USA TODAY International Edition
Don’t let the ever so humble look fool you
There’s no place like a smart home, thanks to Tony Fadell
PALO ALTO, CALIF. In a series of unremarkable buildings that make up Nest’s corporate nest, the home as we know it is being redefined.
You sense it in the lobby, where a prospective employee is being told of mushrooming staffing needs. You feel it in corridors where tech’s brightest talk in hushed tones. You see it in the products — the 2- year- old Nest Learning Thermostat and new Protect fire and carbon monoxide alarm, networked devices that marry slick design with wireless functionality.
But mostly the momentum emanates from Nest’s emphatic co- founder, Tony Fadell, 44, who turned his frustration with “unloved” domestic products into a mandate to “make them smart and save lives,” a refinement of the charge he helped lead at Apple while engineering the iPod and iPhone.
Nest’s first product, a thermostat that retails for $ 249, tracks your heating and cooling habits to conserve energy and reduce bills. Meanwhile, Protect, which ships soon and costs $ 129, is most effective when paired with other Protect units in the home. They serve as talking sentinels that relay alerts (“Smoke in Stevie’s bedroom”) to every unit.
The average smoke/ CO detector costs about a third of Nest’s creation. But Fadell is convinced the difference is worth it. “Everyone I know, including me, has stories where you just rip out the batteries ( from detectors) because they’re so annoying, so who’s that helping?” he says.
ON A MISSION
Make no mistake. Fadell’s mission is personal. “My world changed after having kids, because suddenly my world wasn’t just me. My world was my family’s world. So, then it became, ‘ What other families need this?’ ”
That’s classic Fadell- speak. Linear. Logical. Literate. It’s as if he’s on a campaign trail, only his constituents are employees looking for leadership rife with guiding principles.
Here are some of the things that Fadell believes, which offer insights into his driven mind as well as a blueprint of what it takes to play in Silicon Valley’s mosh pit.
First: Although he became wealthy thanks to his seven years with Apple ( he left in 2008 and in 2010 started Nest along with ex- Apple colleague Matt Rogers), Fadell was compelled to start his company because no one else might have.
“After my time at Apple, the world was rising up saying here’s money, what are you doing next?” he says. “But I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this. This was an ‘ all in’ thing, and I’ve done ‘ all in.’ I know what that’s like. But I also thought, who else is going to do this? Who is crazy enough to do it, and secondly, who would the world allow to do this?”
The answer, of course, is Fadell, in part because of his belief that the Valley isn’t the take- a- chance- on-tech- bromance land of opportunity it’s made out to be. “In the VC ( venture capital) world, most people are very risk averse, he says. “Now ( VCs) ask, how many millions of eyeballs do you have? What’s your traction? What are your metrics? Someone new would get mired in funding issues.”
Second: Any success Nest achieves links back to Fadell’s time at Apple.
“I learned about the power of experience through Steve ( Jobs),” Fadell says, his tones suddenly hushed.
“I knew about making software intuitive and so on, but Steve opened me up to the experience of it all, from the packaging to the ceremony of the unboxing and the installation,” he says. “Then it broadened out to retail and marketing, until you finally start to see a whole life cycle.”
Third: Design is as vital to a successful product as flawless engineer- ing and an intuitive user interface.
“Design is the outward impression you’re trying to cast on your audience,” he says. “Think about it. If you’re frumpy and grumpy, even if you’re the most brilliant person, you won’t have many people attracted to you. If you come in and you have a sense of your own personality, through style or the way you talk, people naturally go, ‘ Who is that? What are they about?’ ”
JOBS ‘ ANOINTED TONY’
Tech world pioneer Bill Campbell, Intuit chairman and a current Apple board member, met Fadell when he first start working for the Cupertino, Calif.- based company. His first impression was a lasting one.
“Steve ( Jobs) was one of my closest friends, and you noticed the people Steve anointed, and he anointed Tony,” says Campbell. “He really does have a passion for making the home better and safer.”
Campbell disagrees with Fadell’s description of Silicon Valley as riskaverse. But he does agree that Fadell is the man for the Nest job, between his commitment to the home- market space and his background at a com- pany known for pairing striking hardware with functional software. He dismisses the notion that perhaps Nest products are only for wellheeled first adopters.
“People said that about the iPad, but I go fishing a lot in Butte, Mont., and do you know how many iPads I see around there?” he says with a laugh. “( Nest) is about functionality and safety with design.”
Fadell’s timing could be auspicious, taking advantage of today’s broad leaps in technological power and connectivity at modest costs, says Jason Tester, research director at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit forecasting group.
“The past two decades are littered with ( smart home) systems and protocols that never took off,” he says. “But we may finally be getting there with products like Nest’s, which are sexy and playful while making your life easier.”
Fadell’s epiphany happened while spending his post- Apple time and money on a new home in Lake Tahoe, Nev.
“I went through every system that was going to go into the house, I wanted to be methodical,” he says. He said that when he first told his wife the idea for a networked thermostat, she called him crazy.
“But when I explained to her how I reached this conclusion, five minutes later she said, ‘ Yeah, you gotta do this,’ ” he says.
CHILDHOOD TINKERING
That founder’s vision is at the heart of any great company. For Fadell it has its roots in Grosse Pointe, Mich., where his educator grandfather encouraged him to tinker.
“I’d be 3 or 4 and he’d say, ‘ Change the light switch,’ and I’d go off and do it,” he recalls with a smile. That precociousness soon applied itself to an Apple II computer, which he bought with caddying tips and a grandfatherly contribution. “What all that taught me was, hey, humans built this thing, humans can fix it, humans can make it better. I’m human, so why can’t I?”
Fadell attended the University of Michigan, where he got a degree in computer engineering in 1991. But while he values his education, Fadell is adamant that the inventors need to study in the real world.
“Go work with your heroes,” he says. “Don’t try to replicate what they’re doing, just go do it with them like I did. Then the next leap is, maybe I can build the next thing.”
Speaking of, what is the next Nest thing? Fadell launches into a story about telling his young son about Protect. His reaction: What are you doing now? “That just about killed me,” he says.
When Fadell stops laughing, he offers only this promise. “Nest will either be a huge rocket ship to Mars or a huge crater,” he says, grinning. “Either way, it’s gonna be huge.”