Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

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. I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from the best—from bold, passionate people who made a dent in the world.

good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective. They’ll loan you some of their hard-fought advice so you can discover your own solution.

This book isn’t trying to be a biography—I’m not dead yet. It’s a mentor in a box. It’s an advice encyclopedia.

Most business books have one basic thesis that they spend three hundred pages expanding on. If you’re looking for a range of good advice on various topics, you might need to read forty books, skimming endlessly to find the occasional nugget of useful information. So for this book I just collected the nuggets. Each chapter has advice and stories informed by the jobs, mentors, coaches, managers, and peers I’ve had and the countless mistakes I’ve made.

But this book isn’t about me. 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 was there, but I was never there alone. This book is about what I’ve learned—typically the hard way.

My life has swung wildly between success and failure, incredible career highs immediately followed by bitter disappointment. And with each failure I chose to start from scratch, take all that I’d learned and do something completely new, become someone completely new.

The latest version of me is a mentor, coach, investor, and, weirdly now, an author.

The advice in this book is by no means complete, but it’s a start. I’m still learning, revising my thoughts each day. Just like everyone else. This book contains some of what I’ve learned so far.

No matter how much you learn in school, you still need to get the equivalent of a PhD in navigating the rest of the world and building something meaningful. You have to try and fail and learn by doing.

Adulthood is commonly thought of as the time when learning is over and living begins. Yes! I’ve graduated! I’m done! But learning never ends. School has not prepared you to be successful for the rest of your life. Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something the world has never seen before.

when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?” Not “How much money do I want to make?” Not “What title do I want to have?” Not “What company has enough name recognition that my mo...

Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

The critical thing is to have a goal. To strive for something big and hard and important to you. Then every step you take toward that goal, even if it’s a stumble, moves you forward.

you can’t skip a step—you can’t just have the answers handed to you and detour around the hard stuff. Humans learn through productive struggle, by trying it themselves and screwing up and doing it differently next time.

I give a speech at high schools sometimes—at graduations where a bunch of eighteen-year-old kids are heading out into the world, alone, for the first time. I tell them that they probably make 25 percent of their decisions. If that.

From the moment you’re born until you move out of your parents’ house, almost all your choices are made, shaped, or influenced by your parents.

All these subtle things that you never made a decision about growing up are already implanted in your brain. Most kids don’t consciously examine any of these choices. They mimic their parents. And when you’re a kid, that’s usually fine. It’s necessary. But you’re not a kid anymore.

When you’re in your thirties and forties, the window begins to close for most people. Your decisions can no longer be entirely your own. That’s okay, too—great even—but it’s different. The people who depend on you will shape and influence your choices. Even if you don’t have a family to support, you’ll still accumulate just a little more each year—friends, assets, social standing—that you won’t want to risk.

eventually a more experienced engineer got around to looking at what I’d coded and, baffled, asked why I’d built a network protocol that way. I answered that I didn’t know I was building a network protocol.

But even though I could have just read a book and saved myself days of work—man, did it feel good. I’d made something the world had never seen before, something useful, and I made it my way. It was crazy. But it was fun. Especially in the beginning when everybody was focused on fun.

General Magic was probably one of the first Silicon Valley companies that truly embodied the idea that playing at work was worthwhile—that a joyful workplace could make a joyful product.

Let the scales tip a little on your work/life balance—let your passion for what you’re building drive you.)

The enormous gut punch of our failure, of my failure, of everything I’d worked for falling apart—it made the path in front of me strangely clear: General Magic was making incredible technology but wasn’t making a product that would solve real people’s problems.

A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics:

It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t make or even understand.

This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily. There shoul...

The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platf...

Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt ...

It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes p...

Cool technology isn’t enough. A great team isn’t enough. Plenty of funding isn’t enough. Too many people throw themselves blindly at hot trends, anticipating a gold rush, and end up falling off a cliff.

to many new grads, it sounds perfect: you get paid incredibly well to travel around the world, work with powerful companies and executives, and learn exactly how to make a business successful. It’s an alluring promise. Parts of it are even true. Yes, you get a nice paycheck. And yes, you get plenty of practice pitching important clients. But you don’t learn how to build or run a company. Not really.

To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together. You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job.

Bill Gurley, the incredibly smart, wry, contrarian Silicon Valley VC and Texan deal maker, puts it this way: “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”

you’re going to devote that much time to gathering information, then learn about something you’d be interested in even if you weren’t trying to get a job doing it.

The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged. You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.

You could go to Google, Apple, Facebook, or some other giant company, but it’ll be hard to maneuver yourself to work closely with the rock stars. And you should know you’re not going to make a real impact. Not for a long time. You’re a pebble bouncing off an elephant. But you’ll be a well-paid pebble eating free kale chips, so if you do go that route enjoy the paycheck while working on your tiny piece of some vast and endless project. Then spend your ample free time getting a feel for the structures and divisions, the micro-disciplines, the processes, the research, the long-term projects and long-term thinking a company can do when shipping tomorrow isn’t critical to its survival.

It’s easy to mistake navigating processes, red tape, job leveling, and politics for real personal growth.

Smaller companies still have specialization, but usually without silos.

being in that lifeboat with people you deeply respect is a joy. It is the best time you can have at work. It might be the best time you can have, period. And it doesn’t have to end once you’re on dry land.

if an IC is constantly looking down, their eyes exclusively on their own tight deadlines and the minutiae of their job, they may walk directly into a brick wall.

The CEO and executive team are mostly staring way out on the horizon—50 percent of their time is spent planning for a fuzzy, distant future months or years away, 25 percent is focused on upcoming milestones in the next month or two, and the last 25 percent is spent putting out fires happening right now at their feet.

Everyone in a company has customers, even if they’re not building anything. You’re always making something for someone—the creative team is making stuff for marketing, marketing is making stuff for the app designers, the app designers are making stuff for the engineers—every single person in the company is doing something for someone, even if it’s just a coworker on another team.

Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.

Honesty is more important than style. Everyone has a style—loud, quiet, emotional, analytical, excited, reserved. You can be successful with any style as long as you never shy away from respectfully telling the team the uncomfortable, hard truth that needs to be said.

Don’t worry that your team will outshine you. In fact, it’s your goal. You should always be training someone on your team to do your job. The better they are, the easier it is for...

Although my startups had employees, there was no real organization structure. No top-down process, no performance reviews, no meetings to clarify roles and responsibilities. I was a founder, but not a real CEO. Mostly I was an individual contributor on a team of 5–10 people—so we were all just in it together. Nobody was managing anybody.

When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings. And while that seems obvious—yes, that’s the whole point of the job—it’s a difficult thing to grapple with when all of a sudden eighty people are looking at you, expecting you to know how to lead them.

Many companies also offer the option of being a team lead—or at least they should. This is a kind of a midpoint between an IC and manager. You have some authority to critique, shape, and drive the team’s output, but nobody reports to you and you’re not dealing with budgets, org charts, or management meetings.

But I wanted to understand the squishy stuff and the geeky stuff. And I liked all of it. I could also translate back and forth—explain the squish to engineers, translate the 1s and 0s to the creatives. I could synthesize all the pieces and keep the whole company in my head.