Tony Fadell

355: Building World-Changing Products, Vision and Success

This week’s conversation is with Tony Fadell, an entrepreneur, designer, engineer, and investor with a 30+ year history of founding companies and designing some of the most influential products of the 20th century.

Over his remarkable career, Tony has become best known as the inventor of the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest Thermostat (which eventually sold to Google for $3.2B).

Tony has authored more than 300 patents and was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”. In 2016, Time also named the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest Learning Thermostat as three of the “50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time”.

Tony also recently published his first book, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, which quickly topped charts as a bestseller.

Tony is a legend, and it was a joy to learn from him in this conversation. I think everyone will find significant value from the insights Tony shares as he outlines his journey from devastating failure to unbelievable success, and some of the lessons he learned along the way.

“You don’t just build a product. You don’t just build a service. You build a mentality, a mindset, a way of working and a network of people so that generation after generation will do the same.”

In This Episode:

How do you define success?

It starts with a mission. You have to have a mission focus to be able to then drive yourself and drive others to get behind something that’s big and bold and meaningful. So I don’t think of success as just making money. People can define it by numbers. I define it by a mission that’s going to change the world in some constructive positive way. That’s the way I think of success. And if you get there, the money follows and the money follows 10 X or a hundred X more than you could ever expect. So instead of chasing money, chase a mission that’s worth chasing, and then people will join you along the way.

How do you view failure?

Failure is the only way we really learn… how did you learn to walk and talk? By failing thousands of times. When you wanted to walk, you failed a thousand times before walking. And you know what? You had an environment around you saying, “I encourage you. Yes, go for it. You just stood up for one second. Yeah, you fell down. Oh, keep trying, keep trying.” And you have an environment who supports failure and understands that the way you’re going to learn is by doing and failing and keep trying till you have success.

What is true failure?

You only truly fail in life if you don’t take the next step to learn through the failure and continue to keep going. So failure is only when you stop pursuing whatever you’re curious about for whatever reason. You can obviously pivot and when you learn and change your direction, but you keep going, right? It’s when you stop and you just say, “Ah, I’ve given up. I’ve failed too many times. I’m not going to get there.” You can always modulate and figure out a new way. And that doesn’t mean you’re going to do the same thing, but it means you’re going to pick yourself up and find the next big mission to go on even if the last one failed. So to me, we have to understand failure is the best way to learn and it’s the only way to learn in life because if you’re doing anything innovative, there are no experts, there are people with experience that you can bring on your team, but there are no experts for innovating to change our planet, our societies, our health in the world, because you’re by definition doing something the world’s never seen before.

Getting people to buy into your mission

Look, every time you add another person to the team, they can further that mission. They are part of it. They need to own the mission just as much as the leader might. In fact, you as a leader, a great leader gives the mission over to everyone to make it better. So as a leader, you need to have more details and more details. And these are the people that you bring on because they are in service of this what starts to be a very vague mission at the beginning. And then it becomes better and better defined at how you implement the strategies and tactics behind that mission. And maybe the mission grows and becomes even bolder over time. So the people that you bring on to help you with the mission need to have agency and ownership of that mission.

His biggest failure, General Magic

So if we go all the way back to General Magic, this was in 1990s, there’s a movie all about it. It was a huge failure. It was the biggest failure. We were trying to create the iPhone 15 years too early. There were lots of opinions and we were doing things, but they were not grounded in enough reality for us to be able to have the right way to think about what we were building. We were just building for building sake. We weren’t thinking about the customer. We had a grand arching vision of pleasing ourselves, but we didn’t know who it was going to buy because we just said, “Oh, we like it. Everyone’s going to buy.” So through that failure, that incredible failure, and I encourage everybody to watch General Magic, the movie, it’s really a lesson in failure and redemption. That’s where it started for me.

Qualities of a “product worth making”

If you don’t make products in service of people and killing pain that the people have, it’s not doing any good. So you have to understand people, their problems, their hopes, their dreams and everything to take the technology, the ideas you have and make sure they’ll meet the needs, meet the people where they’re at, the customers where they’re at, to solve those pains and hopefully give them superpowers. So you need to have deep understanding of the technology and you have to have deep understanding of people and how to make the two connect.

The DJ analogy

If you ever been a DJ, to have the dance floor going, you really need to have the vibe of that audience and you need to know what the next thing is on. You can’t just put what you want on. You got to have just enough to stretch them from where they are musically, not just always give them the hits because you’re going to wear them out. Because they’re like, “Eh, I heard that again, Michael Jackson yet again.” No, you got to stretch them just enough so that they get out of comfort zone to something they can go with and something they can still dance to and have that emotion. So a DJ, if you haven’t done it’s so incredibly stressful. You can’t just put on a playlist and go because that’s not the vibe of the room. You have to read the vibe. And so when it came to the iPod, a thousand songs in your pocket, 10,000 songs in your pocket, it was about taking that love of music and putting it in a factor that people could be their own DJs because they had all their music with them at any one time and then they could figure it out and making sure you connected that way.

Slice your vision into missions

I get this all the time from entrepreneurs. They won’t tell me their vision because they’re worried that they’re going to scare the person on the other side. I scared people too because you have such a big mission, you’re like, “I’m going to do this and this and this.” And then the investors go, “You’re going to need billions of dollars for that, it’s going to take years. I’m not investing in this crazy person. I want to make sure I see the next step.” So you have to put it in chunks that most people will be, how can I say, enthusiastic about and engaged in, but not so far that you’re crazy. They think you’re crazy and they’re like, “I can’t follow this guy. I’m going to go follow him into running into a brick wall. He’s psychotic in a way.” But you need to have that big vision, but you need to parse it out over time. And you do that with missions in between. So the vision’s there and then there’s phases, and each phase is a different mission along the route.

Digital health

When you talk about depression, when you talk about these kinds of things, why do they start? It’s because people are getting these bad things in their brain from somewhere. Obviously, it could be family, it could be their environments, but also their digital environments can be feeding them. I’ve seen digital addiction firsthand. I see what it does to people. I’ve seen people go through digital detox programs. And when I saw what the iPhone and what it was like and how kids were getting in trouble because we didn’t have the tools to really monitor and control our digital consumption like we do for our physical consumption, like a scale, nutritional facts, all of these things. We need the same thing for our digital life. So I went out and spoke up and spoke up hard. People at Apple didn’t like me for it. They were like, “Why are you doing this?” I’m like, “Because you’re not doing the right thing. You’re not doing the right thing for our societies. You need to have healthy customers to have a healthy business. And if you’re treating the customers wrong and they’re being unhealthy, you’re not going to be around for as long as you should be.”

Relationships are essential to success

Relationships are not transactions and you go through the ebb and flow, the ups and the downs and you help people a lot. I try to help people and I’ve always learned that if I help people, I don’t look for a quid pro quo, usually it comes back to me 10 x bigger than I ever thought. So the more I pay it forward, if that’s the right term for it, I’ve always seen it come back to me in some ways. And that’s either, whether it’s advice, good advice that I give or connections or linking people up or whether I give the hard advice, the truth and people hate you for it, and they might hate you for five or 10 years, but then they come back. And I’ve had so many e-mails from people going, “I hated working for you. You pushed me. You were just a complete, for me, mission-driven (beep). But you know what? You pushed me beyond my limits. You saw something in me I didn’t see and you made me make myself become a better person because you wouldn’t let me just skirt by.” That’s when I know that I’m doing the right thing and I’m doing it for the right reasons.

Building individuals within a team

When you have a team that wants to learn and to do better, that’s amazing. And we wanted to make sure that we were growing the team as we grew so that we were growing from the inside and growing the individuals. Because the more that those individuals believe the mission and they believe that you’re supporting them and you’re trying to grow them, not everyone grows with the team, but if enough people are growing with it, you create this culture that’s like, I wouldn’t go anywhere else and this is something I want to do.

It’s not just about the product, it’s about soul

You don’t just build a product or you don’t just build a service, but you build a mentality, a mindset, a way of working and a network of people like that so you can continue generation after generation to do that. To me, that’s your soul. I don’t believe in the ethereal soul. I believe your soul is what you plant in each person on this planet. And they remember you even when you’re gone and they live and take those things that you imparted to them and build on top of it and instill it into the next generations and the next generations and the next generations. That is a person’s soul. That’s what people remember.

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