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.

A 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.

I didn’t have a ton of branding experience when I was twenty. But I had a lot of love. In the late eighties my beloved Apple ][ was struggling. It needed to be faster. So a friend and I decided we were going to save Apple. We built a new, faster processor—the 65816. I did not, in fact, know how to build a processor. I took my first processor design class in college a semester after we started. But we built those chips and they worked eight times faster than what was available—a blazing 33MHz—and even sold some to Apple before they stopped designing new Apple ][s.

The other college kids often asked what was wrong with Fadell—why wasn’t he partying and drinking instead of being stuck in a basement, alone with a computer?

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.

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.

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. So 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?”

The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail. 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.

We were tiny—a startup of three, sometimes four people—and were inching along. But it felt more like treading water. And treading water felt like drowning. Either you’re growing or you’re done. There is no stasis.

So I went where I could grow. The title and the money weren’t important. The people were. The mission was. The opportunity was all that mattered.

But I’d learned early on to ask for forgiveness, not permission.

And I remember the revelation of sitting in my dorm, still digesting the dinner I’d eaten at the wharf in San Francisco, realizing I could be part of two worlds at once. That it wasn’t even that hard.

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” —ANONYMOUS

I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it. And if it turned out to be the wrong move, well, making a mistake is the best way to not make that mistake again. Do, fail, learn.

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, ev...

Humans learn through productive struggle, by trying it themselves and screwing up and doing it differently next time. In early adulthood you have to learn to embrace that—to know that the risks might not pan out but to take them anyway. You can get guidance and advice, you can choose a path by following someone else’s example, but you won’t really learn until you start walking down that path yourself and seeing where it takes you.

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. And after you move out of your parents’ house, there’s a window—a brief, shining, incredible window—where your decisions are yours alone. You’re not beholden to anyone—not a spouse, not kids, not parents. You’re free. Free to choose whatever you’d like. That is the time to be bold. Where are you going to live? Where are you going to work? Who are you going to be? Your parents will always have suggestions for you—feel free to take them or ignore them. Their judgment is colored by what they want for you (the best, of course, only the best). You’ll need to find other people—other mentors—to give you useful advice. A teacher or cousin or an aunt or the older kid of a close family friend. Just because you’re on your own doesn’t mean you have to be alone with your decisions.

Throwing yourself out there and having everything blow up in your face is the world’s best way to learn fast and figure out what you want to do next.

(I don’t recommend working that much, by the way. You should never kill yourself for your job, and no job should ever expect that of you. But if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time. Stay late. Come in early. Work over the weekend and holidays sometimes. Don’t expect a vacation every couple of months. Let the scales tip a little on your work/life balance—let your passion for what you’re building drive you.) For years I ran full tilt in whatever direction people pointed me in—and we were going in every direction at once. My heroes would say take that hill, and by God, I would make it my Everest and do whatever it took to impress them. I was 100 percent sure we were going to make the most world-changing device in history. We all were.

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.

So even if the experience kicks your ass, the force of that kick will propel you into a new stage of your life. And you’ll figure out what to do next.

If you’re going to throw your time, energy, and youth at a company, try to join one that’s not just making a better mousetrap. Find a business that’s starting a revolution. A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics: 1. 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. 2. This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily. There should be an existing large market. 3. The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it. 4. Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs. 5. It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense once you hear it.

If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution. 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.

On the other hand, take Uber. The founders started with a customer problem—a problem they experienced in their daily lives—then applied technology.

That combination of a real problem, the right timing, and innovative technology allowed Uber to shift the paradigm—to create something that traditional cab companies couldn’t even dream of, never mind compete with.

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. They all have thousands upon thousands of employees and work almost exclusively with Fortune 5000 companies. These corporations, typically led by tentative, risk-averse CEOs, call in the management consultants to do a massive audit, find the flaws, and present leadership with a new plan that will magically “fix” everything. What a fairy tale—don’t get me started. But 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. Steve Jobs once said of management consulting, “You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends—I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes—but you never really taste it.”

If you’re passionate about something—something that could be solving a huge problem one day—then stick with it.

Look around and find the community of people who are passionate about it, too. If there’s nobody else on Earth thinking about it, then you may truly be too early or going in the wrong direction. But if you can find even a handful of like-minded people, even if it’s just a tiny community of geeks building technology nobody has any idea how to turn into a real business, then keep going. Get in on the ground floor, make friends, and find mentors and connections that will bear fruit when the world spins just enough to make what you’re making make sense. You may not be at the same company as when you started, the vision may be different, the product may be different, and the technology will have changed. You may have to fail and fail and learn and learn and evolve and understand and grow.

What you do matters. Where you work matters. Most importantly, who you work with and learn from matters. Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world. To put your focus and energy and your precious, precious time toward something meaningful. You don’t have to be an executive right away, you don’t have to get a job at the most amazing, world-changing company right out of college, but you should have a goal. You should know where you want to go, who you want to work with, what you want to learn, who you want to become.

Students seek out the best professors on the best projects when getting their master’s or PhD, but when they look for jobs, they focus on money, perks, and titles. However, the only thing that can make a job truly amazing or a complete waste of time is the people.

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

I spent most of my time building—chips and software and devices and companies—and the rest of my time reading everything I could get my hands on about the industry. And that’s what set me apart.

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.”

And if 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. Follow your curiosity. Once you’re armed with that knowledge, then you can start hunting down the people who are the best of the best and trying to work with them. And that doesn’t mean stalking Elon Musk if you’re into electric cars. Look at who reports to him. And who reports to them. And which competing company would kill to hire those people. Understand the subdisciplines and see who leads the one you’re most interested in. Find the experts on Twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a LinkedIn connection. You’re interested in the same things, you have the same passions—so share your point of view, ask a smart question, or just tell them about some fascinating minutiae that your family and friends find deeply, desperately, unfathomably boring.

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.

But if you can, try to get into a small company. The sweet spot is a business of 30–100 people building something worth building, with a few rock stars you can learn from even if you aren’t working with them every day.

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.

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

When you get a chance to work with legends and heroes and gods, you realize they’re none of the things that you’ve fabricated in your brain. They can be geniuses in one area and clueless in another. They can raise you up by praising your work, but you can also help them, catch things they miss, and build a relationship based not on starry-eyed hero worship but mutual respect.

And let me tell you, there is nothing in the world that feels better than helping your hero in a meaningful way and earning their trust—watching them realize you know what you’re talking about, that you can be relied on, that you’re someone to remember. And then seeing how that respect evolves as you move on to the next job, and the next.

The job of an individual contributor (IC)—a person who doesn’t manage others—is usually to craft something that needs to be completed that day or in the next week or two. Their responsibility is to sweat the details, so most individual contributors depend on their managers and executive team to set a destination and lay out a path for them so they can keep their focus on the work. However, 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. As an IC, you need to occasionally do two things: 1. Look up: Look beyond the next deadline or project and forward to all the milestones coming up in the next few months. Then look all the way down to your ultimate goal: the mission. Ideally it should be the reason you joined the project in the first place. As your project progresses, be sure the mission still makes sense to you and that the path to reach it seems achievable. 2. Look around: Get out of your comfort zone and away from the immediate team you’re on. Talk to the other functions in your company to understand their perspectives, needs, and concerns. This internal networking is always useful and it can give you an early warning if your project is not headed in the right direction.

Think of a project as a straight line in time—there’s a beginning and (hopefully) an end. Everyone is walking at the same pace, day by day, on parallel lines—a line for engineering, marketing, sales, PR, customer support, manufacturing, legal, etc.

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. They also look at all the parallel lines to make sure everyone is keeping up and going in the same direction. Managers usually keep their eyes focused 2–6 weeks out. Those projects are pretty fleshed out and detailed, though they still have some fuzzy bits around the edges. Managers’ heads should be on a swivel—they often look down, sometimes look further out, and spend a fair amount of time looking side to side, checking in on other teams, making sure everything’s coming together for the next milestone. Junior individual contributors spend 80 percent of their time looking straight down—maybe a week or two out—to see the fine points of their day-to-day work. In the early stages of your career, that’s the way it should be. You should be focused on getting your specific piece of each project done, done well, and out the door. Your executive team and managers are supposed to be looking out for roadblocks. They’re supposed to warn you so you can adjust course, or at least grab a helmet. But sometimes they don’t. So 20 percent of the time, individual contributors need to look up. And they need to look around. The sooner they start, the faster and higher they’ll adv...

I hadn’t realized it, but all those people working parallel to me could see things I couldn’t. They had a completely different view of our world—a view that I wanted to understand. New perspectives are everywhere. You don’t have to drag a bunch of people off the street to stare at your product and tell you what they think. Start with your internal customers. 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.

You’re somebody’s customer, too—so talk to whoever is doing work for you. Show up with something of value or a pertinent question. Try to understand what their roadblocks are and what they’re excited about. And talk to the people who are closest to the customer, like marketing and support—find teams who communicate with customers day in and day out and hear their feedback directly.

I was twenty-five years old and had never really managed anyone, never built a team. Now I was one of the CTOs in a massive company of almost 300,000 people. I’d experienced plenty of failure, but this was truly a new and exciting set of experiences to fail at. The rush of imposter syndrome was almost overwhelming.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it, playing around with the technology. In 1999 I sent out an invitation to my thirtieth birthday party—it was a mixed custom CD I’d burned with full Red Book audio as well as MP3s—“Gimme Some Lovin’,” “Instant Karma,” “Private Idaho.” Even though almost nobody owned an MP3 player back then. But I could see the potential for a new kind of device: one designed purely for audio. I talked about it for three hours one day with the CEO of RealNetworks, an incredibly popular technology at the time, the first to create internet streaming audio and video. I’d set up a meeting between the CEOs of our companies to get RealNetworks software on Philips hardware. But the Philips CEO was late. Really late. By the time he showed up, I had a new job. I

Just like the specter of management. How do you manage a team when you’ve never managed before? How do you make decisions when everyone’s split on what to do? How do you set a process to make forward progress toward a unified goal? How do you know if you’re headed in the right direction? Or if you should quit? The sooner you realize these questions exist, the better. Everyone rising in their career has to face them at some point. And I’ll be honest: the first time you encounter them, you’ll probably screw up. Everyone does. That’s okay. You’ll learn and grow and get better. But to make that first big leap into leadership less daunting, I’ve written up a few things that might help.

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.