifting from independent startups into the hands of successive corporate owners, as ecosystem players like Nest absorb the integration ground they once hoped to hold.