How Essential Became NonEssential

Essential also known as Essential Products. Folks in the text fere know it as an upstart phone company that recently went out of business. People outside the text fear may have never even heard of it. So today I'm going to tell you the story of Essential Products, where it came from, what the company accomplished, and then what upen

in February twenty and why it's shut down now. The story starts with some major unpleasantness, but it's something that we absolutely have to mention because it plays such an important role in the story of the company itself. The founder of Essential Products is a guy named Andy Rubin. He was one of the co creators of the Android operating system, also the developer of the Sidekick and tons

of other stuff. He had co founded Android way back in two thousand three, years before consumer smartphones were even a thing. Really, there were smartphones around, but they were almost all marketed towards executives. It wouldn't be until two thousand seven, with the introduction of the iPhone from Apple, that we'd really see a more consumer oriented smartphone. Don't get me wrong, this is not the Android story. I have covered the Android story before, so let me give

you the highlights. Google acquired Android in two thousand five, just two years into that company's existence. The company kept the development of its smartphone operating system hush hush, only even acknowledging it after Apple had debuted the iPhone in two thousand seven. Then Google announced that it was taking a very different approach to Apple. While Apple was creating both the operating system and the hardware, starting with phones and later doing things like the iPad, it would all

run the same operating system. But Google was going to create an operating system that could run on an entire spectrum of hardware from multiple manufacturers, leaving it up to the manufacturers to choose whether or not they wanted to incorporate Android into their products. Or to go with some other operating system solution. In other words, Apple was going for a curated, purpose built approach and Google was going

for a more broad spectrum strategy. The first Android smartphone wouldn't even arrive until two thousand eight, a year after the iPhone's appearance, and Android had a lot of catching up to do. But that broad spectrum approach meant Android could appear on lots of different mobile phones at a lot of different price points, on multiple carriers, from multiple manufacturers. That meant that people who wanted a smartphone but they couldn't afford the more premium iPhone, or maybe they weren't

an a T and T customer. I mean keep in mind, for the first couple of years iPhone was exclusive to a T and T in the United States. Well, they could opt instead to go for an Android phone, typically at a lower price point, and since Apple has a reputation for charging more for its products, this wasn't really

that unusual. In Android phone sales were outpacing iPhone sales by eleven Android phones were outnumbering iPhones in the United States, and by the Android operating system represented an eight percent market share of all smartphones out there the os really made up for lost time. Meanwhile, Andy Rubin was now a high level executive within Google. He trends position from overseeing Android to heading up a division within Google focused

on robotics. He would leave Google inten and in twenty fifteen he would co found a venture capital firm called Playground Global, and the tech company A Central Products would follow a little bit later. It wasn't until tween, with an expose a in The New York Times, that the world at large learned more about his departure. The details would throw major swerves at the company's he was working with, and those details go back to the major unpleasantness I

alluded to earlier. According to the expose in Reuben coerced a fellow Google employee into performing sex acts. And I should add that Reuben himself denies this story. But Google led an internal investigation that must have found some credibility that Reuben was guilty of some form of misconduct or otherwise concluded that having Reuben on staff was untenable. As Larry Page himself, then the CEO of Google told Reuben

to resign. Reuben had recently been awarded one hundred fifty million dollars worth of Google stock, and in fact, according to the Verge, Reuben actually received that stock award while this investigation was underway, which is pretty phenomenal. Now. According to g Q, Reuben wouldn't see any of that money because the directive for him to resign would mean he'd have to leave the company before those stock awards would

actually vest, so he didn't see that hundred fifty million dollars. However, Google would famously pay Reuben a whopping ninety million dollar exit fee. The public facing story was that Reuben was leaving Google on his own accord in order to pursue opportunities in creating new startups and making new investments. It was the combination of the allegations of sexual abuse with the award of early one million dollars that would bring incredible criticism down both on Reuben and Google in general,

and justifiably so. The ramifications of this decision are still having incredible effects to this day, and the culture at Google continues to be shaped by the whole story and the fact that top level executives at Google we're covering up sexual harassment allegations and other awful things that involved quote unquote top performers at the company. Now, I wanted to get all that out of the way early because the actual incident happened two years before Reuben would create

the company Essential Products, so it predates the company. However, the revelation of what happened and the aftermath that followed in and beyond would have a huge impact on everything else Reuben was involved with. So now we know about this awful act that was lurking in the background. But let's get down to the story of Essential Products itself. Noing that this scandal and a few others on top of that one will come back into factor into what

actually happened. I really wish that this was just a typical text startup story and a failure that you know, I could easily cover. But the personal details of the company's founder and the company's fate itself are tied together pretty tightly. So it's two thousand fifteen. Reuben has left Google.

The world at large doesn't know the details of that departure, and Reuben at this point is married to a woman he met at Google named Reri Hera Baru, and that will also play a big role in the story to follow. Reuben goes on to create an investment firm called Playground Global. Playground Global also acted as what is called a hardware incubator. That is, it was a company that would fund research

and development projects related to new hardware products. People could come in and pitch an idea and then if the board liked the idea, they could approve of it and allow the people who pitched it some space and other assets, some mentorship, you know, stuff to help them bring that idea to life. And this could be anything from mobile phones, network devices, smart home technologies, really any kind of hardware product.

And they also looked at software as well, though it was like a seventy thirty split between hardware and software. This investment company got its own initial investment from a group of limited partners and that included HP read Point Ventures. There was the Chinese company Tencent that was an investor

and kill says Google. The amount of money raised by this collection was around three hundred million dollars, So wow, Yeah, that's also pretty outrageous since one of the company's pouring money into this venture was the same one that had pushed Ruben out due to allegations of sexual misconduct a year earlier. Though again that wasn't public knowledge, but presumably people at Google were aware of it. And a bit later in after play Ground Global was off the ground,

Reuben founded another company called Essential Products. This received funding from you guessed it, playground Global in the Series A Round of Funding. Reuben raised thirty million dollars for Essential Products in order to higher on staff, and one of Reuben's businesses was essentially funding another business. The other big contributor for the Series A Round of funding for Essential Products was Red Point And just to be clear, this

wasn't illegal, Folks, weren't raising eyebrows or anything. I mean, the whole purpose of Playground Global was to fund hardware ventures and that's what Essential Products aimed to be. The two ventures, by the way, shared the same operating space, so Essential Products had common space with Playground Global. They were co located in the same warehouse for two years. The company got to work on projects, and during this time things were pretty quiet. The company didn't have anything

to announce yet. It would take time to develop the hardware and software to a point that Essential Products would have anything to announce. So Reuben and his company operated out of sight and largely out of mind. What they

were working on were a couple of different things. Their flagship product and the only one from Essential Products to ever be brought to market spoiler alert on that one would become the Essential pH one smartphone sometimes just called the Essential phone, which is fair because it's the only thing that ever came out from that company, and this

one ran on the Android operating system. The other two products, which again never emerged beyond the development stage, included a home hub similar to Google Home or Amazon's Echo line of products that was essentially called Essential Home, and then a custom built operating system for that hub, and this was one that the company called Ambient. Now I'll go over those in a moment, but we have some more

business e business business to attend to first. In early seventeen, the tech media world was beginning to pick up buzz that Essential was preparing a launch of a product, and that product was rumored to be a smartphone, and it would happen sometime in the spring of Around that same time, the company was seeking a significant investment to the tune of one hundred million dollars from the massive Japanese holding

company soft Bank, but that deal got scuttled. Now the apparent reason for this, for soft Bank's change of heart had to do with another tech company called Apple. One of soft Bank's interests is an investment arm called soft

Bank Vision Fund. This is the arm that would have funded Essential, and Apple had made a one billion dollar that's billion with a B contribution to that fund, and analysts concluded that soft Bank backed out of this investment with Essential due to that sizeable contribution from Android's chief competitor.

In fact, while Reuben would not specifically say the name Apple, he did state that a party that was involved in this investment fund discovered that they were one of the potential investments and that this would mean that this other company, Apple would have a stake of ownership in his company, and that neither party, Apple nor Essential wanted that and that was the reason why the deal fell through. Now, losing out on a one hundred million dollar deal is

obviously enormous. Shortly after news broke of SoftBank's reversal, Andy Ruben tweeted out a message that included a render image of a new smartphone design and it would turn out to be the pH one, but we didn't have a name for it yet. This was the beginning of sort of a campaign of marketing for the phone and for the company at large, because Reuben was seeking out new investors to replace the fact that he lost the soft Bank money. The pictures showed an undeniably attractive smartphone. The

device had an extremely thin bezel. And the word bezel comes from the world of jewelry and watches. It refers to the ring of material that holds in place the innerds of the thing, sometimes like the glass cover of a watch or a jewel in a setting. So with smartphones, it's the frame that holds the screen in place, and older smartphones had really wide bezels, and in turn that eats into the potential screen size, or if you want to have a really big screen, it means you have

a really big phone because of that bezel. The phone in Reuben's tweet had an extremely thin bezel, creating a sort of edge to edge appearance for the phone's screen. Now, this was not the first smartphone to go that route, mind you, Sharp's Aquos Crystal phone, which launched way back

in Twoteen, boasted a bez less screen. The Essential phone also appeared to have no three and a half millimeter headphone jack, which would be confirmed later, and again, this wouldn't be the first smartphone to ditch the headphone jack. That would require people to invest in either bluetooth headsets or use a dongle adapter to plug into the USBC jack that was on the phone and then use wired

headphones through the adapter. But other smartphones, like Apple's iPhone seven, which had launched in TwixT also didn't have a three and a half millimeter headphone jack, and the headphone jack required more space and resources, including power supplies and stuff like that, and that takes up valuable space inside a phone. So ditching it was a somewhat controversial decision when it first started to happen in the industry, because a lot

of folks like yours truly were dinosaurs. We were still using wired earbuds, and we get real grouchy about the fact that we didn't have those anymore, we couldn't use them without a dongle, or that we had to say the word dongle. But more people begrudgingly accepted that this move actually meant that phones could be thinner, lighter, and that they could dedicate the space that would have gone to the headphone jack to supporting other stuff. So sometimes

progress is painful, but later we're thankful for it. Now, the headphone jack thing wasn't entirely clear from that first tweeted photo, but the image first shared on March two, thousand seventeen, would be the first taste of what was to come, and it helped Reuben get other investors to line up to take the spots soft Bank would have held, so essentially he was able to get new investors for the Series B round of funding. That round of funding would be official in June of but I'm not quite

at that point just yet. At the end of May seventeen, just before the Series B funding round would become official, Reuben would take the stage at the CODE Conference and he was interviewed by Walt Mossburg, and it was at that presentation that he would reveal more information about his company, his company's plans, and their planned products. More on that in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. At the CODE conference, Ruben showed off the Essential Phone,

or what would later be called the pH One. He explained that the bezel of the phone was made out of titanium and that the reason for that was because he needed a really strong material that could stand up to the typical forces of phone might experience without buckling, because other phones around this time were usually made out of aluminum, but aluminum would dent if it had been made as thin as the p H one's bezel had been.

He explained that the back of the phone was made out of ceramic and that it was resistant to damage, so that was also really important, and it came in both a glossy or matt finish. He also explained that the camera on the phone was behind the screen itself, so if you look at a photo of an Essential phone, you'll see that the lens of the camera is at the top center of the very top of the screen,

with the screen actually wrapping around the lens. It's not in its own section like its own little black band at the top of the screen. The screen is both on the left and right of the lens as well, so would be in the center of a notifications bar in other words. Of particular interest was a pair of magnetic pins on the top back section of the phone, and these were designed to interoperate with various accessories for the Essential Phone, so rather than plugging an accessory into

a port, you could snap it on. You would align the pins on the phone with the pins on the accessory and the magnets would click together. The accessory would just snap into place, and the phone would detect the accessory through a wireless connection at the same speeds as USB three. So that would mean that this accessory would raw power and other capabilities from the phone, and it

could in turn enhance the phones. This would mean the accessory would draw power from the phone as well as tap into the phone's networking capabilities, but it would also enhance the phone in some way. So what kind of accessories are we talking about. Well, the one that got featured in that talk and in various reviews and news articles for the phone was a three hundred sixty degree camera accessory. It looked a little bit like a periscope

for the phone. So you would snap it on with these magnetic contacts and the phone would detect the accessory. You would be able to capture three hundred sixty degree

photos and video using the camera. When you were done, you could just remove the camera from the back of the device, just pull it free, and then you could snap on some other accessory if you had one and you wanted to and Ruben's point was that he was pushing devices to move towards a truly wireless kind of future, you know, one where you wouldn't need any ports at all in a phone. You would charge your phone wirelessly, and you'd use a system like these contacts to enhance

the phone's features. And this was a big selling point in the philosophy of Essential. For one thing, in an ideal manifestation, you could buy a basic phone and through this interface you could boost its capabilities with various peripherals. And this was the underlying principle of modular phones in general. And this also was not a brand new idea. I

don't want to suggest that Essential invented this. Other companies like Motorola had toyed with modular phones, but it hadn't really gained much traction, and honestly, it still hasn't when you look at the current market. But another way to look at it was that the wireless data transfer technology meant that for future devices, the company could place the contact points in a different position on the back of the next phone, for example, and the older peripherals would

still work with the new models. One of the downsides of other modular designs, at least according to Ruben, is that they frequently involved physically connected modules that make up a phone. But then if you redesign the phone form factor, then those modules won't connect, they don't fit with the

new form factor. By making this sort of a magnetic contact, you could as long as you kept the same pen arrangement, you could place that wherever you wanted along the backside of the phone and still be able to snap stuff to it, and presumably still be able to use older peripherals with newer models of phones. So it was a

kind of future proofing. For another thing, getting rid of ports means that you could in the future do stuff like create form factors that are more resistant to water and dust and other stuff that could work its way into the electronics of a device that has an open port, So you could create a sealed electronic system that could be far more water resistant or even potentially water proof. Now, that was not what the essential phone was because it

did have a USB C ports. Ruben acknowledged on that stage that we were not yet at a point where we could easily transition into a truly wireless form factor, because charging stations like on an airplane or in hotels. Those almost always requires some form of cable. You've got to plug them into the USB port and then plug

that other end into your device. You aren't likely to find charging pads in most charging hotspots, so the Essential Phone had a USB c port for that reason, and it was a compromise made in an effort to try and transition electronics to a more wireless approach. Let's get to some of the specs of the Essential phone. So it was an Android phone, but without a lot of the added stuff that was found in phones from other

manufacturers and on various carriers. Another selling point for Essential was that users could expect at Android experience with as little added on software, often referred to as bloatwear tacked on. With some Android handsets, you're dealing with stuff that gets added on by the hardware manufacturer as well as whatever phone carrier you're using, and this all can bog down the phone's performance, and users typically don't care for it

very much. A lot of it tends to replicate various applications, and so you don't really need it all, and often you can't remove it. Ruben did not want that to happen with his phone. The phone's processor was a qual Calm snap Dragon eight thirty five, which is an eight core processor running at two point four or five giga hurts clock speed. It also had an adren No five forty graphics processing unit. It sported four gigabytes of RAM, had a d twenty eight gigabytes of data storage space,

did not have a memory card expansion slot. It had to thirteen megapixel rear facing cameras capable of shooting four K resolution video you at thirty frames per second. Uh you could set the frame rate higher, but doing so would reduce the resolution, so you could shoot up to one twenty frames per second, but that would make the resolution seven twenty P, so you've downscaled quite a bit.

It also had a forward facing camera that could shoot at the same resolutions, but it was an eight megapixel camera, not a thirteen megapixel like the rear facing ones. The Essential phone supported Bluetooth five point o l E, the low energy Bluetooth standard that would draw less power from the battery. It had NFC chips near field communication chips,

had WiFi compatibility obviously. It had a rear fingerprint sensor for unlocking the phone and for authorizing purchases and stuff, and it came in a variety of colors, from pure white to black moon to ocean depths, because of course those were the names they used. Reuben revealed that the phone was available for pre order at the cost of six hundred nine nine U S dollars. That's going to change before too long, so I'm gonna have to get

back to that price in a little bit. But first, let's talk about some of the other stuff Ruben had to announce at the Code conference. Ruben also talked about this Essential Home device, the hub that Essential was working on,

as well as the Ambient operating system. Now, according to Reuben, he had no plans of releasing a phone that was running on Ambient, but rather intended Ambient to act as sort of a unifying platform upon which any number of other systems could run, and specifically for home automation purposes. He laid out the challenge of creating a true smart home. So, if you wanted to outfit your home with smart devices,

and we're talking everything. You wanted smart locks, smart lights, you wanted a climate control system that could tap into it, you wanted smart appliances, and everything else, you were likely going to have to depend upon products from lots of different manufacturers, and each product would likely be running on its own set of protocols or rules, and you would likely have to interface through each of them through individual apps,

which would be very frustrating. You'd have an app for your lights, you would have an app for your locks, you would have a different app for your dishwasher, You'd have another one for your air conditioner, and so on. He said the goal of Ambient was to create an operating system that would be compatible with all these different systems, so you could have a centralized way to interface and

control them. You wouldn't have to think about this fractured app environment, so you can have a system that could interpret your commands and make the relevant outcomes happen. And this isn't that different from what Google and Amazon and others were trying to do around the same time, I should add moreover, with Ambient, the goal was to make these various systems operate according to the desires of the user, making them do things that perhaps they weren't able to

do on their own. So, for example, a user might tell their hub that they want a reminder to go off at a certain time of day. Maybe you've got a meeting coming up and you're working from home, so you said an alarm, and as part of that alert, the hub makes the lights in the home dim and brighten a few times. That way, even if you're not within hearing distance of the hub, you see the lights going dim and bright and you realize, oh, that's my alarm.

I need to get ready for this phone call. That would be an example the sort of thing you could do with this hub, and it would be able to take these incoming commands and set up processes necessary to

achieve whatever the outcome was that you desired. Ambient was meant to run on top of the Essential Home Hub, and the images of the hub, or at least the concept images of the hub, showed a round device shaped kind of like a classic analog clock, you know, the kind that hang on the walls and have hands and stuff in the old school, and a log clocks, But

in this case this device was on its back. So imagine taking a clock off a wall and setting it flat on a table and the backside of it the or the top if you want to think of it that way, Like the twelve o'clock location on the clock

was thicker than the six o'clock location. Uh, the whole thing was several inches thick at least again according to the concept photos, so it meant that the face of the hub was at an angle right, the top side was at a higher elevation than the bottom side, and on the face of it it was like again like

a clock. Was a digital screen that Reuben said measured around five and a half inches across, and the screen was touch enabled, and the device itself could be voice activated, so the device could display information as well as spell out data on its screen. And Reuben said that the way information should be delivered is frequently dependent upon the purpose of that information. So in some cases hearing the information is really useful, like asking a quick question and

getting an answer, that's fine. But in other cases it might be easier to read the information off a display. So, for example, if you were trying to follow a recipe, it would be way easier to follow it if the instructions were on a screen rather than ving them just spoken to you all at once. Unlike the phone, Reuben didn't have a release date or a price for the Essential Home smart hub, and it would turn out there would never be a need for one because it again

never came to market. Shortly after the Code conference event, Essential Products completed the Series B round of funding and raised another three hundred million dollars, bringing the total now to three thirty million. With those two series of investment funding rounds, this gave the company evaluation of one billion dollars, which catapulted Essential into the ranks of Unicorn startups. But now we're right at the precipice of where things would

start to fall apart for the company. Some of those things revolved around the critical reception of the Essential pH one phone. Some would focus more on Reuben's past, as details about the real reasons for his departure from Google would slowly become revealed. But let's start with the reviews, as those came first, though not by very much so. Ruben announced the phone in May, and he said originally that he expected the phone to start shipping within thirty days.

This was at the very end of May, so it would have looked at around July as a launch date. However, the phone would actually launch in mid August seventeen. The company had supplied a few different tech journal outlets with review phones before the final version shipped and the review models didn't have the finalized operating system on them, and the company missed those two ship dates. There was one in July, and then there was another one earlier in

August that they missed. UM outlets like c net stated that they held off on writing and publishing a review until they were pretty sure that the handsets they had were running the same sort of software that the consumer models that were being shipped out we're running. Those reviews would end up being fairly mixed. Reviewers liked the look of the phone, and they like the feel of it. They liked how it felt when they held it. It felt substantial, it felt sturdy. They liked the thin bezel.

They liked that it was carrier agnostics, so it could work with any cellular provider, at least in the United States. They liked how fast the operating system was and how responsive it could be switching from app to app, largely thanks to the absence of that bloatwear I mentioned earlier, but Something's reviewers really didn't like. They found the phone

wouldn't perform well on T Mobile's network. They didn't care for the camera app, though the camera could take spectacular photos and video, but initially before Essential would send out a firmware patch, the camera had issues with stuff like auto focus and low light captures, and white balance stabilization. It didn't have a portrait mode. Some of those problems,

like I said, would get addressed in a patch. The phone also lacked a noise reduction strategy, so if you were shooting in an environment with ambient noise, like on a windy day, that noise would get picked up in the video you shot, so it'd be very hard to hear anything else. Reviewers also initially found problems with the three hundred sixty degree camera peripheral, which at code conference

Reuben had suggested might cost around fifty dollars. It actually retailed for two hundred dollars, and a lot of people felt that the battery just wasn't very good it didn't last very long. Ultimately, the general consensus was that despite the missed ship dates, the Essential pH one launched without being fully baked, like it still wasn't really ready and that would be a big problem. I'll explain more after

this quick break. So, the Essential pH one launches after missing a couple of dates, and reviews are mixed and because it's not tied to a specific carrier, it gets no support from the major cell service providers. It's not occupying prominent displays in places like spring It or T Mobile or a T and T or Verizon stores. Customers don't flock to the phone. Sales are slow. It was not a great start to essentials plans of making a

coherent tech ecosystem. And while the company would fix several of the initial problems of the pH one a few weeks after it launched, the damage had really been done already. However, that damage would be compounded in late November. That's when an initial report first broke the news that Reuben left Google, not because of some sense of wander lust, like he claimed at the Code conference, but a totally different kind

of lust. And again, it would be another year before we would get the New York Times expose where more details would really come out, But the word early on was that Reuben had left Google after he had had an inappropriate relationship, an inappropriate and undisclosed relationship with a fellow Google employee that was totally not his wife, and his wife also was a Google employee, but that part was you know, known and fine and everything this was

a different relationship. H Baru. The aforementioned wife had begun divorce proceedings against her husband back in May seventeen. That was the same month as the Code conference. Now that information hadn't really hit the news outlets at this time.

The divorce process was a really ugly one, and it would just get uglier, as his estranged wife would later file a separate civil lawsuit against Reuben that would claim the former Google executive had been running a sex ring operation, that he had failed to disclose his actual finances, and that he had coerced re into signing a prenuptial agreement on top of a ton of other stuff. So if you really want all the salacious details, you can actually

find lots of articles about it. Suffice it to say the allegations are many and lurid, but at this stage not much of that had been revealed other than this article that said Reuben had been forced to leave Google due to an investigation into allegations of misconduct at the company. Right around that time, Reuben requested leave from the Essential board of Directors so that he could you know, quote unquote attend to some personal issues, and the board granted

that request. Now, as far as I can tell, he had no formal departure from Playground Global around this same time. Remember that's his investment company. So Reuben was gone from Essential for just a couple of weeks. He took his leave towards the end of November, and by early December he was back. So why this quick rubber banding. Well, Essential wasn't doing so well. The lackluster sales of the pH one were a real source of concern for the company.

Ruben's return was in part a way to address investor concerns about essentials future. The revelation of the real reason for his departure from Google, even without all the details that would later follow, couldn't have hit at a worse time for the company. What Essential really needed was someone in a leadership role who could be viewed both as a visionary and someone who would reliably be in charge.

And Reuben was still viewed as a visionary, but in the wake of these revelations, the reliability part was more in question. Essential would reduce the price of the pH one by two hundred dollars, so they knocked it down to four hundred bucks in the United States, and before a year would pass from the launch of the phone, the price would get knocked down again. It reached around three hundred fifty bucks on Amazon, which meant that it was being marketed at a fifty percent mark down at

that point yikes. And there was no word about the Essential Home smart hub or the ambient operating system. The company was in a type of information lockdown. They weren't really saying anything much at all about what was in development.

Presumably the company was working on the follow up to the pH One, but there were no details about that either, and so it went throughout the rest of and much of According to slash Gear, the company only sold nine thousand handsets of the pH one in all of seventeen, keeping in mind they didn't really launch until August, but still ninety thousand not a lot. Essential flagship Phone eventually sold out. The company announced that they had no intentions

to manufacture more of them, and that makes sense. They had had to cut the price down to half by the time they finally sold out, so my guess is that making more of them would have been a money losing process, and that it probably made more sense internally to focus on the next divide rather than try to continue to push a failed device, at least one that

had failed in the sense of market reception. And then the latter half of two thousand eighteen came, and with it the double whammy of Ruben's ex wife filing that civil lawsuit and the expose in the New York Times that contained way more details about Ruben's alleged activities that led to his dismissal from Google and more, plus the added piece of information that he had left with a

ninety million dollar exit package. That bit of information would inspire thousands of Google employees to participate in a walkout protesting the company's tolerance for sexual misconduct perpetrated by quote unquote high performing employees. This was one of the big stories to play out during the early days of the hashtag me too movement, along with equally high profile stories out of companies like Uber, and Reuben's story was front

and center in this discussion. Now, I imagine that those revelations made it even harder for essential products to secure investment money. Reuben had always been pivotal for landing those deals because he had previously had a really good reputation as a co founder of Android, and his reputation at Google until two thousand seventeen appeared to be a very upstanding one, and it gave him a lot of cash.

Among investors, they were all eager to back the next runaway success, you know, the way Android had turned out to be. They wanted to be on the ground when

the next one happened, and they thought really believed in Reuben. Now, Reuben, mostly through his lawyer, denied many of the allegations were made against him, but the New York Times piece was pretty darn thorough, and the civil lawsuit brought up even more allegations, including a charge that Reuben had intentionally misled his ex wife about his finances when he committed her

to sign that prenuptial agreement. On that front, the matter became a story about an accused ex husband who may have been involved in a lot of unethical and potentially illegal activities and an ex wife who was accused of trying to work around a legally binding prenup agreement. So, like I said, this got super ugly. That civil lawsuit would eventually be settled out of court, and we never

learned the details of that settlement. Now, back on the company front, Essential was still in business, but things were not great. The company had seemingly abandoned the smart home hub project and the ambient operating system project. There were no signs of an essential pH two phone. There were rumors that Reuben was looking to sell off the company even in the middle of twenty nineteen, but apparently no

suitable suitors came a call in. In the spring of twenty nineteen, Reuben quietly resigned from Playground Global, you know, the investment firm, but he stayed on with essential products. His departure from the investment in hardware incubator firm was not widely reported until a few months later. In the fall of twenty nineteen, the company broke radio silence to announce a new product in development. This was Project Gem. Technically it's a smartphone, though at casual glance it looks

more like a remote control. It's long and narrow. It does not fit the more established form factor that you think of when you think of the words smartphone. The front of the device is a screen surrounded again by a thin bezel, kind of like the pH one, except again it's long and narrow, not in your typical smartphone shape, and applications appeared to be represented as cards or tiles, employing users would use touch commands to scroll through apps

rather than selecting an icon on a screen. Now, according to earlier reports from Bloomberg, this phone's user interface would rely more on voice commands than a typical smartphone would, And there was a small section on the back of the phone, a little round section looked like a touch sensor or a fingerprint skinner, and the general thought was maybe this was an activation for voice commands, kind of

like a walkie talkie button. The company released at least one video showing off the concept of the phone running productivity apps, and I gotta say I was not blown away by this video. It looked awkward to me, particularly the on screen keyboard, which had sort of a diagonal layout, which was necessary because again, the device itself is narrow, so it's not wide enough to fit a keyboard and quirty layout across the screen. And that's about all we know as far as Project Gem goes. It didn't get

far enough for us to learn very much more. And that's because while Essential announced the Project Gem device in October two thousand nineteen, the company itself would not last very much longer. On February twelve, twenty Essential said that the team had taken Project Gem as far into development as it could go, but they had no route forward into the marketplace, and that the project was scuttled and the company itself was shuttered. Essential was non Essential, I

guess now. Even mind this was February of which is early enough to be before the real impact of the coronavirus and COVID nineteen would take hold. The company was already struggling enough as it was, so my guess is that if they had decided to try and tough it out a little bit longer, they would have still had to call it quits once the scope of the coronavirus

outbreak became better understood. So what actually happened, Well, if I had to guess, and I do, because there aren't a lot of reports about this, I would say that Ruben's presence became toxic as far as raising money for the company goes, and the failure of the pH one, exacerbated by details of Reuben's departure from Google, was a huge blow. If it were not for the stories about Reuben's departure, he might have been able to secure more investments.

The company's first product is rarely a runaway success after all, and the vision Reuben had was one that investors could really still get behind. But I think the increased singly gross stories about his alleged conduct discouraged investment. While I don't know if he left Playground Global you know that investment hardware incubator firm, or if he had been asked to leave, I suspect that Playground really wanted to distance itself from its co founder and focus on other projects.

So that also meant that Playground Global wasn't going to be backing Essential any further. They didn't want to have that pr albatross around their corporate neck, and so Essential and Playground, because they were sharing the same workplace, I imagined there was a lot of pressure for Essential to move out as well, again to actually make physical distance between the two companies. This again is me using conjecture.

I don't know any details for sure about this. I suspect that the Playground partners were eager to get more distance from Reuben. In addition, Project Jim was such a dramatic departure from what people expect with smartphones that I get failed to capture a lot of excitement. It was

more like a befuddling kind of response. So you had a company with a leader who was increasingly seen as being an anchor as far as pr is concerned, and a product that no one was really sure would be met with enthusiasm if it ever made it to market, and you had a company with dwindling capital because their first product was a failure. It was a flop, and it's not a big surprise that the company ultimately folded.

It's a shame for a lot of reasons. I don't want to see people lose their jobs, especially with the timing involved. Right, losing your job just as the coronavirus outbreaks starts to become a dominant thing in the world very very hard for people. The ideas that were behind all these products are really intriguing. I mean, they're they're

good ideas from a technological standpoint. As for Reuben Man, I mean, if the things said about him are true, even if half of them are true, I don't really mind if he just sort of fades away from the public consciousness, because while he might have great ideas as far as tech is concerned, everything I've read about the person really makes me think it would be best if we all just took a break, you know, and that

wraps up the story of Essential. I know it's not incredibly satisfying because there are a lot of question marks that remain, but ultimately I think my guesses are probably pretty close to the mark. If you guys have suggestions for future topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, a trend in tech, maybe some other tech related concept. Reach out to me and

let me know. You can get in touch on Twitter the handle is tech stuff hs W, or on Facebook, where the handle is tech stuff hs W probably was a better way to say that, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.