We made the Jambox — a Bluetooth speaker so beautifully designed that people put it on their coffee tables like art. We were a hardware company that cared about aesthetics. That was rare in 2010.
We raised $930 million. Nearly a billion dollars. For a hardware company that never figured out how to make a profit on a single product. That's a special kind of failure.
The UP fitness band was supposed to be our future. We sold millions of them. But Fitbit sold tens of millions. And Apple was coming. We were stuck in the middle — too premium for mass market, too small for Apple.
We tried to be a speaker company, a wearables company, and a health data company all at once. We were good at all three and great at none. That's how you burn a billion dollars.
Our products won every design award. Every one. Red Dot. IDEA. IF. The products were beautiful. The unit economics were hideous.