Carving the Path

Skiing is ancient. 

Archeologists have found rock paintings in Central Asia and wooden skis preserved in Scandinavian bogs that prove that humans have been using skis for over 5,000 years.

By the mid-1960s, the sport of skiing had become stodgy and elite.

Younger people were priced out, a generational rift was opening, and innovation had stalled.

Then, on Christmas Day in 1965, an inventor called Sherman Poppen went into his garage, bolted two children's skis together, and tied a rope to the nose so his daughters could stand up on it and slide down his snow-covered garden. 

He called it the Snurfer.

Poppen saw his creation purely as a toy and an alternative to sledges.

He licensed the idea to a bowling ball manufacturer, who treated it as a seasonal gimmick and sold it in department stores for a few dollars each. 

It became a mildly successful fleeting fad, selling 800,000 units.

But they were incredibly hard to ride and the progression was limited, so gradually the interest faded away, production ended and Snurfers just became something that gathered in people’s garages.

Snowboarding 

The Snurfer sparked the imagination of a small and dedicated group of young people who would tinker with the idea over the next decades.

One of them was Jake Burton Carpenter. 

Burton had been working in corporate finance in New York, but he wanted to start a successful business of his own and he thought there was an opportunity in Poppen’s invention.

In 1977, Burton quit his job, rented a small barn in Vermont, and began making boards.

He began by building better boards: adding bindings, trying metal edges to help the boards carve turns through hard snow, and flexible wood cores, constantly combining the best early snowboard concepts he could find with existing ski manufacturing expertise.

All of this trial and error by Burton and a handful of other pioneer innovators created the new and distinct sport of snowboarding. 

But the new sport faced a massive problem - almost every ski resort in the land banned them. 

No Snowboarders Allowed

The established skiing industry viewed young snowboarders as reckless, rowdy knuckledraggers who would ruin the pristine snow and terrify their wealthy, traditional clientele.

It was a generational culture clash. 

Snowboarders were left to hike up small hills which limited the market to only the most committed riders. 

If Burton wanted to sell more snowboards, he also had to engineer the sport itself.  

Burton set to work dismantling the institutional barriers.

With the help of his newly employed resort liaison, Paul Alden (the father of one of the team riders), Burton first addressed the legal problems, directly lobbying the resort insurance underwriters to include snowboarders in their policy terms. 

Next they tackled the stigma of snowboarders being perceived as unsafe.

They introduced standard instructor certification programs to show resort operators that snowboarding could be taught safely. 

And they launched test programs to qualify riders before they could use chairlifts, systematically stripping away every objection the ski industry had. 

Just a handful of resorts allowed snowboarding during the 1984-85 season when Burton and Alden started their drive, but by 1990 the number had grown to 476. 

(Today, only three North American resorts continue to ban snowboarders)

Growing the Market

Now that people were allowed to snowboard, the next challenge was to cultivate more snowboarders.

They needed to showcase the sport.

Burton established the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships and helped build a World Cup circuit that eventually pushed the sport into the Olympic Games and TVs across the globe. 

People follow sports because of the characters so he also built teams of legendary riders like Craig Kelly, Terje Håkonsen, and Shaun White, turning core athletes into household names. 

Burton engineered the entire infrastructure of snowboarding, transforming a fad into a mainstream sport.

Today there are 9.7 million snowboarders in the U.S, compared with 13.1 million skiers.

Snowboarding is now a $230million business and Burton Snowboards is still the leading manufacturer. 

Jake Burton Carpenter stepped away as the CEO of Burton Snowboards in 2014 and sadly died in 2019, but the business he founded and the sport he engineered continue to thrive. 

Creativity -> Applied Creativity -> Stewardship

Taking something from an idea to a successful result is a three-stage journey. 

Stage 1 - Creativity is the invention of a novel idea. 

Stage 2 - Applied Creativity is the execution of the idea to turn it into a success. It’s the innovation and discipline required to cross the chasm, taking an unproven idea, overcoming massive structural barriers, building an ecosystem, and creating a genuine market. 

Stage 3 - Stewardship is about protecting, streamlining, and scaling what's already been proven so that it endures over time.

The Snurfer ended up being just a fad because it skipped stage two. 

It was an idea that jumped directly from invention to exploitation, but there was no one driving it's improvement, building a market for it and creating something that would last.

Stage two was what Jake Burton Carpenter excelled at.

He relentlessly and successfully bridged the chasm from the idea across to stage three, to leave an enduring global enterprise and sport.

Every great idea needs someone like Jake Burton Carpenter - someone who can use applied creativity to improve the product, tear down barriers and build the market.

Today snowboarding continues to grow, skiing is struggling, nobody Snurfs.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

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Pat Bridges, “A Paper Trail: The Jake Burton Carpenter Interview”, Snowboarder Magazine (2016)

“How I Built This - Burton Snowboards: Jake Carpenter”, NPR (2017)

Dennis Romboy, “A pioneer in the rise of competitive snowboarding dies”, Deseret News (2026)

Paul J. MacArthur, “The Top Ten Important Moments in Snowboarding History”, Smithsonian Magazine (2010)

“Participation Study”, Snowsports Industry Association (2024-25)