John Imah Explains Why Fossil & Gen 5 Smartwatch Are The Future
Written by SOURCE on November 7, 2019
Even the best minds need a little something extra to get them through the day.
It’s a digital kind of world, and we’re just trying to live in it, but Silicon Valley-based tech executive John Imah is one of the few geniuses chosen to create it – and we just want to know his secrets. The Dallas native realized his passion for technology and its development at a tender age. “I was five years old, [when] my parents bought our first household computer,” Imah recalls. “They had it upstairs, and I was so infatuated by it. So, when they went downstairs to where they had their bedroom, I got a screwdriver and I took the whole thing apart.”
Imah explains how furious his parents were at the sight of their brand new computer on the floor in pieces. His parents gave him time to think about his actions by going to a movie for the afternoon, but not before demanding he find a way to fix it! Scared and confused, a five-year-old Imah didn’t know what to do.
“I was crying,” says Imah, but he was a precocious and determined kid, and after an hour (or three), the child prodigy assembled his first computer.
At the age of 15, Imah built and negotiated the private sale of his first start-up. Now, he is an executive jet-setting between Tokyo, Singapore, China, New York, and, of course, his current homebase in California. Flying between time zones and boardrooms can get exhausting, and make life hard to track. The mastermind behind some of your favorite social media and gaming apps admits that scrolling through his phone for updates in the news or about his day every few minutes is time consuming, but digital accessories like the smartwatches in Fossil’s new Gen 5 collection keep him focused and on track.
Thankfully, the no-minute-to-lose businessman was able to block out time in his schedule to chill with Complex inside an all-white Brooklyn mansion and share his story. Chatting on the sun-drenched second-floor balcony, overseeing BK’s famed Fort Greene neighborhood, Imah opened our eyes to the advancement of technology, improvements that need to be made, and how Fossil’s latest smartwatch is equipped with the smart capabilities everyone wants—especially tech execs.
“You start to realize when you get busy, time is the most important thing,” Imah says unconsciously checking his watch. “If the [Gen 5] watch can save me 30 seconds to an hour each day—from checking my emails or texts, or looking at my pulse rate—that’s great. [That way] I can dedicate the rest of that time somewhere else that may need it.”
When Imah is in between meetings, planning his next move, he turns up a little hip-hop or classical music to map out his day. The tech exec uses the Google Assistant on his Fossil smartwatch to prepare for the day, asking questions like, “What is my schedule is for tomorrow? What’s going on in the news? What’s the weather?”
