“I don’t regret selling Nest to Google. Neither does our executive team. We always revisit this question when our old team meets up. Our only regret is that we didn’t get to finish what we started. But we made the decision to sell together, and we all stand by it today. Given the data we had at the time, we’d do it again. Especially since we were right. As predicted, once Nest brought the idea of the connected home to life, the giants of Apple, Amazon, and Samsung all wanted a piece. They built teams to compete with Google and Nest and created their own home products, platforms, and ecosystems. We dodged a bullet. And Google was and remains an incredible company. It’s filled with brilliant people at every level. It’s changed the world many times over. Google’s culture works for them—there’s a reason a lot of people never leave the mother ship. But that culture is enabled and driven by the fact that Google’s search and advertising business pretty much prints cash. Even Googlers call it the “Money Tree.” It’s turned Google into a place of wild abundance where anyone can more or less do anything—or sometimes nothing at all. They’ve been so profitable for so long and have had so few existential business threats that they’ve never had to cut back or slim down, never had to be scrappy. They haven’t had to really fight for anything in decades. Lucky them! But at Nest, we were fighters. Our culture was born from the Apple way, a culture that survived multiple near-death experiences over its forty-plus years of existence. We were ready to fight for our mission and our place at the table, fight to keep our culture and our way of doing things.”