Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

And although time wasn’t our issue at Nest, we did make a few major mistakes:

They began to immediately dilute our culture and caused endless headaches complaining that we weren’t Googley enough.

If I had spent more time with the leaders of previous acquisitions, like Motorola Mobility and Waze, I would have had a much clearer understanding of how Google digests the companies it buys. The majority of big Google acquisitions other than YouTube had been less than successful.

Culture is incredibly sticky. I should have remembered that. Larry, with Bill Campbell’s prodding, wanted Nest to come in and shift Google’s entire way of thinking, to give it a burst of startup mojo. But culture doesn’t work that way—you can’t repaint an old factory and show the workers a training video and think you’ve made any kind of difference. You have to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it again.

Most people and companies need a near-death experience before they can really change.

“Great companies are bought, not sold.”

My advice is to always be cautiously optimistic. Trust, but verify.

You should surely reward them for their hard work. But you have to remember how the human brain works. There’s a psychology to entitlement.

Companies that bubble-wrap their employees with tons of free perks are usually shortsighted and have no long-term strategy to sustain those perks, or they have an innately problematic core business and the perks are the cover.

It was almost as bad as when we had to outlaw takeout containers after we realized a ton of people weren’t staying late to work—they were hanging out until dinner, then shoveling a full meal into to-go boxes for their families and taking off.

But there was no way I was going to let entitlement creep in when there was still so much left to do. I wasn’t going to parcel out more perks just because Google employees were used to them.

It’s the same problem that the very wealthy face—a gradual drifting upward, away from the regular problems of regular humans. Unless you stay grounded—take public transit, buy your own food, walk the streets, set up your own IT systems, understand the value of a dollar and how far it can take you in New York or Wisconsin or Indonesia*—you start to forget the daily pains of the people you’re supposed to be creating painkillers for.

CEO is not a king or queen. It’s not a lifetime appointment. At some point, you have to step down. Here’s how you’ll know it’s time:

At a different company, the same conversation took two minutes. We told the CEO that he shouldn’t be CEO anymore. He sighed, then smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “What a relief!”

That’s why some CEOs—even founders—just turn into barnacles. I can’t tell you how many longtime CEOs I’ve seen clinging to the job even when their passion for it was gone.

Maybe you’ll have your own General Magic—an incredible vision, a beautiful idea, toppled by bad timing, immature technology, a fundamental misunderstanding of your customer.

The thing holding most people back is themselves. They think they know what they can do and who they’re supposed to be, and they don’t explore beyond those boundaries.