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Once Valued at $3.2B, Wearable Company Jawbone Shuts Down, CEO Launches New Startup: Report (axios.com)
Consumer hardware company Jawbone is being liquidated, according to The Information. From a report: The San Francisco-based company, which once was valued at $3.2 billion by private investors, has hired Sherwood Partners to handle the wind-down process and assume its ongoing litigation with rival FitBit. Jawbone 2.0: Co-founder and CEO Hosain Rahman reportedly has formed a new company, named Jawbone Health Hub, that has hired many of Jawbone's employees and will take over servicing Jawbone's products. BlackRock, which loaned Jawbone $300 million in 2015, has a stake in the new company. No other existing Jawbone investor has a stake in the new startup, with one telling Axios that his firm has been kept in the dark.
Looks like some VCs got suckered in for a second round of blowing money out the wazoo.
I just invested 5 bucks in Turd, LLC. I deem it to be worth 5.7 billion dollars. Where's my payday?
So, were are these dollars now? They never existed? Money is a consensual hallucination.
Fitbit did this with Pebble. Why shouldn't their competitors get to do it too? Silly Valley is a special place with unicorns and the old rules do not apply there anymore.
We need stories like this to remind investors, and people in general, that unicorns are made up. Especially the kind that come in startup form.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The tech in the headset was fantastic for its time, but the wire ear loops repeatedly snapped off just from putting the unit on your ear. Their response to the raft of complaints was to put out a YouTube instructional video showing how to put a Jawbone on your ear "properly" (i.e., without breaking it), and to only sell replacements in 3-pack of different sizes -- use one, throw the other two away. This doesn't surprise me at all.
Pikachu! I choose Apple's worth on paper!
They just ducked all their financial and legal responsbilities and just form a new company. Who would invest in such an obvious scam?
The San Francisco-based company, which once was valued at $3.2 billion by private investors, ...
What bullshit numbers. Those people sell a fraction of the company for an obscene amount all based on pie in the sky numbers.
Silly Valley "investors" would believe a pizza place could make a billion dollars a year.
My uncle owns a business out there and he's trying to sell it so he can retire. I told him to have someone write an app that does something - anything, associate it with your store, and you'd be a billionaire over night!
And then go public as a "tech" company and all those (stupid) people will buy up the stock and keep bidding it up into stratospheric levels and you'd be richer than Zuckerberg! Especially since you are actually profitable!
.. and this CEO just had to shut down his company, what does that say about his worth?
He has a lot to prove.
The per-item value of trinkets and doohikies is rapidly declining, as are the supposed values of some tacky, commercial online/web services and appy app-apps. Protonet just closed shop after being a big crown-funding darling child just 3 years ago. We're seeing the same with Rocket, errrm Rippoff Internet and countless other blowhard startup projects. Jawbone had their jawbone thingie but wanted to extend it beyond it as fast as possible and they failed. People don't seem to realise that it's mostly about big bets and very little substance.
The first jawbone device was a neat idea for the quantitive-self crowd and could've carried on as some special must-have device for the hippster sportive folks, they should've stuck with it and not inflated their brand so much so fast.
The most valuable thing today is peoples time and attention, as the most valuable thing in the cities today aren't cars but parking spaces. It will take some time and a few more crashes before the economy adapts. That's my suspicion anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Thanks for the money, now fuck off!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There used to be some good premium Bluetooth headsets. Jawbone led the pack, BlueAnt had a good strong showing, and there were a couple of other also-rans that weren't so bad.
Jawbone is gone, BlueAnt's inventory is drying up and getting dated.
There's all sorts of stuff from China that's super cheap, and some of it isn't too bad, but there's nothing that reaches their reliability and has JawBone/BlueAnt noise cancellation. Motorola stuff has horrible background noise and it's actually painful for me to listen to when someone is using one on the other end. Jabra has gone desktop and never did have the noise cancellation down (but did have the most comfortable headset I ever wore). Plantronics, despite being known for indoor/desktop stuff is sort of stepping up to the plate. Still there's really nothing left that really fills the void being left by Jawbone.
I personally consider talking on the phone an annoyance I can't avoid. I work, drive, and do chores with my hands. I started using headsets back when the only really good option was a Jabra with a wire, I even figured out how to integrate that wire and headset into my clothing so I never had to stop doing what I needed to get done for a phone call. Before that even as a teen I got a headset for my normal wired phone so I could keep doing what I needed to do.
I'm really going to miss Jawbone for headsets. I don't think the fitness band was a bad idea, but the company shifting focus to it probably wasn't the greatest move they made. They should have focused on making cheaper but still high quality headsets, maybe even going binaural so the music people could get their fix. Had Jawbone kept their focus right they could have been the people who beat Apple to the market with their own Airpod.
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The UP 3 sounded really interesting when it was announced. I was on a fitness kick at the time, and my girlfriend ordered one for me for Christmas. At the time, Jawbone was saying it would deliver by December 22. December came and went. We called, and Jawbone gave no reason but said deliveries would be delayed, and that it should be shipping soon January came and went. We called again. Same answer. February, March... the device didn't come until April.
When I had finally received it four months later, I found that the UP 3 had tons of problems. The biggest one was bluetooth syncing. It was supposed to constantly be sending data to the phone through bluetooth. But, the bluetooth connection failed multiple times a day. When it would fail, I would have to repair the band.
Also, the initial marketing for the UP 3 was heavy on the heart rate monitoring feature. It seemed based on the advertising that I could use the band to track my heart rate during the workout. But when the band shipped, it would only track resting heart rate while you slept.
Finally, the band just died. Customer service was terrible. Long waits on the phone, to hear them tell me they weren't authorized to send me a replacement. If that wasn't enough, was that in the midst of all of these UP 3 problems, Jawbone announced the UP 4 shipping soon. No discounts for the UP 3 users dealing with all the crap. On top of that, the UP 4 just seemed silly, with the only new addition being that could be used to make American Express (and only American Express) payments.
So I'm not surprised at all to see them fail. And given the track record with this CEO, I would strongly recommend against investing in any of his future projects.
So, this is how unicorns die - VC $$ blown then reincarnated into some other useless product.
...time to move on to the next town.
When I bought my first Aliph Jawbone headset, I was amazed at the ability of the "noise assassin" to knock down noise. So much so, that I was on the phone during an ice storm, where we had part of our office running on two gasoline generators out in the parking lot. I was on the phone talking to a coworker and turned the noise canceling off and then on and he was amazed that if he didn't know any better, he would never have known the generators were running. Kept with them buying another one that was considerably smaller, but, by the time they came out with "the new era" one, it was a piece of junk. VERY poor battery life, kept disconnecting etc. Sent it back, the replacement didn't work, sent that one back, had poor battery and sound quality. I gave up on them and looked elsewhere. I think they stretched themselves with all the do-dads, speakers, fitness bands, and let their headset part falter. Yeah, a lot of people don't use these, but someone in my line of business NEEDS that type of headset working in a noisy environment and needing both hands free. Hopefully someone will buy/license their noise assassin technology and put it in their headset.
IT was once valued at 3.2B by private investors means that someone bought some percentage of stock at that value. Say, $32M for 1%.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
It had raised more than $580 million in funding from top investors like Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Kleiner Perkins.... and... BlackRock, which loaned Jawbone $300 million in 2015, which has a stake in the new company
Plus 14 rounds of funding.
How is this CEO still trusted with anybody's money if he blew through over half a billion dollars? #SuckerBornEveryMinute
I bought the original Jawbone headset for it's noise and wind canceling. It was THE BOMB. It was the first headset I had ever used, where people cod hear me clearly. I also have the second generation, which fit better in the ear, but was a bit light and unstable.
All in all, I was disappointed when they shifted away from the headsets. Not doing much hands free work anymore, requiring headsets, but if I do, I'll probably go with Plantronics.
I saw him with court side tickets at the warriors all the time. He had models in and out of headquarters doing photo shoots. He acted like he'd made it when he hadn't.
Jawbone was once one of the top rated high end Bluetooth headset providers. They didn't adapt and expand as necessary to keep up with the shifting market.
It's not like they didn't try (like Blockbusters) but their attempts were all failures.
RIP... along with Blackberry, Palm, etc.