Most business philosophies get reverse-engineered from success. Someone builds something that works, looks back at how it happened, and extracts a principle. Tom Bishop's philosophy came the other way. He committed to it in a hospital bed in his twenties, long before Paleblue existed, and it has run through every decision he's made since.
Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Paleblue, a rechargeable battery company based in Park City, Utah. Before that he spent over a decade building manufacturing operations in Asia for companies including Burton Snowboards and Skullcandy, and later led product development at Owlette, a children's safety technology company. He has spent his entire career in product development and manufacturing, and he runs Paleblue the same way he has run every role before it: by choosing work that matters and building the capability to match the commitment.
Paleblue now serves consumer, commercial, research, and defense markets. None of those came from a market strategy. They came from phone calls Tom answered "yes" to before he had fully worked out how.
Tom grew up in rural upstate New York, found snowboarding and skateboarding in the late eighties, and built his early identity around a small group of friends who shared those sports. He studied physics as an undergrad without knowing where it would take him, drifted into materials science for graduate school, and was somewhere in the middle of that uncertain trajectory when a snowboarding accident led to knee surgery, the surgery led to a staph infection, and the infection nearly killed him.
He spent two months in and out of the hospital, lost fifty pounds, and couldn't walk without a walker. Coming out of it, he made a decision he has held to ever since: from here forward, he would only work on things that actually mattered to him. Two months on his deathbed had clarified that everything else was a waste of time.
He called friends from the hospital. Asked about jobs in the snowboard industry. Landed one at K2 as a sales rep, got pulled into Burton Snowboards when the rep group shifted brands, and talked his way into Burton's product team when someone noticed he had an engineering degree. From there he spent eleven years building manufacturing operations in Asia, worked with the founder of Skullcandy to set up their Shenzhen office and scale production to 100,000 headphones a day, and eventually came back to Park City to lead product at Owlette.
Every move traced back to the same logic. He went where the work felt meaningful and built the skills to do it well.
The Paleblue idea came from a simple observation Tom made as a new parent. Everything in his house was becoming rechargeable except batteries. Lithium-ion chemistry had gotten dramatically better. USB charging had become the universal standard. And yet the shelves at every store were still lined with single use alkalines heading for landfills at a rate of roughly a million tons a year in the US alone.
He and his co-founder got samples made, charged them up, handed them to his kids, and charged them again when they were done. The experience validated the concept faster than any market research would have. No trip to the store. No new packaging in the trash. No scavenging batteries from another device at the wrong moment. He stepped away from Owlette in 2018 and Paleblue launched on Amazon and its own website on January 1, 2020, two months before COVID shut down the country.
The timing was not ideal, but the product had something working in its favor. Meaningful work, as Tom describes it, creates its own energy. Not just for him personally, but for the team, the vendors, and the people who use the product. That energy is the thing that gets everyone out of bed on hard days, and in the early years of Paleblue, the hard days came regularly.
The Kickstarter they ran in late 2019 started strong and then got buried by an algorithm change that dropped them below campaigns with zero dollars raised. The biggest retail customer they had, True Value, went bankrupt. SVB's collapse in 2023 hit their banking relationship. Each of those events came from outside the business and landed without warning. Tom's description of navigating them is consistent: you figure out what you have to solve and you go solve it, because giving up on the best idea you've ever had isn't a real option.
The phone calls that built the business didn't come from outbound sales campaigns. Ernie Ball, the third-generation guitar string and accessories company that invented rock and roll strings in the 1960s, called Paleblue one day and asked if they could make better batteries for musicians. Tom said yes. He knew voltage stability was a Paleblue strength. He didn't know the full technical picture of what musicians actually needed until Ernie Ball walked him through it. Within months, Paleblue batteries were being used by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jack Johnson, Nine Inch Nails, and Miley Cyrus. Ernie Ball walked them into Guitar Center and Sweetwater. Tom estimates it would have taken decades to build those relationships independently.
The Department of Defense called with a similar ask. Same answer. Paleblue now serves defense applications Tom had never anticipated when he started a consumer battery company. Grizzly bear researchers in Montana use the batteries in trail cameras. A NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab research project sends Paleblue-powered onboard computers to 99,000 feet in weather balloons. Bat researchers in Miami use them in acoustic study devices. None of those relationships were on a roadmap.
Tom's advice to other founders on this is direct. If anyone calls and asks whether you think you could do something, say yes and see where it goes. Saying yes has always turned out to be the right decision for Paleblue, even when it wasn't the easy one.
A company that grows by saying yes to unexpected partners across consumer, commercial, defense, and research markets accumulates legal and structural complexity at a pace that can outrun its governance. Paleblue's situation illustrates several of the pressure points that FraxLaw works through with scaling product companies.
The first is IP strategy. Paleblue competes in a market where the underlying battery chemistry is commoditized and the differentiation lives in the control circuitry, the charging architecture, and the application-specific engineering on top of the cell. Jeff Holman noted during the conversation that the real opportunity for meaningful patent protection in this space is at the circuitry level, not the chemistry level. Companies that understand where their defensible innovations actually sit, and protect those specifically rather than broadly, build IP portfolios that hold up under competitive pressure. Companies that don't tend to discover the gap when someone else is already in the market with a version of the same thing.
The second is partnership structure. The Ernie Ball relationship opened retail doors and end-user relationships that would have taken Paleblue years to build independently. Partnerships like that carry real legal weight: exclusivity terms, IP ownership of co-developed improvements, liability allocation when the product is used in a professional performance context, and what happens to the relationship if either company is acquired. Getting those terms right at the front of a partnership is substantially easier than renegotiating them after both sides have built a dependency on each other.
The third is customer concentration risk. True Value's bankruptcy removed Paleblue's largest retail customer without notice. For product companies selling through distribution, understanding the legal and financial exposure that comes from over-reliance on a single channel or customer, and building contractual protections where possible, is part of building a company that can absorb the random events Tom describes as part of the operating reality.
Tom's operating philosophy is simple enough to fit in one sentence: work on things that matter and build the capability to support wherever that leads. Paleblue's business, its team culture, its customer base, and its market reach are all downstream of that standard. He didn't plan for defense contracts or Grammy-winning musicians. He answered the calls and figured out how to deliver.
For growing companies, that pattern of opportunistic growth requires legal and governance infrastructure to hold it together. The partnerships, the IP, the customer relationships, and the market expansions that come from saying yes to unexpected calls all need structural support to become durable. FraxLaw works with companies at exactly that stage, building the legal foundation that lets a founder keep saying yes without the business getting out ahead of its own structure.
For more on how growing companies build the systems that sustain unexpected growth, read PATTERN INSIGHT 4 — Building Systems Before You Need Them.
Listen to Tom Bishop's episode here.
