That was the kind of thing that was always my go-to when I want to just hear something that gets me going. And why is that? And we had teams of people working on it from every single angle. Let’s talk about your early years. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! We need to get it right. Tony Fadell. Whitepages people search is the most trusted directory. We’re gonna change the hardware.” We’re like, “Wait a second. You want to stay comfortable, too. Don’t get ahead of yourself. And so he had this educational aspect and this builder aspect and he, he didn’t just give it to my brother and I but also all the people he worked with. They’ve been building digital, little devices and stuff.” And a week later, I was on the ski slopes getting ready in Vail to get on the chairlift, and, “Hello, this is Jon Rubinstein.” I didn’t know who he was, and then the conversation started, and lo and behold, the iPod came out less than a year later. We have a green issue. And we’re like, “There’s got to be a better way, especially because it’s mandated. We move on.” It’s when you didn’t do what was right and you failed because you didn’t put your heart and soul into it, and you let the team down. I do these things that people told me to do and get back and then I come home. The labels are failing because everyone’s stealing music. They manage that device. It came back 10-X from the community. And everything just magically happened for you. So it is a big leap, but it was a great leap that he and Chiat Day and the whole team there were able to create. Joanna Hoffman. In the end, you don’t know. Could you tell us your thoughts about that? So you agreed to come on as a consultant, and then wasn’t there some pressure to join the company full-time? You want to be able — it should turn down when you go away. All Rights Reserved. Returning to California, Fadell and Lambert set out to build an environmentally sustainable, energy-efficient dream home in Lake Tahoe. They don’t know who their mother is. Fadell will remain at … There were certain things where we would add certain new hardware components two weeks before we launched the product and had to ship it three weeks later in full production. If I fail, I could fall off this mountain. It’s not going to be something that everybody runs to and then just gathers around the digital hearth. It occurred to Fadell that many of the devices in everyday use in the home were overdue for reinvention. So it sounds like working on your own nest, in a way, inspired Nest Labs. But your gut was right, wasn’t it, that you needed to be around like-minded people, perfectionists who are really striving to do something new? They have superpowers now. Don’t bet against the Internet of Things. Well, you can say there is a self driving car. There’s 20 – 25 people in it. Tell us about the idea of the “Internet of Things.” Is that something you relate to? We tried to make sure we understood the risks we were getting into and mitigate them along the route. The reason being is because they didn’t do a lot in high school, even in grade school, in college, to know what they really love. Saying not just, “Hey, let’s build on that idea,” as opposed to, “Oh, that’s the shittiest idea I’ve ever heard,” and then tomorrow, “I got this great idea,” which was the same thing. At General Magic we learned how to do products. So I looked him straight in the eye, and I said yes. And it’s like, someone’s selling the wrong dream. It was like an old rotary phone. He wanted to focus on the product, because that’s what would really convert people, to sell. Sometimes you need to collaborate. We can’t go back and say, “Was that startup company going to be a success if I’d stayed?” We do know what happened with it. And the thing with my studies and at the University of Michigan back at the time — and this was with all colleges for the most part — there were no projects in school. We had to earn our right, so we had to work incredibly hard to earn our place in the sun. I can feel it.” And that’s how I make decisions and figure out where to go in life. You’re not just impressing the geek down the hall. Tony Fadell: It’s fun to look at. There’s some mythology about the iPod and how it came to happen, that Steve Jobs said, “Go out and find me the man who is going to put this together. Meanwhile, Fadell began dating Apple’s vice president for human resources, Danielle Lambert, and the couple married within a year. So I got to do customer support and engineering and logistics — shipping things out and marketing, and all these kinds of things alongside him. Below is all you want to know about Tony Fadell's family, spouse, height, weight, and more! Were you convinced that the price would come down and that it would be adopted by the world? You had the idea of a personal digital music player well before you came to Apple and built the iPod, didn’t you? Exactly, and he put it to me very clearly, which was, “Look, a human made this. Tony Fadell:  To leave Apple, obviously, was really hard. Tony Fadell: Why me? But you know what, you’re just a bubble inside of this community. And they’re both looking at it from the inside out and the outside in, trying to break in, so we have people trying to break into our technology, that we pay to make sure that we keep that data secure and private. I brush my teeth. Tony Fadell: “Some” is an interesting way of putting it. He just gave you that confidence — 18, 19, whatever — and then we started a company together even. It is as much a work of design as it is of engineering. He was like, “Let’s do this.” And he goes, “Now we have to hire you.”, And Jon turns to me and goes like this, he goes, “I got this. Join Facebook to connect with Tony Fadell and others you may know. So if you could always make it accessible to those beginners, then you can empower them, and you’re gonna capture a whole huge audience of people who want those superpowers too. Put up cubes. Between his two stints at Apple he had Next. But then we had 80-year-old people doing it, and it’s everything between, and it was just a thermostat that no one cared about just a year previous. And they started this company called General Magic. I didn’t know what I did, and for the next two days, I was an utter mess trying to figure out, “Did I do the right thing?” or whatever. And much to the chagrin of my mom, my grandfather would try to fix up some of the houses, and he wouldn’t do it in a very nice way. So you said your mother worked too, and what did she do? You’ve talked about having this open culture at Nest. Tony Fadell: I knew what my path of engineering was, and I really loved that. Nest Labs, Inc. is located in Palo Alto, CA, United States and is part of the Electronic Component Wholesalers Industry. It totally cannibalized it — the iPhone. Tony Fadell, co-founder and ex-CEO of Nest, said both companies' efforts in connected gadgets were hurt when Google made Nest a separate business less than two years after acquiring it. We love all those things. It figures out when you come and go. And it was just that. So I’m like, “Wait a second, Jon. It wasn’t rational. Did you see Disney’s Tomorrowland and the Monsanto House of the Future when you were a boy? So that’s where I learned in life that even with the most resources, you can design and build anything, but if you don’t have the right team behind you to sell and market it, and really do it, you’re not gonna have a great success. It was fun. A human can repair it and make it better.” So it was, don’t worry about those things. When you’re in those moments, when you’re at that fork in the road, logic doesn’t always apply. So — and I had some help with some other people at Apple. Let’s give you a heads-up.” And you go, “Hey, we smell something. Tony Fadell: It was two years ago this week, or next week, that we closed the deal to sell Nest to Google. You need to set near-term milestones. And then it swung all the way to these shared spaces, everybody talking, right? Go down a little bit, but don’t look down. I don’t know everything I need to know.” So she’s crying. But as they grew older, they started ignoring all that, and especially now, they’re like, “What? Except for two people, they’d never met me. In high school, he perused MacWorld and the other computer magazines and dreamed of working with the team responsible for creating Apple’s Macintosh computer. It is really fun. And you do have to distort reality if you want to change the reality we’re living in. Tony Fadell: The Internet of Things, I think, is a horrible term for individuals, for people. None of them were great. He attended 12 schools in … So Steve and I hang up. Just this lifeblood of people. Jobs too was interested in developing a music player, and Fadell went to work for Apple as an outside contractor in 2001. I went right to the CEO with the help of some other people, and I pitched ’em. And I had to start carrying around all these CD cases, thousands of CDs — because vinyl went out. His father was a sales executive with the Levi Strauss company and the family moved frequently when Tony Fadell was growing up. And usually, it always is expensive because there’s not enough volume in it. We’re going to make it happen.” And that is as much of a skill and as important to Steve as any of his other traits, maybe the most important. So engineering was always along the route, and it was just another tool to go with all the things my grandfather had taught me, right? He would just look at the logical way it should be done, and what was the best thing for the customer and then push you on it, whether it was in this detail or that. Tony Fadell: So General Magic. We didn’t have the cash, the team — the technology even — to be able to have a grand master plan back then and just implement it. 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. My room’s clean.”  Like, hardly clean, but when they were young, they saw those little bits and pieces. Nobody’s perfect, obviously. We bonded over the nine months he was contracting. And so for us we would move to a new place, probably usually left our things in the boxes. We have babies using them. So we had, we had the wind at our — at our backs, but we were going again against very big cell phone competition, right? I do this. Tony Fadell is married to Danielle Lambert. I’ve seen so many people get out of school. I meet you for the first time, 24 hours — let’s get married.” That’s not the right way to do these kinds of things, in my experience. I can’t hire anybody in Silicon Valley if you ask for that.” And then I go, “I’m gonna make you a deal. Feel that elation. So we put tons of love and attention into our first product, and guess what? We were told we were gonna topple Microsoft and all these companies. The Street, as we know — Wall Street, whatever, venture capitalists — they’re fickle. Tony Fadell, who is known as the “Father of the iPod,” is an American engineer, innovator, designer, and entrepreneur. I’m starting the company, and we’re working through it, and we’re selling our wares. Instead of, you know, instead of dropping out, because there were a lot of dropouts in the ’50s and the ’60s. The company was packed with talent and new ideas but never achieved takeoff. For example, net worth, nationality, age, and more! Did you foresee how successful the iPod would be, how universally accepted it would be, and how it would revolutionize the music industry? Like when we were saying, “Well, we need open offices,” or “We need this,” or “We need great marketing for that,” all they’d want to do is sell TVs. Tony Fadell: You know, people think that “smart” — that was the other thing that Monsanto — everything was about “the smart home,” and every time I heard the word “smart” attached to anything, it means it’s pretty dumb, because no one knows what it really does. He later started to work as a diagnostic engineer and system architect and helped in the manufacturing of many devices such as Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy. And he also taught special-ed kids. So that was his talent, and allowed us — and has really instilled in me — to do the same thing, hopefully to the same level he could. And that gives you a good perspective as to which to observe the world because it’s really about people at the end of the day. The Nest Thermostat conserves energy by learning the habits of its users and can be managed remotely by smartphone. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home. Tony Fadell, Founder and CEO of Nest and SVP of Google, attends The New York Times New Work Summit on February 29, 2016 in Half Moon Bay, California. We want to let people take their tunes on the go from iTunes, but they’re all bad. Tony Fadell: Sure. We reverse-engineered the CPU — the central processing unit — for the Apple II, and we made it run five or six times faster, and we actually sold our chips to Apple. You need to believe it to achieve it.” And Steve would believe something so passionately that — how could I say — it was educated. We had the pleasure of having him address the Academy of Achievement in 1982. One area he has avoided is mainland China, whose vast market and innumerable startups he prefers to leave to the experts. And that’s where Nest was born out of, those frustrations with not getting the right things to make a green and connected home. Its latest concept watch, the Type 2 e-Crown, was in part designed by ex-Apply designer Tony Fadell and connects wirelessly to a phone. I’m seeing the automation of vehicles. Tony Fadell's height is pretty average measuring 1.7 m. Boasting a weight of 88 kg. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. But at the same time, we also have a different culture. But yeah, you had to be steadfast and strong and hold your ground, and sometimes it took a team of people to hold their ground to win over Steve with an argument. They were like, “Who is this guy? He spent the next decade pioneering mobile technology for the leading electronics companies, but none would fully commit to marketing the devices he created. We had a great run. So I encourage people all the time, make sure you do things before you commit to that’s your life path. Biography. I can’t leave this startup. Tony Fadell: Exactly. And it was such a great relationship that we got to date and learn a lot about each other. You’re not really interacting with it. Just as like my dad was, because he had a sales team as well. He wasn’t always mired in so many of the details, so he could really step back and not worry about the intricacies of implementation and how hard it might be. Or we weren’t thinking about it right, or somebody was falling down on the job or whatever the case may be. Tony Fadell:  The first thing to realize is, don’t believe everything you see in movies and read in books. Both sides of my shoulders are screaming in my ears. Don’t do that again. Tony Fadell Wiki Biography. Design, not just of the product itself, but design of the marketing, design ultimately of the retail stores. Apple also announced that Tony Fadell, Apple’s senior vice president of the iPod Division, and his wife Danielle Lambert, vice president of Human Resources, are reducing their roles within the company as they devote more time to their young family. 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. This thing is going to become the primary interface to your world, whether you’re in your home using it or you’re outside your home. There is no way both my wife, who worked for Steve directly — I worked for Steve — could do that for ten years if there wasn’t some amazing stuff that came out of it. 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