Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Every member of your founding team should be proven and great at what they do (consider any failed startups in their past a bonus—that means they know what to avoid this time around), but they also need to have the right mindset.

Getting from 0 to 1 is a huge lift that asks a lot of everyone, especially considering it may not pay off. So you need individual contributors who will enthusiastically take the leap with you, either because they’re as excited by the idea as you are, or because they’re simply young or ambitious, or because they’ve already had some financial success and aren’t worried about paying rent for a while.

In those very, very early days you want people who are there for the mission above all. You’re looking for passion, enthusiasm, and mindset. And you’re looking for seed crystals.

Seed crystals are people who are so good and so well loved that they can almost single-handedly build large parts of your org. Typically they’re experienced leaders, either managers of large teams or super-ICs who everyone listens to. Once they’re in, a tidal wave of other awesome people will typically follow.

Big companies are not a shortcut. Their spacious, attractive offices are littered with the skeletons of innovative little projects that died because they were set up for failure from the start.

If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.”

the rules for every successful human relationship are the same: before you can jump headfirst into a major life-changing commitment, you need to get to know each other. Trust each other. Understand each other. That means you have to be ready to be scrutinized, to be examined, and—most likely—to be found wanting.

But it will end. Just like it ended in 2000. There’s always a reversion to the mean. And even when it’s crazy, it still won’t be easy. You’ll still have to work for it. Details will still matter. Even if it looks easy, it never is. There are just varying degrees of difficulty—from damn hard to nearly impossible.

VCs have bosses to report to—their LPs, the people and organizations who give them money. They need to show that they’re making wise, highly profitable investments with the right management teams.

if things go south, you can end up in an estranged marriage—still legally tied together, but never speaking. When a VC writes off your company, they basically ignore you. Won’t help you. Won’t connect you to other VCs. Won’t speak up for you to partners. They’ll stand on the sidelines as your company goes bankrupt.

Typically a VC needs between 18 and 22 percent to make their model work—step carefully if they begin asking for more.

The hardest way to get a meeting with a VC is by cold-calling them. And before you make the call, try to drum up a little press, get some good PR, so when the VC looks you up there’s something to see.

Even in Silicon Valley, most VCs won’t be technical. So don’t focus on the technology, focus on the “why.”

Remember that you don’t have to come in perfectly polished for that first meeting. You can say, “I’d like to give you an early look at this. Maybe it would be of interest to you. I’d love to get your comments on it.” Listen to their feedback and learn from it. You don’t have to take every word of advice or criticism, but you should understand the reasons behind it and adjust accordingly.

It will take longer than you think to get funding. Expect it to be a 3–5 month process. It may end up being faster than that—especially in a founder-friendly environment—but I wouldn’t gamble on it.

Listen to people’s feedback on your pitch and your plan, change it when it makes sense, but hold on to your vision and your “why” and don’t rearrange yourself based on the whims of every investor you talk to.

Be clear with investors on how much money you need and exactly how you’re going to spend it. Your job will be to create value for investors and ensure you’re hitting major milestones to raise the valuation of the business. That way the next time you raise money you won’t dilute existing investors, employees, or yourself.

Steve Jobs was clear about the lesson he’d learned and made sure we all learned it, too: any company that tries to do both B2B and B2C will fail.

Personal balance when you’re working: Knowing you’re going to be working or thinking about work most of the time and creating space to give your brain and body a break. To reach some level of personal balance, you need to design your schedule so you have time to eat well (hopefully with family and friends), exercise or meditate, sleep, and briefly think about something other than the current crisis at the office.

To withstand a complete lack of true work/life balance requires a clear organizational strategy. You need to prioritize. It’s important to have everything you need to think about written down and have a plan for when and how you’ll bring it up with your team. Otherwise it will swirl around in your brain endlessly, killing any meager chance you have of relaxing your shoulders for a minute.

there’s a world of difference between racking your brain, ruminating all night about a work crisis, versus letting yourself think about work in an unstructured, creative way. The latter gives your brain the freedom to stop hammering away at the same problems with the same worn-down tools. Instead, you let your mind rummage around to find new ones.

A computer or a smartphone between you and the team is a huge barrier to focus and sends a clear message to everyone in the meeting: whatever I’m looking at on my screen is more important than you.

Vacations are a great way to build a team’s future capabilities and see who might step into your shoes in the years to come. Everyone thinks they can do your job better—until they actually have to do it and deliver.

even if you’re in a high-stress job, you need to take vacations. They’re important for your team.

create time to breathe in your schedule. It’s all too easy to go from meeting to meeting to meeting, all day, with no chance to eat or go to the bathroom, never mind time to rest. But you have to. And I mean that literally. You have to do it. Otherwise you will fall apart.

you have to engineer your schedule to include these breaks and then hold the line when people try to schedule over them.

There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don’t make a bad decision because you’re frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day.

Your job once people get over the initial shock will be constant communication. You need to talktalktalk (with your team, the rest of the company, the board, investors, and potentially press and customers) and listenlistenlisten (hear what your team is worried about and the issues that are bubbling up, calm down panicked employees and stressed-out PR people). Don’t worry about overcommunicating.

It doesn’t matter if the crisis was caused by your mistake or your team or a fluke accident: accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize.

near-perfect team is made up of smart, passionate, imperfect people who complement one another.

Experienced people have a wealth of wisdom that they can pass on to the next generation and young people can push back against long-held assumptions.

Everyone leaves eventually. But before they go, you want them to mentor and train an army of young people. That’s how you keep your company going. That’s how you create a legacy.

Someone took a risk on you once. Someone guided you through your mistakes, took the time to help you grow. Not only is it your duty to create that moment for the next generation, but it’s also a good investment in the long-term success of your company.

Even when we accepted a candidate, there was always an awareness that nobody is perfect. There were always critiques, challenges. So it was the hiring manager’s job to understand potential issues from the outset, talk them through with leadership and the candidate, and commit to coaching their new team member through those challenges.

Another good interview technique is to simulate work—instead of asking them how they work, just work with them. Pick a problem and try to solve it together.

You’re not just interviewing to see if a person can do the job required of them today. You’re trying to understand if they have the innate tools to think through the problems and jobs you don’t see coming yet—the jobs they can grow into tomorrow.

when bringing in new employees—especially execs—you shouldn’t just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think you’re done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated. Explain how you do things in detail so they don’t make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about what’s working and what isn’t, what you would do in their position, what’s encouraged and what’s verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves.

Any employee could come to five lunches a year. And each lunch was a cultural inoculation, a vaccine against indifference and apathy, against thinking that what you do doesn’t matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are.

nobody should ever be shocked that they’re getting fired or have to ask why it’s happening. They may not agree, of course. But anyone who’s struggling should be having weekly or twice-monthly 1:1 meetings about that struggle. That’s where issues are honestly discussed, solutions are attempted, and there’s a follow-up about what worked and what didn’t and what’s going to happen next.

Just as people make a commitment to your company when they join it, you make a commitment to them.

sometimes the people you don’t expect to be amazing—the ones you thought were Bs and B+s—turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They’re modest and kind and just quietly do good work.

At many companies I’ve seen HR topics left to the end of team meetings, or lumped into a separate HR or recruiting meeting. But your priority is your team, its health and growth. The best way to show that is to make it the first agenda item each and every week.

What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.

Growth will break your company. As more people join, your organizational design and communication style need to keep up or you risk alienating the team and cratering your culture.

In the early days of a company, when most people are self-managing, the absolute maximum number of people one human being can effectively manage directly is 8–15 full-time employees. As the company grows, that number shrinks to around 7–8. When teams approach that point, you need to preemptively create a management layer, ideally by promoting from within, and then put systems in place to ensure effective and efficient communication.

When the watercooler disappears and spontaneous, unstructured communication disappears along with it, you have to be even more thoughtful, disciplined, and intentional about your communication strategies. You have to give people a road map to connect with each other.

You have to start forming a strategy for how you’ll grow past a breakpoint long before you reach it—at a minimum two to three months before the break and then months of follow-up after.

usually the people at the top—the team leaders can keep only so many projects in their heads. They can focus on three, four, five projects but by the time they get to six or seven their brains are fried. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. So those projects get sidelined for later, and later never comes.

there’s a difference between coaches and mentors: Coaches are there to help with the business. It’s all about the work: this company, this job, this moment in time. Mentors are more personal. They don’t just help with people’s jobs, they help with their lives, their families. A coach helps because they know the company; a mentor helps because they know you.

to preserve what you love, have your team write down the things they value most and build a plan to continue them. And remember it’s not necessarily the obvious stuff that binds people to your company—it can be small things, silly things.