And then he ticked off the advantages Pebble had over the specs of Apple’s vaunted vapor-wearable: a week-long battery life, compatibility with iOS and Android, and a wide-open API that let developers run wild with apps. Oh, and its cost—$99 for the standard model and $199 for the deluxe Pebble Steel — was a fraction of Apple’s stated opening bid of $349. (Of course, Pebble does not have the dazzle element of Apple’s promised offering, like a super-high-res touch screen, a wide variety of exotic sensors, and a world class Marc Newson/Jony Ive design.)

Still, Pebble was refusing to bow. And in the weeks following that meeting, the company had a blowout holiday season that ended with its millionth unit sold, just before the ball dropped on 2014.

What Migicovsky did not tell me on that September day was the contents of Pebble’s pipeline. For that I had to return to the Palo Alto headquarters in mid-February. The place seemed to be more bustling than usual: it had the unmistakable frisson of a small company preparing a big launch. Indeed, the company was only weeks away from debuting an entirely new product: the Pebble Time. (The announcement date is February 24.) Unlike the previous generation of Pebble, the Time has a color display, courtesy of the first smart-watch implementation of a mysterious new e-paper technology. It also has an ingenious new operating system that may be transformative in itself.

What’s more, Pebble is going back to Kickstarter to launch it. That’s something else that the biggest company in the world can’t match.

I first met Migicovsky when he was a founder of one of 43 startups enrolled in the Winter 2011 session of the Y Combinator incubator. His company, then called InPulse, might have been the only hardware startup in the bunch. He had arrived from Waterloo, Ontario, with a little funding from the government and an ungainly wrist computer that worked only with the BlackBerry OS. Still, he felt confident that his plan was a winner — to put the notifications, weather info, sports scores and other timely data (like time) on a wrist display. He was 25 and had already been at it for three years.

Early in the session, the Y Combinator founders learned that they would be offered funding from investor Ron Conway and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. Every startup in the group received $150,000 at impossibly favorable terms. For almost all of the young companies in that group, the bonus was a launch pad for more significant sums from angel investors or venture capital firms. But not InPulse; investors were steering clear of hardware startups in those days. Migicovsky left the program with around $300,000 total and spent all of it on manufacturing Blackberry-compatible InPulses that he couldn’t sell.

In a hail-Mary move, Migicovsky rebooted his company. He renamed the product, made it compatible with multiple operating systems, made the watch waterproof, and contracted with Chinese factories to produce thousands of units. To pay for all of that, Pebble took to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter on April 10, 2012. The goal of the 37-day campaign was to raise $100,000 in pre-orders. Would-be customers pledged that sum in two hours. And they kept coming: a total of 68,929 people ordering over $10 million worth of Pebbles. (It could have been more: Migicovsky pulled the plug a week before the period ended. Why get greedy?) “It felt fresh and tangible,” says Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler. “And it had a price point that was enticing and did not scare people away.” It remained Kickstarter’s biggest project until last August, a record of 862 days.

Since then, Migicovsky has built a thriving developer community (over 26,000 have written over 6000 Pebble apps — everything from golf aids to one that rolls six-sided dice for Dungeons and Dragons); introduced a premium model, Pebble Steel; and forged partnerships, including one with Jawbone that takes Pebble more deeply into the quantified-self personal fitness category. He got retailers like Best Buy to sell the Pebble. Meanwhile, major competitors began selling smart watches on the Android platform, notably Samsung’s Gear and the Moto 360. Their reviews were mixed. None of this quelled Pebble’s momentum. On December 31, it sold its millionth watch.

“Pebble didn’t break any new boundaries for fashion,” says Migicovsky. “It didn’t revolutionize anything. But it was the first smart watch that people would actually consider putting on their wrists.”