Tony Fadell

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Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

He says, “Well, then here’s where you can connect the telephone cable.” Tony Fadell: And they go, “But Tony-san, where is the modem?” Michael Stern: In the block diagram there was no modem chip. Tony Fadell: I said, “In software.” Steve Jarrett: They all look at each other and one of them says, “Honto desu ka?” which is “Can it be true?” The other guy just kind of shrugs his shoulders. Then they immediately just start yelling at each other in Japanese. One of them jumps up and grabs the telephone that’s in the room and yells down the phone. They ask us to stop and wait. Tony Fadell: Just then the boss, Nagasawa-san, comes into the room and sees this activity.

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It was a design that we had scaled down to a small portable player, and up to a nice little cube stereo system. Tony Fadell: I never went off to the internet. When everyone went off to the internet I stayed doing devices. Yves Béhar: We had made a lot of progress: We had a great product lineup, we had some hardware designed, we had some mock-ups, the technology was aligning… Tony Fadell: And then the internet crunch happened. Yves Béhar: Just as it was for everyone else, it was impossible to find money to fund the next round for the company. Tony Fadell: No one wanted to fund it. They were like, “You are crazy, you should only be doing software, hardware is dead,” blah blah blah.

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I think I was employee number thirteen. Michael Stern: Andy and Bill were the gods of the universe, and then these kids came to work for them. Andy in particular was the mentor for and helped train a cohort of brilliant kids. Many of whom had their first job at Magic, like Tony Fadell. Tony hung around and would just talk to people until we finally hired him. Tony Fadell: I had my own start-up in Michigan doing educational software and getting frustrated being a big fish in a little pond. There was no internet then, so I would religiously read MacWEEK and Macworld, and there was always the last page of each of those rags which were like the murmurs, the rumors, the goings-on, and this company called General Magic kept popping up in it.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

Mike Slade, a former adviser to Steve Jobs, described Ording as a wizard: “He’d take ninety seconds pecking away, he’d hit a button, and there it was—a picture of whatever Steve had asked for. The guy was a god. Steve just laughed about it. ‘Basification in progress,’ he’d announce.” Ording’s father ran a graphic design company outside of Amsterdam, and he learned to code as a kid—maybe it was in his blood. Regardless, industry giants like Tony Fadell hail him as a visionary. One of his peers from the iPhone days puts it this way: “I don’t know what else to say about Bas, that guy’s a genius.” The new touch-based template proved so promising, even exhilarating, that Chaudhri and Ording would pass entire days down there, sometimes without realizing it—UI’s Lennon and McCarthy at work.

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“Well, Steve,” the exec said, “we have a glass prototype, but it fails the one-meter drop test one hundred out of one hundred times—” Jobs cut him off. “I just want to know if you are going make the fucking thing work.” That exchange may be notable for its snapshot of ultra-Jobs-ness, but it had real ramifications. “We switched from plastic to glass at the very last minute, which was a curveball,” Tony Fadell, the head of the original iPhone’s engineering team, tells me with a laugh. “There were just so many things like that.” The original plan had been to ship the iPhone with a hard plexiglass display, as Apple had done with its iPod. Jobs’s about-face gave the iPhone team less than a year to find a replacement that would pass that drop test.

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Predictably, the lithium-ion battery is the subject of a constant tug-of-war; as consumers, we demand more and better apps and entertainment, more video rendered in ever-higher res. Of course, we also pine for a longer-lasting battery, and the former obviously drains the latter. And Apple, meanwhile, wants to keep making thinner and thinner phones. “If we made the iPhone a millimeter thicker,” says Tony Fadell, the head of hardware for the first iPhone, “we could make it last twice as long.” About two hours after departing the world’s largest lithium refinery, Jason and I got our batteries stolen. Along with the stuff they powered. We’d just left the comfy clutches of SQM; our driver had dropped us off at the bus station.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

I thank Eric Zwick for pointing me to it. are at least 10,000 independent creatives: This includes rich owners of S-Corporations and partnerships. Chapter 5: The Long, Boring Slog of Success Tony Fadell: Fadell’s story was told in many places, including here: Seema Jayachandran, “Founders of successful tech companies are mostly middle-aged,” New York Times, September 1, 2019. In an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show, Fadell said: The Tim Ferriss Show #403, “Tony Fadell—On Building the iPod, iPhone, Nest, and a Life of Curiosity,” December 23, 2019. “people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas”: Corinne Purtill, “The success of whiz kid entrepreneurs is a myth,” Quartz, April 24, 2018.

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What determines, within a field, who succeeds? Data scientists have mined recently collected datasets on the entire universe of entrepreneurs—and found some surprising predictors of success. Chapter 5 The Long, Boring Slog of Success Every aspiring entrepreneur should hang a poster of Tony Fadell on their wall. One day, a short while ago, Fadell was frustrated by the clunky thermostats available in his house. So, like so many entrepreneurs before him, Fadell harnessed new technology to fix a problem that frustrated him (and millions of others). He created a company (Nest Labs) to develop a new programmable thermostat.

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Within a short time, the company made Fadell, like so many other tech entrepreneurs, exceedingly rich. A mere four years after starting his company, Fadell sold it to Google for $3.2 billion in cash. There are some important points about Fadell’s story that make it such a valuable one for entrepreneurs—and motivate my “Hang a Tony Fadell Poster on Your Wall” campaign. The data tells us that many aspects of Fadell’s story are common among successful entrepreneurs, even if they might go against some conventional wisdom. First was Fadell’s age. When Fadell started Nest, he was not some whiz kid. He didn’t start Nest from his dorm room.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

See also product management classes in, 51–52 considerations of, 43–44, 47 crisis and, 220–21, 224 cultivating natural successors, 55 decisions and, 61–63 discipline of, 44 establishing effective style of, 52–53 human resource topics at meetings, 240, 241 individual contributors as managers, 238, 248, 251–53 managers becoming directors, 238, 253 meetings of, 253 micromanagement, 44–46, 49, 52, 66, 211, 218, 221, 236, 277 motivation and, 53–54 performance reviews, 51 self-managing, 242 size of organization and, 46, 244 skills required for, 43, 44, 46–49 of teams, 41, 43–44, 46, 49–56, 242, 244, 245, 247, 249–50, 331 training for, 252–53 management consulting, 17–18 manufacturing design team and, 264, 269 disruption of, 115 product development and, 90, 92, 93, 96, 122, 130, 166, 168, 209 product management and, 288 role of, 24, 27, 277 sales team and, 293 marketing CEO expectations and, 324–25 culture of, 258 customer experience and, 270–71, 272, 273 legal team’s checks on, 276, 306 messaging activation matrix, 274, 275, 276, 280, 284, 285 messaging architecture, 102, 271, 272, 273, 280 of Nest Labs, 264–65 product development and, 279 product management and, 270, 273, 279, 281, 286, 287, 288–89, 290, 291 prototypes of, 100, 105–6 rigorous and analytical process of, 270–71 role of, 24, 27, 182 sales and, 295 startups and, 227 storytelling and, 270, 271, 273–74, 278–79, 278, 285, 286, 290 teams and, 270–80 Memegen app, 255 mentors/coaches board of directors and, 340, 341 breakpoints and, 256–57, 260 of early adulthood, 9 individual contributors as, 47 relationships and, 373–76 for startups, 180, 183, 184, 185–86, 194, 218, 223 teams and, 230, 240, 256–57 value of, xi, xii, xiii, 374–76 Microsoft, 3, 91, 123–24, 282, 310, 321 Microsoft OS, 31, 37, 77, 88, 202 Moore, Geoffrey, Crossing the Chasm, 151, 152–54, 156 Mossberg, Walt, 134 motivation of assholes, 68, 70, 75 management and, 53–54 Motorola, 148 Motorola Mobility, 352 Motorola ROKR iTunes phone, 329 MP3 players, 40–41, 87, 120, 122, 134, 332 Musicmatch Jukebox, 134 music streaming, 122 Musk, Elon, 21, 321 Nadella, Satya, 123–24, 321 Nest Cam, 306–8, 307, 313 Nest Labs board of directors of, 338, 339–40 culture of, 257, 325, 346, 349, 351, 352, 363, 375 customer support and, 323 development of, xviii–xix, 55, 165, 177, 185, 199–200, 226, 230 Google’s acquisition of, xix, 304, 310–16, 338, 345–52, 354–55, 359–61, 371 Google’s reabsorption of, 319–20 Google’s selling of, 317–19, 367 growth of, 225, 230, 236 intellectual property and, 306 investors in, 164, 165–66, 177, 178 marketing of, 264–65 perks at, 359–62 research for, 230 sales culture of, 297 Three Crowns hiring method at, 233 Nest Learning Thermostat app for phone, 98–99, 164, 167 customer installation, 99, 103–6, 113, 178, 280 defining feature of, 120 development of, xiv, xix, 98–100, 164, 166–68, 174–77, 279 disruption of, 124 generations of, 105–6, 159, 160–61, 167–68, 179, 230 interactive components of, 309–10 launching of, 117, 167 lawsuit against, 117, 303–4 marketing of, 274, 275, 276, 277–79, 278 packaging prototype for, 100, 101, 102, 264–65, 274 problems solved by, 166, 279 product manager for, 230, 289 Rush Hour Rewards, 113–14 screwdriver for, 104–6, 104 storytelling for, 112, 113–14, 234, 264–65, 274, 276, 278–79, 278 success of, 310–11 user testing of, 103–4 Why We Made It page, 278–79, 278 Nest Protect development of, xiv, xix, 161, 168, 309 generations of, 313 launching of, 169 Wave to Hush, 219–20, 222–23 Nest Secure, 289–90, 313 Newton, 139 Ng, Stan, 92 Niel, Xavier, 199–200 Nokia, 117, 122–23, 327 Not Invented Here Syndrome, 327 Novotney, DJ, 92 Oenning, Anton, 264–65 Oh-hyun, Kwon, 54 Omidyar, Pierre, 188 operations team competition and, 123 product management and, 291 role of, 24 sales and, 293, 295, 298 startups and, 182 Page, Larry acquisition of Nest and, 314–15, 320, 347–48, 351–52, 354, 355, 361 Alphabet and, 314 selling of Nest, 317–18 Palmer, Andy, 322 Palm PDAs, 15, 130, 332 patents, 305, 306 perks, criteria for, 356–63 personal growth adulthood, 5–13 criteria for getting a job, 14–19 heroes and, 20–25, 27 individual contributor’s perspective, 26–27, 28, 29, 30, 31–33 Philips competition with iPod, 121 culture of, 36–37, 209, 258 Tony Fadell as CTO at, xvii, 18, 36–37, 45–46, 58, 61, 77, 81, 88, 89, 96, 125, 129–30, 209, 374 as partner and investor in General Magic, 36, 37 target customer of, 58–61, 130 team schedules for, 144–45 Philips Nino, launching of, xvii, 38, 39–40, 39, 90 Philips Strategy and Ventures Group, Tony Fadell’s launching of, xvii, 40 Philips Velo customer panels for, 58–60 launching of, xvii, 37–40, 38, 90 project schedule for, 145 Pichai, Sundar, 53, 347–48, 355 Pinterest, 160 Pocket Crystal, 1, 2, 12 Porat, Marc, 1–2, 1, 27, 37 Power Mac G4 Cube, 329 PR crisis and, 219 customer experience and, 105 product management and, 137, 285, 288, 291 role of, 16, 27, 48 venture capital and, 195 product management legal team and, 287, 288, 306 marketing team and, 270, 273, 279, 281, 286, 287, 288–89, 290, 291 PR and, 137, 285, 288, 291 product manager and, 230, 270, 273, 281–91 project manager and, 281–82 role of, 24, 48, 227, 230, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286, 289 as set of skills, 284 startups and, 227 as voice of customer, 281, 282, 284, 286, 289–90 product managers (PdMs), 230, 270, 273, 281–91 product/market fit, 150, 151, 155, 156 products as brand, 270 building of, xii–xiii, 87–93, 373–76 CEO expectations of, 325 characteristics of, 14 competition for market share and mind share, 111 cost of goods sold (COGS), 106, 155 evolution versus disruption versus execution, 115–25 external project heartbeat rhythms of, 145–46, 149 internal project heartbeat rhythms of, 138–49, 139 making the intangible tangible, 95–106, 113, 323 messaging architecture of, 102 packaging prototypes, 100, 101, 102, 264–65 press releases for, 136–37 problems solved by, 14, 15–17, 19, 36, 61, 96, 109, 110, 262, 263, 273, 279, 290 product specific groups, 250–51 profitability of, 150–51, 152–54, 155, 156, 158, 160–61 prototypes of customer experience, 95, 96, 97, 98–100, 102–6, 119 stages of profitability, 150–61 storytelling and, 107–14, 266, 270, 271, 273, 278, 286, 288 user testing of, 103–5 version 1 products, 60, 115, 126–27, 133–34, 136, 138, 140, 146–47, 149, 150, 151, 152–54, 155, 157–58, 159, 179 version 2 products, 115–16, 126, 127–28, 134, 135–36, 149, 150, 151, 152–54, 155, 156, 157, 159, 179 version 3 products, 150–51, 152–54, 155–57, 159 program managers (PgMs), 282 project managers (PjMs), 281–82 Quality Computers, xv quitting career growth and, 41, 76–78 human resources and, 76, 81, 85, 86 narrative of, 83–84, 235 as negotiating tactic, 82–83 networking and, 78–80, 81, 84 personal problems and, 82 storytelling and, 83–84, 235 as strategy for dealing with assholes, 71, 73, 84–85 transition of, 76–81, 235 RealNetworks, Tony Fadell’s digital music player with, xvii, 41, 77, 80, 87, 332 reinvention, in Silicon Valley, xii risks of early adulthood, 6, 8, 9–13 political assholes and, 65–66 Robbin, Jeff, 303 Rogers, Matt at Apple, 237 brown-bag lunches with the CEO, 237 hiring process and, 233 on iPod engineering team, 55, 165 Nest Labs acquired by Google, 316 Nest Labs development, xviii–xix, 55, 165, 177, 226, 230 Ross, Ivy, 64 Rubin, Andy, 327–28 sales culture of, 292–99 product management and, 287, 288 relationships and, 294, 295–99 role of, 27, 182, 284, 285, 292, 295 startups and, 227 vested commission model of, 292–93, 298–99 Samsung, 89–90, 189, 345 Sander, Brian, 24 Sander, Wendell, 24 seed crystals, 180, 185, 232, 339–40 Silicon Valley culture of, xi–xii, 4, 10–11, 16, 37, 359 early adopters of, 157 “fail fast” mentality in, 174 investment in, 90, 192 smartphones customer experience of, 109, 128, 130 products based on use of, 16–17 Smith, Cheryl, 85 social media, 73.

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It is an amazing blueprint on how creative thinkers can negotiate their way to making ideas come to life in the world.” —Sir David Adjaye, OBE, architect “Tony Fadell is the rare combination of engineer and entrepreneur, with the soul of a storyteller. Build takes you far away from the beige box and into the glistening white world of the man who gave us the iPod, iPhone, and Nest, while providing actionable advice for formulating, launching, scaling, and even selling a business.” —Benjamin Clymer, founder, HODINKEE Copyright BUILD. Copyright © 2022 by Tony Fadell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

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So my leadership style is loud and passionate, mission-focused above all else. I pick a goal then run full speed ahead, refusing to let anything stop me, and expect everyone to run with me. But I also realize that what motivates me may not be what motivates my team. The world is not made up entirely of Tony Fadells (and let us all be grateful for that). There are also normal, sane people with lives and families and lots of things they can and need to do, all pulling at their time. So as a manager, you have to find what connects with your team. How can you share your passion with them, motivate them? The answer, as usual, comes down to communication.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

A FOUNDER WHO ALWAYS BUILT HIGHLY DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS INTERVIEW WITH TONY FADELL OF NEST AND APPLE Nest’s first product, its thermostat, is one example of a highly differentiated product. When the company began to reinvent the home thermostat, the product category had barely been touched in decades. Thermostats date back as far as the seventeenth century, and the “modern” thermostat—a digital, programmable device designed in the 1980s—was a clunky, rectangular wall panel that required people to punch in their desired temperature each day.3 Tony Fadell, former SVP of the Apple iPod division, is known as the “father of the iPod” and coinventor of the iPhone.

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Classification: LCC HD62.5 .T3554 2021 | DDC 658.1/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044864 ISBNs: 978-1-5417-6842-0 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-6841-3 (ebook) E3-20210420-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction Correlation Is Not Causation: A Note on Methods and Statistics PART ONE: THE FOUNDERS 1 Myths Around Founders’ Backgrounds Founding a Billion-Dollar Startup at Age Twenty-One: INTERVIEW WITH HENRIQUE DUBUGRAS OF BREX 2 Myths Around Founders’ Education A Professor Who Built Multiple Billion-Dollar Startups: INTERVIEW WITH ARIE BELLDEGRUN OF KITE PHARMA AND ALLOGENE 3 Myths Around Founders’ Work Experience Founders Who Built a $2 Billion Cancer Company Without Any Medical Background: INTERVIEW WITH NAT TURNER OF FLATIRON HEALTH 4 The Super Founder A Founder Who Met Success on the Second Try: INTERVIEW WITH MAX MULLEN OF INSTACART PART TWO: THE COMPANY 5 The Origin Story A Billion-Dollar Startup That Originated at a Large Tech Company: INTERVIEW WITH NEHA NARKHEDE OF CONFLUENT 6 Pivots 7 What and Where? A Billion-Dollar Move Out of Silicon Valley into Denver: INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL CARLSON OF GUILD EDUCATION 8 Product A Founder Who Always Built Highly Differentiated Products: INTERVIEW WITH TONY FADELL OF NEST AND APPLE 9 Market A Founder Who Did Both Market Creation and Expansion: INTERVIEW WITH MAX LEVCHIN OF PAYPAL AND AFFIRM 10 Market Timing A Billion-Dollar Startup with Perfect Market Timing: INTERVIEW WITH MARIO SCHLOSSER OF OSCAR HEALTH 11 Competition Competing Against Strong Incumbents: INTERVIEW WITH ERIC YUAN OF ZOOM 12 The Defensibility Factor PART THREE: THE FUNDRAISING 13 Venture Capital Versus Bootstrapping A $7.5 Billion Company That Was Bootstrapped for the First Five Years: INTERVIEW WITH TOM PRESTON-WERNER OF GITHUB 14 Bull Market Versus Bear Market A Billion-Dollar Company That Started in the Depth of the Recession: INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE ZATLYN OF CLOUDFLARE 15 Capital Efficiency 16 Angels and Accelerators A Prolific Angel Investor Turned VC: INTERVIEW WITH KEITH RABOIS OF FOUNDERS FUND 17 VC Investors An Investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, Zipline, and More: INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED LIN OF SEQUOIA CAPITAL 18 Fundraising An Investor in Facebook, SpaceX, Stripe, and More: INTERVIEW WITH PETER THIEL What to Remember Acknowledgments Discover More About the Author Praise for Super Founders Notes Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

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In some cases they are a representative sample of the data, and in other cases they are outliers. The outliers are important too—they demonstrate that sometimes you can succeed even in the face of data that shows otherwise. We will hear from Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Affirm, on market creation versus expansion; from Tony Fadell, founder of Nest and the inventor of the iPod, on product differentiation; from Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, on starting a company during the recession; and from Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom, on competition. We will talk with Peter Thiel, an investor in companies like Facebook, SpaceX, and Spotify, Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital, an investor in companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, an investor in companies like YouTube and LinkedIn, about what they look for when listening to a pitch and how startups should best prepare for fundraising.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

A Lion at Fifty: Interviews with Mike Slade, Alice Waters, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Jony Ive, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, George Riley, Bono, Walt Mossberg, Steven Levy, Kara Swisher. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, All Things Digital conference, May 30, 2007; Steven Levy, “Finally, Vista Makes Its Debut,” Newsweek, Feb. 1, 2007. CHAPTER 36: THE iPHONE An iPod That Makes Calls: Interviews with Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, George Riley, Tim Cook. Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, Nov. 2005. Multi-touch: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Tim Cook. Gorilla Glass: Interviews with Wendell Weeks, John Seeley Brown, Steve Jobs.

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Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001; Joshua Quittner, “Apple’s New Core,” Time, Jan. 14, 2002; Mike Evangelist, “Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article,” Writer’s Block Live, Oct. 7, 2005; Farhad Manjoo, “Invincible Apple,” Fast Company, July 1, 2010; email from Phil Schiller. iTunes: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell. Brent Schlender, “How Big Can Apple Get,” Fortune, Feb. 21, 2005; Bill Kincaid, “The True Story of SoundJam,” http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-sjstory.html; Levy, The Perfect Thing, 49–60; Knopper, 167; Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct. 17, 2005; Markoff, xix. The iPod: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell. Steve Jobs, iPod announcement, Oct. 23, 2001; Toshiba press releases, PR Newswire, May 10, 2000, and June 4, 2001; Tekla Perry, “From Podfather to Palm’s Pilot,” IEEE Spectrum, Sept. 2008; Leander Kahney, “Inside Look at Birth of the iPod,” Wired, July 21, 2004; Tom Hormby and Dan Knight, “History of the iPod,” Low End Mac, Oct. 14, 2005.

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Microsoft: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, Eddy Cue. Emails from Jim Allchin, David Cole, Bill Gates, Apr. 30, 2003 (these emails later became part of an Iowa court case and Steve Jobs sent me copies); Steve Jobs, presentation, Oct. 16, 2003; Walt Mossberg interview with Steve Jobs, All Things Digital conference, May 30, 2007; Bill Gates, “We’re Early on the Video Thing,” Business Week, Sept. 2, 2004. Mr. Tambourine Man: Interviews with Andy Lack, Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Jon Rubinstein. Ken Belson, “Infighting Left Sony behind Apple in Digital Music,” New York Times, Apr. 19, 2004; Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, Nov. 2005; Saul Hansel, “Gates vs.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

And its “random access” capabilities distanced it even more from the likes of a Discman, since it gave you the potential to find a particular song out of that enormous trove almost instantly. In January 2001, Ruby asked some former Newton engineers to begin work in earnest on some sort of portable audio device around the Toshiba micro-drive. In March he put an engineer he’d hired from Philips NV, Tony Fadell, in charge of the group. Fadell, an energetic entrepreneur with the build of a college wrestler and the intensity of a high school football coach, had worked at General Magic back in the early 1990s, with Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare, veterans of the original Macintosh team, who had told him horror stories about Steve in his early days.

…

Motorola promised Apple that it would create a new line of phones, called the ROKR, expressly as a vehicle for iTunes. The ROKR project was controversial from the start, for one simple reason: most people at Apple didn’t like the idea of collaborating with other companies. The iPod hardware team, especially, led by Tony Fadell, couldn’t stomach the notion of ceding the development of what they had started to call “musicphones” to the traditional handset industry. And the more Motorola showed them of its plans for the ROKR, the more certain they became that licensing their precious iPod and iTunes software had been a mistake.

…

He conferred with Steve Sakoman, another former Newton and Palm engineer who now worked for Avie Tevanian as the VP of software technology, and who had been pushing for Apple to make the move into phones. And he wanted to hear what the iPod guys thought about multi-touch, since they’d already built the two musicphone prototypes. He asked Tony Fadell to come check out the Jumbotron, since he had the hardware engineering expertise to judge what it might take to build such a technology into a much smaller device that could be mass-produced. Once he saw it, Fadell agreed that the technology was really interesting, but allowed that it wouldn’t be easy to shrink that demo the size of a Ping-Pong table down to something functional that could fit into a pocket-sized device.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Ruby had six months to come up with Apple’s first MP3 player. “In Your Pocket” As Rubinstein remembers, his biggest initial problem was that everybody at Apple, including Jony’s ID group, was already busy with other products. As was usual with such exploratory, blue-sky projects, Apple went looking for an outside consultant. Someone recommended Tony Fadell, a designer/engineer who specialized in handheld hardware and digital audio. Fadell had worked for General Magic, an Apple spinoff, and developed PDAs for Philips before launching his own start-up, Fuse Networks, in the late 1990s. Fadell’s twelve-person firm was busy trying to build an MP3 stereo player, a conventional rack-mounted component with a hard drive and CD reader instead of a tape deck or FM radio.

…

Jobs asked Fadell if he could build Schiller’s scroll wheel. Fadell said yes, of course. The project was code-named P-68. Project Dulcimer For reasons that no one seems to remember, P-68 came to be known among insiders as “Project Dulcimer.” Jobs had green-lighted it, but one main player on the project, Tony Fadell, not only didn’t work at Apple, he didn’t particularly want to. Fadell pitched Rubinstein on awarding the job to his start-up on a contract basis, but Rubinstein refused. Instead, he extended the reluctant Fadell’s contract. As the project moved forward, however, Rubinstein got more and more uncomfortable with the arrangement: He wanted Fadell on board full time at Apple.

…

Jony reportedly went to Jobs and told him, “It’s him or me.” Despite Rubinstein’s essential role in the development of the iPod and scores of other products, Jobs chose Jony.27 In October 2005, Apple issued a press release that framed Rubinstein’s exit as a long-deserved retirement. He was replaced as head of the iPod division by Tony Fadell.28 Rubinstein would spend some time building a house in Mexico before later becoming CEO of Palm and developing a rival to the iPhone. Speaking of the affair years later, Rubinstein was diplomatic about his relationship with Jony. “Jony and I worked very closely over many years and did a lot of work together.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

That’s the classic sign of a chronic entrepreneur and good leader – they are always itching to move on to ‘the next big thing’. I don’t know about Tony Fadell or anyone else around the table that evening, but I’ve often been told I exhibit all the classic symptoms of suffering from ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). There may be distinct similarities to ADD but I have always believed I am more likely to be suffering from a bad case of SERS – Serial Entrepreneurial Restlessness Syndrome. As the Apple story so capably demonstrates, a company’s culture is really the power behind the brand and feeds into everything it does. At Nest, using lessons learned from his time in Cupertino, Tony Fadell told us he has worked at deliberately developing a more collegial and less dictatorial culture than that which Jobs fostered at Apple.

…

By coincidence, right around the time that Virgin Produced, our entertainment division, was about to release the movie Jobs, which tells the story of Steve Jobs and the early years of Apple, I had dinner with a fascinating group of business leaders that included Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nest’s Tony Fadell, Mike McCue of Flipboard and Dave Morin of the social network Path. As someone who is a regular user of Flipboard and, for reasons I cannot begin to explain, has millions of followers on Twitter, this was a mindboggling group and they didn’t disappoint – they all had great stories to share.

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As I write this I just heard a news item that the latest iteration of the iPhone has sold nine million units in its first three days on the market: a quite amazing statistic by any measure. Selling nine million of something in a decade would be an achievement for most companies, but in three days! AN APPLE A DAY Tony Fadell, I learned, was one of the key players in the development of Apple’s revolutionary iPod. He told us how, early in his Apple career, he’d approached Jobs with the initial concept, then gone on to work on building and developing no fewer than eighteen generations of iPods and three generations of iPhones – gizmos that almost single-handedly turned the music and telecommunications industries on their heads.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

—George Bernard Shaw Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Cast of Characters Prologue Chapter 1: One More Thing Chapter 2: The Artist Chapter 3: The Operator Chapter 4: Keep Him Chapter 5: Intense Determination Chapter 6: Fragile Ideas Chapter 7: Possibilities Chapter 8: Can’t Innovate Chapter 9: The Crown Chapter 10: Deals Chapter 11: Blowout Chapter 12: Pride Chapter 13: Out of Fashion Chapter 14: Fuse Chapter 15: Accountants Chapter 16: Security Chapter 17: Hawaii Days Chapter 18: Smoke Chapter 19: The Jony 50 Chapter 20: Power Moves Chapter 21: Not Working Chapter 22: A Billion Pockets Chapter 23: Yesterday Epilogue Author’s Note Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Bibliography Notes Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Cast of Characters Tim Cook: Chief Executive Officer (2011–present), Senior Vice President for Worldwide Operations, COO (1998–2011) Jony Ive: Chief Design Officer (2015–2019), Senior Vice President of Design, member of design team (1992–2015) EXECUTIVES Angela Ahrendts: Senior Vice President, Retail (2014–2019) Katie Cotton: Vice President of Worldwide Communications (1996–2014) Eddy Cue: Senior Vice President, Services (2011–present, joined Apple in 1989) Steve Dowling: Vice President, Communications (2015–2019, joined Apple in 2003) Tony Fadell: Senior Vice President, iPod Division (2005–2008, joined Apple in 2001) Scott Forstall: Senior Vice President, iOS (2007–2012, joined Apple in 1997) Greg Joswiak: Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing (2020–present, joined Apple in 1986) Luca Maestri: Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (2014–present, joined Apple in 2013) Bob Mansfield: Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering (2005–2012, joined Apple in 1999, remained as an adviser on future projects after 2012) Deirdre O’Brien: Senior Vice President, Retail + People (2019–present, joined Apple in 1988) Peter Oppenheimer: Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (2004–2014, joined Apple in 1996) Dan Riccio: Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering (2012–2021, joined Apple in 1998) Jon Rubinstein: Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering and iPod Division (1997–2006) Phil Schiller: Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing (1997–2020, joined Apple in 1987 and 1997) Bruce Sewell: Senior Vice President and General Counsel (2009–2017) Jeff Williams: Chief Operating Officer (2015–present, joined Apple in 1998) INDUSTRIAL DESIGN Bart Andre: Designer (1992–present) Robert Brunner: Director of Industrial Design (1990–1996) Danny Coster: Designer (1994–2016) Daniele De Iuliis: Designer (1992–2018) Julian Hönig: Designer (2010–2019) Richard Howarth: Designer (1996–present) Duncan Kerr: Designer (1999–present) Marc Newson: Designer (2014–2019), LoveFrom (2019–present) Tim Parsey: Manager, Industrial Design Studio (1991–1996) Doug Satzger: Designer (1996–2008) Christopher Stringer: Designer (1995–2017) Eugene Whang: Designer (1999–2021) Rico Zorkendorfer: Designer (2003–2019) SOFTWARE TEAM Imran Chaudhri: Designer (1995–2016) Greg Christie: Vice President, Human Interface Design (1996–2015) Alan Dye: Vice President, Human Interface Design (2012–present); Creative Director (2006–2012) Henri Lamiraux: Vice President, Software Engineering (2009–2013, joined Apple in 1990) Richard Williamson: Designer (2001–2012) MARKETERS Hiroki Asai: Vice President, Global Marketing Communications (2010–2016, joined Apple in 2000) Paul Deneve: Sales & Marketing Manager, Apple Europe (1990–1997); Vice President, Special Projects (2013–2017) Duncan Milner: Chief Creative Officer, TBWA\Media Arts Lab (2000–2016) James Vincent: CEO, TBWA\Media Arts Lab; Managing Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Apple (2000–2006) MUSIC MEN Dr.

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The nascent MP3 market sparked dreams of a next-generation Sony Walkman. The project took flight after Jon Rubinstein, the head of hardware engineering, discovered that Toshiba’s semiconductor unit had created a miniature disk drive that would hold a thousand songs. He pushed to buy the rights to every disk Toshiba made. To run the project, Jobs hired Tony Fadell, a hardware engineer who had worked on General Magic’s personal digital assistant. Rubinstein and Fadell assembled the components, while Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, contributed the idea of creating a wheel to scroll through songs, a concept inspired by a Bang & Olufsen phone. They handed the ingredients to Ive to package.

…

It also showed that Cook’s decade at Apple had imbued him with a deep understanding of the company’s unique culture. It cemented his position as Jobs’s most likely successor. There wasn’t a true challenger. Three of Apple’s most talented engineers, software developer Avie Tevanian and hardware executives Jon Rubinstein and Tony Fadell, had already left the company. Rising software star Scott Forstall was considered too young, hardware leader Bob Mansfield was regarded as too narrowly focused, and product marketer Phil Schiller was thought of as too divisive. Jony Ive was better at managing a small team than worrying about Apple’s sprawling business.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

For other parts of the book, there were people I spent whole days with, such as Timothy Buchman at the Emory medical center in Atlanta and Nick Dokoozlian in the grape vineyards of central California and Michael Haydock in suburban Minneapolis. Many others were interviewed for this book. They include Sam Adams, Brooke Barrett, Richard Berner, Patrick Bosworth, Thomas Botts, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Calkins, Murray Campbell, Dennis Charney, Herbert Chase, Jeffrey Chester, Sharath Cholleti, Adam D’Angelo, Arne Duncan, Sue Duncan, Tony Fadell, Edward Felten, David Ferrucci, Rachana Shah Fischer, Brian Gehlich, Jim Goodnight, Nagui Halim, Hendrik Hamann, Glenn Hammerbacher, Lenore Hammerbacher, Danny Hillis, Jeffrey Immelt, Jon Iwata, James Kalina, Kaan Katircioglu, Gary King, Jon Kleinberg, Martin Kohn, Randy Komisar, Patricia Kovatch, Edward Lazowska, and Michael Linderman.

…

Her stature in the field grew out of a stellar academic career, beginning as a graduate student at MIT, and later as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and elsewhere. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Yet in 2010, Matsuoka joined a start-up company. Its product? Thermostats. A dumbfounding move at first glance, but Nest Labs was not just any start-up, nor did it plan to make humble household wall fixtures. Nest was cofounded by Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who designed the iPod, and then headed the iPod and iPhone division until he left in 2009. The other cofounder was Matt Rogers, a younger Apple alumnus. They recruited an impressive team of Silicon Valley talent in hardware, software, design, and data analysis. They won the backing of blue-chip venture capital firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the investment arm of Google, as well as Generation Investment Management, cofounded by Al Gore and dedicated to environmentally responsible investments.

…

That involved writing software to handle the data signals from sensors on the prosthetic hand and writing machine-learning software to train it. At Nest, he calls himself an algorithms engineer, and he is adept with the software toolkit of data science. His job is to write the software that makes sense of the sensor and other data to school its learning thermostats. He describes it as “thermal modeling in the home.” Tony Fadell, the chief executive of Nest, is at heart a hardware designer who loves elegant objects of utility. The Nest thermostat is such an object, as is the smart smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector that the company introduced in late 2013. It communicates in spoken words, offering information and suggestions, instead of emitting earsplitting beeps.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

But by the end of 2003, as the iPod became Apple’s most important product since the Macintosh, it was also starting to look misguided. Cell phone makers were putting music-listening applications in their phones. And companies such as Amazon, Walmart, and Yahoo! were beginning to sell downloadable music. Executives such as iPod boss Tony Fadell worried that if consumers suddenly gave up their iPods for music phones, Apple’s business—only five years removed from its flirt with bankruptcy—would be crushed. “We didn’t really have a hit on our hands [with the iPod] until late 2003, early 2004, so we were saying maybe we don’t have the market domination—the retail channels—to expand the iPod’s business properly,” Fadell said.

…

He’d spent the night before the Tuesday keynote at a San Francisco hotel up the street from Moscone, but he’d forgotten to check out, and he’d left all his luggage in his room. * * * Getting the iPhone ready for sale wasn’t the only distraction Apple engineers had to contend with in early 2007. To get the iPhone built, Jobs had pitted two of his star executives against each other—Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell—to see who could come up with the best product. The fallout from that two-year fight was now rippling through the corporation. It had been an ugly war, full of accusations of sabotage and backstabbing, pitting friends against friends. It had left many people on both sides feeling that Apple no longer resembled the company they had joined.

…

But it also seemed as if Jobs had some internal flames to fan of his own, said one of the engineers who was there along with Grignon and many others who had worked on the project, including Fadell and Forstall. “So there’s this reunion of the original Mac guys, and it’s really cool. And then Steve goes up to Tony [Fadell] and proceeds to go over in a corner of the store and talk to him for an hour and ignore Forstall just to fuck with him.” “Up until that day, for the previous six months, everything had been Tony’s fault. Any hardware problems or ship delays or manufacturing problems—all Tony’s fault. Scott could do no wrong.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

Naturally, when you look at someone's music, you make judgments. An eclectic and knowing collection raises your opinion of the collector. By some accounts, a really good playlist can even generate an aphrodisiac effect. In a blog posting, the tech writer Mitch Ratcliffe reported on a lunch with Apple's Tony Fadell, who told Ratcliffe about grateful e-mails he'd received from collegians on campus networks. Apparently these male students were beneficiaries of midnight visits from female students who'd scanned the guys' playlists on the campus networks and were so impressed that they craved an instant hookup.

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The 32-year-old engineer was taking a rare few days off. He had recently started a small company and was more than happy to continue with it. He liked the control of heading his own firm; too many times while working for someone else, the fiercely independent Detroit native wound up feeling cheated. This call was from Apple. All his life, Tony Fadell had idolized that company. When he was twelve, he'd combined a summer's money he'd made caddying with a contribution from his grandfather to buy an Apple lie personal computer. He became an ace pro- The Perfect Thing 54 grammer and started three companies before he graduated from the University of Michigan.

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It was logical to expect a task like that to take at least a year. By their working very hard, it could be done sometime in 2002. But that ignored a more important deadline. This was a classic consumer product, nailed down to unyielding seasonal economics. And the lion's share of sales would come during one season. The Apple people made this crystal clear to Tony Fadell. "I'll never forget the conversation," says Greg Joswiak. " 'Tony, we've studied the math here and we're brain surgeons, and we think.Christmas is gonna be big.' " Nonetheless, Origin it was far from certain that producing a breakthrough device— and one that was a considerable departure from Apple's usual products—could be completed in not much more than six months.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

See his book Social Interaction Systems: Theory and Measurement(London: Transaction Publishers, 2001). Later work focuses on the concept of group cohesion and how it impacts performance, as noted above. 50Google bought Fadell’s firm for $3.2 billion in 2014. Fadell departed Google in 2016. 51See Connie Loizos, “Is Tony Fadell in Nest’s Way?” Techcrunch, March 30, 2016. Also see Lydia Dishman, “What’s Going on at Nest?” Fast Company, February 17, 2016. 52Steve Lohr, “Tony Fadell Steps Down Amid Tumult at Nest, a Google Acquisition,” New York Times, March 3, 2016. 53There are cases where firms experience a crisis, identify the need to change their cultures, and then fail to do so. NASA, after the Challenger space shuttle disaster, claimed that it was going to become a “safety first” culture where its employees felt comfortable voicing any concerns they had with the safety of a mission.

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An excessive drive to deliver can come from the senior leaders of a company, from a team’s leader, or from the team members themselves. In many cases, it is a combination of all three factors. The challenge is delivering results without creating a culture that is too harsh—a culture where people compete with each other in unproductive ways or live in constant fear of losing their jobs. Take the case of Tony Fadell, who was a highly successful executive at Apple before starting the firm Nest Labs (which produces “smart” thermostats, smoke detectors, and security systems). Fadell has a reputation of pushing himself and his people hard—and he delivered at Apple and initially at his own firm.50 Then things started to unravel.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

., ‘How our daily travel harms the planet’, BBC Future, 18 March 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-climate-change-cut-carbon-emissions-from-your-commute. 3 McKibben, B., ‘If the world ran on sun, it wouldn’t fight over oil’, Guardian, 18 September 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/18/climate-crisis-oil-war-iraq-saudi-attack-green-energy. 4 Fisher, A., ‘Tony Fadell’s next act? Taking on Silicon Valley – from Paris’, Wired, 19 October 2017, www.wired.com/story/tony-fadell-revenge-on-silicon-valley-from-paris/. Chapter 1 The Battery Age 1 Tesla Battery Day presentation, YouTube, 22 September 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6T9xIeZTds. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Watts, S., The People’s Tycoon, Henry Ford and the American Century (New York, Vintage, 2009), p. 288.

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The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is green at its core but there are many choices to be made in the way it is executed that will affect both the environment and global power dynamics. Green energy evangelists tend to assume that a fossil-free future will be without conflicts. Bill McKibben, a well-known activist, wrote that ‘if the world ran on sun, it wouldn’t fight over oil’.3 This idea was repeated by Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod, who told Wired magazine: ‘If we have energy storage technologies that are very cheap and very efficient, then we’re going to see wars stop, because no one is going to be fighting over oil reserves anymore.’4 Yet the demand for raw materials to build our clean energy infrastructure is as geopolitical as the age of oil.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

But Purple was different. The stakes were higher—Steve Jobs was watching obsessively. As a new hardware product with the potential to rival and cannibalize the sales of the hottest Apple product of the day, the iPod, there had been an intense competition to be at the center of what might be the next big thing. Tony Fadell, the senior vice president of iPod development, had wanted the phone software to be in his domain. Scott Forstall thought he could do better, and these two had engaged in an executive-level contest to own the future of Purple software development. Scott won the tussle by assigning Henri and a couple of software engineers to develop a platform that borrowed as much from the Mac as possible but replaced AppKit with a brand-new multitouch-aware user interface system called UIKit.

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My keyboard would be a part of the overall impression, and Phil was confused rather than convinced. The derby-winning keyboard with some modifications to make it more full-featured. The shift and delete keys made way for a return key and a key to display numbers and punctuation. A couple days later, Scott and I repeated the demo performance for Tony Fadell, the executive in charge of the iPod division. I had never met Tony before either, but I didn’t have to know him to see how preoccupied he was. When he walked over to the conference room table with my demo on it, he barely glanced at my keyboard. He didn’t ask any questions. Then he tried my software, but he couldn’t have typed more than a word or two.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Who would write the rules and laws in this hyperconnected future? How would people make their voices heard? Who would own all those sensors and controllers embedded in our hamstrings and boats? Fadell didn’t address these issues. His vision seemed to take for granted that this new world would be kind and safe. Tony Fadell, “Nest CEO Tony Fadell on the Future of the Internet,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2015. Chapter 6 1. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations,” Guardian, June 11, 2013. 2. Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden, NSA Files Source: ‘If They Want to Get You, in Time They Will,’” Guardian, June 10, 2013. 3.

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Richard Waters, “Google Eyes Better City Life for Billions,” Financial Times, June 11, 2015. 156. Matt Novak, “Google’s Parent Company (Probably) Wants to Build a City from Scratch,” Gizmodo, April 5, 2016, http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/google-s-parent-company-probably-wants-to-build-a-cit-1769181473. 157. Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive and a connected-device guru who works as a personal adviser to Larry Page, sketched one vision of a future where Google’s technology benevolently ruled over and mediated everything and everyone in the world. “Tomorrow’s Internet will be everywhere and in everything. It will draw on massive amounts of data to augment our own intelligence.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

In the evenings, Musk headed to Rocket Science Games, a start-up based in Palo Alto that wanted to create the most advanced video games ever made by moving them off cartridges and onto CDs that could hold more information. The CDs would in theory allow them to bring Hollywood-style storytelling and production quality to the games. A team of budding all-stars who were a mix of engineers and film people was assembled to pull off the work. Tony Fadell, who would later drive much of the development of both the iPod and iPhone at Apple, worked at Rocket Science, as did the guys who developed the QuickTime multimedia software for Apple. They also had people who worked on the original Star Wars effects at Industrial Light & Magic and some who did games at LucasArts Entertainment.

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Smartphones were revolutionary because of the ways they allowed hardware, software, and services to work in unison. This was a mix that favored the skills of Silicon Valley. The rise of the smartphone led to a massive industrial boom in which Apple became the most valuable company in the country, and billions of its clever devices were spread all over the world. Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to market, has characterized the smartphone as representative of a type of super-cycle in which hardware and software have reached a critical point of maturity. Electronics are good and cheap, while software is more reliable and sophisticated.

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Tesla’s engineers unpacked it furiously, installed the battery pack, and then let Musk take it for a spin. About twenty Tesla engineers jumped in prototype vehicles and formed a convoy that followed Musk around Palo Alto and Stanford. *At some point from late 2007 to 2008, Musk also tried to hire Tony Fadell, an executive at Apple who is credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to life. Fadell remembered being recruited for the CEO job at Tesla, while Musk remembered it more as a chief operating officer type of position. “Elon and I had multiple discussions about me joining as Tesla’s CEO, and he even went to the lengths of staging a surprise party for me when I was going to visit their offices,” Fadell said.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It consisted of DARPA and industry leaders but was initiated (and funded) by DARPA in 1995, with the total government investment of $100 million during its existence. 6 Lower costs became visible when the price of a microchip for the Apollo program fell from $1,000 per unit to anywhere between $20 to $30 per unit within just few years (Breakthrough 2010). 7 Roland and Shiman (2002, 153) document Japan’s significant progress in the global chip market as having 0 per cent market share as opposed to the US’s 100 per cent share in 1970s, to 80 per cent global market share in 1986. 8 During his TV interview on 30 April 2012, Tony Fadell, who was in the original iPod design team, revealed the challenges Apple was facing with finding ways to replace buttons on the new gadget. Available from: http://www.theverge. com/2012/4/30/2988484/on-the-verge-005-tony-fadell-interview (accessed 12 April 2013). 9 Capacitive sensing is a technology that draws on the human body’s ability to act as a capacitor and store electric charge. 10 As a world-renowned expert on touch-screen technology, Bill Buxton provides an extensive archive of electronic devices with touch-screen applications.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Rob Price, “The Smart-Home Device That Google Is Deliberately Disabling Was Sold with a ‘Lifetime Subscription,’” Business Insider, April 5, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/revolv-smart-home-hubs-lifetime-subscription-bricked-nest-google-alphabet-internet-of-things-2016-4, accessed April 10, 2016. 9. Arlo Gilbert, “The Time That Tony Fadell Sold Me a Container of Hummus,” Medium, April 3, 2016, https://medium.com/@arlogilbert/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.nhl96qogu, accessed April 10, 2016. 10. “Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone,” Apple Press Info, Apple Inc., January 9, 2007, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the-Phone-with-iPhone.html, accessed September 7, 2015. 11.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

—JOE GEBBIA, cofounder and chief product officer, Airbnb “Having been through the ups and downs of the messy middle many times, it’s critical to understand the challenges ahead. This insightful book empowers you to approach them head-on. Belsky’s powerful tool kit, based on hard-earned experiences, is an essential guide to building a compelling product, revolutionizing an organization, or growing your leadership abilities.” —TONY FADELL, inventor of the iPod, coinventor of the iPhone, founder and former CEO of Nest, principal at Future Shape Portfolio/Penguin An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 Copyright © 2018 by Scott Belsky Penguin supports copyright.

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The question is whether you’re close to the tipping point of the project working and the difficulties you’re experiencing are just wearing you down, or if they’re rightfully making you question your true belief in the final vision. It’s extremely difficult to halt all progress and start all over again, but the boldest projects have multiple such “resets.” Perhaps one of the most challenging and important consumer product creations of our lifetime was the iPod, and subsequently the iPhone. So I asked Tony Fadell—who, before creating the thermostat company Nest, was brought into Apple by Steve Jobs to lead the iPod project, and then iPhone—about how his teams worked their way around so many dead ends. Tony explained, “I think there are two kinds of resets, one which is product spec based, not meeting the customer needs, and the other which is engineering based, not having a way to implement the plan with the current team or current technology inside or outside the company.

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

And, of course, these machines will be connected wirelessly, and all data will be managed and stored in the cloud. One example in the smart home/connected devices arena is about to enter the mainstream. In our opinion, one of the most successful innovations of 2012 was the Nest smart thermostat, created by Tony Fadell, who ran the teams that created the iPod and the iPhone. Tony turned beautiful design and smart functionality into significant sales in Nest’s first year of commercial operations. Companies that offer home automation services, such as Control4 and Vivint (acquired in 2012 by Blackstone for $2 billion) are surging, and the decreasing cost of sensors, coupled with the growing ubiquity of smartphones, tablets, and high-speed wireless Internet, is enabling a raft of new applications.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The Google Plus social-networking service, around which all the other web properties were reorganized, at no small expense and degree of user inconvenience, radically unperformed expectations; launched in 2011, it’s wound up a quiet backwater in a world where Facebook and its properties dominate social media. It has been widely reported that the Nest team loathed founder Tony Fadell, and the division suffered from a string of embarrassing reversals during its time under the Google aegis;2 to date, the parent organization has been unable to leverage the data presumably flowing upstream from its thermostats and networked cameras. Boston Dynamics was put up for sale in March 2016, in what has been characterized as a corporate retreat from the entire field of robotics (and what was notably, again, a failure to integrate organizational cultures following an acquisition).3 The company’s autonomous car initiative has suffered a long wave of defections among senior personnel, and keeps rolling back the date at which it plans to introduce its driverless technology;4 it now estimates its vehicles will be fielded commercially no sooner than 2020.

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Levesque, Ernest Davis and Leora Morgenstern, “The Winograd Schema Challenge,” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 2012, aaai.org/ocs/index.php/KR/KR12/paper/download/4492/4924. 12.Cara McGoogan, “Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Labelled ‘Not Ready for Streets’ After They Are Found to Cut Across Cycle Lanes,” Telegraph, December 20, 2016. 13.Timothy A. Salthouse, “When Does Age-Related Cognitive Decline Begin?,” Neurobiology of Aging, April 2009, Volume 30, Issue 4, pp. 507–14. 10Radical technologies 1.Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky, “Topic 487: State of the World 2016,” The WELL, January 3, 2016, well.com. 2.Mark Bergen, “Nest CEO Tony Fadell Went to Google’s All-Hands Meeting to Defend Nest. Here’s What He Said,” Recode, April 13, 2016. f 3.Brad Stone and Jack Clark, “Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat,” Bloomberg Technology, March 17, 2016. 4.John Markoff, “Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist,” New York Times, August 5, 2016. 5.Mark Harris, “Secretive Alphabet Division Funded by Google Aims to Fix Public Transit in US,” Guardian, June 27, 2016. 6.Siimon Reynolds, “Why Google Glass Failed: A Marketing Lesson,” Forbes, February 5, 2015. 7.Rajat Agrawal, “Why India Rejected Facebook’s ‘Free’ Version of the Internet,” Mashable, February 9, 2016. 8.Mark Zuckerberg, “The technology behind Aquila,” Facebook, July 21, 2016, facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technology-behind-aquila/10153916136506634/. 9.Mari Saito, “Exclusive: Amazon Expanding Deliveries by Its ‘On-Demand’ Drivers,” Reuters, February 8, 2016. 10.Alan Boyle, “First Amazon Prime Airplane Debuts in Seattle After Secret Night Flight,” GeekWire, August 4, 2016. 11.Farhad Manjoo, “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick?

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Today, as many linguists argue, emojis are redefining the way we communicate. 1999: TWO-SECOND REWIND, Paul Newby TiVo heralded a new era for TV and digital video, and, in addition to ad skipping, one of its earliest and most loved features was the two-second rewind. Its invention sprang from observing users watching TV and wondering what someone had just said. 2001: APPLE IPOD, Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, and Phil Schiller Just like the Sony Walkman in the late 1970s, the iPod ushered in a wave of gadget adoption that was driven by user-experience innovations rather than new functionality. The iPod click wheel embodied Apple’s long-held belief in the seamless integration of hardware and software.

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It’s an open question whether we can wean ourselves off them, and whether we want to. 2009: LIKE BUTTON, Justin Rosenstein, Leah Pearlman, Aaron Sittig, Mark Zuckerberg, and others The most successful button in history, the Like button made it almost frictionless for users to act on even the faintest twinge of affection or animosity; multiplied, that signal would shape the information diet of billions. The Like button introduced a new layer of social exchange that society hadn’t seen before; and it proved once again the power of feedback to shape our psyches. 2011: NEST LEARNING THERMOSTAT, Tony Fadell, Ben Filson, and Fred Bould The Nest Learning Thermostat represented a milestone in applying the sort of user-friendly design approach we associate with high-end devices such as the iPhone to the mundane appliances we take for granted. Like the Ford Fusion dashboard, the Nest thermostat incorporates subtle behavioral nudges intended to make the product more convenient to use as well as more environmentally sustainable.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

A more recent demonstration of how old thinking holds back even smart entrepreneurs is how long it took for the Amazon Echo to arrive, given that speech recognition has been a feature of smartphones since the 2011 launch of Apple’s Siri intelligent agent. Yet it was Amazon’s Alexa, not Siri or Google, that brought a seemingly minor change that made all the difference: Alexa was the first smart agent always listening to your commands without the need to first touch a button. Tony Fadell, one of the creators of the original iPod and the founder and former CEO of Nest, the company bought by Google for $3.4 billion to be the heart of its push into the connected home, gave me a clue when I ribbed him about Amazon stealing a huge march on him. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “what the backlash would have been if Google had put out a connected home device that was always listening to you?”

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Much as he saw in 1998 that it was time to cut through consumer fears about stored credit cards, and that you could create a far better user experience if you pushed the boundaries a little bit, he saw that the time was right for an always-listening intelligent agent in the home. This is a key lesson for every entrepreneur. Ask yourself: What is unthinkable? And if, like Tony Fadell, you aren’t ready to push past that boundary of unthinkability because you believe the market isn’t ready, you can still prepare. Keep waiting for the missing pieces of the puzzle to arrive. Even if you aren’t the one to push that boundary, once someone does it successfully, there’s a huge opportunity for a fast follower.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

And there are smart security cameras, smart kitchen scales, smart light bulbs, smart toilets, smart nappies and even smart toothbrushes. The most prominent smart device company, Nest Labs, was acquired by Google in January 2014 for a jaw-dropping $3.2 billion in cash. Founded by former Apple employees Matt Rogers and iPod creator Tony Fadell, it builds a range of connected smart devices, chief among which is a smart thermostat, designed to ‘learn’ its user’s habits over time and adjust itself accordingly. What makes these devices ‘smart’ is a combination of sensors, Artificial Intelligence algorithms and constant Internet connectivity via Wi-Fi.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

But this failure barely threatens the company, whose last quarterly revenues neared $17 billion, whose cash on hand exceeds $56.5 billion, and whose 2014 market cap topped $400 billion.69 Indeed, if any of the tech powers is to become a full-fledged keiretsu, it’s likely to be Google. In addition to their other ventures, Google’s recent acquisition of Nest, a company founded by Apple alum Tony Fadell, brings Google into the “smart home” marketplace, part of the so-called “Internet of things,” with its almost infinite capacity for ever greater information hauls from your once “dumb,” but at least private, household appliances.70 In splendid keiretsu fashion, the acquisition also helped Kleiner Perkins, one of the early investors in both Google and Amazon, gain a return of twenty times their original investment.71 In the process, as industry veteran Michael Mace observes, Google has stopped being a “unified product company” and is turning instead into what he calls “a post-modern conglomerate.”

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Essentially, the device can reprogramme itself. Boasting an elegant, simple, intuitive user interface – only current room temperature is displayed in bold font – the device can be set up in just 1 minute and controlled remotely through a smartphone. The device’s plug-and-play ease of use is no accident. Nest was co-founded by Tony Fadell, who created the iPod while at Apple. Although the Nest costs $250, it saves users an average of $173 annually in energy bills. Furthermore, a Nest-commissioned study found that southern Californians who used the learning thermostats saved over 11% of alternating current (AC)-related energy. The Nest device helps consumers adopt more eco-friendly behaviour by: E-mailing users a monthly energy report.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Musk had his own view of the situation. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard,’” he said. “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.” Steve Jobs had floated the idea of making a car in several discussions in 2008, according to former Apple vice president Tony Fadell, who went on to start the smart-devices company Nest, which was eventually acquired by Google (and which he left in 2016). Jobs and Fadell had discussed the proposition during a few walks, Fadell told an interviewer in 2015. “A car has batteries; it has a computer; it has a motor; and it has mechanical structure.

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

That year saw 590 rounds of capital-raising in France, more than any country in Europe. Venture capitalists in London, who had until then shied away from Paris, became bullish about France for the first time. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, said the country now had ‘some of the most innovative technology companies in the world’.14 Tony Fadell, the inventor of the Apple iPod, moved to Paris to work with entrepreneurs in the French capital. In 2009, he said, French corporate life was all about big, old companies, and ‘felt like the Dark Ages’. Now, he declares with all the passion of the convert: ‘I’m telling everyone, “Do you know what’s going on here?”

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

“We wish you luck”: Suw Charman-Anderson, “Amazon Ebooks Are Borrowed, Not Bought,” Forbes, October 23, 2012. All Revolvs in the world: Cory Doctorow, “Google Reaches into Customers’ Homes and Bricks Their Gadgets,” Boing Boing, April 5, 2016. “Which hardware will Google”: Arlo Gilbert, “The Time That Tony Fadell Sold Me a Container of Hummus,” Arlo Gilbert, April 3, 2016. But it is a bait-and-switch: To explore this theme further, see Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016). believe they own digital content: David Lazarus, “You Don’t Really ‘Buy’ Digital Goods,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2016.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Apple however had a way around the transfer speed problem: a technology called FireWire that it had developed to transfer video from professional digital movie cameras. FireWire shifted data 30 times faster than USB 1.1. Rubinstein headed a crash programme to build the iPod, bringing in outside help in the form of an engineer called Tony Fadell who had been hawking the idea of a handheld music player around Silicon Valley, without success, and acquiring software from outside companies. Apple signed a contract with Toshiba giving it exclusive access to those tiny hard drives for a limited period after a new product launch; nobody else would be able to mimic it.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Gregg Zachary and I have been both competitors and collaborators for decades, and he remains a close friend with an encyclopedic knowledge of the impact of technology on society. John Kelley, Michael Schrage, and Paul Saffo are also friends who have each had innumerable conversations with me about the shape and consequences of future computing technologies. I have for years had similar conversations with Randy Komisar, Tony Fadell, and Steve Woodward on long bike rides. Jerry Kaplan, who has returned to the world of artificial intelligence after a long hiatus, has real insight into the way it will change the modern world. John Brockman, Max Brockman, and Katinka Matson are more than wonderful agents; they are good friends.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

In February 2006, David Tupman, Apple’s vice president for iPhone and iPod engineering, realized that he was a year away from shipping the first iPhone—but he didn’t have the main processor ready, or even a time line for creating one. Fortunately, Apple’s hardware engineers were already getting their chips for the iPod from Samsung. Tony Fadell, one of the leaders of the iPod team, asked Hwang’s team if they could produce a chip for Apple to the iPhone’s specifications. Hwang’s employees could—by modifying a chip currently used for a cable box. Apple gave Samsung an impossible deadline: to create a chip for the iPhone in five months.

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase

Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application

Years after hiring Steve into Apple, he worked for Steve at Microsoft. Later, he co-founded Skia with Mike Reed (another Apple colleague), which was acquired by Android, and Cary again found himself working for Steve. Be nice to your colleagues — you will work with them again someday. And maybe even several somedays. 340 Tony Fadell ran the iPod group at Apple for many years and later co-founded Nest. 341 “you there?” 342 Mobile World Congress is a huge annual trade show for the mobile industry. 343 Years later, Steve ended up back at Google, running the software division of Motorola. “My biggest contribution was to abandon years of accumulated cruft and modifications and put Motorola on a pure ‘vanilla’ software path.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

So, at a minimum, our educational systems must be retooled to maximize these needed skills and attributes: strong fundamentals in writing, reading, coding, and math; creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; grit, self-motivation, and lifelong learning habits; and entrepreneurship and improvisation—at every level. The Compounding Solution Fortunately, new technology tools will aid this endeavor. The new social contracts we need between government, business, the social sector, and workers will be far more feasible if we find creative ways—to borrow a phrase from Nest Labs’ founder, Tony Fadell—to turn “AI into IA.” In my rendering, that would be to turn artificial intelligence into intelligent assistance, intelligent assistants, and intelligent algorithms. Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

But no matter how stylish the design, the iMac couldn’t elevate Apple out of niche status within the big bad PC market. The company needed a new popular hook, one (like VisiCalc back in the Apple II days) that was exclusive, that no one could clone. Rather than develop the next great idea, Jobs decided to buy one, from a celebrated electronics inventor-engineer named Tony Fadell. Fadell began his own poorly timed start-up, Fuse, in 1999, hoping to ape Dell’s success with the direct-to-consumer model. His plan was for an MP3 player with a mini hard drive that connected easily to an online music store, but the dot-com bust dried up the VCs and Fadell began pitching established tech companies on the idea.