Happy Monday!
I hope you had an amazing weekend.
Let me give a brief about Tony Fadell before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons from him for you to read this week.
Tony Fadell sometimes called “the father of the iPod,” joined Apple Computer, Inc., in 2001 and, as the SVP of Apple’s iPod division, led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Tony founded Nest Labs, Inc., in 2010 and served as its chief executive officer until his resignation in 2016.
1 STORY FOR YOU
How did he go on to create the iPod
At General Magic, Fadell joined a small team that was trying to build something the company had labelled a personal communicator. “It had an email. It had downloadable apps. It had shopping. It had animations and graphics and games. It had telecommunications—a phone, a built-in modem,” Fadell says. “It was the iPhone 14 years too soon.” It never got off the ground, and Magic ran out of tricks and cash by the early 2000s, but the experience was formative. “Hardware, software, services. That was the first link that I ever saw like that,” Fadell says. “That has influenced everything I’ve done since.”
A few years after leaving General Magic, Fadell had his own startup, Fuse Systems. It was a hardware company that was attempting to capitalize on the Napster-fueled rise of the MP3 music format. Yves Béhar, the noted product designer, remembers working with the nascent company: The idea was to make a full line of MP3-optimized music players—everything from a component stereo system to a small portable Walkman-type device. “Tony was talking about a world where media, especially music, was going to be all digital,” Béhar says. “And he got so excited and animated and passionate that he broke a chair—he was just very physical, getting up and sitting down again—and that became a joke: Tony’s a kind of excitable guy who breaks the furniture.”
To get the idea off the ground, Fadell rented an office in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood and hired about a dozen people. Then Apple called. This was just after Jobs had returned to the company he founded and was struggling to save it from oblivion. Jobs was looking for a way out of a no-win battle with Microsoft and, like Fadell, had hit upon the idea of a portable MP3 player. Toshiba had just announced the launch of a small-format disk drive that would give the Apple MP3 player a crucial advantage over the competition. But Apple needed someone who knew the tech forward and backward to build out a prototype. Executives asked him to come in to discuss something—they were cagey about exactly what.
Fadell assumed Apple needed some help designing a next-gen Newton and took the meeting. It was only after he signed the nondisclosure agreements that he discovered that the company wanted him to design a portable MP3 player—the future iPod. In effect, Apple was asking Fadell for help in competing with himself. Yet if Fuse were to have any chance of survival, Fadell had to take the consulting gig at Apple, because Fuse needed another infusion of cash. The traditional sources of funding had shut down because the dotcom crash was already under way.
Fadell put Fuse on autopilot and designed the iPod prototype for Apple in six short weeks. After he demonstrated how the iPod could be built—which components, which interfaces, and at what price—Jobs put Fadell into a double bind. He asked him to abandon the Fuse MP3 player designs and develop his idea inside Apple, which would mean killing his own company. It was agonizing for the young entrepreneur. “I was just like, whoa!” says Fadell, who even now gets worked up at the thought. “I am like, ‘Wait a second, I have a company, and there are people over there working on this other thing. How am I going to do this?’ So I just got in my car, and I started driving through the hills of Saratoga and Los Gatos. I go up to Skyline, I wind up those roads, and I’m just sitting there going, ‘What am I going to do? What am I doing?’”
In the end, Fadell didn’t have much of a choice. The odds of Fuse succeeding on its own were not good. So he put his own dreams in a box and went to work for Apple as the head of the iPod project. The first iPod was not perfect, but it was still way better than the competition—and as it was refined, it grew into a monster hit.
The iPod was a hit, and Fadell was a hero inside Apple
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“Get bored. Just put away all of your things. Maybe go clean up the garage or whatever it is. Right? Through that, you’re going to start to think differently. You’re going to act slightly differently and your mind might open up to other sources of inspiration, other problems…"
“I'm always doubtful. Everything I do is always doubtful. When you're trying to differentiate, there's going to be this gut sense, is this right? If you're not having doubt, then you're not pushing it hard enough, or you're not looking at the details close enough. You need to be feeling that doubt every single day.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
If you can have a great analogy for someone, they’ll continue to repeat that to everyone else.
Tony learnt this lesson from Steve Jobs —
“The biggest one was storytelling, storytelling, storytelling. Always, with whatever you’re doing, have great stories or great analogies because you need to relate to people on their level.”
This applies to everything – whether it’s a product/software story or if you’re trying to change something up about a work-related process. Stories are the BEST way to get people to understand the facts.
One example: “The Mac was like bringing a glass of ice water to somebody in hell”
Or another for the iPod: “A thousand songs in your pocket”
Wear your beginner’s hat
Often, engineers and designers, who’re building B2C companies, design and build products and features that impresses the person next to them. That’s geeky, but how does that make a difference to the common person who might want to use this product? As designers and engineers, it is our job to take powerful and robust software, and simplify it, so much so, that users feel like they have a new superpower they can use. Google is a great example. Your product team needs to always wear their beginner’s hats and think of how the end customer would look at this product.
Don’t trust recycling labels
When you live in Southeast Asia, you start to really understand plastics. They’re all around you – on the ground, in the water, even in the air. You see it everywhere. You start wondering, ‘Why do they have this problem, and in other parts of the world, we don’t seem to have it?’… For me, plastics are a problem that we all have, it’s just hidden in many parts of the world… It’s a problem with our usage, the material itself, how we use it, and how we design with it. We are baring our future generations in this toxic mess
This is not a societal problem. This is truly a design problem. We designed this mess. We have to design ourselves out of it.
So many products are designed with plastic components when they shouldn’t be
Plastic is used in single-use products (like packaging) and then “recycled”
As it turns out: “Just because something has the recyclable label doesn’t mean it’s recycled. It’s literally buried or burned, setting off toxic gases… Or, it ends up in the environment as litter as we see in the oceans.”
Why does this happen? – Many third-world countries can’t afford to recycle as it doesn’t make sense economically
Question for everyone - What is that one analogy that has stuck with you? Reply back to the email.
That’s it from me, until next Monday!