How a surprise layoff let this founder turn his passion for hockey into his own company

Russ Layton pins the origin of his company, Sparx Hockey, on his freshman year of high school: His parents forgot to drop off his skates to get sharpened before an ice hockey game and it felt catastrophic.

“The analogy I like to use is if you were driving a car and had no brakes and no steering wheel, that’s what it’s like when you lose an edge in skates,” Layton told Founder Brew. “You can’t stop, you can’t turn, and you can never predict when it’s going to happen.”

Years later, an “idea cloud” exercise during a Stanford engineering graduate class resurfaced that long-held frustration. At the time, he was playing on Stanford’s club hockey team and driving hours all over the Bay Area to get his skates regularly sharpened. He started ideating on potential solutions. He scrapped initial approaches—including a Netflix-inspired mail-your-skates model—and landed on a “Keurig”-like machine for skate sharpeners where users could “just press a button.”

Layton fiddled with the idea in the background while building his career. He worked full time as a mechanical engineer and toyed with prototypes in his garage on the side. “I started out this company by moonlighting,” Layton told Founder Brew. “It was a tough thing to do while you’re also doing another job.”

Then an unexpected layoff gave Layton the perfect opportunity to take his shot.

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Layton explained how he pushed through years of self-doubt and uncovered an important realization: If he failed, he could always go back to that career he didn’t like anyway.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m interested in the idea of preparing to be a founder before starting the company. What were you doing to prepare yourself to eventually take on this role?

I had a really interesting career trajectory in that I was doing engineering. I went from individual contributor to engineering leader. Our company was very acquisitive, so we were acquiring lots of different companies, technologies. One of the leadership members in the company was a president of our division. He asked me, “Hey, would you mind taking a look at this product and let me know what you think about manufacturing and the patents and all this?” I was super interested in it, and I just dove into it, and basically showed him my value in helping someone who is a traditional marketing salesperson understand the product and the engineering and the patents and all that side.

It became an exit ramp for me out of engineering. Four or five years before I started Sparx, I moved into business development, and that was where it all became clear. I started meeting lots of other people that had identified products to build, built companies, and then we were buying them. I was watching these people go from idea to product, prove it in the market, and then acquisition. Obviously those are life-changing events, and it’s very exciting. It’s like it’s Shark Tank in real life.

That’s when I just said, “Holy cow!” I believed I have the engineering ingredients, the patent ingredients, the business model, because I was building lots of business models at that point. I had the passion and the desire to create my own company and culture. Had I not had those, it would have been less clear that my next step was to just go do it myself.

A Stanford graduate class assignment helped you come up with the idea. What was the exercise?

It was a need-finding exercise. The name was “bug lists.” As an engineer, as an inventor, as a creator, you observe things in the world that need to be improved, maybe more than the average person. Everyone should keep a bug list. You should walk around just writing like, “Oh, wow, that’s really inconvenient. I wonder why there’s not a better solution for that.”

We would list out all of the inconveniences that we recognized in our lives. From there, you would build this idea cloud of all of the different ways that you could possibly solve for that bug. For this area of skate sharpening, I was playing club hockey for school.

I was like, “Maybe we could actually build a skate sharpener that would be like a single-serve coffee machine that you just press a button and then magically your skates are sharpened.”

How did the prototyping phase go for you?

We went too quickly to try to solve the problem in the beginning…We thought we knew what we wanted to build, and so instead of proving out the fundamental engineering concepts behind the product, we went right to the end product. We were designing how it looked and what NHL team logos were going to look like on the product.

We had raised a seed round. We had formed a board of directors. We spent a year with that seed money building what looked like a mountain bike…We brought this prototype to a board meeting, and you could just see everybody in the board meeting from a different vantage point was like, “This is wrong. We’re going at this the wrong way.” I had just spent a year of funding, basically. I’d only raised enough money to build that prototype, and this was my chance to go. “Aren’t you proud of us? Now we need more money.”...We had to crumble up the piece of paper and start all over again.

One of the first things we did was buy a book on grinding metal. That’s how much of the engineering fundamentals and physics we jumped over the top of. We actually went back to square one. “Ok, how does stainless steel get ground by abrasive, and what are speeds and feeds and the pressures required?” Then we built basically an Erector Set version of the product, where it looked like a bunch of Legos where we could tweak and tune every parameter of the skate sharpening to figure out: What was the diameter of the wheel? What was the abrasive? How much pressure? How fast should it go back and forth?

We ignored completely the product for another year just to fully understand what were the ingredients because once you understood the engineering ingredients, then you could package it.

What would you tell someone who is in a similar position as you were then, about things they need to be absorbing and doing to get ready?

Building your network is key. Pay attention to those people who are super wise around you. Everyone floating around us in our lives are people who have insights, connections. Then I think if you know it’s in you, if you’ve been that kind of person that’s just always striving for more, and you can take on lots of responsibility, and you feel like you could spin lots of plates at the same time.

I doubted myself for a long time. I was in my late 30s. I had two kids, a mortgage, a nonworking wife who was taking care of our young kids. It took me too long to realize I could bet on myself, and the worst thing that could happen was I could go back to what I was already doing. Even a mentor said, “Why are you holding so firmly onto this life that you actually are trying to move away from? That you could always fall back to?” That was like an “aha” moment for me, which was like, “Oh wow, I could go get 10 other jobs just like the one I’m trying to get out of.” That was the push.

If you have conviction and you have a good idea and a business model, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for success. Success because there’s also plenty of points to pivot.

How did you get your family on board?

That’s one we talk about still to this day, because it’s a very clear moment when there was a question of:“Was the risk worth taking?” In the end my wife just believed in me.

The story was: I actually started the company, and then I got caught in a mass layoff. We had submitted patents. I was so far down the line of doing this in a moonlighting setting. The fact that I got the little push to go do it, I knew at that point, like, “Hey, I’ve got this much money in the bank and I’m going to let it ride until I get to a threshold point where I’m going to go find another job.”

That actually happens a lot in life. We often think about very black-and-white decisions, and the world is so gray. It was realizing I can go start this company for a little while, and if I feel like it’s not going where I need to, then I can pull the rip cord and change directions.

A lot of times we give too much credit to making a change and it being an irreversible path. Every path you can always come back. So I was convincing my wife: “Let’s just give it a go. This will scratch that itch. If I do this and I fail, at least I tried.”