Just a few years ago, Jawbone, the nearly defunct maker of wearable technology, was handing out its brightly coloured fitness tracking wristbands like lollipops to VIPs at Davos. Today, it’s selling itself off piece by piece. You could argue that the company was a victim of many things, like being too early into the market (it launched Bluetooth-enabled devices in the late 1990s), or not realising soon enough that things like sleep monitoring and step tracking would eventually be apps that would live on the largest platforms run by companies like Apple and Google, rather than standalone technologies that would warrant their own devices and ecosystems.
But you could just as easily argue that this Silicon Valley unicorn, which at its peak boasted a valuation of $3.2bn and attracted money from the world’s most successful venture capitalists (Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures), was a victim of its own success. The company burnt through so much money and reached such sky-high valuations that it became like one of its users — too rich and fat for its own good.
Last year, the company had to turn to the Kuwait Investment Authority to keep running — never a good sign given that sovereign wealth funds aren’t exactly the smart money in Silicon Valley. (They tend to come in big but late, offering loads of cash when others won’t.)