The Stanford duo and a Livermore scientist they recruited ended up with grants from the U.S. Navy and DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm whose precursor had funded the creation of the Internet. Recognizing that what might work on the battlefield would be equally useful in an automobile, the small team decided to build a headset that would employ technology to block background noise. (Its eventual trademarked name had a martial flair: Noise-Assassin.) They formed a company, AliphCom, evoking the first letter in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets with a wink toward speech communication. Early on they turned down an offer to sell out to headset leader Plantronics. Like all good entrepreneurs, they believed they were onto something.

What they were onto was good enough to get a meeting with Steve Jobs in 2004. Unfortunately, he savaged their product, a headset that connected via a wire and a clip to a cellphone. Recalls Rahman: “Steve said, ‘The only place anyone would ever use a clip like that is in your mind.’ ” Jobs was right. Rahman and Asseily introduced their headset that year to favorable reviews, but the product flopped. By then they had recruited Pat McVeigh, a seasoned hardware executive who had worked at Palm as CEO. They had also attracted a modest investment from Mayfield Fund, an old-line Silicon Valley venture firm. When the headset failed, though, Mayfield threatened to close the doors, and another DARPA grant helped keep the company afloat. Most of the employees left, including McVeigh. Rahman calls that period Jawbone’s “nuclear winter.”