Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

The religion of Silicon Valley is reinvention, disruption—blowing up old ways of thinking and proposing new ones. But certain things you can’t blow up. Human nature doesn’t change, regardless of what you’re building, where you live, how old you are, how wealthy or not.

The world is full of mediocre, middle-of-the-road companies creating mediocre, middle-of-the-road crap, but I’ve spent my entire life chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence.

Because I didn’t make anything. I was just one of the people on the teams that made the iPod, iPhone, the Nest Learning Thermostat, and Nest Protect.

I drank every last drop of the Kool-Aid and poured my life into that company. We were going to change the world. We couldn’t lose.

why lug around a giant plastic brick with you?

I was 100 percent sure General Magic was going to make one of the most impactful devices in history. I poured everything into it. We all did. The team worked literally nonstop for years—we even gave out awards for sleeping in the office for consecutive nights.

Then General Magic imploded. After years of work, tens of millions invested, newspapers shouting that we were destined to beat Microsoft, we sold three to four thousand devices. Maybe five thousand. And that was mostly to family and friends.

But I didn’t care. I knew I just needed to get in the door to prove myself and move up.

learned more from my first colossal failure than I ever did from my first success.

It was deeply flawed and strangely suspended between the past and the future—it had both animated emojis and a little printer for faxes. But it was still absolutely, flat-out, ahead-of-its-time amazing.

but wasn’t making a product that would solve real people’s problems.

Too many people throw themselves blindly at hot trends, anticipating a gold rush, and end up falling off a cliff. Look at the body count of virtual reality (VR)—dead startups as far as the eye can see and billions of dollars burned up over the past thirty years.

But even if you’ve got the tech, then you still have to time it right.

General Magic did not. We started from the technology—focusing on what we could create, what would impress the geniuses at our company—not the reason why real, nontechnical people would need it.

If they even understood what it was. A luxury toy for rich people or nerds or very rich nerds.

A glaring example is Google Glass or Magic Leap—all the money and PR in the world can’t change the fact that augmented reality (AR) glasses are a technology in search of a problem to solve.

Just whatever you do, don’t become a “management consultant” at a behemoth like McKinsey or Bain or one of the other eight consultancies that dominate the industry.

But what happens if you fall in love with the wrong thing? If you find a product or company that’s too early—the supporting infrastructure isn’t there, the customers don’t exist, the leadership has a crazy vision and won’t budge.

Your heroes. Those (typically humble) rock stars will lead you to the career you want.

Dark wood paneling with smoke stains from the 1970s, no cubicles, constant meetings, managers who just said no to everything. An old guard of old Dutch guys complaining about the lack of Douwe Egberts coffee and frikandel

Marc Porat had made many promises to many people and they were all coming up empty.

So Best Buy put the Velo in the Calculator section.

And that’s all it takes. That’s how normal, reasonable people turn into unbearable micromanagers.

But those formal reviews should simply be an exercise in writing down the things you’re talking about every week.

But data can’t solve an opinion-based problem. So no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive. This leads to analysis paralysis—death by overthinking.

We had no idea what Joe Sixpack might want, so we built features that we liked and just assumed the rest of the world would fall in line.

The customer is always right, right? Except customer panels can’t design for shit. People just can’t articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another,

But this also isn’t a dictatorship. You can’t give orders without explaining yourself.

And then they can sigh, and shrug, and go back to their team, communicate the “why” of the decision, and get on the train.

Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them.

This is often a tactic of people who are trying to cover their asses.

These are the kinds of people who won’t question their directions and drive their car right off a cliff. If at all possible they want to erase the human element—human judgment—from the equation.

That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

according to University of San Diego professor Simon Croom, up to 12 percent of corporate senior leadership exhibit psychopathic traits.

These assholes usually build a coalition of budding assholes around them—copycats who see it as their path to success.

They resent any good idea that didn’t come from them and are extremely threatened by anyone on their team who is more talented than they are.

“Yes, this idea is insane. But sanity will prevail! Even if Steve is wrong today, trust that he’ll get to the right answer sooner or later. We just need to find a better approach and make our case.”

Political assholes thrive in large organizations where they can pull the kind of Machiavellian BS that makes you sound crazy and paranoid when you’re describing it.

and that may mean earning less money for a while or staying at a problematic company so you can finish your project.

I quit Philips after seeing my projects through—ensuring I had explored every avenue to make my team successful. I quit because we were never going to outshine the competition when everyone was using the same Microsoft operating system that dictated most of our features.

And you cannot work with people you cannot trust.

People won’t remember how you started. They’ll remember how you left.

Once you find yourself in a place where you believe in the mission, everything changes.

If you’ve found a good opportunity to follow your passions, you should not give up until you’ve tried to make it work at the company you’re at.

If the mission you’re excited about is growing dimmer because of internal politics or poor administration or leadership churn or simply bad decisions, don’t be shy. Get to networking. Talk to everyone. Not watercooler talk or internal gossip, not just complaining with no solutions. Come with suggestions to fix the intractable problems that you and your team face.

If you’re going to get everyone’s attention, make sure it’s to support the mission, not for personal gain.

You absolutely cannot threaten to quit, then hesitate and flip-flop and stay. Everyone will instantly lose respect for you. You have to follow through.

And we did it despite the fact that my manager was doing his best to take credit for our team’s hard work [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes.] I’d tried everything—engaging him, ignoring him, fighting him, soothing his ego—but now the project was done.

I still believed in the mission. I was proud of what we’d made. I was excited to keep going. But there was no getting around this guy.

The basic technology for the first iPod wasn’t designed at Apple. It wasn’t even designed for a handheld device.