Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell

**Tony Fadell** (00:00:00):
You still need humans in the loop. Don't surrender to the machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:05):
Because it's so easy to build, the things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through.

**Tony Fadell** (00:00:10):
Today in the AI world, I can just make a prompt, and all of a sudden, it gets spit out. You're building on a really crusty foundation. You're getting short-term gain for very, very long-term laws. If you're going to build a real company, it can't be throwaway.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:22):
When your colleague's Hermann Hauser, then ask him how he decides what is worth building.

**Tony Fadell** (00:00:26):
I always start from pain. Are there new technologies to solve that pain? Bring innovation in, revolution in, then redefine the space.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:33):
What's the threshold? What's a sign of, "Okay, this isn't big enough."

**Tony Fadell** (00:00:36):
Oh, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became successful. You got to fail a few times until you find your way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:43):
You are so into marketing that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.

**Tony Fadell** (00:00:49):
The technology's in service of the customer, not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat. A customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:57):
You often come back to the value of storytelling for product builders.

**Tony Fadell** (00:01:00):
Too many times when we're technology-led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. The why is with storytelling. When I watched Steve, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just because he had done it a hundred thousand times.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:19):
Today, my guest is Tony Fadell. Tony doesn't know this, but ever since I started this podcast, he's been near the top of my wishlist of people that I've dreamed to have on this podcast. And that's because Tony is the epitome of what most people listening to this podcast want to become. He co-created some of the most innovative and beautiful and popular products in history. The iPod, the iPhone, the Nest Thermostat.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:44):
He's also famous for being part of the legendary team at General Magic. He's co-authored over 300 patents. He also wrote one of the most important and valuable and inspiring books for builders called Build. Tony is currently an active investor and advisor to deep-tech startups with his team at the Build Collective. He was recently named the Inaugural Designer in Residence at the MIT Morning Academy of Design. There's so much gold in this episode.

**Tony Fadell** (00:02:31):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:02:33):
I have a bazillion questions I want to ask you. I feel like I could feel four hours of conversation with all the things that I want to get out of your head. I want to start with the BlackBerry. I was just watching the Blackberry movie recently, and it's kind of this journey of the BlackBerry founders and their story.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:02:49):
And then at the end, they're like, "Oh, and this iPhone thing launched." And they're like, "No, this is dumb. It's like no keyboard. This is not serious. Can't do anything with it." I've always wondered, just being on the other side of this, being within Apple building the iPhone, how much did you guys actually doubt that, "Okay, maybe they have something, maybe we need to add a keyboard."

**Tony Fadell** (00:03:08):
It was the most heated conversation and it dragged out the longest. There was one way of looking at the BlackBerry, which was that is the market we want to go after or we want to win. And then there's the other side, the flip side of that argument, which is only 1% or 2% of mobile phone users at the time had a BlackBerry, knew what a BlackBerry was. So what about the other 98% of the people? What would they want? What would they need? Why are we going to go after winning this very loyal and incredibly passionate user base and try to pull them away from something?

**Tony Fadell** (00:03:50):
And so there was this basically head-to-head competition between a display keyboard or virtual keyboard and a physical keyboard. I had been doing virtual keyboards for a while since General Magic in the '90s, and I knew what handwriting was and keyboards were like on these touchscreens and... but I was only doing it on a... and I was writing software and calibrating them and trying to make them work with a single-touch display, resistive or what have you.

**Tony Fadell** (00:04:25):
And so I knew what the limitations were of those kinds of things. So I was like, "Hmm, this is really going to be difficult." And we had... Multitouch just was on a big ping-pong table. It hadn't been scaled down, so it wasn't like something in a consumptive form where you could really do user test with it. And so we set out a set of tests like, "Okay, how fast can I type this text? How fast can I do this on a hardware keyboard? And then how can we do this on the virtual one with multitouch?"

**Tony Fadell** (00:04:56):
And it was a hardware-software integration challenge of how we could get this to work. So we were going back and forth and back and forth, "Oh, that doesn't quite work in the software. Oh, we need to change this in the hardware." And so this was over a set of months would, "Okay, the hardware keyboards here," and depends on how... how much you've been using it, but there's this margin error, and we could really understand it. This, over time, was started way down here, and it started to get it, and it got a little faster and a little faster and a little faster.

**Tony Fadell** (00:05:28):
And how many errors, not just how fast, but how many errors, and how do you correct the errors, and all of those things. And at the end of the day, I was able to convince myself it wasn't going to be a hardware issue, and I was convinced at some point that we were good enough. Were we as good as a hardware keyboard? No. But were we good enough? Yes. And then other people came to that conclusion, but at the same time, there were other people who were adamant that the hardware keyboard has to be there, and they were unrelenting.

**Tony Fadell** (00:05:57):
And so it came down to... So this was a classic, like I say in Build, data versus opinion-based decision. And if you think about it, you had data that said there was pros and cons on both sides. And what happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other. And Steve said, "We are going this way." Enough other people kind of said, "Yeah, that seems like that's the right thing to do. We're going to get close enough to get there." And then other people were like, " No, my opinion is this." And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve Jobs' opinion does.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:06:34):
Steve Jobs.

**Tony Fadell** (00:06:34):
And he was like, "If you're not going to get on board, get out of this room, and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this one."

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:06:41):
**Tony Fadell** (00:08:42):
When you're doing a 1.0 of anything, when you're doing... if you're doing anything that matters, and it's a 1.0, and it's a new category, or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before, you have very few analogs that you can use to make data-driven decisions. And so if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, you have to have one or two or a very, very small set of people who are charged with making the opinion-based decisions and can actually get you from point A to... from a white paper or a white... bank sheet of white paper or whiteboard to an actual 1.0 spec.

**Tony Fadell** (00:09:23):
Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing, or you're just getting just bullshit data, right. So you're going to have to figure out how to get opinion-based decisions to happen, and that means you have to have, for lack of a better word, taste makers. This is what we are doing. We are the person or the team who is going to make those opinion-based decisions. Of course, some people aren't going to like it, and it's going to be like, "I'm sorry, this is a benevolent dictatorship. This is what's going to happen, and this is the vision."

**Tony Fadell** (00:09:58):
And we don't know what we don't know until we ship it and we get opinions from the users. Now it's very different when you do this in a B2B context versus a B2C context. And so the hardest environment to work with it when you have these opinion-based distinctions is in a B2C context because you have to see these decisions in the full light and you don't... a consumer does. They have to see it from the marketing, from how they discover it in the marketing, the key feature sets, the ability to use the product, all of these different things for them to actually come up with an opinion of what they like, and what they don't like and being able to critique it.

**Tony Fadell** (00:10:41):
And if you don't... And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen, you're not going to get that from consumers ever. You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness, so that when they do the evaluation, and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback. When it comes to consumer... atoms-based products with services or not, whatever it is, you have to build the entire thing and visualize the entire thing to be able to make those opinion-based decisions. And so you need a small team who's looking at the marketing angles, the engineering angles, the sales angles, all those different things to go, "Okay, that's the way we're going."

**Tony Fadell** (00:11:22):
And there's only so many ways you can do it because the rest of the team doesn't see this either. And so you have to be very articulate about how... what that opinion-based decision is made for, why, how it might affect market, how you do it, and make sure the team understands it. Now, if the team is just fully against it, well then maybe it has to be unkind, but hopefully if you've done a good job and you really have an informed gut and you can articulate that, you can get everybody moving in the same direction even if it is... And it's going to be risky. You're right. You got to know that you got to take risk because most people in those other functions, they don't want to take any risks. And so there's someone who's got to be the target, right. And today, in many contexts, people go and hire consultants, right. They go and hire, "Okay, we're going to do a user study, or we're going to do all this." And they don't have the user studies and have the full context like I was just describing. They don't go buy the product, and they don't what have you and then they get data, and that's because the leader or whoever's in there, board maybe, it's like, "We need data to make sure this 1.0 is going to be a success."

**Tony Fadell** (00:12:28):
And I saw this so many times at all these major corporations, so they're just kind of covering their with bullshit data and not really doing the hard work of saying, "I'm going to make this decision and we are going to select this, and yes, I might be wrong or we as the opinion based decision makers are wrong and we will correct it later and we'll take the heat for that." So that's the... a great product manager or a great person who's leading this thing has to understand that that's what they have to do if they're really doing something innovative.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:12:57):
So what I'm hearing here is just the power, especially in a consumer product, of a singular vision of a singular leader that drives it, that is... basically relies on their instinct and their taste and their experience.

**Tony Fadell** (00:13:09):
And a lot of... But again, a lot of informed judgment from all the experts around asking questions, refining, prototyping these kinds of things to then make a decision. So it's not just like, I woke up one morning, and this is... now it's we're going this direction. No, there's a lot of work to get there.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:13:29):
I want to come back to the idea of micromanaging, which a lot of people... to a lot of people that word is bad and don't be a micromanager. You advocate for creating great products, you need to actually be really micromanaging. Just speak to that, what people you think miss about the importance and power of micromanaging as a leader.

**Tony Fadell** (00:13:46):
We've heard the term sweat the details. It's micromanagement of certain details, and then there's the kind of hands-off of other details. You have to really understand the blend of which things really matter, which things don't. When I was early on my career, I thought everything mattered, and I drove everybody nuts, drove myself nuts, the people hated...

**Tony Fadell** (00:14:10):
And it became my... became like, everybody's got to do it the way I would do it. It's like, no, no, no, no. There's only a few key things, mostly for the customer or maybe some certain things from manufacturing or cost or something where it needs to really be very clear or a long-term vision. But then you can delegate other things, but certain pieces of it you really need to... And when I mean micromanage, it means micromanage the decision, not necessarily the operations of doing it, making sure you're getting the data like we did with the keyboard on the iPhone to make sure we're getting the right data to help us get the informed gut to make that opinion-based decision.

**Tony Fadell** (00:14:46):
And so it's the micro specification and delivery of those certain data pieces that you need, and maybe it's also to get out of a crisis, or maybe it's a system-level thing where you have to worry about this thing at the low level changing up here and here, and like, "We could do that, but only if they do this and this." It's like, "Okay, guys, we're going to fix all of those things at once." And you have to micromanage it because everybody wants to find the excuses why they can't do that, or they can't do that. So you have to ask why a lot. So it just... But it's all in service of some really key detail that needs to get delivered or some innovation that needs to be delivered.

**Tony Fadell** (00:15:29):
Just like, like I said, the keyboard, we had to do the hardware, we had to do the software, we had to do the filtering. We had to do how it was... how the graphics were done on the screen. So you had all of these layers that had to keep constantly changing and adjusting. And sometimes you have to micromanage that because there's just too many variables and someone has to be the orchestrator of this huge orchestra of many different components to kind of make it all come together and be harmonious.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:15:57):
I want to go in a slightly different direction. I want to talk about the Nest.

**Tony Fadell** (00:16:00):
The thermostat, I'm assuming?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:16:02):
Thermostat. Yeah. Versus, what? [inaudible 00:16:05]-

**Tony Fadell** (00:16:04):
Well, there were many other products.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:16:06):
All the other [inaudible 00:16:06]. Right.

**Tony Fadell** (00:16:06):
Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:16:08):
Yeah. Man, the smoke alarm, is that discontinued by the way, the smoke alarm? Yeah. I just...

**Tony Fadell** (00:16:08):
Oh.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:16:08):
Yeah. Okay, sorry.

**Tony Fadell** (00:16:14):
You just... What do you... Why are you... You want to stab me in the heart? [inaudible 00:16:17]. That was one of the toughest products I and our team at Nest and other people who were on the team have ever made their life because it's so hard to make something like that. There's so many constraints. That's an ultimate constraint kind of product to actually innovate in.

**Tony Fadell** (00:16:34):
So, yes, it unfortunately is discontinued, but it was the best product in the space for a decade, and no one changed it, no one invested in it. It is so crazy. It pains me, and it pains everyone. People are like, "They're expiring around me. What do I do?" And I'm like, "I wish I could tell you there's something better." No one replaced it with something better. It's mind-boggling that the number one product with revenue and everything, you're just going to toss it away.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:04):
Why do you think that's happening?

**Tony Fadell** (00:17:05):
Because it was an orphan.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:06):
It's just not a big enough business within Google [inaudible 00:17:08]-

**Tony Fadell** (00:17:08):
It's a stepchild. No, no. It was-

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:10):
Yeah.

**Tony Fadell** (00:17:10):
Yeah, it was a stepchild. You really had to pour a lot of love, a lot of attention, a lot of love to make something that was that crystalline, and it had to be well-formed, and nobody really wanted to put in the efforts. They were probably like, "Who wanted to do this? Who's excited by it?" Nobody was probably excited, and they just said, "Okay, we'll just..." It's not that big a deal in the end of the day, where if it was invested in, I think it would've been a critical piece of the next generation AI assistant in your home.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:42):
I want to hear more about that. And just on the smoke alarm point, my favorite feature, I was at an Airbnb once, and it just started... Instead of just straight to beeping, it was just like, "I'm about to make a loud noise," just warning you that it's going to get-

**Tony Fadell** (00:17:56):
Heads up.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:57):
It's going to-

**Tony Fadell** (00:17:57):
We call it heads up.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:17:58):
Just like it's going to... I love that feature so much. It's like it's about to get very loud.

**Tony Fadell** (00:18:02):
Thank you for telling me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:18:05):
So good.

**Tony Fadell** (00:18:07):
As soon as you don't get PTSD every time because you know when a smoke alarm well, you're like, "Okay, everyone calm. We're going to do this now." Especially when we're doing tests and stuff, we're like when we... because people are supposed to test or are supposed to test it. So like, "Everyone, stay calm. It's going to be good, children. We've got to do this one thing, and we'll get through it. Don't worry."

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:18:28):
That's so good. I was like, "Thank you so much for telling me."

**Tony Fadell** (00:18:30):
There was a lot of love and care poured in that thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:18:32):
So I was going to ask specifically about the Nest. The Nest thermostat is still the best thermostat out there. I use it everywhere I go. It's just the best. The app hasn't evolved. Nothing's changed for a long time. Is it the same reason you just described, as just not a priority? Stab in the heart.

**Tony Fadell** (00:18:46):
Yeah. The whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason. There was cultural mismatch. There was probably a business mismatch. I think if Nest was around and alive today like it was, it would have a whole different thing when like Google and Gemini and Google IO was what yesterday or the day before. It would have been one of... I think some of the centerpieces of what you could do because AI needs context, AI needs a lot of context, and in a home, you want to make everything very seamless.

**Tony Fadell** (00:19:23):
And the way you give best context is by having sensors properly placed around the home that don't necessarily invade privacy, but allow you to pick up a lot of comings and goings, and who's who in the room, and your voice, and these kinds of things. Audio, I should say, not voice, to be able to give AI's context so that you can have a anywhere assistant that really knows what's going on.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:19:48):
Is there a space for someone to launch the new Nest, do you think?

**Tony Fadell** (00:19:51):
Oh, for sure. For sure. People keep asking me, "Are we going to get it?" It's like, no, absolutely. Now's the time if this isn't already happening. I'm actually getting business plans of people who are like, "Hey, is this interesting to you? Want to invest in it? You want to come and help us build it? This is like Nest 2.0." So they're trying to do stuff like that at Ring. I don't think very... Not very privacy-focused, but that's what they're trying to do.

That was our vision in the beginning, to tell you the truth. That's how we were like, "You're going to need lots of context [inaudible 00:20:22]." Because we... Remember, the Nest Learning Thermostat wasn't the Nest AI Thermostat. It could have been called that, but we couldn't call it that in 2011 because people would have freaked out. Now you would have called it the Nest AI Thermostat, and people would have bought it. And so we knew what AI was, right. So, since 2010, one of the foundational pieces of the company was AI.

**Tony Fadell** (00:20:44):
And so that's how we were able to do a lot of the things we were able to do, but it was much, obviously, not LLMs, but smaller stuff. And we said, "Okay, we can see this world growing in this AI assistant." Then voice assistance came, then there was Alexa and all that stuff that happened later on in 2013, '14, '15. It's like, "Okay." And that was gen one, but we could see this kind of blossoming, and unfortunately, in the fullness of time, it takes 15 years more from the time Nest launched for that vision to come to fruition, but it is there now. And if Nest was... We pitched it that way. We were just too early.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:21:24):
Let me follow this thread around how to know what to build and how you come up with ideas. So I emailed a bunch of people that know you, I asked them what to ask you. One of your colleagues, Hermann Hauser, Hermann?

**Tony Fadell** (00:21:36):
Uh-huh. Oh, Hermann Hauser. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:21:37):
Hermann Hauser. So his question he wanted me to ask you said, "Ask him how he decides what is worth building."

**Tony Fadell** (00:21:43):
Okay. Well, Hermann's great. I've known Hermann since 1987, probably before most of your listeners were even born. But Hermann... Just for context, Hermann was the creator of Acorn Computer, which was the Apple II of the UK back in the '70s. And then he created with his team the ARM processor. So Acorn RISC... So ARM means Acorn RISC Machine from Acorn Computer. And so he was one of... one of the founders of ARM. And so I was talking about processor. Anyway, so that's... so how do... so Hermann and I go way, way back. So the thing is, how do you solve or figure out what is worthy to be built and what's not?

**Tony Fadell** (00:22:25):
So the first thing is I start from pain. Some people start from other directions. I always start from pain. That's what I learned is what are people's pain right now, or you can see it on the horizon, they're going to have pain, and not too far away, but how do you solve for that pain? And typically those pains were because when those products were created, either it was unintentional consequence or it was a limitation of the technology at the time it was created, and it kind of just... it evolved, but it never revolutionized itself.

**Tony Fadell** (00:23:03):
And so it just evolved, and that same pain kind of was it, but it gave you enough of a painkiller for the other problem that having this new pain was worth it. And so I always kind of start with, "Okay, where's our current pain, and are there new technologies to solve that pain?" And like in the thermostat case, Nest, was we could use AI to learn so it can learn when you're there, when you're away, what temperatures you're like, so you don't have to program it, so you can save energy.

**Tony Fadell** (00:23:32):
So the big pain was being either comfortable or saving money because 50% of your energy bill was in this heating and cooling unit that you hated the interface, you didn't know what it was, you just paid the bill. And so it started from that pain and said, "Okay, well, programmable thermostats weren't innovative, but they weren't used." Everyone... A lot of them had it because the energy company would give you rebates for it, but no one knew how to use it because it was arcane. It was-

**Tony Fadell** (00:24:00):
... give you rebates for it, but no one knew how to use it because it was RK and it was programming a VCR. And so what I said was, "Oh, wait a second, what if it could learn your patterns?" And that was AI. And so now let's put that together in a much cooler looking attractive package that costs five to six times more than the things that you're buying today. But that was the crazy opinion-based decision was, okay, yes, it's going to cost 249, but it's going to save you 800 to $1,200 a year. So it could pay for itself literally within a year or two. So that was the big idea. And AI was brought to bear on that old problem and hopefully solve it in a new way. So it starts with the pain, longtime pain, maybe habituated away pain that you have to discover and new technology bonded with that to then bring innovation in, revolution in, and then redefine the space in a way, which is what we did, which is not with just the product but how you installed it.

**Tony Fadell** (00:25:01):
It was always installed by third party installers as opposed to yourself, how you bought it, which was you bought it through the installer, you didn't buy it in Best Buy or somewhere else. So we had to reinvent many different pieces of the puzzle to get Nest to be the Nest. It wasn't just the product. It was all the other things. Just like the iPod wasn't the iPod or the iPhone wasn't the iPhone. It was the iPhone plus the app store, iPod plus iTunes and then the iTunes music store. So you have to think about the full thing you're trying to build, not just the one piece, even though that's what you might remember, you have to remember it's a system that you're going to innovate with.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:25:47):
So these two part formula you shared here, pain and new technologies. The second part is really interesting. Essentially it's what's the why now? What's the new tech that has emerged that now allows us to solve this pain? It feels like that's a core part of it. Okay. It's because it's interesting because when you talked about the iPhone keyboard, it was a similar story of, okay, we can actually sort of do this virtual keyboard for the first time in history.

**Tony Fadell** (00:26:10):
Right, exactly. It could because of multi-touch. That's really what it was. And then we were just on the verge of having fast enough processors, and we were just on the verge. If you look at the iPhone, or you're with Nest, iPhone or iPod, you can see where all these technologies were just coming to light. So in the iPod, it was just now mass storage that was portable and battery operated. That was really what it was. And it was also MP3s or digital music. And we also had high density. We were the first products to have lithium ion or lithium prismatic polymer cells. So it was new battery technology, new mass storage, portable mass storage and this new generation of digital music and we had ARM processors. And really, really low power. So all of those things had to come together to do that. And then on the iPhone, it was multi-touch, but it wasn't just that.

**Tony Fadell** (00:27:08):
It was also the fact that now we had wifi everywhere. And we knew that 3G was coming because we was only 2.5 G when that was, and that was very slow, but we had wifi. And we had digital cameras. We had the digital camera, we had digital video, which we had YouTube at the time. So it was all of those things just on the verge to say, this is what's going to be very different than what just came before it, like a Blackberry. Which was really just a texting machine and nothing else.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:27:38):
I want to close the loop on your advice on finding a great idea. I'm curious about the flip side of when it's not good enough. So there's like so many gadgets out there that are solving some pain level. Maybe there's a new technology that they integrated, but it's not a big business. It's not a real company. What's the threshold? What's a sign of, hey, this isn't big enough?

**Tony Fadell** (00:27:59):
Well, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became successful. Well, anyone who knows if they remember iPod before iPhone, because iPhone swallowed everything. It's the black hole of everything. But iPod, the first generation was only successful with the Mac Geeks. And the Mac Geeks were less than 1% of the market. And then the second generation was also that way. We'd sell everything we could for the most part in the first quarter and then it would die, because it was just the Mac aficionados, the loyalists who'd come and buy everything. And it wasn't until the third generation where we made it work on Windows. And we had the iTunes music store. Did it actually start to take off? So sometimes you have to say, "We're on the right thing, but we need to make some changes to get this market going. And that was a real opinion-based decision. The team that I was running, we were really clear that we had to have Windows connectivity out of the gate, or not out of the gate, but just after the first iPod shipped. And Steve said, "Over my dead body, no way. This is going to help us sell more Macs." And then we're like, "Okay, we're making the second one. Oh, we're going to keep it with Mac only. We just got to fix a few of these things and then all of a sudden it'll take off." And it was like, it didn't take off. So then it was a long story about how we finally got Windows connectivity, but there was always this skunk works thing project behind the scenes doing that. I did the same thing with Stylus. Steve never wanted a stylist on the iPhone or the iPad. He never wanted it. He's like, "The finger is good enough.

**Tony Fadell** (00:29:46):
And we can't do it with the finger." And I'm like, "But we're going to have the B2B context and we're going to have form filling, and people are going to write." And he's like, "I don't care." That means we're going to get to Windows pen because he thought it was going to be like Windows pen, which was you had to use the pen for everything as opposed to using your finger. So it was like, "Instead of pen dominant, I want it finger dominant." But that's what he was saying. But then when we added the stylus, which was another skunk works project, all of a sudden it came out and it was like, "Well, we had to have stylus." And now it's a big feature of the product. Not everyone uses it, but it is a big feature for certain professionals who really want that, and artists and hobbyists and stuff.

**Tony Fadell** (00:30:25):
So sometimes you have to have those skunk works things that even if the opinion- based leader doesn't like it, you're like, "That seems like the right thing." Maybe not right now, but you can see it on the horizon so you just keep working on those things. But we had to, like I said, the iPhone wasn't a hit right away. It was like a, "Oh yeah, it worked on AT&T and it was two and a half G and it was this and that." It only worked in the US. So we had to get multiple versions till we got out. And that's in my book, it's called, I think it's three generations. Everything needs three generations. Yes, Bill, there it is. Three generations. I've learned, you make the product, you fix the product, then you fix the business.

I've never seen anyone get it all right the first time. You would like to, but you get close. But make the product, fix the product after you get customer feedback and then make the business, which means make the margins. Like on the first iPods, we weren't making any money. First iPhones, we weren't making any money. The second iPhone and second iPod, okay, we started getting a little bit better numbers, but we got more or less the features dialed. Third one was like, okay, Windows, we got the margins, we're getting up the volume, we got all the right [inaudible 00:31:48]. And like go. Reliability, whatever else it had to be. So you need to stick with your idea even if it's not necessarily going the first time, unless your brain-damaged about whatever it was, you have to restart. But sometimes you have to hang in there.

**Tony Fadell** (00:32:05):
And same thing with Nest. We had to hang in there with two generations of the smoke detector and a few generations of thermostat before we made the business work, not just make the product work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:32:16):
There's so many directions I can go here. One that's interesting is how often Steve Jobs was actually wrong and how many times you had to [inaudible 00:32:24].

**Tony Fadell** (00:32:24):
We all were wrong at certain times, but it's when you hit those, when you hit it big, when you get the right ones, they overshadow all the other stuff, but that's how you have to try and iterate. Jeff Bezos says the same thing. I believe in the same thing. You got to fail a few times until you find your way, but you only fail if you stop. If you keep iterating and keep going, well then that's not failure. That's called learning.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:32:54):
The other interesting part of the story you just shared here, it was one of my favorite stories in your book actually, the fact you implied this, but basically the first iPod was you had to have a Mac to use it. And the idea is you want to sell Macs. This is a way to get people to buy Macs. The way you tell it is basically this ended up saving Apple eventually, not selling Macs, but people buying iPods. And that became the big part of the business.

**Tony Fadell** (00:33:18):
Yeah. The mantra was, "Steve, if we don't have Windows connectivity, the iPod doesn't cost $349. It costs $3,000 because you got to buy a Mac, and you got to move all your digital life over to it and everything else. People are not about to take a risk on this company that's almost bankrupt for $3,000. So how are we going to do that?" Okay, let's make sure it is only $349 and that they can try it. And once they try the brand, they go, "Ooh, that's pretty interesting. Maybe I should try other products from this company and give them a shot." Because that was just such a sublime experience and that's how it all changed and that's how iPhone was able to be created, because without the iPod, I'm pretty sure there would've been no iPhone. There would've probably been no Apple because it was close to bankruptcy.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:34:07):
Wow. That's crazy how close it was to that if some of these decisions went the wrong way.

**Tony Fadell** (00:34:12):
Yeah. Very close. Remember, there was no retail back then. Apple retailers, none of that stuff. Most people don't know how on the ropes Apple was back in 2001.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:34:22):
So many stories, but I want to come back to the customer journey thread that you touched on, which I think is really, really important for people listening to this podcast to hear, something that you kind of reinforce again and again in the book. And you have this awesome image that we're going to show of the entire customer journey. And your point that you make is so many product builders focus on building the product and think, build the best product we're going to win. And you have this very important advice of there's so much more to it. Especially the marketing piece, talk about what you think builders don't really get, even though they hear this advice in many ways.

**Tony Fadell** (00:34:54):
When we build products, we define products when we build them. We have a good sense of the context when we are defining those things. We're living in that world. And so we're like, "Oh, we're like this and these are our issues and this is who we are." And maybe you put on personas. We would strip out and figure out who our target customers were with their personas. Is it a single mom with kids or is it a dual income, no kid family, or is it senior citizens or whatever? And we would come up with these personas and we would live inside them as we're thinking about the product. But you have to also remember that these people, they live in the context, but they're not aware of your product in their context. And so you have to bring it home to them and meet them where they are.

**Tony Fadell** (00:35:48):
And so your marketing, your website, your Instagram ads, your whatever, your owned and earned and owned media that you do, you really need to put your product in their context and make the visuals and make the words and everything sing to them. And if not, they're not going to get it. And so too many times we just say," Well, if we just make the perfect product." No, you have to put all for a consumer thing specifically, and it's also really good for a B2B product as well, is make sure you understand your customer. And when you say the right word, they go, "Oh, they get me. Oh, I want to listen to these more." And this is before they ever got the product. You need to get them to convert in some way and they need to hear that you've already thought about their issues, or you know and you're living in their shoes. And they're like, "Yes, yes, yes. More of that."

Is this an emotional point? Is this a rational point? And you're weaving this tapestry to get them to come to some kind of trial or purchase or conversion or something of the product. And the best way to do that is word of mouth by other early adopters, but you got to do the same thing for the early... and I mean not the earliest early adopters, but the early adopters who other people trust to talk to. Because a lot of other people who are late adopters, they know, "Oh, that's wacky George, he tries everything and then [inaudible 00:37:20]. No, no, no."

**Tony Fadell** (00:37:20):
But if so-and-so's tried it, oh, I should take notice to that. And so what you want to do is make sure you understand the gestation of your customer and where they are and where they are in the thing. I also updated the crossing the chasm graphic in the book saying how we go about this in your product developments. Because you really have to think about who your target user set is and your target marketing based on the version of product you're in and how you're going to get those higher and higher volumes.

**Tony Fadell** (00:37:59):
And it really means about speaking the context. So maybe when you first ship, you can speak to those early adopters and you can put it in enough words that they're going to convert. But then the second version of the product, you're getting these later adopters. And you've got to speak in their language. And the third set of adopters who are really laggards, you've got to really speak to them and go through that and it could be totally different. And so this was a very interesting story that it was so emblazoned in my mind. Back in 2001, '2, '3, still when Apple had no presence outside of the US, Apple was really, it was selling in the US, some Canada, and some in Japan, but that was it and that was the max. So we were selling iPods into those areas. And so we had the early adapter, and then we had some other language. And then by the third, fourth version of iPod, we had some really refined language for those late adopters.

**Tony Fadell** (00:39:02):
So then we said, "We're going to go back and get a push into Europe." Because iPod hadn't taken off in Europe, so we're going to push iPod into Europe. And so we're on, I think the fourth generation or something like that. And so what did we do in Europe? We ran the same marketing as we were doing in the US in Europe. And the thing is it didn't resonate with the early adopters. It didn't resonate with the later adopters because we didn't have the same messages. We were going for a different set of people and we're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sales aren't working. We got to change the marketing. We got to meet those Europeans where they're at, because they're slower to adopt technology. Versus it starts with the coast and goes inward in the US. And so we're like, "Oh, we got to change things up."

**Tony Fadell** (00:39:53):
And so sometimes it's when you get to new areas, you have to rethink your marketing for that area and remember to meet them where they're at and where if it doesn't have an installed base for word of mouth, you're going to have to get that word of mouth started to work with those people to get that going. Now it's different with all software products and all these things and many products can go global right away, but marketing, you still got to tell a story. So it just reminds me that even though we've maybe compressed the time for some pieces of the adoption puzzle, because we can distribute faster, doesn't mean the awareness can get accelerated. And that we can get people to intelligently understand with this product faster if we just say the words of somebody who might have known about the product for three years.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:40:53):
I got to ask about maybe the most famous, I don't know, tagline of all time when a product was launched, "1,000 songs in your pocket."

**Tony Fadell** (00:41:01):
Songs in your pocket.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:41:02):
Is there a story behind that?

**Tony Fadell** (00:41:03):
Back in the day at Apple, and maybe it's changed now, but back in the Steve days, there was the different functions of Apple. And because they were all lean because the company was only 4,000, 5,000 people and it was already doing Max and everything, each function was very, very functional. And so the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks. It was separate. Steve was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together, like I said, the opinion-based decision maker. And so when we heard the tagline for the first time, I was like, "That's genius." Now, how long that happened, what was the behind the scenes? We were just a tiny team. We were getting this done in 10 months. So everybody was just running for it. Versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it, should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day, and there was copyright issues and trademark issues.

So we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development, and we were in [inaudible 00:42:20]. And it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod. So there was a lot more discussions, but in those early days of 1,000 songs, it was everybody running in literally it was really five to six months everything got done. Because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:42:40):
So I think one of the core takeaways from what you shared here is even if you may have the perfect product, the marketing may be the gap that if something isn't working, it may-

**Tony Fadell** (00:42:51):
Absolutely. And the thing is, I think we're starting to see that, the cracks of it might be more than cracks now, with OpenAI. What is it? It's like, oh, it's your answer machine, whatever you're like, "Well, what does it do for me? And now I got to keep paying you. It was fun as the demo, but what am I using it for every day? And, oh, Claude, it does Claude code and it does code." And then what happens OpenAI is like, oh, "We have Codex now. But then they were Sora, and they were this and they were that. We're going to do sex chat." What are you? And so it's like, "Oh yeah, you're the great first Netscape. Everyone went out and bought Netscape Explorer or whatever it was called, Netscape Navigator.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:43:36):
Navigator.

**Tony Fadell** (00:43:37):
And then all of a sudden it evaporated like, "Well, what do I use the net for? I got the tool to get onto it, but what do I use it for daily." And it had to develop. And so OpenAI is now shifting like, "Oh, we got to get product teams and we got to start about product marketing." So to me, it's marketing. But if you are already thinking about the marketing, you're already going to start thinking about the product. And that's the thing is when you're just thinking about the product, and it was really just a technology demo that went viral. And they're like, "Oh yeah." And they still keep winning on that. They never put product in until it was too late. And now Anthropic's where they are and valued more and higher revenue and all that other stuff.

**Tony Fadell** (00:44:18):
So even if it's a software only product, yes, there's lots of hardware and servers and all the other stuff. You need to think holistically and you need to think about the entire customer journey, the marketing, the sales pieces, the distribution pieces, the product definition piece, the messaging, the target markets, early on. You can't leave it till later and and then back calculate it. And that's why I say you should really make the press release before you more or less start the project.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:44:53):
Yeah. There's a whole chapter on that. Amazon's also very famous for that, this whole book on Working Backwards that goes really deep on this approach.

**Tony Fadell** (00:45:01):
But the weird thing is it's working backwards. See, the thing saying working backwards, would a movie be created that way? Is it called working backwards when you say, "I'm going to make a script, and I'm making the treatment, and I'm going to really know what it is. I know what my characters are and how I do character development." Is that really working backwards? It sounds like it's backwards. It's, no, that's the way you do it. It's just because it's so technology led and technologist, and this is what I thought when I was 20, I was like, "Yeah, now it sounds backwards." It's actually, no, that's actually insane. It's not working backwards. It's just an insane way of working. Come on, let's really think through this.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:45:39):
It says so much that you as one of the, I don't know, most successful insightful builders are so into marketing. I think that's a really important takeaway for people, just how obsessed you are with that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.

**Tony Fadell** (00:45:55):
Well, when you live in that world and you live in the customer... Because you're coming from a customer point of view. So you have to see the lens. And the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing and sales. And so you have to be in their shoes and you go, "Okay, when I do the press release, I can only have three or four key features." After that, it becomes gobbledygook for a customer. So you're like, "Okay, what are those three or four things? Okay, what is that? That's what we're going to focus on." And so no, we're not going to add five more features. That's not going to make it sell better. Or, "Oh no, we're going to cut these two features and ship it." It's like, "Well, wait a second, we cut out two of our three key tentpole features.

How are we going to sell that anymore?" So it's a holistic design. It's not [inaudible 00:46:41]. Because we think the technology's in service of the customer, not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat, and they're going to figure out how to use it. There's too much noise that you've got to make it frictionless, and you got to fit it in their world and see from their point of view go, "Oh, that's why I need it. " General Magic was the perfect story for that. I don't know, your viewers should definitely watch the movie General Magic because-

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:05):
Absolutely.

**Tony Fadell** (00:47:06):
... we made the iPhone 15 years too early and that was a classic case where we were just making the things that were really cool, but nobody needed it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:14):
Yeah, that documentary's incredible. It's such a very young version of you.

**Tony Fadell** (00:47:19):
Yeah, very different and probably people won't recognize me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:22):
Yeah. You have a whole chapter about just not overworking in your career based on that experience.

**Tony Fadell** (00:47:27):
Which General Magic was for me. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:30):
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**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:48:38):
I want to talk about something else around the evolution of the product management role and builders. What's really interesting, this is kind of going in a different direction, but it's all connected. I feel like you were so ahead on this idea that we are builders versus product managers, engineers, design. I have your book right here. It's called Build. And this is what everyone's starting to call product managers, people on product teams. I'm curious just what you're seeing with this kind of merging of these roles. Do you feel like everyone just becomes a builder and there's no more designer, engineer, product manager? Do you think they'll continue being these functions, but more merged? I don't know. What are you seeing with the discipline of product management specifically?

**Tony Fadell** (00:49:20):
Well, the discipline of product management sits between all of these functional roles, okay, whether that's marketing, sales, distribution, sometimes manufacturing, depends on what the product is, engineering obviously, and customer support. So when you sit between all of these things, maybe those roles shift or change, especially depending on what it is you're building and that kind of thing. But you have to interpret what's going on between all of them and stitch them all together to make this thing sing. And what we're saying is, "Oh, I can just, today in the AI world, I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets spit out." And you don't know what all those little functions are. If you are not aware of each of those functions, even in an AI world of what those things are, they are very clear definitions of certain points of view for the customer and you have to consider them.

**Tony Fadell** (00:50:24):
And to say that they're going to get washed away and an AI is going to come up with it, it reminds me a lot of how software coding is getting done with something like Claude today. I don't know, maybe it was a month ago when the Claude source code leaked, right? Claude source code leaked. And everybody's like, "Oh my God, it leaked." And at the time, and maybe they changed it, maybe they didn't, but at the time Dario was saying, " 90 to 100% of all our codes written by Claude, and we just monitor it and watch it." And we're like, "Oh, well, that's really interesting." And then the code leaks.

**Tony Fadell** (00:51:12):
And then if you looked at the code, anybody who looked at the code who's a real software architect and engineer threw up, they were like, "It made what?" They're like, "This stuff is brittle." Engineers were looking at like, this should be layered in four or five, actually 12 or 15 different sub functions. This is the main loop of Anthropic's Claude. The main loop, not just something off in the... This is the main loop. And people are like, "How can you do this? This looks brittle. It's unreadable." And they're like, "Well, the AI knows it."

**Tony Fadell** (00:51:50):
But when you think about it and you have to maintain it, you can have an agent make code for you and it could work and it could test, but is it secure? Is it maintainable? If there's something going wrong, can you roll things back and understand what's going on? There's so many other aspects to writing code and delivering a product thing that you still need humans in the loop. And so when I think of product design, I think of software code with AI. And when you look at AI, and if it's not architecting things, and it's not segmenting things, and looking at each of those things, like I was saying, like there's software architects, and then there's software optimizers, and then there's just general coders, and then there's security reviews. And if you don't have those different mixture of experts around the code structuring it so that subsequent generations can get better and better and it just kind of devolves into this mass of things you don't know, you're getting short-term gain for very, very long-term laws. And that's called software debt, right, technical debt. And everybody hates technical debt.

**Tony Fadell** (00:52:59):
So it might be fixing something, but it most likely is giving more technical debt, especially when you're at the high level. So now how does that map to product management? So if you're a product manager and you type this in and you get some result, but you don't have a really good marketer, a really good marketing communications person, a really good salesperson, a real good channel salesperson, a really good architect, a really good manufacturing manager, all these different things in this thing that you're getting, you're not going to be able, you might be able to make the first one, but when you go to version five, six, how does that work? You're building on a really crusty foundation and people are like, "Well, my AI is going to be smarter." It's not proven to do that. What's proven is if you properly architect it and have Claude Code go into certain sub-segments, or have Claude help you build the architecture, you modify, refine it, lock it in and say, "Just work on these few things and these more limited-scoped things," yeah, you can make that work.

And I think that's the way we have to consider how we use these tools in a product management capability as well: to just say it's all abstract away, it's all going to be better. And when you ask specific pointed questions and you want this thing fixed in your marketing thing or whatever, and then they're going to be like, "Well, the AI should just figure that out too." It's like, you have given up so much.

**Tony Fadell** (00:54:25):
To me, sure, you can write code, but there's going to be the difference between... It's like the difference between H&M and a luxury brand. You could go get certain things that look like that and copies that, but it doesn't last more than one washing or one season, and it's this, and you throw it away, and it's cheap and blah, blah, blah. Or you go to the luxury thing and you pay more and it's crafted, it's handcrafted, it's dah, dah, dah, dah, and you know it's going to be around for a while. There is this dichotomy of like fast and throwaway. So like it's called fast fashion. We got fast software.

**Tony Fadell** (00:54:58):
But software, if you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway. Maybe it can, but I don't think it can be if you're really going to do this because you get just technical debt and you got to start over again. So you've got to really understand how you're using these tools, and a lot of these things that these AI coders can do, agent coders can do, can make you incredible prototypes, do more prototypes, do more of those things to help you get that informed gut to say, "We're going this direction," architect that in and then work on the sub-segments below it and all the expert systems, expert things that you need in each of those domains.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:55:34):
Yeah. And I think what you may also be saying here, which I think is really, really important, is that because it's so easy to build, people can just build all these features and additions and the value accrues to build something awesome and the product mind becomes more important to help push this stuff from just a sloppy every feature, every checkbox to something awesome that people actually use.

**Tony Fadell** (00:55:59):
Right. Because at the end of the day, if you're building it for yourself, whatever, go have fun. But if you're going to build it and you want to sell it and you only need three key features to sell it to someone, like it's going to have to be boiled down. It's going to have to be figured out because you're still selling it to a human who needs to understand it. Now, do you think you could vibe code Flighty?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:56:22):
Probably.

**Tony Fadell** (00:56:23):
Maybe now that Flighty exists, you could.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:56:25):
Copy this.

**Tony Fadell** (00:56:26):
Like you could do version two of Flighty, maybe vibe coded because you say, look at Flighty. But the original Flighty, to me, that's luxury software, right? It was understood, how the pixels are done. So you got to remember, is it version one or is it version two, three, four? Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You still need the version one to be done and maybe you can prototype with these things. So I just, I could go on for hours, but whatever, that's just one old guy's point of view.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:57:03):
I think it's really important, this insight that as it becomes easier to build, the things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through, and great, and luxury almost as you described.

**Tony Fadell** (00:57:15):
And you can feel it, right? And you go, oh my God. And I'm like one of the biggest proponents of... I'm like telling, Flighty, Flighty, because all the people in my sphere, they're all flying all time. I'm like, "Have you tried it? Have you tried? So insane?" And then you get the word of mouth and things take off because there has been that level of care and craft to it. And yeah, maybe a lot of the sub-functions of Flighty could be built and whatever from Claude Code or whatever, but the whole thing and the architecture and everything, I don't think so.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:57:50):
And if someone hasn't tried Flighty, clearly downloaded and play with it.

**Tony Fadell** (00:57:54):
Yeah. Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:57:54):
I love that this is the example of an amazing product. That's a really cool thing-

**Tony Fadell** (00:57:58):
Yeah, and it's all software. It's all software.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:58:00):
Yeah. Something along these lines, as people hear you talk, clearly you are an amazing storyteller and in your book, you often come back to the power of storytelling, the value of storytelling for product builders. I guess one is just: why is that so important, do you think? And two, is what's one tip you could give people to get better at storytelling?

**Tony Fadell** (00:58:19):
Storytelling, that's how we've passed information down or got people to commit to doing something. Stories are so who we are. We go to the movies for stories. We have books, we have all this stuff. And it's just so essential to who we are because we like to be taken on a journey. And hopefully when you're buying a product or licensing one or whatever it is, you're subscribing, you're taken on a journey that meets your expectations or is better than what the expectations were set, it's outsized that. And so Dave Chappelle is, when it comes to comedy and storytelling, the way he weaves it, he can weave a story for 20 minutes to get to the punchline and you're just in it, right? I just love his comedy as opposed to the punchline guys who are just, or excuse me, the short ones.

**Tony Fadell** (00:59:20):
It's something in our nature, human nature. We were told stories when we were a kid, we read the same or watched the same movies 100 times when we were kids. There's something about being taken on that journey that we love, and people love to be educated that way. Right. Your best college professors, high school teachers, whatever, they taught you why you should love certain math or certain physics or whatever and took you on a journey of why it mattered and then you're like, "Oh, now I get it." You can learn all the basics of how to do something, but that doesn't really tie it into something that's meaningful. And so when you tie it to something that's human, right, that's when it becomes and accessible for humans and it's relatable, that's when it goes and it can be for anything. And that's when great marketing, great sales happens.

**Tony Fadell** (01:00:16):
And great story telling through the product design, that's even better, right? Because it wasn't just perfuming this pig and you put some on this bad product and you say, "Oh yeah, try it. Oh, yeah." And you're like, "Oh, and then it doesn't meet the expectations." But when it sings from the depths of the product, like you were bringing up with the Nest Protect, the smoke detector and stuff. When we had all that and that you could feel the love and care, that's when people go, "Oh, I love this and I want more from that brand, or from that company, or that team." That's what they want.

**Tony Fadell** (01:00:49):
And so to get better at it, I've learned it because I watched my dad, he was in sales, right? So I watched how he would sell Levi's and I would watch and he would be like, and he wasn't always selling to sell. Sometimes he was convincing them not to buy something because that wasn't the best product they had. "Buy this one instead. And actually go to my competitor down the street," because he was building a relationship in storytelling because these people loved what it was.

**Tony Fadell** (01:01:17):
So it sometimes is not just setting expectations and telling a story, but it's also saying, "Hey, maybe I'm not for you." And that's truth. That's also truth. And so like Steve always said, "The best marketing just tells the truth." Now might put nice words around it, nice creative and everything, but it's telling the truth. And so when I watched Steve prepare for, and like I said, when we did the two and a half years with the iPhone, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was and what those key features were like we talked about and micromanage those features because he knew those were the things the world's going to take notice to. And he would refine the story and then tell other people who were unwashed by it, like friends who were really smart and say, "I'm going to give you the pitch and give you the pitch." And he would refine, refine, refine.

**Tony Fadell** (01:02:15):
And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just because he had done it 100,000 times or at least 10,000 times, right? And he knew it like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it just came off. And so I watched and I learned from that and that's what we did for like the Nest Learning Thermostat. That's what we did for each of those things. It was just that same storytelling over and over, why does it matter? Why does it matter? And because too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is because you want to take a journey of why it matters to you. If you're talking about the what, you're just talking to another geek. Love geeks, no problem. I'm one of them. And we can relate on that level, but general, most people who are not in the technology world, they want a story and they want something that touches them in some way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:03:14):
One lesson I'm hearing from what you just described is telling the story over and over and over and refining it over time is where the best stuff comes from, not just here, I just came up with this and it's going to be amazing.

**Tony Fadell** (01:03:25):
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And telling it to other people to see if it resonates. I remember the number of times I told the Nest story before Nest came out because I was like, "This is crazy, this thermostat thing." I'm like, "Okay, let me set up the virus of doubt, which was, do you know how much you spend on your energy bill every year for your heating and cooling? Don't you hate your thing?" Now, there's another way to look at the storytelling and this is, and I put this in the book. Oh, no, I didn't put this in the book.

**Tony Fadell** (01:03:59):
We all have seen infomercials, right? Those ones that drag on for a half an hour, an hour at late night TV on some random, on every channel now, right, and they just sit there and they tell you the story from all the different directions. They give you the virus of doubt. They're like, "Oh, here's this cheese grater. And you know when you have this bad cheese grater here and your knuckles bleed," and whatever and it's hard to clean. And they over exaggerate everything. And they show you all the pain points of it and then they show how wonderful, easy it is to use in this whatever they're selling and then it's easy to buy, and then it's easy to return, and it's overly dramatic.

**Tony Fadell** (01:04:41):
And we all know it's like wrestling, it's all an act and whatever. There's probably no realness there, but it is storytelling in a way. And not that you should do that because they over-hype the expectations, but look at the techniques that are used, the psychological techniques, the emotional techniques to get there and then dial it back and go, "Okay, I'm going to do that but with truth." And that's when things start to go pop, pop, pop, pop, or at least that's what I've seen.

**Tony Fadell** (01:05:11):
And so I always use that as another metric. And it's not just telling the story over and over, it's what story you are telling. And so I try to think of that as well, but not obviously clowny and cheesy and everything else, but it is a caricature of doing good marketing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:26):
I feel like this is a really interesting lens into the press release first or working backwards idea, is create the infomercial first and just go extreme.

**Tony Fadell** (01:05:35):
Sure, you could.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:35):
Oh my God. I just kept up with a whole new-

**Tony Fadell** (01:05:36):
Know what you don't want to do for sure.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:39):
But it's like a cool lens to go really far and then kind of pull back the best parts and make it honest. I think we just came up with a really good idea here. I want to come back to the iPhone. So I think it-

**Tony Fadell** (01:05:39):
Okay.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:51):
Came out 20 years ago almost at this point, right? It launched 27, 2007. Something like that.

**Tony Fadell** (01:05:51):
Yeah, 2007.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:57):
So what's crazy is people are still trying to build the next iPhone, especially with AI. Everyone's just like, "We've had this thing forever. What the hell? Why has nothing changed?" I'm curious, I imagine people ask you this question. I'm curious just what you think the next iPhone may look like with AI. What's the device that you think emerges over time? Do you have vision?

**Tony Fadell** (01:06:16):
Okay. There's the what it could look like long-term and there's what it could look like soon. And so a lot of people are like, okay, there's the long-term thing and when we can trust the models, and when they have memory, and when they do this stuff, then we're still going to need a display because, sorry people, unless we're plugging it into our brain like a BCI brain computer or there's some laser thing going into our retina, we're going to need a display. So barring those kinds of technologies, we're going to need a display. And so the best display that we have is a smartphone-like thing. Okay. Not going to be this tiny thing. We saw what happened with Humane, all that other stuff. So you're going to have some kind of, because the best way to visualize visual information is with a display, right? So we're going to have some kind of small slab, maybe it's foldable like we see today, whatever, so that you can access it.

**Tony Fadell** (01:07:16):
Maybe many things you don't need a display for, but a lot of things you still do, right? Because you might not be tapping, and swiping, and all that stuff. So I am of the opinion that long term, if you look at how a device is layered today, and this is many, many devices, and iPhone specifically started this, which was tapping and swiping, right? That was the first thing, is use your finger. Then after that was keyboard and then after that, the tertiary thing was a voice input. We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do with Nest, which is I want to remove displays and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature and you build around voice. Then we have keyboard if necessary and then we have tapping and swiping. Okay. It should go exactly the opposite.

And the problem why most of us don't go around talking to our phones and everything, and we saw this also happen with cars. There was tactile buttons, and then there was the touchscreens, and then they also added the voice in, but nobody really uses voice in the car unless it's some accessibility thing, right, because voice was always added at the end because it was always like, well, it sort of works and it's a gizmo, but it's like Alexa was for version 1.0 or Siri was [inaudible 01:08:55]. But when we actually have really good voice input with not just understand it's like whisper flow or something because that's great. And what I'm saying is the intelligence behind it with memory and everything else. So then we can start to say and we can start to use that much more specifically and then deprecate those other things, but we've always have to have them there as a crutch for voice because voice has never been able to deliver.

**Tony Fadell** (01:09:25):
So that's the long-term thing. So it'll have some kind of display, but it's going to be much more voice primary and then you're going to have the other things as secondary and tertiary. In the middle now or sometimes soon, it's going to look much, much like the smartphone is because we're not going to get away from the all app interface anytime soon. We're going to remove some things, but we don't trust it yet.

**Tony Fadell** (01:09:51):
It's going to take a while till we trust it. And we are literally turning over a lot to this trusted thing, right? Because tapping and swiping, we know what that is, for the most part. We know that we can trust ourselves when we're tapping and keyboarding or whatever. This other thing, we don't know. And so it's going to take a lot of time, reminds me of kind of general magic in a way, for us to be able to get en masse to trust it. And we're already seeing this with coding agents and everything else, "Oh, they deleted my source code." And again, I'm not trying to be an old guy who's saying it's not going to work. Sure, it's going to work in certain things. I'm saying for consumers every day and the things they want, and it's cheap enough so it doesn't cost them a lot, right?

**Tony Fadell** (01:10:36):
Today people are like, "Yeah, I'm going to try ChatGPT or whatever. It's $20 a month or $200 a month." That is unsustainable if you think consumers are going to pay that. There's just no way unless it's incredible, but they're not going to... You know what I mean? They tried it and now they're getting kind of their Siri, a lot of them are getting their Siri 1.0 with this. "I paid for it, but it's really not all that yet." And it's like full self-driving. I paid for full self-driving, it's 15 years later, I'm still waiting for full self-driving. So I think we, again, understand what we think we want, but where the technology is and the social adoption and the social trust that needs to be created around that is going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of iterations to get there, and it's especially if you're going to have to pay for it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:11:26):
It's really interesting to hear you say that long-term even we're going to need a screen because I think a lot of people are trying to go to just like an AirPod or some kind of magical AI.

**Tony Fadell** (01:11:35):
Sure. How are you going to look at a map if you want to look at a map? You're going to listen, like put on the voice stuff in your car and never look at the map on your car and say, "Oh, turn left in 200 feet. Turn left in 100 feet." You're like, "Shut up. I can't hear you anymore. I just want to glance over." So I don't buy it, like unless you have it jacked in your brain or into your eye or some other way, it's getting into your cortex.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:11:58):
That is so interesting. And you're not a fan of, like, the Humane approach; I think it was like a little projection on your hand as a screen...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:12:00):
... have the humane approach, I think, was a little projection on your hand as a screen replacement.

**Tony Fadell** (01:12:05):
It was.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:12:05):
Was that part of it?

**Tony Fadell** (01:12:07):
Yeah. Why? What? It's different, not better.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:12:14):
So funny. I guess the advantage obviously is it's like a small little device you could just put somewhere versus a screen, but yeah.

**Tony Fadell** (01:12:21):
Yeah. And you're like, oh, it's like the hologram projections of Star Wars or something. You're like, yeah, that's cool, but you still need a screen or something to project on. So it is a screen at the end of the day. You got to still project it onto something.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:12:38):
Yeah. It's wild because everyone keeps saying, how is it possible that the end ideal product is a piece of glass that we look at? And what you're sharing here is just that's, actually, maybe, the ideal product long-term.

**Tony Fadell** (01:12:49):
Yeah. And like I said, you fold it up, you put it in your thing, and it rolls out or whatever else. But I still think there's going to be that thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:12:55):
The screen it's so interesting.

**Tony Fadell** (01:12:55):
If you look at Her, if you remember the movie Her, they had glass. There was glass there for certain things.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:03):
[inaudible 01:13:03]. Wow. And I completely don't know [inaudible 01:13:06]-

**Tony Fadell** (01:13:05):
Yeah. You have to go back and watch the movie; it's there.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:10):
Oh my God. That movie. That nailed it. Oh man.

**Tony Fadell** (01:13:13):
Go Spike.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:13):
It's Spike Jones, right?

**Tony Fadell** (01:13:14):
Yep.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:18):
That I didn't know. I wanted to ask also, just, it's interesting that basically everyone is getting to hardware now. You've been at this for so long, building hardware in AI, and now it's just the hottest thing. Everyone's building hardware.

**Tony Fadell** (01:13:27):
So funny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:28):
Thoughts? I don't know. How does that feel?

**Tony Fadell** (01:13:30):
Look, I was building hardware when it wasn't in Vogue in 1995 and '96. Everyone's like, "Tony," and this was in the Valley, "Tony, you're crazy. It's all about the internet. We don't need any hardware." And then iPod comes, and I was pitching new businesses in '99 and 2000. They're like, "Well, that's the stupidest idea ever." Then the iPod comes out, "Tony, you want to leave Apple and start that business you wanted to do with hardware?" And then it was like, okay. Then it was all software mobile stuff again, like, " Okay, we don't need anything," but we can't get to the next level of software if we don't make the next level of hardware. And the revolution has to happen completely. You got to have the mobile network and the mobile network software for the mobile network to work. You had to have the MP3 player and the MP3 format bits to make that work.

**Tony Fadell** (01:14:23):
We're seeing with AI, we got to have AI plus all the data centers and edge compute to make that work. And then over time, the hardware becomes less, it becomes more mundane. Okay, it doesn't change as much, but all the software starts to then... So I've always just been continually going through the things that I love to do and doing the things at the full stack level, because that's where I know is innovation, that's what we had to do at Nest. We had to innovate at the software level, the hardware level, the network level to get the first thermostat out and then the Nest Protect and all that stuff. If we look now, going on, people are like, if you're a SaaS company or if you're a software only company, your software companies' worthless because anyone can vibe code it into the thing. And then they're like, "We're only funding companies that have atoms in their business plan with software." I'm like, "Duh. Where have you guys been?"

**Tony Fadell** (01:15:22):
So it's just funny to watch these cycles go and happen, and it's like, "Okay, all right, you guys can go chase your tails. I'm going to just keep here doing these full system kind of products and businesses." Yes, they're a lot harder, and yes, they cost more money, and yes, they're going to take longer to scale and adopt and blah, blah, blah, but they have staying power for years. And they bring new features that you could have never had if you just did software only because you need, especially, let's say, in robotics, you need new sensors and new this and new that and what have you. Look at Waymo, it's an electric car with tons of sensors and everything. It's a hardware platform. Maybe it doesn't look as streamlined as maybe a smartphone, but it's an incredible hardware platform with an incredible software platform. And that is something that we're going to be able to innovate on, and it'll become a platform for something else, I'm sure, delivery or this or whatever else.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:16:19):
When Evan Spiegel's on the podcast, Snapchat founder, he said exactly this. This is why they've spent so much money on these specs, and he's just like, "This is the only way to survive in software is you need to have a hardware component now."

**Tony Fadell** (01:16:30):
Yeah, just very interesting. Everything old is new again, and I've been in this game 35, 40 years. You just see it, and you're like, okay, I was there at '99 when the bottom fell out, and AI is different, but there's a lot of similarities, and we're going to have the gen one companies, the gen two companies. And when people really understand product instead of selling technology platforms that people have to figure out for themselves. So it's fun to watch. It's a game.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:17:02):
Okay. Maybe one more question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. What are you most excited about these days in terms of, I don't know, gadgets or hardware or technology that's emerging? Is there anything you're like, oh, shit, pay attention?

**Tony Fadell** (01:17:13):
I've been doing this AI plus hardware thing now, not just at Nest, but in many of the startup companies that we funded at Build. And so company like Simbe Robotics, it's Simbe Robotics. We were doing robotics way back, and now it's not a humanoid, but it does inventory of retail stores. And we've been at it, I don't know, eight years now, seven years, and now it's just taking off, and it does have AI, and it has a robotic platform, and it really solves real pain points for the retailers of inventory. And the workers hate doing inventory, counting everything on every shelf, and all that stuff. So it really works, and I love seeing that stuff. We're doing the same thing at Greyparrot with AI and recycling. It's literally figuring out what things should go in this recycling bin versus that and doing it really fast with cameras and all this stuff.

**Tony Fadell** (01:18:05):
And we've been at that for a few years, and we have AI plus textiles. Most textiles have weaving errors, and color errors, and defects, and things like that. And so people still make all of these products, but then they have to incinerate them because they're not perfect at the end because they don't catch the quality problems early enough in the product. And we're doing AI plus cameras to spot all this stuff. And again, another thing. We've been doing AI and drug design now for 10 years at Orionis, and that's taking off. So I'm really interested in not just these frontier models, and this whole other thing is really good AI that you can trust, scoped correctly with this, solving real problems every day as opposed to pipe dream AGI, okay, you can go solve that. I'm going to go and build all these businesses that really matter right now.

**Tony Fadell** (01:19:01):
And we're finally getting traction because people are like what AI and oh, more robotics and now, all of a sudden, we're in vogue, and we've been here really working on our product-market fit, working on our marketing, working on version 3.0 the device and everything, and people are adopting them. And that's what's wonderful to see. And so I'm excited by all that. We have another one like AI Infusion and doing that, or finally doing tons of software with chemical reactions, and now we have a clean agricultural fuel and oils company that is cleaning up farms all around Central America, and we're almost all atoms plus software in some way. And so it's just nice to be sitting here and knowing that we made these bets a long time ago and we're doing it. Now we're not necessarily... I was early on in Grok, and it was cheap then, and it was like, "Yeah, that's the right way to go."

**Tony Fadell** (01:20:07):
And my friends were in Cerebras, and I got into that, and then it's like, but these are long-term plays, and they're finally coming to fruition, but we did invested in it not when it was hyped, and it's... We were doing it back when unicorns valuations were billions of dollars. Today, if you don't have a $5 billion round raised, you're not anything. It's like, okay, well, that doesn't work from a venture perspective. You never get their venture returns. You can't invest in things when the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're got a small portfolio that's got like... Uh-uh, that's not the kind of game I want to play. So I'm glad that we are well positioned in all these companies that have real good product-market fit, that came in the right valuations, that we can really help and make big change and deliver painkillers, and we'll let everybody else over there play. So that's what's exciting to me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:21:03):
Oh man, there's this quote that I used the other day on a different podcast that I think applies to you. It's a quote from the Bible that you were made for a time like this. Feels like all the things are converging around the things that you have been doing for so long, and the technology is finally getting exactly as described to actually something amazing.

**Tony Fadell** (01:21:23):
Same thing happened to General Magic, right? General Magic iPhone too early, and then I just kept adding and adding and adding, then doing the iPhone. So you stick with it. There's too many people who chase their tail and chase whatever the hottest thing is. When it's already hot, it's already too late to be in it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:21:39):
For people that don't know what you do these days, you talked about all these companies you work with, help people understand what it is you spend your time on, in case they may want to try to work with you on this stuff.

**Tony Fadell** (01:21:48):
I think the first thing to know is that we invest in deep technology. So that could be hardware, it could be software, software plus hardware, it could be chemical, it could be all kinds of different stuff. But remember, we talked earlier about what's the pain and is there new technology that comes out to solve that pain in a new way? And so what we do is I've learned that I invest in the deep technologies that are going to unseat the incumbents because it's going to change the market or the product in such a dramatic way that customers will choose this. So we're not just competing on features or better marketing or whatever. We're fundamentally a different product. Now it might take longer to get the market to shift to it, but it's fundamentally different, just like I brought up Grok and Cerebras and these kinds of things.

**Tony Fadell** (01:22:42):
It's fundamentally different. And so at Build, what we do is we invest in those technology companies that can be that seed that can unseat things, and maybe they go the distance, or maybe they are the key enabling tech that allows another startup to go to the distance, that kind of stuff. And so that's what we invest in, and we do it in the environment, in societal benefits, and health benefits. That's where we focus, and at times we've had a portfolio of over 200 companies, and we do that, but we don't just invest.

**Tony Fadell** (01:23:16):
When we get involved, many of the companies we advise and that we come in help them with product management, operations, we help them with financing, we help them with org development, just all kinds of different ways that... A lot of times in marketing and communications, right? Because we talked about storytelling, storytelling is really important, and a lot of deep technology people, they're incredible engineers, scientists, researchers, what have you. They have a really good idea, but they don't necessarily know how to form the product around it, or form the marketing around the product they're building, or help the marketing to inform the product and vice versa.

And so we try to encapsulate that and really bring that to bear so they don't hit it on the fourth version. They try to get very close to the first or second version so they can get on that three version cycle to get to a great company, and so that's what we do. So we get to have a lot of fun. We get to word play in all these different spaces: health, medicine, drugs, robotics, chips, these kinds of things. So that's just what's wonderful to us, and we get to just be kids in the candy store and work with all these incredible, smart entrepreneurs and everything. So that's one thing I do. The other thing I do is I'm a designer at residence at MIT. So I just finished up my first year there with the MIT Media Lab in architecture and design, and help to give lectures and work with students, amazing, amazing, smart students with the great technology, but help them with the customer journey.

**Tony Fadell** (01:25:01):
Try to make sure that they see this stuff early on in their career, not after 10 years, and then they finally understand, oh, wait a second, what am I really building? Who is it for? Not just what is it am I building, but why am I building it, and for who? And so, trying to get that into some of the later undergraduate and graduate students so we can watch them change the world more quickly.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:25:23):
Incredible. I love just all the levels of ways you are helping people. There's the investing, there's this book, there's MIT, there's these conversations.

**Tony Fadell** (01:25:32):
It's fun. It's just so much fun.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:25:35):
I love how much fun you're having. Is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn't cover?

**Tony Fadell** (01:25:39):
We should really just talk about ethics and morals and your point of view on that. And as a product manager, as a product designer, you need to really consider these things. I understand we have lots of big questions about AI and is it going to be a disaster for the next generation and for societies and all the other stuff? But I think that you really need to be well grounded and have real principles when you're designing something, and don't let those things go astray, just like you wouldn't go astray with a bad user interface or something like that. Make sure you're not trying to addict your users. And if anybody is, there's always other jobs, and there's always other better companies, and don't chase the money for tearing apart what it is the fabric of this society that we built. Obviously, there's going to be innovation, and there's going to be change, but when you're really doing it, and you can see that you're doing it, and you're trying to get people hooked, or you're like, "Oh, I give more dopamine or what have you."

**Tony Fadell** (01:26:47):
That's when you have to start really looking at things. And a lot of times, people are young, and they think, "Oh, that's great. That's what I want." But when you start to have kids, and you start to have families, and you start to see the... And you're not just about you; you're not trying to just get out of your family when you were growing up. I'm an individual, and I want what I want. You really need to start thinking systemically about the benefit that you're bringing to this society as a whole, not just to the business that you're in and trying to bring in whatever revenue you're trying to do because at the end of the day, users will feel that and then I think and will reward that as we see with Apple with privacy and people say, "Oh, they're behind because they're so private and there's this."

**Tony Fadell** (01:27:34):
But it's a double-edged sword. I remember when we had a very pointed discussion when the iTunes music store and when it was turning into video was being specified and what we were thinking about it, and everyone's like, "Oh, this is going to be great. We're going to do movies. We're going to do TV shows. That's going to all be great. We're going to make a lot of money with this in the studios. Everybody's behind it." And then somebody goes, "Yeah, and we should have porn, of course." Steve was like, "What? Is that the kind of world you want your kids to grow up in? And Apple is related with that and Apple's about... Is that what we want to do?" And it was very clear, it was shut down, and we need leaders like that. We need leaders who are very clear as opposed to "I'm going to make a huge service for everyone." And they're all sex chatbots for everyone.

**Tony Fadell** (01:28:24):
I just think when you start normalizing those things, and you start telling other generations that's a value and you start... And I understand that everyone has their own what's right and what's wrong. And here I am, the old guy, again, I think we can go a little too far. I'm for individual rights and for everyone to be a thing, but when major companies are doing this in the guise of certain kinds of behaviors they're trying to achieve, when we're selling... We're turning personal connection into a product with AI chatbots and making them really devolve social interaction to the point where I'm going to have a perfect interaction with this thing because the world is so messy, it's like we're losing humanity with that, and we're just for gain. So I wish that the other product designers out there really take it to heart. I'm not saying you got to be Lily White and being in a church every weekend and Bible banging. I'm not saying that; I'm not MAGA. I'm not any of that stuff, just saying, hey, think about it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:29:37):
A lot of people look at the iPhone as this thing now that everyone's hooked on. It's so good. We're just like, it's too good. And there's all this data showing all the impact it has on people and things like that. Just how do you think about that and the impact the iPhone has had on people?

**Tony Fadell** (01:29:53):
Well, the first thing is the iPhone wasn't set out to be that. There's unintended consequences, and the unintended consequence was social media happened, and social media, Apple's not a social media company, but it does distribute the apps or make available those apps. And so the way I think about it is we have lots of junk food, and we have an obese nation or obese world because of all the junk food, and it takes us to regulate our consumption to do that and get healthy tools. And there's nutritional elements on the back of things. If you want to make a better decision, you can, and I hope AI and these assistants will help people be able to get better control of those kinds of things where our lizard brain is being stimulated in a way that consume more, consume more of physical food. And now the same thing's happening in digital food, but we have digital food that doesn't have the nutrition labels, doesn't have the warnings, doesn't have the regulation that it needs to have, just like we do with our physical food because, oh, you can't let innovation, whatever, be slowed down.

**Tony Fadell** (01:31:09):
I'm not saying again, being a nanny and all the other stuff, but we got to have some balance, and it's just swung too far. And I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families, and what have you, because you could go to the... iPhone's just a refrigerator, and you can put in junk food or you can put in good food. And even if you put in good food, you could go to the good food every five seconds. You have a refrigerator in your kitchen. You can put good food or bad food.

**Tony Fadell** (01:31:46):
You could open it all the time and keep consuming. So we need to learn habits. We need to teach habits. We need to put in regulations. We need information. We need tools to help us monitor and manage that stuff, and they need to be supplied. And just like we have rules around who can buy something when they're 21 or under 21. We need all those kinds of things, and it needs to happen because why? Sure, you could have a short-term gaining of customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, you're not going to have customers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:32:18):
Let me just say for folks that haven't read your book, I just want to communicate how great it is. There's very few books that are both tactically useful that give you, like, here's how to do a thing and also just inspire you to build and make great things. And Build does that in such a great way. I think everyone knows about it. I don't know if everyone's read it. So highly encourage you to read it. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to maybe learn about the stuff you're up to now, and how can listeners be useful to you?

**Tony Fadell** (01:32:46):
Great. Well, let's see. Well, thanks again. This was a fun interview. I really enjoyed it. I think if you want to interact with us, we're at buildc.com. So Build Collective, but we're BuildC, B-U-I-L-D-C.com. You can go and see the companies we invest in, and you can find ways to contact us there. And how can viewers help me or help us? I think learn about the companies, see if you can model whatever you're doing in some of the learn from insights. There's a lot of websites that we help to create. A lot of the marketing we created for deep tech through those investments we made, so you can see some well done marketing. I hope you like our website for BuildC to show you how what we think is a really great website that only... Doesn't sell things necessarily. You know what I mean? Like point and click and purchase, but it just get them... Rebuild and apply it.

I think that's the most thing is: rebuild, read other things like that, and really hone your craft, make better products, make a better world because the world only gets better by the things we make and what we bring. And so, to me, that's the most important way to help me is by making other cool products like Flighty or other things. They're like, "I love this thing." So make great stuff, people, and don't think the AIs will. Use them for the tools that they can help with, but don't have cognitive surrender. Don't surrender to the machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender and make better stuff. Make better stuff than myself or any of the teams that we back can make because we do have better tools now. So please do.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:32):
Amazing. Tony, thank you so much for being here.

**Tony Fadell** (01:34:35):
Hey, Lenny, that was great. Really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing what your audience creates.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:42):
Same. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.