#32 - Hosain Rahman on The "Defibrillator Experiences" of Jawbone

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's episode is with Hosain Rahman and Jessica Livingston. Hosain is the CEO and founder of Jawbone, and Jessica is a co-founder of YC.
This conversation was recorded at our 2014 Startup School, and if you want to watch the video or read the transcript, it's at blog.ycombinator.com. All right, here we go.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:23)
Thank you for coming. I hope to do not much talking at all, and I'm gonna just ask you, because it's sort of a strange thing you have this, I want you to sort of go through the chronology of the early days, and talk about, you really did have a lot of close calls, and I'd love for you to talk about them and how you got through them and sort of...

**Hosain Rahman** (0:43)
What did we call them the other day? The sort of the not near death experiences, but defibrillator.
You actually had to sort of resuscitate it.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:50)
Yeah, and I've literally never heard of so many, so I'd love for you to give us a little story, because it was back in 1999

**Hosain Rahman** (0:58)
Yeah, when we started the company, it was 1999 I mean, a lot of people don't know this, but when we started, we sort of started working on the ideas in sort of 97, 98 And for lack of a better way to describe it, we were trying to build Siri for mobile devices. We've been inspired by Palm and Nokia and all these folks that were sort of at the front of this mobile device revolution. And we thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if you could talk to your phone?
And that would sort of transform the user interface experience and all of that. And so we started with this kind of customer problem, and that's always when we've been good and when we've stayed away, when we stray away from trying to solve that customer problem, we sort of fall down. And there's been a few of those along the way. But, you know, and so very early on, we were trying, we said, okay, voice would be the great way to interact with this. How do we make, basically Siri, this voice interaction layer on top of the operating system? And we set out to do that, we realized everything we wanted to do with speech recognition wasn't going to work.
And at the same time, we'd sort of started to try to go raise money for this idea of a new way to interact with your device. And, you know, I say now, it was harder for us to raise our first half a million dollars than it was for us to raise our first $200 million. And it's because in those days, people weren't in the valley, they weren't so focused on mobile, they certainly weren't thinking about mobile voice.
And we really needed to prove that we had, everyone thought, yes, there absolutely has to be a better way to interact with your device, but what's your hook? What's your advantage? What's that kind of breakthrough? And what we ended up doing is inventing this noise cancellation technology that turned out to be the biggest breakthrough in mobile audio in 30 years. And it was a sort of serendipitous thing that we stumbled upon, mostly because we were trying to solve this problem. And then when we did that, we said, wait, this is bigger than making speech recognition work. It gets to the core of what people do on their phones, which is talk at the time. Now we do lots of other things on our phones. But in those days, it was a lot about talking, mostly about talking.
And so then we thought, okay, great, everyone's gonna want this.
Everyone that ever heard the demo where we would do these A-B tests with weed whackers and blenders and all this stuff, and we'd sort of take out all the noise. Everyone's like, wow, I wanna have that on my device. And so we set on this journey. We started talking to all the handset manufacturers that were big at the time. Sort of Nokia and Motorola and the Korean guys, Sony Ericsson, Ericsson actually.
And it was a real wake up call. No one actually wanted to take this technology. They thought, yeah, it's a neat demo. We think it's cool. So they loved the demo, but they didn't want to integrate the technology. It was too expensive to add additional microphones. I was with somebody from Apple the other day who was telling me they now have six microphones, I think, in an iPhone.