The episode of crucible Moments podcast explores the rise and fall of Jawbone, a prominent Silicon Valley company known for its innovative Bluetooth products like the Jambox wireless speaker and the Up fitness tracker. The founders Hussein Rahman and Alex Aceli, along with Yves Behar, provide insights into the journey of Jawbone from its groundbreaking technology and market prowess to its eventual liquidation due to a series of critical missteps and financial challenges.

The narrative highlights that despite Jawbone's innovative products and rapid initial growth, the company was plagued by various operational and economic issues. The financial crisis, manufacturing errors, poor decision-making, and intense competition led to its downfall. The podcast underscores the importance of solid fundamentals and the need for startups today to navigate the contemporary business landscape with due diligence and sustainable practices.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. valuation [ˌvæljuˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - The determination of the economic worth of something, often for investment assessment. - Synonyms: (assessment, appraisal, estimation)

And with the Jambox, the company's valuation continued to skyrocket while products flew off the shelves.

2. implosions [ɪmˈploʊʒənz] - (noun) - Sudden collapses or failures of something, usually accompanied by a decrease in size or level. - Synonyms: (collapse, failure, breakdown)

Jawbone was at the time among the largest implosions in Silicon Valley.

3. fundamentals [ˌfʌndəˈmɛntəlz] - (noun) - Basic principles or elements on which something is based, especially in business contexts. - Synonyms: (basics, essentials, principles)

In the next decade, sound fundamentals and operating rigor will determine a business's success.

4. inflection points [ɪnˈflɛkʃən pɔɪnts] - (noun) - Crucial times in business or life where a significant change occurs, influencing future direction. - Synonyms: (turning points, decisive moments, tipping points)

crucible moments are the critical crossroads and inflection points that shaped some of the world's most remarkable companies.

5. meteoric rise [ˌmiːtiˈɔːrɪk raɪz] - (noun) - A rapid and spectacular increase in success or status. - Synonyms: (rapid ascent, swift climb, quick upturn)

In 2008, Jawbone's meteoric rise would come to an abrupt halt with the global financial crisis.

6. crucible [ˈkruːsɪbəl] - (noun) - A severe test or trial where various forces interact to cause a change and reveal properties or strengths. - Synonyms: (trial, ordeal, test)

Jawbone had stumbled. Now they faced a crucible moment within a crucible moment.

7. resonated [ˈrɛzəˌneɪtɪd] - (verb) - To evoke a strong response or agreement, often used metaphorically to describe how well an idea or emotion connects with others. - Synonyms: (echoed, reverberated, struck a chord)

And I think people gave us another bite of the apple. Let's take responsibility. Let's not try to tell the public that they're wrong and do right by them.

8. proliferation [proʊˌlɪfəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Rapid increase in numbers or spread of something. - Synonyms: (expansion, multiplication, growth)

The proliferation of cell phones and new laws that banned the use of handheld devices while driving created an important why now?

9. malleable [ˈmæliəbl] - (adjective) - Able to be bent or shaped easily, capable of being altered or influenced. - Synonyms: (pliable, flexible, adaptable)

People, like, fiddle with the thing they put it on. They think it's malleable, they think it's plastic, but actually it's elastic.

10. enamored [ɪˈnæmərd] - (adjective) - Intensely captivated or filled with love for something or someone. - Synonyms: (enthralled, infatuated, fascinated)

I was frustrated. And I think it came down to being too enamored by our ability to design fancy things.

Jawbone - The Rise and Fall of the First Wearable Technology Company

So you guys want the raw answer? Like it doesn't leave you. Guys like me don't like to fail, man. We invented three categories that now, like, billions of people use. That doesn't happen without what we did. That was all us, right? Wireless speakers like this didn't exist, so you feel all those things viscerally.

Welcome to crucible Moments, a podcast about the critical crossroads and inflection points that shaped some of the world's most remarkable companies. I'm your host, Roloff Werther. So far in this series, we've taken a look at startups that successfully navigated crucible moments to become some of the most important companies of our time. Today's episode is different. It's about how failing to make the truly hard decisions at critical junctures can lead to your undoing.

Today, we'll be looking at Jawbone. You might remember Jawbone's portable Bluetooth speaker, the Jambox. Back in 2010. They were everywhere. You'd see them on the train, at the beach, on dinner tables, at parties. Finally, wireless speakers you could just throw in your bag and take anywhere. I absolutely loved the product, and they were wildly popular.

Jawbone got its start pioneering some of the first smart Bluetooth headsets for phones. And with the Jambox, the company's valuation continued to skyrocket while products flew off the shelves. But the thrill of flight masked the danger ahead. Weak gross margins, product malfunctions, manufacturing shortages, inflated valuations, and fundraising challenges would ultimately melt Jawbone's wings.

From a nearly $4 billion valuation to liquidation, Jawbone was at the time among the largest implosions in Silicon Valley. Its spectacular growth and equally spectacular retreat provided indelible lessons for everyone involved, myself included. This story is more relevant today than ever. An era of low cost capital and easy fundraising is now behind us. In the next decade, sound fundamentals and operating rigor will determine a business's success.

Jawbone's story is a rich cautionary tale as we reflect with the founders on lessons learned. We hope a new generation of startups can take away valuable insights as they build the next great companies of tomorrow.

Hi, I'm Hossein Rahman, formerly CEO and co founder of Jawbone. I was at Stanford. It was the mid nineties, and it was almost like the florentine renaissance. The Internet browser was being created. Jerry Yang and David Filo were grad students when I showed up just leaving to build Yahoo. The Google guys were at Stanford. They were my tas in computer science.

So it was just this incredible time. There was just such an optimism about what was possible with everything that was being built. And it was this brave new world. It was at Stanford that Hussein met his future business partner, Alex Aclie. Hi, my name is Alex Aceli. I was one of the founders of Jawbone.

My encounter with Hussein is pretty amusing. We met playing rugby at Stanford in our freshman year. And because both of us were quite tall, we were both put in the second row of the scrum, which is sort of the least glamorous position. And added to that, we had to sort of hold each other by the waist. So it set us up for being quite irritable and disliking each other.

I think he thought I was just some english guy, and I thought he was a shallow guy from Laden. And then within the space of one conversation, he realized I was half lebanese. I had some sensibilities to his muslim upbringing. He had a much more expansive and sophisticated view of the world, which was something that I welcomed. And so we ended up hitting it off. And by the end of the evening, I think we were great friends.

Together, they would form the company that would later become jawbone, originally called Alif or Alifcom. In 99, my co founder, Alex and I were trying to solve this big problem around how do you talk to your phone in a way that would make it easier to use? Up until that point, if you wanted to speak to someone on the move, they would have to have a long boot.

Otherwise you just hear a bunch of background noise, and the person's voice would, in most cases, get lost. And so what we realized is that if we could actually clean up the inbound signal going into these speech recognition engines, that you would get a really amazing set of performance. If we can control the experience and we can make something beautiful and something that would be appealing to people, it would be this wonderful vessel to get out and harness the power of this technological innovation that we had.

And that was the dawn of the first job on headset. And that's when we teamed up with Yves Behar. I'm Yves Behar. I'm the founder and CEO of Fuse Project, a design agency. And then at Jawbone, I was the chief creative officer from 2003 to 2017. They had this incredible technology that was using bone conduction around the ear and really taking out the surrounding noises.

We saw ourselves as technologists and designers on the one hand, but we also saw ourselves a little bit as Robin Hoods of the tech space, in the sense that we really felt strongly that a lot of people were excluded from technology, from the everyday tech that was supposed to make life easier.

At the time when we were doing this, the only products that had ever been kind of quote unquote designed were really the palm three and then the Apple iPod. Right? And those two products in particular had shown that when you approach building these consumer technology hardware products with a sense of craftsmanship and a love and a focus on an attention to detail to delight these users, that there was a big reward that came with that and you could capture people's imaginations.

After difficult early years, toiling through a market meltdown, fundraising challenges, and a first version panned by Steve Jobs himself, the co founders kept iterating and in 2006 released the first wireless jawbone headset. It was a breakthrough. The world's first smart bluetooth headset with instantly lauded performance and design.

Right out of the gate, there's magic like, you just freaking know it. We thought he would make a big splash because we knew there was something there. Within minutes of it launching at at and T, we sold out. We had sort of almost solved a problem that they didn't know that they had, and now they couldn't live without that solution. And we built a consumer technology product with five people and no money, and it sold out immediately. And all of a sudden, we knew that we had a massive hit on our hands.

The proliferation of cell phones and new laws that banned the use of handheld devices while driving created an important why now? For Jawbone? Demand exploded. Sukhoi made his first investment in Jawbone in 2007, the same year the iPhone came out. At the time, Jawbone had the fastest revenue growth of any company that I had ever seen.

Alex and Hussain were a wonderful pair as founders go, with Alex being very methodical, disciplined, and detail oriented from an engineering point of view, and Hussein being an incredible visionary and an incredible storyteller. But in 2008, Jawbone's meteoric rise would come to an abrupt halt with the global financial crisis and ensuing recession.

The crash was wild because we had 2 million units. I want to say open Pos, like, these are purchase orders that your best buys and at and T's and Verizon's have given us. These are like hard orders that were non cancelable, right? And it's. It's money.

We probably had about 50 million, $60 million worth of raw goods inventory in China, and all of a sudden, these non cancelable orders, like, went to zero. What do we do? We ended up, like, going into Costco. We ended up hand to hand combat to figure out how to burn all that inventory off. This is the time that we said, okay, we've got to move to a new neighborhood.

And I remember it distinctly. We were in a board meeting, and at the time, we had two sequoia partners who were helping us. Roloff was on the board, and we had an observer in Gaurav Garg. And he said, we got to figure out a new neighborhood, right, to move into. Because the neighborhood that we were living in, that we thought was amazing, and it was at the time, is not as amazing anymore. And so we just need to, like, figure out what that next thing looks like.

The company faced a crucible moment. The financial crisis had devastated companies across the globe, and Jawbone had hustled to stay intact. What could they do to reignite growth? The team looked for a new why now? To drive their next product. All of our media became mobile. All of our music, all of our video, all of our podcasts. All of a sudden, it was all in your pocket, on the go all the time.

And the consumption model and what you used to interact with all that media was totally different. Like, do you remember we used to dock ipods, right? You used to, like, take your ipod, stick it in a dock, and that's how you, like, play speakers. We really felt that we had mastered Bluetooth as a technology. We had sort of liberated the corded headset, and we wanted to liberate the docked phone.

Seeking to liberate the docked phone and seize upon a new market opportunity, they hit upon an idea for an innovative product category, the wireless smart speaker. The sound effects we had created for the headset were the same, more or less we were going to add to the speaker. It was a kind of perfect confluence of signals at a perfect time.

The risk in innovating a new product category is like, there's no precedent for what you're doing. The cost of getting it wrong for a hardware product is far greater than it is for a software product because you have to invest in tooling, you have to find contract manufacturing partners, you have to invest in purchasing inventory.

You often have to enter long term contract arrangements to ensure that you have access to critical components should supply grow. This was like a crazy, controversial decision internally because we had folks in our team who had worked at Sony and said, we're going to make a speaker. Are you out of your mind? Like, this market is so saturated and so crazy.

We had concerns that it may be a treadmill business, and it was hard for us to differentiate with our software longer term because we didn't own the music service. The risk was that it was a bit of a standalone hardware product. I think internally we just knew it would be a success. I'll never forget switching on the first prototype and being like, oh, that sounds good.

We just knew that people would love it. We also came up with a name, Jambox. As designers, this was sort of a dream come true. The focus was on great sound, which meant that the grills were very, very opened, which let as much sound out as possible. We could create these beautiful faceted textures on the front of the jambox.

We could really present the innovation in all of its facets through industrial design, through naming, through packaging, through go to market, through images, through photo shoots and lifestyle. And we did everything differently from the way the industry presented speakers and docs at the time, which were static and dodgy. And we were sort of fun and expressive, and we drew on a lot of street culture.

We said, the revolution in media consumption and audio consumption is going to be in the mobile phone, so let's go do this with our existing customer for Bluetooth headsets, which is the mobile operators. When the company started to sell its product, it was an instant hit with the Jambox.

Jawbone had released a second category defining product. In a sense, it became much more iconic and much more synonymous with the Jawbone brand than the headset, because frankly, it's cooler. Like a speaker playing music is cooler than a mobile businessman doing a call in an airport. And I didn't realize just intuitively how much people love music, right?

We went from productivity in headsets to love, right? And the energy around the first Jamboxes was crazy. We had every single artist in all kinds of genre of music, from hip hop to country to pop, say I love this thing. Jambox saved the company. The MP3 speaker dock business was a crowded market with high manufacturing expenses.

But by transforming the technology into a smart wireless device, Jawburn had overcome the odds and created a whole new category that revived their sales. For the longest time in Jambox, we had 80% market share, right? Until everybody started to kind of crowded into space and started eroding the price points and the margins.

In 2011, Bose released the Soundlink mobile, and other competitors piled on. My concerns about the Jambox becoming a treadmill business were also coming true. Had we owned the music service, we could have created a stickiness that kept customers coming back for repeat business. Instead, we depended on constantly inventing new hardware hits.

Jambox had indeed saved the company, but the team soon found themselves pursuing yet another breakthrough product. Their new inventions stemmed from an idea that went back to their very beginning, wearable technology that could help track your health and wellness. But this time, innovating another new product category would prove much more challenging.

One of the things that was really special about the jawbone headsets is that we were using innovation on the sensor side in terms of understanding when people were talking versus what was noise. Well, it turns out those body worn sensors, if you move them to other parts of your body, you could see all kinds of other information about yourselves.

Using those same sensors, these accelerometers, putting them on the wrist, for example, all of a sudden could tell you all sorts of things about your movement, your efficiency of movement, how many calories you were burning, are you running? Is your gate working? And it could also tell you a lot about your sleep, which was this whole magical, new, undiscovered area.

The product they designed, the up bracelet, was the first wrist worn health and fitness tracker, monitoring a user's steps, sleep, and more. A lot of product development and a lot of resources internally went into developing the up bracelet. It engaged technologists, hardware folks, it engaged software, and it engaged the medical field as well.

It was really the convergence of technology and health and lifestyle. People thought I was really crazy. Like, they were really, like, what are you talking about? Like, you're gonna put sensors on the wrist and, like, people are gonna see what. And how's that gonna work? How do you place something in a bracelet that's comfortable, something that you know is not going to compete with a watch that you'll be able to use at night?

So it has to be soft, it has to be flexible. It has to move with you. All really tough challenges to reconcile with technology. I would say wearable technology is probably one of the hardest thing to design.

We were on the wrist before Fitbit, before Garmin, before Apple, before Nike. So there was a whole, how do you get people to change their behavior and do something completely new? I always used to use this metric of, like, are we building something that if you left it at your house, like your wallet, your keys, or your phone, you would go back for? And that's the bar, right, of, like, would we be able to play a role in someone's life that was so important around solving a thing that they cared so deeply about that they would go back and get it?

The issue with up is that we were flying blind. We just didn't know what the dynamics of the market were. You could predict what was going to happen with speakers, for example, or with headsets. It was, in theory, a much bigger market because guess what? Who doesn't want to be healthier?

The expectations were very high. All eyes were on this small innovator. Pressure to have a great product at scale was certainly there. The company had two successive massive hits. I mean, there are not many companies that build consumer electronics that tens of millions of people buy and love.

That is a rare accomplishment. And so it's natural if you're, you know, this is your third time at bat. The stakes are higher, the expectations are greater. The market testing showed promising results, and we were excited for it. We pre announced it, and I did it on stage at Ted Global.

And they don't typically do product announcements at Ted. The reception to what we did was crazy. And again, it was one of those things. We knew really quickly that everybody wanted it up. Was released in November, 20 eleven, and it sold out instantly.

It had incredible amount of traction. Sales were through the roof. It looked like we had another category breaking success on our hands. And within a couple days, we started to hear reports of, like, it's breaking or things aren't working. I experienced that myself with one of the early up units that after a couple of weeks, it wouldn't recharge anymore, which was baffling.

This is a crazy part of this story. I just joined Twitter and didn't really know much about. The platform was on it, and I started to get people attacking me, death threats, like mad, my product's not working. I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna do this. I was like, wow, this is a crazy, crazy place.

What we realized is that water was getting into the product, and it was shorting out a few capacitors, and the thing would basically brick. Well, it turns out that when we did our waterproofing testing and water resistance testing, we were testing with pure h two o. Well, it turns out that, like, pure h two o doesn't really exist in the world, in real life, ever, anywhere.

Right. It's mixed with oils from your skin, lotions, soap. Right. Like, all this stuff changes the viscosity of water, and it was penetrating at a molecular level. Our seals, like our glue seals, seeping into the product, damaging the processor or the battery. Whenever you release a consumer product like this, you do a lot of testing.

So we do all this mechanical testing on the up bracelets to make sure that they wouldn't break if you twisted them a thousand times. And then you expose them to heat. There are all these testing centers in America. We get these certifications to show that products meet certain criteria.

And so we did all these tests, and we were able to iron out all the, what you might call infant mortality, bugs in consumer electronics. But what we didn't test for is how the bracelet would survive over time, how it would hold up after weeks of use. It's midlife mortality, so to speak. People, like, fiddle with the.

The thing they put it on. They think it's malleable, they think it's plastic, but actually it's elastic. So they keep messing with it like it's like a piece of jewelry or something, but it's not. It's got electronics in it. So there's all these behaviors that we just didn't understand.

We had the capacity to do more rigorous testing. I think it's a reasonable expectation of our customers that we should have done that testing. Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, we wish we had done multi week testing of products, but it wasn't the standard at the time. We had followed all the typical approaches to testing consumer electronics, and maybe we should have thought out of the box.

Remember, this was before direct to consumer e commerce and Shopify, where now you can ease into selling a new product all at once. Jawbone needed to deliver large quantities of up to big box retailers for Christmas inventory. Sometimes, first two industry companies learn things the brutally hard way.

I don't even know what the financial implications really could be. How big of a hit is this? Is it tens of millions? Is it hundreds of millions of dollars? And I was really nervous. I was terrified. We realized that we had a real crisis, and needless to say, this was a disaster.

Jawbone had stumbled. Now they faced a crucible moment within a crucible moment. How would they survive? When a company faces a crucible moment like this, a true crisis, it's an all hands on deck. And in a situation like this, you know, some people may be tempted to do a cover up. The COVID up is always worse than the crime.

We would have to do a recall, which meant that we would take back all these devices. We'd obviously have to refund customers. We'd have to eat the cost of having made all these devices suffer enormous brand damage as a result of doing the recall. But part of the judgment call was that not doing the recall would be worse brand damage anyway, because then you completely destroy trust with your customers.

We wrote a letter, and I apologized to everybody. I said, look, we were trying to push the envelope, trying to do something new. We think there's a lot of value here, but this is what's happening. There's no risk to anybody physically if people want to keep this thing. They can. They can keep using it. But if you want your money back, we'll give it to you, too, and you can keep using it anyways. We're gonna go back to the drawing board, fix this, and we'll be back.

I thought that the letter he wrote to customers and to our stakeholders was great. What was written there, it found the right combination of mere culper vision, action plan, and so on. And I think people gave us another bite of the apple. Let's take responsibility. Let's not try to tell the public that they're wrong. We need to do right by them.

Even the naysayers that we had in our investor base or board, and everybody was just like, this is the right thing. Clearly, this category matters. We know there's a there, there. People love this. Let's go fix it. Despite the enormous recall, Jorban pushed ahead with the next version of up. They went back, fixed the issues, and released a more durable product in late 2012.

It was just very difficult for us to have overcome the challenge of the recall. I sometimes think about an equivalent for people where if you've had a really serious disease, maybe you had a very bad bout of pneumonia, you sort of deal with the lingering after effects for many years. It's not as though you get healthy in a couple of weeks and it's all back to normal.

There's sort of these long term consequences that result from such an intense and serious illness. And I feel the same is true for a company in this situation where an episode like this lingers and the damage lasts for a very long time. At the end of the day, if someone believes in you and they open up your product two or three times and there's a problem with it, it doesn't work, or they have to send it back.

It catches up with you, you know, catches up. In late 2012 and early 2013, Jawburn realized it had yet another massive problem on its hands. The recall had cost the company approximately $100 million. While orders for the re released up continued to roll in, the company faced a massive cash crunch. They didn't have enough working capital to fulfill the orders piling up.

We had had this hole in our p and l. We hadn't sort of really slowed down our R and D investment. We are back to 2 million units or so behind on open purchase orders, and how do we scale up? And now we need real big inventory dollars to do that. The supply chain in Asia doesn't necessarily want to front us the money to go make that inventory investment.

We got to manage the risk. So we think, hey, interesting. Debt could be an alternative. Debt is dangerous. Like many other things, it's a double edged sword. And one of the things in general, when you're a startup company or a private company, is hope for the best, plan for the worst, and raising debt is kind of hoping for the best and planning for the best.

Jorban raised short term debt financing, intending to fund its inventory needs and get out of its cash crunch, after which it planned to raise an equity round at a higher valuation. The company then started pursuing a series of increasingly risky fundraising deals, some in the form of equity, some in the form of debt, each with their own challenges and dangers.

We were at the mercy of new investors. We were struggling with wave after wave of struggling to raise money, or raising money in small increments, drips and drabs where we couldn't secure a single substantial lead with favorable terms that would enable us to continue to scale the business. The higher the burn rates get, the more difficult it is to get a new investor to believe that the company can turn a corner and turn profitable.

In 2014, they finally received two equity offers. One offered more money and a higher valuation, but it came with a series of conditions and the risk of losing the company if things went south. The other offered less money at a lower valuation, but came with cleaner terms. A schism erupted between early investors on the board who advocated for a more focused, streamlined strategy, and newer investors pressuring jawbone to take the deal with the higher valuation and essentially hold a sprawling company together with duct tape.

We thought the larger offer would be a good way to give us a war chest of efficient dollars to get the revenue engine and that p and l hole that we had to get fixed against open orders. I often chuckle when people talk about entrepreneurs as being risk takers, because I actually think the opposite is true. Entrepreneurs are risk mitigators.

They identify the risks in the business and they work assiduously to figure out how they can minimize the impact of that on their success. And this felt to me as though we were amplifying the risk to the business by taking a very aggressive set of terms that really exposed us, and if anything goes bump in the night, we would be in trouble.

So after a lot of back and forth and a lot of tension and a lot of differing views, we end up taking the larger offer. This might be a really efficient way to kind of get the business back on its feet on a growth trajectory again. So we go into the process, we go through all the diligence, we end up getting ready to close. And for a variety of reasons, the full amount of money that we were intending to raise was not available there.

I do remember hearing that the financing had fallen through, and I don't think I was surprised. Throughout this turbulent period, the day to day functioning of the rest of the company suffered. We had three different companies with different needs, sometimes different retail channels, different logistical needs, different engineering and team needs. And because we were constrained in our growth and hiring, we basically had teams rotating through these categories and sort of trying to fight fires in these completely different product lines.

The challenge really was on delivering durable, long lasting products, quality products across these different categories that were quite different from one another. We ended up being no products. We ended up having, you know, bugs. Things weren't working in the same way. Meanwhile, you know, market share is eroding, things aren't producing enough margin. So we got into the spiral where what almost became a financially difficult to keep producing the products if they weren't profitable, one difficult financing leads to another one, and you think you're going to then use that to get out of the hole and get to the next level.

I felt conflicting emotions. Alex had stepped away from daily operations in 2010 and was now living in London. I could have said, like, listen, hey, I don't care what happens. I just want us to remain friends. That could have been a route. Did I really feel that way? It's like, all things being equal, certainly, yeah.

But what I was really feeling is like, you're not being collaborative with people, trying to give you constructive criticism about how to fix this company, and your reaction is unreasonable. It's understandable under the circumstances, but it is not reasonable given that you're responsible for a two to $3 billion company. We were spending vc cash developing high tech, high design products, and high tech, high design products need good margins. That's how Apple does what it does.

First time I met Steve Jobs, it's meeting the icon of a builder. It's like Leonardo da Vinci of our time. And I remember one of the things that really struck me was he was really focused on product costs, delivery costs, unit economics, and gross margins. And I was surprised at the level at which he was really razor focused on it, because I thought, not having ever met him, but seeing the products, I was like, I must be an artist.

Insane thinker. Why is he so bogged down in this unit? Economics. I now understand it viscerally. Whether we raise debt or whether you're raised equity, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the fact that you can never catch up because you're constantly raising money to fill the cash gap.

I think it became a runaway train. There was a failure at the board level of just saying, this is going to end in tears early enough. There was one more contentious, massive debt round of $350 million where things came to a head. There was such disagreement that some of the board members decided to step off the board.

It was better for us to resign from the board and let the founder CEO decide how to proceed. Given my personal history and friendship with the founders, it was a very difficult decision. Soon, Fitbit took over as the leading player in the wearables market, and Jawbone became embroiled with him in a bitter trade secret dispute.

Then Apple debuted the Apple Watch. Not able to keep up with competitors nor production costs, in early 2016, Jawbone stopped production. By 2017, they had liquidated. I respect him for this enormously. He called me up in 2017, and he just gave me a heads up and he said, I'm sorry it ended this way.

Ostensibly, we died of, and people took write downs, and the media landscape was that you failed. And so that was a really weird experience. It sucked because I felt like I had let down a bunch of partners that had believed in me and stuck through really hard times. It was a tough time, a sad time, and a lot of lessons learned from that.

When I heard the drawbar was liquidated, it obviously comes with a pang of regret, a very deep pang. I spent six years of my life working with the founders. They spent decades of their lives working on their company. And to have spent that much energy to have built leading products that made millions of consumers happy, and to end up not being able to build a business that self sustaining is an incredible disappointment.

There's a profound sense of loss. You feel like all the life force and all the life force of the people that work for you, the energy that these people put to build this stuff, and it didn't work. And for reasons that maybe you could have done better, and you're the one that lives with the mistakes. When you're the leader of a company, you get outsized credit and outsized blame both ways.

So you guys want the raw answer? It doesn't leave you. Guys like me don't like to fail, man. I'd say that as the financings unraveled, I really worried that the company was doomed. Not just because fundraising was difficult, but more importantly, that we, we werent willing to make the very hard decisions to just rebuild the company from scratch, be willing to tear down a large organization that had been built for a different scale of business and be willing to go back to your roots. And we werent willing to do that.

I still think the biggest competition we had was the one that faced us in the mirror and we were our own worst enemy. And I think that was really the death knell. Raoul, its easy for me to look back with 2020 hindsight and say, oh, what we should have done is this. I was frustrated. And I think it came down to being too enamored by our ability to design fancy things and not being able to actually follow through with reliable products with good margin, reliable products with good margins.

If you do not have good margins, you cannot build a business. It's as simple as that. We're in a business where we often get it wrong. Very high percentage of the companies we invest in don't end up succeeding. And it's really humbling to be in this business.

You know, we manage money for what we call great causes, LP's, foundations, endowments, nonprofits, and they entrust us with their money. And I feel an intense fiduciary responsibility to look after that and to help them generate returns. I think it's inevitable in our business as a venture investor on the heels of failure, to fret and to become more risky. And I've reflected on that often.

It plays out in many, many different dimensions, how we cope with failure. That's really the essence of it. And one of the things I've learned, as you look at sports psychology, some of the best athletes that we know have an incredible ability to reflect on a failed attempt. A shot that didn't work, a serve that didn't work, a kick that didn't go through, but they don't let it encumber them.

So there's this incredible ability to actually learn from what happened, because if you just brush it off, then you're not going to get better. So you've got to understand what went wrong before, but not have it debilitate you. You just let go, just forget about what happened. Lesson learned. Okay? Fresh, fresh eyes, new opportunity. And I think that same mindset helps investors, founders, product leaders succeed.

Jorban's story is not entirely over. The breakthrough research and development that came out of jawbone while building up led to Hussein founding a new company called all health. When you have these crazy levels of success, I was getting accolades. Young global leaders, like every list, being invited to these things. Everyone wants to hear what you say.

You're building products that people love. They stop you on the street. It was amazing, it was fun. It was rewarding. But you also think that you can do no wrong, right? You think you start to maybe sometimes believe that you could be infallible, that you're always going to get it right.

And the reality is, like, no matter how successful people are, you don't ever always get it right. I am ruthless with the entrepreneurs that I am friends with, that I advise or help or angel invest in that. Like, don't make those mistakes because I lived them. I lived the overvaluing of your company, the schism it creates. If you cant catch up to it, if you have a low gross margin business, its capital intensive. Its the worst thing to do to overextend your valuation and go higher than where you ought to be.

I think the wisdom that you get when you fall down as hard as we ended up doing is that you get better, actually, at having tough conversations. I certainly could have been better at like really trying to step away and just bring dispassion and thinking, all right, let's just look at it with a fresh set of eyes and space. And how do you do that? It's difficult. That's the advice I'd give myself.

This has been crucible moments, a podcast from Sukhoi Capital. Join us next time as we learn from Anne Wojcicki of 23 andme about how the company overcame an existential regulatory challenge, built a brand new high risk division from scratch, and transformed its consumer business after booming sales suddenly flatlined. crucible Moments is produced by the epic stories and box creative podcast teams, along with Sequoia Capel. Special thanks to Hossein Rahman, Alex Assali, and Eve Behar for sharing their stories.

Leadership, Inspiration, Technology, Silicon Valley, Bluetooth, Entrepreneurship, Sequoia Capital