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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

Jawbone has been around for almost 20 years. Doesn't fit in with the rest.

You have to wonder how they got through a billion of VC money and couldn't make their company a success?

I'm sure more food delivery and taxi startups will fail in the next few years. Such aggressive markets, hoping that they can undercut their competitors for longer and conker the market.

Jawbone should have been Sonos. Their initial success was in audio products.

The 20 years might not but the never making money while still getting massively funded would fit with the rest. $590M over 11 rounds. Maybe the 20 years is an intensifier rather than an extenuation.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/jawbone#/entity

And that's only equity funding - including debt, they're up past $980M.

I remember from a class I took once at Berkeley that after the Roman Emperor Nero had been deposed, he was running away and a centurion who saw him quoted Virgil:

  Is death so hard to bear?

Really, 20 years of failure? I am not understanding this.

Based on what I know of them, I think I'd have to describe their target product as "small electronic devices powered by rechargeable batteries and connected via Bluetooth." That's a really vague area to focus on unless you have some great and protected technology that fits best in that area, and even then you'd probably be best off licensing that out.

But they took hundreds of millions in normal funding and hundreds of millions in debt sort of funding this decade. The vast majority of their funding. Wasn't most of that funding and growth of Jawbone going with the company trying to semi-pivot into wristbands (UP) along with their services? And a bit of the Bluetooth speakers I guess.

The 11 or so odd years before that were their Bluetooth headsets only. I think Jawbone could fit into this list. It's sort of like a spinoff company using initial foundations around 2011. That's not a good sentence or way of wording it but I can't think of something better right now. Still, the expectation from 2011 onward was huge growth with all that funding. Unlike their first 11 years.

I wonder if in hindsight they were competing for a (perceived) zero-sum niche that was given to Beats.

Many of the other companies got funding and burned up quickly. Barely got any traction or beyond their first product. Jawbone had quite a few products over those years even though it was not a financial success.

I understand your point. And I agree they had successful products in a small scale through 2010 with their headsets.

But Jawbone could've become a completely new company in late 2010 when they unveiled their speaker. And being close to unveiling their wristbands. All the money and funding (like 90% of their funding) were done since then. The last 6 years. Jawbone was already flaming out in 2015 and 2016. That's only a few years after 2011.

Otherwise we might as well include Apple and Google in a list of well-performing startups.

Agreed. As a follow up, where do you draw the line? Is there even a single frequently used definition of a startup, or is it a gray scale for everyone?

I thought around here the definition is usually a company still expecting massive growth, hasn't gone public, and not being too old. Not sure what the guidelines are with age.

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