Build Quotes

“At around 120 people, you need directors: managers who manage other managers. Directors need to think more like a CEO than an individual contributor.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Just start doing manager training early and make sure they have other experienced managers to talk to. Get them interested in the craft and science of being a good manager and explain that one of the critical parts of management is helping the team come up with creative solutions to difficult problems. You may not be doing all the work yourself, but you’ll be a vital part of making it great.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“As you grow past 50 people, some people become managers of managers—which is a very different beast than just managing individual contributors—and HR is really coming into play for the first time. You need proper processes to deal with promotions, defining job duties and hierarchical levels, and benefits. You’ll also really need to figure out job titles.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“As you grow past fifteen people, a layer gets added between the CEO or leader and the rest of the team. It’s at this point that silos can begin to form and communication can break down, as information is no longer evenly distributed.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And 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. They’re a different type of “rock star.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You can’t wait for the perfect A+ candidate to appear for every single empty slot. You need to hire. The best of the best don’t always want to join a big team, or they’re tied up in another job, or you can’t afford them or give them the titles or responsibilities they want.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Just as people make a commitment to your company when they join it, you make a commitment to them. If you’re leading a company or a large org, it is your responsibility to help people identify their challenge areas and give them space and coaching to get better or help them to find a spot at the company where they can be successful.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Here’s how it worked: Crown 1 was the hiring manager. They got the role approved and found the candidates. Crowns 2 and 3 were managers of the candidate’s internal customers. They picked one or two people from their team to interview the candidate. Feedback was collected, shared, and discussed, then the Three Crowns met to decide who to hire. Matt or I would watch over it all and make the final call in the rare instance when the Crowns couldn’t agree. Typically the answer if we had to get involved was no, thank you: PASS.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. Every product. Every company. Every time.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Today it’s called finding product/market fit.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team. That last point is important.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You will encounter a crisis eventually. Everyone does. If you don’t, you’re not doing anything important or pushing any boundaries. When you’re creating something disruptive and new, you will at some point be blindsided by a complete disaster.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“If you’re worried about the optics, just make the assistant a shared resource. A capable assistant can support three, four, or even five people. Or they can be a resource for your entire team—help them schedule their travel or figure out their expense reports or do some special project. They can help everyone.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Everyone thought I was crazy—and many still do—but here’s what I did: I took several sheets of paper with me everywhere. They had all the top milestones in front of us for each of the disciplines—engineering, HR, finance, legal, marketing, facilities, etc.—and everything we needed to do to reach those milestones. Every top-level question that I had was on those papers. So when I was in a meeting or talking to someone, I could quickly scan it. What are my top issues? What issues do our customers have? What’s the current roadblock for this person’s team? What are the next major milestones? What date commitments did our teams make?”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“I had to be close to the day-to-day design and engineering work but also manage the expectations of the executives but also work with sales and marketing to make sure not to repeat the mistakes of Philips but also go to Taiwan to check on manufacturing but also make sure my team was dealing with the stress but also debate with Steve and other execs daily but also occasionally attempt to sleep.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else. But you don’t have to figure out your vision all by yourself. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Locking yourself alone in a room to create a manifesto of your single, luminous vision looks and feels indistinguishable from completely losing your mind. Get at least one person—but preferably a small group—to bounce ideas off of. Sketch out your mission together. Then fulfill it together.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And they might sue you. If they can’t innovate, they litigate.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10–15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“That’s the case no matter what you make—even if you sell B2B payments software. Even if you build deep-tech solutions for customers who don’t exist yet. Even if you sell lubricants to a factory that’s been buying the same thing for twenty years.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“To do that right, you have to prototype the whole experience—give every part the weight and reality of a physical object. Regardless of whether your product is made of atoms or bits or both, the process is the same. Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from an ad to the website to the app and what information they would see at each touchpoint. Write up the reactions you’d want to get from early adopters, the headlines you’d want to see from reviewers, the feelings you want to evoke in everyone. Make it visible. Physical. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. And don’t wait”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Your customer doesn’t differentiate between your advertising and your app and your customer support agents—all of it is your company. Your brand. All of it is one thing. But we forget. Too often makers only think of the user experience as that moment when the customer touches an object or taps a screen. The moment they actually use the thing—whether it’s made of atoms or bits or both. The thing is always central.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The key to finding them is networking. By that I don’t mean going to a conference and working the room, handing out your business cards or QR codes and cornering potential employers as they try to eat their stack of tiny sandwiches. I just mean make new relationships, beyond business—talk to people outside your bubble. Get to know what else is out there. Meet some new human beings. Networking is something you should be doing constantly—even when you’re happily employed. I”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Sometimes a potential investor sees something interesting in your company—maybe you haven’t received money from the right VCs, or you’re tight on cash, or you have an incredible breakout success. So they’ll propose a really sweet deal, but their terms will screw the other investors who have gotten you this far. We see lots of big and small VCs trying to gain an edge by not playing fair—they may overdilute previous investors or put terms in your deal that scare off new ones. And if things aren’t going well a couple of years down the road, they’ll have no qualms about screwing you, too. So be careful when the terms aren’t standard or seem too good to be true—sometimes it may appear that you’re only giving away a small thing, but if it doesn’t feel right in your gut, it may be that they’re trying to get a foot in the door to start turning the tables against everyone else. They want to control your company sooner or later.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Greedy VCs who will invest only if they can take an outsized piece of your company. Typically a VC needs between 18 and 22 percent to make their model work—step carefully if they begin asking for more. And don’t assume they’re the only game in town—if your gut is telling you to keep looking, then keep looking.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“VCs who force the timing—who give you a term sheet to sign right here, right now—to make you feel panicked. A VC once gave me a term sheet as I was walking out of the meeting and pushed me to sign it on the spot. I asked if this was a used car dealership and told him I’d only sign after I read the terms.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making