YouSaid · the spoken record

Hosain Rahman

lines on the record: 112
first: 2018-09-26
most recent: 2018-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You have to find that balance in what makes you and what drives you and what are the things that give you confidence and what are the things that cause stress.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all about that new thing and everything's going to fix itself. Well, guess what? It doesn't. And you have to do that. You have to invest in yourself. You have to grow. You have to manage your insecurities, your blind spots. You have to be really transparent in understanding about that. I'm a big advocate of coaching and mentorship and talking about this stuff. I'm a lot more open about my strengths and weaknesses. I work on them. You know, mental health, people don't talk about enough, right? That stress is hard. It's wonderful when everyone's saying good things. the level and look what you realize in these things is all the credit is sometimes overplaced and all of the blame is sometimes overplaced both sides right and it's one of those things where”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or a management structure like look, I used to think HR was this thing that you just like applied later as you were scaling. And the new thing, we've had like HR partners right from the beginning, right? Building the infrastructure. Here's how we operate. Here's how we work. Here's our set of thinking. Here's what's okay. Here's what's not. Here's how we communicate. Here's how we catch problems early. Here's how we hold people accountable. I mean, these are all things that are important and just as important as the creation side. And frankly, you think when you're that it's all about the creation.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, hyper growth hides a lot of problems. That's what I mean. And I've been through three or four hyper growth cycles. Yeah, exactly.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was younger. Absolutely. A lot of these companies are in the hands of people who aren't. You look at Facebook. I think it's a management problem. He was not experienced. He has not been experienced. You don't have to say anything about Mark Jack Robert, but I don't think that management team had a veneer of being highly competent because they did very well. But a lot of it was stuff they should do. Look hyper”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, you come into these, one of the things I affirm like Andrew Horowitz does and like what Ben's been amazing at is they help train a lot of these people because you don't get that training. There is nothing that you can go to school for that helps you be a great manager, right? But you need that training, you need that rigor, and a lot of it is by doing. Right? And so do I think I'm 42 now? Do I think I'm way better as a manager than I was? Absolutely.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, come on. You know, it's hard. There's nobody teaches you sort of how to be disciplined in these situations where everything's trying to sweep you off your feet.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. Of course. We were one of the first unicorns, and everyone's like, oh my God, you're great. And you can be this and get all these accolades.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“two or three things well look i a i think that a hardware business model is really hard And I think that we would have moved to services a lot faster, which is what we're doing in the new thing. Number one, I think we wouldn't have overreached on valuation, right? I think we would have been a lot more paced and disciplined. Do you get caught up?”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I took a bunch of other people's money. And until I thought it was going to die, they were going to have to carry me out in a body bag. And that's a commitment that I made.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is why I stuck with it. I had a lot of people who said, Hey, you know what? Come do this here's this job or here's this other opportunity jump into this you want to help do this like and I didn't walk away”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When things don't go well, there's not like a moment. In my life, where it goes, where I don't think about it every single night, about all the mistakes we made and all the things that went wrong and what we would do differently. All of that is hard. I mean, it can be emotionally and mentally crushing. It crushes your soul. Then you money.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife wanted Moments in those lives. In being creative and creating things, you also leave behind a lot of. Anger, like, right? I mean, you were aware of that. We've talked about it extensively. I used to get emails from employees. I think they were employees who were unhappy with you. I can't imagine investors weren't happy about losing that amount of money. And then, you know, you also had vendors and stuff like we talked about that too. Yeah. That you didn't pay and stuff like that. But you're also in this creative mode. I want you to get to a bigger idea of the entrepreneur when you're like this, when you're juggling, you're not paying this person. You have investors on your back. You've made management mistakes. And I want to finish this part, I promise. But what things do you think you did wrong there and what things did you do right? How much time do we have? No, we keep going.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? I'll give you a great example. When we were doing wireless speakers, when we invented that space, there were a lot of people who told us that we were crazy to do it, right? That, you know, going into the speaker space, there were so many dead bodies, big brands, a lot of channel pressure. It just wasn't like a great category. But we did it and we transformed it. And I find that process of creating new things extremely rewarding. It's tough. There's a lot of fights and you're pushing and you're trying new things. There's no playbook established. But that process is, you know, if you're a creator, that's what you live for.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there's a part of that for sure, but you also see it and you see what you've been able to achieve, you see what's held you back, and part of being that pioneer and that creator is thinking that you can push through those walls”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not Fuse. It was called Something Else. Anyway, there's just tons of them, and I have them all in a drawer in my house. Why not sell? Like, talk about that journey of you just think you're going to be the next big thing, I presume.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but most people who have done better have sold, it seems like. I'm thinking of Instagram, lots of things. But by the way, he could have made Instagram enormous Kevin's system, right? Who's investing in your newest thing? We'll talk about that in a minute. He has made it enormous. Yes, he has made it enormous, but it's where someone else, what would he have done if it was by itself, for example? Or what have you gotten to that level? These are all the things that entrepreneurs go into. What prevented you from doing that”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, it wasn't just a me decision. I think that there was opportunities where we had opportunities to exit the business. I think that, you know, you look at all the factors, you look at where you stand, you look at what you have in the pipe, and you make that decision the best you can with your board to say, can we take it to the next level? Do we have resources? And you could. We're believers. You're entrepreneurs.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But by the time you see it, it's starting to be descending, right? And there's a variety of factors. In some ways, the thing that got us through when we had to take the up was our speaker business. When we had to take the up off market, we stayed alive because we had the speaker business.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go ahead, keep going. So I think that's a big part of the challenge. I was talking to Mary Mika the other day who was an investor in the first jawbone, and she said, I wonder what would have happened had we sort of thought about selling off those businesses at their peaks. Yeah, why didn't you?”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apple did the iPhone as a transition from iPod. It was probably one of the most masterful product transitions when they were at the peak of the market. Everyone's like, wow, they're just sort of dumping that off. We watched the other side of that, which was the Motorola Razor, where I think they did 21 versions of that same phone, right? Just trying to ride the wave. And so a lot of that is a timing issue, cannibalizing yourself, deciding you have the new thing, it's ready to go and kind of scaling to the next level. And I would say that we did it for a couple generations, but what we didn't do well was continue to harness and continue to bring the new thing and the new thing and the new thing. And candidly, it's really hard to do that across three different categories at the same time within a startup. The capital it takes, the amount of people, the talent to forward front all of that is really, really expensive.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We created the smart headset space. We thought that was going to continue. It's very hard to predict when these things flatlane, as you know. And then do you have the opportunity to flatten?”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, you didn't, I mean, look, we didn't take money thinking it wasn't going to work. No, I get that. We took, look”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there was lots of arguments at a board level, which is are we putting too much energy into the design side? Are we putting too much dollar investment or are unit economics so expensive that we can't charge enough to justify that, right? The Apple model is let's put a bunch of really cool technology into it and high design, but we're going to charge a real premium. And they're able to do that at scale, right? And we weren't able to necessarily charge the premiums that justified all of the cogs that the cost of goods sold that we put into the device. And so that's the downside, frankly, of being a high design product.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, look, a lot of it went to fund the RD And the creation of new technology. A lot of it went to working capital to fund inventory and that scaling. And a lot of it went to whatever was left. We funded the operation and people, as well as, and again, we weren't able to generate enough margin”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And change behavior, and we're building off a lot of the stuff we learned from that. But so we did a lot of that, and that Software and Services create more stickiness and more community, and there's a bunch of data that you can use to how to help people. And that's a lot of the foundation for what we're doing now. But again, it gets back to the fact that you just don't generate enough margin to do all of that heavy future R&D. And that R&D doesn't work on a linear basis. Like that process of creating new stuff is not linear.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it was great. It had 10x the engagement, it still does of anybody in the digital health space, right? I think it's now between Facebook and Snapchat in terms of daily engagement.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much money, even 900 million is a lot for tooling, I can tell you, as someone who's built a lot of device. I mean, we shipped about called 40 million-ish devices over time in the different categories. So a good amount. But the challenge is like, how do you as a startup build for that kind of scale, the automation, the supply chain, efficiencies you get glitches and things like that? And you get glitches, you don't have like room for error to sort of, you know, go fix that stuff. So, you know, what takes up a lot of the cash is the working capital cycle. You're trying to scale R&D, right? Because you've got to build the next thing. And in all these things, you're only as good as your next device or your next product. And look, as we evolve and as the device has got smarter and as they became more connected, we added a lot more software content to it. Like in the early days, a lot of our software team was machine learning algorithms, digital signal processing. And then as it sort of evolved, we moved.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so a lot of it came after 2011. And that's when the business was scaling. And we never shared our revenue numbers, but we were doing several hundred million dollars at a time. I think at our peak we got to almost like a $500 million of revenue to us, right? $500 million run rate, you know, sort of to Jawball, which means that we produce billions of dollars in revenue for our channel partners like Best Buy and Apple and Amazon and all carriers and all those guys. So, you know, the franchises were successful from a revenue perspective to our partners. As I said, I think that the challenge with hardware for us is we put all that design content into it. We put all of that new technology into it. And it's hard as a hardware startup, you don't generate enough margin to really, like, you know, somebody told me the other day, Apple spent like $900 billion on tooling for the Apple Watch.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And then you had a stellar board. You had Marissa Mayor for Yahoo CEO. You had been, oh, I'm losing my mind. Ben Horowitz. Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz. You had Eve Bihar, is that correct?”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very early. We were the first people to do it. And there were issues there. There weren't terminals ready to accept the payments. There weren't enough places. It was certain new behavior.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That inception of the market. And then it creates bad will all over the place. I mean, so we're going to talk about those errors when we get back. But one of the things that I'd really like to get into is sort of this journey of the entrepreneur, because more than any, you know we talked about this, the emails I get about Jawown are really, you've got some people who hate you, for example, and you have some debts behind, and what do you do with the investors? So I want to talk about that because I think you want to be honest about what happens with these things. Because on one hand, you have these incredible pioneering concepts that everybody else takes advantage of. You're not echo you started that. You're not beats. You started that. You're not...”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. Of that people. And that's To sort of go to the next stage of it, because there's that inception of the market.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In general, yeah, when you're doing this, because you're going from one to the other and losing the previous business. You know, you started with the earphones and then people caught up, cost too much. These things do have a cycle, by the way, all these products. Yeah, absolutely. Then you move to the next one, which is the speakers, and then that gets eaten up, and then you move to the next one. It strikes me as the planes are covered with the bodies of pioneers. You know what I mean? Like the concept of that people. And that's what happened. And then you end up sort of trying desperately to keep the funding going at the same time.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It trades at a fraction of its revenue multiple, right? But the point is, but they didn't make all the R&D investments. So what we were doing is putting a lot of our capital into R&D investments and funding inventory and trying to scale not so much on marketing, right?”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the thing that's hard in a hardware business model candidly is you don't necessarily generate enough gross margin to fund R&D and marketing, right? And that's what makes it really hard to get to an escape velocity. So if you think about hardware, anybody like the two companies that really make money in hardware are Apple and Samsung, right? And if you think about the startups, what startup has achieved total escape velocity and continued to scale? You look at guys like Ring, they sell out, they get great success, you know, get out a billion, same with Ness, Tony got out at three. It's awesome. They get to a certain scale and they say, look, to get to the next level, we need bigger partners and bigger backers to kind of fund that expansion. And if you look at companies like Fitbit or GoPro, they put a lot of what they get in margin into marketing and they build brands and they're spending $100 million, a quarter for TV advertising.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you're trying to hold it together. There's all this cool promise of the technology. You see that there's demand. One of the things that we've always been really good at at Jawan was inventing new stuff, right? Creating new technologies, creating new product categories. I mean, we did it three times, right? We did the smart headset devices, a number of the people on the job one headset team have ended up working on AirPod, which is awesome. Really proud of the work that they're doing there. A number of our speaker folks ended up at Amazon and other places working on products that are now rolling out and getting scale. So we see that. And obviously we created the risk-based wearables market. We were the first ones there well before Fitbit or Nike and then ultimately before any of the smartwatches. So we saw these things early. And so we had continued to develop really cool technology that we felt like was going to take this thing to the next level.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That six of our ex-employees had stolen sort of systematically stolen $365,000, which was basically all of our trade secret information and gone to Fitbit. So then we got into this like very expensive legal battle to protect ourselves. Since then, actually, the DOJ just a couple months ago, Criminal charged all six of those people for that, so sort of, you know, ultimately showed why we had to protect ourselves because there was pretty massive criminal activity around that.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The capital you take in, what you agree to, and is the business ready for it, right? Because when you raise money at those kinds of prices, it's really hard to move and recover and sort of be nimble. You've got a big scale organization, just things get really, really complicated. So what ended up happening is when that financing broke, we all, the management team, had to go out of the building to go raise capital and try to hold things together. And that's when you started, you know, a lot of things started to crack. Like if we're not in the building, there's not direction. Our product execution suffered, our in-market execution suffered. Obviously, a lot of our competitors surged at the time started to catch us in the various markets in terms of market share. Fitbit and others, even in the speaker space, I mean, you know, so we in a lot of these spaces, we had 80, 80% market share, but as these things evolved, like people start to chip away from you. And then the other thing that happened to us in early 15 is that we realized”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't that they were giving it to us in pieces. There was a sort of a syndication model And I think there was misunderstanding on how the timing and how that all process would work. And I think there was just, again, it happened in the past, and it's one of the things at the time we were all very frustrated. And I think there was a lot of anger on all sides of the equation. But it broke. It didn't happen. The syndicate didn't come together the way it anticipated at the time it was expected to be. The company felt like it wasn't the company's fault. Of course, right. And so it wasn't the capital wasn't all there in the way that the deal had been signed up to do. So then all of a sudden now we found ourselves in a scramble. And effectively, you're trying to sort of duct tape and bail-in wire this thing up. And so I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs now about be really careful how you structure these deals”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So look, there's so many things that went wrong. One of the things was that the capital that we were expecting to get didn't all show up. Right.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The lead on the financing was Rizvi Traverse. And so again, for a variety of reasons, like the financing broke, we never actually completed it. And that put us into a tailspin, right? In 2014, because we had a capital intensive business. You know, with all these things, there's maybe a thousand reasons and ultimately none”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two billion ish, and then we had another one that was like, you know. 3.2 to 3.5 billion dollars depending on how you sort of looked at how the deal was structured. So obviously a big delta. And we had a big split in the organization at the board level, shareholder level, some of the folks that had come into the last round obviously wanted us to take the larger markup. Earlier folks were saying, hey, we might not be ready. We're not stable enough to take social high valuation, et cetera. Ultimately, we ended up taking the larger valuation. That deal for a variety of reasons didn't work and it broke apart.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel for a lot of the scaling issues they have. I mean, obviously, it's on a much smaller scale and a smaller product, but it's not that dissimilar in terms of the fundamental issues that you face, right? And you're doing new things, so there's new manufacturing processes and you want to ensure quality. It's complicated. So anyway, so we're doing all that. That's 13. The idea was we'd get the momentum back through the sort of working capital injection. And then at the end of that, we would do an equity raise, which would kind of pay off some of the debt and then create the next wave and we'd sail off and do our thing. So at the end of 2013, beginning 2014, we ended up doing a deal. And we had two deals on the table. This is an interesting lesson candidly for all entrepreneurs. And this is where one of the big mistakes that we made as an organization meet as sort of running the company is we had two offers on the table. One was at Callit, you know,”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We needed cash, and that's one of the things that happens with a hardware company you've got to like, if you have a successful product, you hit another wall, which is how do you fund all that growth efficiently? And equity is not the great way to do it. So the thought then was in 2013 was let's do this big debt round, we'll pull the whole thing together, it'll get momentum back in. Yes, we had great momentum, and we're back ordered, but we actually needed to fulfill it, get the revenue machine going, and then we would go, you know, pay that debt off.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“build out that prediction capacity to supply it, but you need cash to do that. And it is extremely costly, and you've got to front load a lot of that cash. And given your startup, no manufacturer really wants to give you big credit or anything like that. So we scrambled in early 2013 to figure out how do we get this working capital cycle figured out. And we did a big debt deal with Fortress and Silver Lake, JP Morgan, and Wills Fargo. And that was, you know, Partmez debt as well as asset-based lending facility. And it's something that a lot of technology companies don't traditionally do that much because there aren't that many hardware startups.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plagues hardware startups when you get to a certain scale is that we had a working capital issue where we had all these millions of units on order from our channel partners. We had a manufacturing base that needed to build up the supply chain, buy all the components, tooling, all that sort of stuff”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, it just went crazy, it was faster selling than anything we'd ever had. People were really excited about it. But we started to get reports from the field that they were breaking. And we couldn't get them back fast enough to figure out what was happening. And finally, when we did, we realized that what was happening is water was getting into the device, whether it's sweat or, you know, just wash your hands, whatever, just when you wear something, it gets wet, right? Whether you think it does or not. And that was getting into the device and shorting out some of the capacitors. So when we figure that out, we pulled it off the market. We went and did this big thing, apologized to all our customers, gave them refunds, let them keep using it. And people liked the way that we treated that whole situation, the way we handled it. So we went back to the drawing board in 2012, fixed all those waterproofing issues, and relaunched it at the end of 2012. And it went vertical again from a demand perspective. Then we ended up hitting a different problem, which is one of the things that”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was called up And so we debuted it in kind of mid 2011, talked about it publicly the first time, and then we shipped the products in 11. They sold like crazy. And you had some...”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, if you move them around the body, you could see other things about people's physiology and understand them. And so I felt like, hey, this would be a really interesting opportunity to open up this whole new understanding about what's going on with ourselves on sort of a continuous daily basis. So we worked on that for a couple years. And then in 2011, we debuted the whole risk wearables category. So it was the first time we did that, did it on stage with TED, got a bunch of wonderful feedback. People were really excited about this.”
2018-09-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jawbone Health CEO Hosain Rahman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT