Sarah Lacy writes for PandoDaily, a news site which she founded.
She is also an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008) and “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos... → Learn More
These are bittersweet days for Tony Fadell. The man who oversaw 18 generations of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone is finally launching his new company, Nest Labs, today. It has been eighteen months in the making and marks a new era for thermostats– and quite possibly other neglected categories of home electronics.
But he’s also recently lost his former boss and long time friend Steve Jobs. In this final segment of our sit-down interview with Fadell, he talks about the Steve Jobs he knew. He also talks about the future for Apple, and what he hopes Apple’s legacy will be for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
You know, I want to get back to Apple a little bit here at the end. Now, we talked about why you came out of retirement, but why did you decide to leave Apple to begin with? I mean you left one of the hottest technology companies at one of the hottest times.
Well, my wife was also an employee at Apple and she also worked for Steve. So, we were there for eight years at the time. After eighteen generations of Ipod, three generations of IPhone, I was getting kind of like, "OK, I've had enough; I need to do something different." My wife had been there eight years. She was working ungodly amount of hours as well and we had a 1-year-old and just a newborn. We were like, "Wait a second." We looked at each other and said, "This would be a great time to go. Apple's in a great state. Let's go, let's spend our time with our kids and let's travel the world and that's what we did.What was the coolest place you traveled to?Well, we actually lived in New York for a period of time, but we actually lived in Paris for almost eight months. And we put our youngest in the...
Not too shabby.Yeah, right there in the heart of Paris. And actually it's because we went to Paris that I got the inspiration to actually say I want to do something else. I looked at...we would go into the museums every day with the kids and we'd go and look at all this different art. And I was inspired looking at the artist, saying, "Oh, they had this period, you know..." Picasso's blue period, Picasso's green period. And they would take some time off, maybe a year, two years between each of this periods. And I was like, "Wow. All this fascinating art." I'm like, "Wow. I can't just retire. I'm gonna have to do something else, you know. Let's utilize these skill sets for something else."
Have you roped your wife back into this company or is she staying retired?
Oh, she's staying. She's halfway around that. She's learning to fly. She's doing all kinds of great stuff.So, I know the last couple of weeks must been very difficult for both of you guys with Steve Jobs' passing. You know there have been so many remembrances of him, so many words written, and so many videos cataloged. But anything that you remember of working with him that you think people don't know about him or he didn't get enough credit for, with all the things he did get so much credit for.
I think our memories of Steve are very personal and the things that we talked about are very personal, but the big thing that I remember about Steve is, number one is, if it wasn't for him, my wife and I would have never met. We would never have the wonderful family that we have. And secondly is really, Steve was an incredibly-- how can I say?--caring person. He...when he found out that various people on the team...our team actually had very dire illnesses. He reached out and helped the people on the team. He didn't know them. They were the lowest person on the totem pole, hands-on engineers, and they needed help. And he actually...he brought that to bear. The best doctors, any kind of things. And they mattered to him as much as the products did. When people really needed help, he was there for them. It was very touching.How do you feel about the future of Apple? It must be a company you still care about.I think Apple's going to do amazingly well.You don't think we passed through the golden age?I think, you know, if you look at the team that was around Steve and then Steve left, they've had decades of experience with Steve. They've learned so much. They know how to really work together. all the while and they're going to continue the product pipelines long. Tim Cook's an amazing individual. The management team is amazing there and I think they're going to do really, really well.Now Apple obviously started out as a computer company, has become so many other things. A couple decades will we be talking to you about all the different areas and that's just getting into. Do you have a whole product pipeline or is it thermostats?Today, it's thermostats. It was, you know, in the beginning it was just Macs right.Right. Apple too then it was just Mac or just computer. We'll start here and we'll take it from there. We'll see. As you said, there's a lot of unloved products in the world.Right. So for all of our 20 something fan boys who might be disappointed that you're doing a thermostat. Anything you want to say to them to buck them up? Make them love thermostats. Well, I think that, you know, soon they're going to have homes and soon they're going to find out that when you carry the iPad or they carry their iPhone with them wherever they go that interface to the world changes when you have those devices. And that was what inspired this as well, is that you're carrying these incredibly intelligent products with you - how does the world change around you? Think about it. They're going to be able to see the world change dramatically over the next 10 years. Both personally, because they're going to maybe have a family and they're going to need something like that, but they're also going to get engaged and see that there's going to be a ton of other gadgets that are going to change over time for their fan boy love of the iPhone or iPod to change the environment around them.Not that many cool gadget companies in Silicon Valley right now. Do you think that's going to change? Do you think we're going to have a gadget or a trifle?I think gadgets are hard, you know, what we've lost in Silicon Valley is a lot of hardware design expertise. How to ship atoms is very, very difficult and it takes a lot of experience and a lot of money and so, I hope through the legacy that that Apple leaves, that we leave, that there's a new generation of engineers who learn how to create these types of harder projects and are able to bring them to reality. Because at the end of the day, everything around us is atoms, not electrons. You need atoms to deliver electrons. So the world's going to change by the people who change the atoms.Right. And we will have ugly things in our house.I sure hope so. That's why I'm here.
