Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

By the time General Magic was unraveling around me, I wasn’t just a lowly diagnostics engineer anymore. I’d worked on silicon, hardware, and software architecture and design. When things started to go awry, I’d ventured out and started talking to people in sales and marketing, began learning about psychographics and branding, finally grasped the importance of managers, of process, of limits. After four years, I realized there was a whole world of thinking that was needed before a line of code should be written. And that thinking was fascinating. That thinking was what I wanted to do. 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. But I thought I could.