Tony Fadell

Tony Fadell
Anthony Michael "Tony" Fadellis a Lebanese-American inventor, designer, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He served as the Senior Vice President of the iPod Division at Apple Inc., from March 2006 to November 2008 and is known as "one of the fathers of the iPod" for his work on the first generations of Apple's music player. In May 2010, he founded Nest Labs, which announced its first product, the Nest Learning Thermostat, in October 2011. Nest was acquired by Google in January...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionInventor
Date of Birth22 March 1969
CountryUnited States of America
You have to look at why people come and work at Nest. Part of it is that a lot of people here already know each other, but we're also on a mission with a purpose. People are personally motivated by energy or safety.
It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.
Well, you can say there is a self driving car. I'm seeing the automation of vehicles. Really, computer-assisted driving. I think that is really interesting to us because we are taking all of the sensors technologies and putting them in cars and making people safer.
I have not seen a true grounds-up revolution from a bunch of companies getting together. It takes one company to put it together, then people draft off of that, but they don't build it top to bottom with a specific vision.
If you look at most successful startups, they're run by people in their mid to late forties, who've gone through the trenches multiple times and had multiple failures, so they understand.
If you look at where the tried and true of Silicon Valley VC's are investing, it's in people who understand what it takes, who've been through it and have a network of people they can tap and resources to pull together.
I knew there were all kinds of interesting things going on at Google, but now that I've seen them, my mind has been blown - in a great way. They have all these amazing projects and people that the world doesn't know anything about. I'm like a kid in a candy store - it's an idea factory.
People buy products, and they want to understand what those things are and how they are applicable to their life.
Even if you have constrained resources, don't cut corners. People will feel it.
I used to work about 100 hours a week; now it's about 70. But 40 hours? Forget about it. Either you're all in, or your not.
I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.
With most tech guys, it's the same outfit every day - they wear their company logo.
Nest really came out of a process where I was trying to design the most connected and the most green home that I knew of. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home.
While I was designing my home, I was living in different houses all around the world, and I saw thermostats that were just as bad as the ones in the U.S., or houses that needed them but didn't have them. I realised that this was a worldwide problem. I thought, 'Let's fix it.'