Build Quotes

“There’s a competition for market share and a competition for mind share. If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“If hardware doesn’t absolutely need to exist to enable the overall experience, then it should not exist.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Good things take time. Big things take longer.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“it was what I loved to do, so I kept finding new opportunities to do it. Each job took a different angle, a new perspective on the same problem, and eventually I had a rich, 360-degree view of the challenge I wanted to solve and all the possible solutions.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“this isn’t a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and you’re not going to reach the right choice by consensus.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive. This leads to analysis paralysis—death by overthinking.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“everyone wanted data so they wouldn’t have to make decisions themselves.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it’s terrible.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“There should only be good surprises in a board meeting—We’ve exceeded our numbers! We’re ahead of schedule! Check out this cool demo! Everything else should be a known quantity. It’s best not to debate new discussion items in the boardroom—there’s just never enough time to cover them in detail and get to a resolution. It always goes nowhere.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Bill Campbell helped me understand how he did it. Bill would always say that if there was any potentially surprising or controversial topic, the CEO should go to every board member, one-on-one, to walk them through it before the meeting. That allowed them to ask questions, offer different perspectives, and then the CEO had time to take those thoughts back to the team and revise their thinking, presentation, and plan.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And you can never tell if you’re getting it right. When you’re an independent contributor, you can typically look at something you’ve made that week and be proud of it. When you’re a manager, you can look at the collective achievement of your team and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. When you’re a CEO, you dream that maybe, ten years down the road, some people will think you did a good job. But you can never tell how you’re doing in the moment. You can never sit back and look at a job well done. This job can suck you dry if you let it. It can also be one of the most liberating experiences of your life.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And just because you’re in charge does not mean you’re in control. You plan out your day, think you’re finally going to have some time to talk to people, look at the product, meet with engineering. Then your day disappears. There’s always some new crisis, some new people problem, someone quitting, someone complaining, someone falling apart.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“When your team knows too much about you as a person, not just you as a CEO, they start dissecting your personal life to try to understand your decisions. Your motivations. Your ways of thinking. That’s not only a distracting waste of time, it’s counterproductive. When you explain why you’re doing something, it should be all about the customers, not about you. So it’s wise to stand alone—not to let anyone at work get too close. Even if you wish you could just grab a drink with your team like you used to. It’s a cliché to say “It’s lonely at the top.” But it’s also true.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves, or keeping pleasant but incompetent people on the team might make you feel better. It may give you the illusion of niceness. But it chips away at the company, bit by bit, and erodes the team’s respect for you.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“But Steve was a parent CEO. A pushy parent. A tiger mom. He knew if we kept pushing, together, we’d figure it out. The sacrifices would be worth it. And he was right. That time. But not every time. Steve took a lot of risks, made bad decisions, launched products that didn’t work—the original Apple III, the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the list goes on. But if you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough. He learned from the screwups, was constantly improving, and his good ideas, his successes, totally wiped away his failures. He was constantly pushing the company to learn and try new things.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“A CEO has to recognize fantastic ideas—regardless of their source.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The other commonalities of successful leaders are just as straightforward: They hold people (and themselves) accountable and drive for results. They’re hands-on, but to a point. They know when to back off and delegate. They can keep an eye on the long-term vision while still being eyeball-deep in details. They’re constantly learning, always interested in new opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new people. And they do it because they’re engaged and curious, not because those things may end up making them money. If they screw up, they admit to it and own their mistakes. They’re not afraid to make hard decisions, even when they know people will be upset and angry. They (mostly) know themselves. They have a clear view of both their strengths and challenges. They can tell the difference between an opinion- and data-driven decision and act accordingly. [See also: Chapter 2.2: Data Versus Opinion.] They realize that nothing should be theirs, even if the genesis was with them. It all has to be the team’s. The company’s. They know their job is to jubilantly celebrate everyone else’s successes, to make sure they get credit for them, and hold little for themselves. They listen. To their team, to their customers, to their board, to their mentors. They pay attention to the opinions and thoughts of the people around them and adjust their views when they get new information from sources they trust.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The other commonalities of successful leaders are just as straightforward: They hold people (and themselves) accountable and drive for results. They’re hands-on, but to a point. They know when to back off and delegate. They can keep an eye on the long-term vision while still being eyeball-deep in details.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“It’s not easy. But all that attention, that care, the quest for perfection—they’ll raise the team’s own standards. What they expect of themselves. After a while, they’ll work incredibly hard not just to make you happy, but because they know how much pride they feel when they do world-class work. The entire culture will evolve to expect excellence from each other. So your job is to care.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Most people are happy with 90 percent good. Most leaders will take pity on their teams and just let it slide. But going from 90 to 95 percent is halfway to perfect. Getting the last part of the journey right is the only way to reach your destination. So you push. Yourself. The team. You push people to discover how great they can be. You push until they start pushing back. In these moments, always err on the side of almost-too-much. Keep pushing until you find out if what you’re asking for is actually impossible or just a whole lot of work. Get to the point of pain so you start to see when the pain is becoming real. That’s when you back down and find a new middle ground.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“People will hand you something that they worked on tirelessly for weeks, that they’ve thought through and are proud of, that’s 90 percent amazing. And you will tell them to go back and make it better. Your team will be shocked, stunned, possibly even dejected. They’ll say it’s already so good, we’ve worked so hard. You’ll say good enough is not good enough. So they’ll march out the door and do it again. And, if necessary, again. They might get so tangled up that it’ll be simpler to just start from scratch. But with each iteration, each new version, each regroup and reimagining, they’ll discover something new. Something great. Something better.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“So Andy showed every person in that company where their priorities should be. He didn’t care how much it cost to reach perfection, how many times a car had to get retooled, reworked. The important thing was to deliver exactly what the customer expected. To overdeliver. If you want to build a great company, you should expect excellence from every part of it. The output of every team can make or break the customer experience, so they should all be a priority.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“If a leader gets distracted from the customer—if business goals and spreadsheets full of numbers for shareholders become a higher priority than customer goals—the whole organization can easily forget what’s most important.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The job is to give a shit. To care. About everything”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“As CEO, you spend almost all your time on people problems and communication. You’re trying to navigate a tangled web of professional relationships and intrigues, listen to but also ignore your board, maintain your company culture, buy companies or sell your own, keep people’s respect while continually pushing yourself and the team to build something great even though you barely have time to think about what you’re building anymore.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Berkshire Hathaway buys unrelated companies that are run separately and it works great. “Why can’t we do the same?” I pointed out that Berkshire Hathaway buys companies that are ten, fifteen, fifty years old. They’re fully formed, have plenty of revenue. They’re grown, healthy adults. Alphabet’s other bets were infants, toddlers, adolescents trying to find themselves. They were still scrambling to innovate, trying to find a path to profitability. The fundamentals were totally different.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Even the basic, no-brainer stuff stalled out: Can we sell Nest products in the Google Store? No. Not for at least a year. Can we get off Amazon Web Services and onto Google Cloud? No, not without a huge set of changes. And it’ll actually be more expensive”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“That’s what you’re ultimately looking for. You don’t want a lawyer who thinks their only job is to point out the sinkhole you could fall into, to block your way. Hire someone who will help you find a new path. Hire someone who will build a bridge. Hire a lawyer who doesn’t just think like a lawyer.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making