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Here are some highlights from a book I recently read. I found these parts interesting while reading, though they may not make the most sense in isolation. These are put here to aide my recall of the book and to give you the barest of encouragements to read it too.

Build by Tony Fadell, 2022.

Page 15

"If you make it, they will come" doesn't always work. If the technology isn't ready, they won't come for sure. But even if you've got the tech, then you still have to time it right. The world has to be ready to want it. .. I think of this as the General Magic problem. We were trying to build an iPhone years before it was a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye. .. You couldn't jam a Rolodex into your pocket or purse, so Palm was the right solution for the time. It made sense. It had a reason to exist.

General Magic did not. We started from the technology -- focusing on what we could create, what would impress the geniuses at our company -- not the reason why real, nontechnical people would need it. So the Magic Link solved problems that regular people wouldn't have for more than a decade.

59

The customer is always right, right? Except customer panels can't design for shit. People just can't articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another, especially if they're considering something completely new that they've never used before. Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it's terrible.

69

So here's how to deal with people like me, how to talk down a hurricane: ask why. It's the responsibility of a passionate person -- especially a leader -- to describe their decision and make sure you can see it through their eyes. If they can tell you why they're so passionate about something, then you can piece together their thought process and either jump on board or point out potential issues.

81

If the mission you're excited about is growing dimmer because of internal politics or poor administration or leadership churn or simply bad decisions, don't be shy. .. Talk to everyone. Not watercooler talk or internal gossip, not just complaining with no solutions. Come with suggestions to fix the intractable problems that you and your team face. .. Get up as high as you can and let them know what the issues are. You'll probably quit anyway if these issues aren't solved, so you have nothing to lose.

82

I remember we had a huge all-hands meeting at Apple once... And a guy stands up during Q&A and starts asking Steve Jobs why he didn't get a raise or a good review. Steve looks at him in stunned disbelief and says, "I can tell you why. Because you're asking this question in front of ten thousand people." He was fired shortly thereafter.

96

People often get excited about making something with atoms--they dig into the design, interface, color, materials, textures--and instantly become blind to simpler, easier solutions. But making anything with atoms is incredibly difficult-it's not an app that you can copy and update with a click. The only time hardware is worth the headache of manufacturing and packaging and shipping is if it's critically necessary and transformative. If hardware doesn't absolutely need to exist to enable the overall experience, then it should not exist.

Of course, sometimes you do need hardware--it can't be avoided. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, "Don't tell me what's so special about this object. Tell me what's different about the customer journey."

98

[in the early days of Nest] Everyone was obsessed with the thermostat--crafting the design, the AI, the device UI, the electronics, the mechanical bits, colors, textures. They thought carefully through every element of installing it, how it should feel when you turn the dial, how brightly it should glow when you walk past. The worked tirelessly on the hardware and software making sure the device itself was perfect. ..

The thermostat was important, of course, but it occupied only a tiny fraction of the customer journey:

  • 10% of our customers' experience was the website, advertising, packaging, and in-store display...
  • 10% was installation...
  • 10% was looking at and touching the device: it had to be beautiful so people would want it in their homes.
  • 70% of the customer experience was on people's phones or laptops...

100

Your product, marketing, and support have to grease the skids--continually communicate and connect with customers, give them the answers they need, so they feel like they're on a smooth ride, a single continuous, inevitable journey. To do that right, you have to prototype the whole experience--give every part the weight and reality of a physical object. Regardless of whether your product is made of atoms or bits or both, the process is the same. Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from an ad to the website to the app and what information they would see at each touchpoint. Write up the reactions you'd want to get from early adopters, the headlines you'd want to see from reviewers, the feelings you want to evoke in everyone. Make it visible. Physical. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. And don't wait until the product is done to get started--map out the whole journey as you map out what your product will do.

100

The packaging led everything. The product name, the tagline, the top features, their priority order, the main value props--they were literally printed on a cardboard box that we constantly held, looked at, tweaked, revised. The physical limitations of the box forced us to zero in on exactly what we wanted people to understand first, second, third.

107

Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems. A good product story has three elements:

  • It appeals to people's rational and emotional sides.
  • It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.
  • It reminds people of the problem tha's being solved--it focuses on the "why". That "why" is the most critical part of product development--it has to come first. Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works.

109

[Steve Jobs] used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It's a way to get into peoples heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt--"Maybe my experience isn't as good as I thought, maybe it could be better"--then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things. .. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it.

124

If Nest had only disrupted hardware--if we had just built the Nest Learning Thermostat alone--we would have failed. We needed to disrupt the sales and distribution channel, too. At the time, regular people didn't really go out and buy thermostats. You could get them at a hardware store, but they were intentionally complicated so you couldn't install them easily yourself. And they weren't sold online so you couldn't comparison shop and see the steep markup HVAC technicians would charge you. .. For every upsell of a fancy new Honeywell thermostat, the HVAC would get a nice little bonus for a job well done. Sell enough thermostats and Honeywell would send you on a Hawiian vacation. This was an entrenched market where the existing players had done everything in their power to keep out competitors.

135

In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else. But you don't have to figure out your vision all by yourself. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Locking yourself alone in a room to create a manifesto of your single, luminous vision looks and feels indistinguishable from completely losing your mind. Get at least one person--but preferably a small group--to bounce ideas off of. Sketch out your mission together. Then fulfill it together.

136

Typically your vision is so much greater than what materializes in V1. .. When do you tear yourself away from what you're making and just...stop? Ship it. Set it free. See what happens. Here's the trick: write a press release. But don't write it when you're done. Write it when you start [working on V2].

141

It was only with the third version that we understood all the pieces well enough to create the right V1 device. But we would have never reached that third design if we hadn't given ourselves hard deadlines with the first two--if we hadn't cut ourselves off after a few months, resent, and moved on. We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team.

143

Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship--24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months.

143

But even if it takes ten years to research a question, regular check-ins along the way ensure you're still chasing the right answer. Or still asking the right question. Pre-V1 launch, that heartbeat is entirely internal. You're not talking to the outside world yet, so you have to have a strong internal rhythm that pushes you toward a set launch date. This rhythm is made of major milestones--board meetings, all hands meetings, or project milestones at certain moments of product development where everyone, engineering and marketing and sales and support, can pause and sync with each other. This might happen every few weeks or every few months, but it has to happen in order to keep everyone moving in lockstep to the external announcement.

150

...there are three stages of profitability:

  1. Not remotely profitable: With the first version of a product you're still testing out the market, testing out the product, trying to find your customers. Many products and companies die at this stage before they ever make a dime.
  1. Making unit economics or gross margins: Hopefully with V2 you can make a gross profit with each product sold or each customer who subscribes to your service. ..
  1. Making business economics or net margins: With V3 you have the potential to make net profits with each subscription or product sold. That means that what you take in in sales revenue outstrips your business costs, so your company as a whole makes money.

158

Far too many people expect profitability, for the product and the business, right out of the gate. When I was at Philips I watched most new product categories and businesses on their slate get cancelled--even for products that were almost ready to ship. .. They would die on the vine because the top brass were protecting themselves. Any execs joining the team always wanted a near guarantee that new products would make money. They demanded to be shown ahead of time that the unit and business economics of the product were sound. But that was impossible. They were asking us to predict the future with near 100 percent confidence.

163-4

But no matter where we went, we could not escape one thing: the [] thermostat. The infuriating, inaccurate, energy-hogging, thoughtlessly stupid, impossible to program, always-too-hot-or-too-cold-in-some-part-of-the-house thermostat. Someone needed to fix it. And eventually I realized that someone was going to be me. The big companies weren't going to do it. Honeywell and the other white-box competitors hadn't truly innovated in thirty years. It was a dead, unloved market with less than $1 billion in total annual sales in the United States. And after a failed green innovation wave in 2007 and 2008, green-tech investors had firmly turned away from energy-saving devices. A small startup filled with fresh faces and few connections wouldn't have the credibility to get funding. I could already hear the VCs sneer, "Thermostats? Really? You want to make thermostats? The market is tiny and boring and hard."

164

Since I deeply trusted Randy, I decided to test my idea on him an floated the idea of a smart thermostat. He offered to write me a check on the spot. I was exactly the kind of founder investors like. Four failed startups and years of professional disappointment had paved the way for a decade of success [iPhone]. I was forty years old, knew exactly how hard this was going to be and which mistakes not to make again. I'd worked on hardware and software at tiny and enormous companies. I had contacts, credibility, and enough experience to know what I didn't know. And I had an idea.

164

Your thermostat should learn temperatures you like and when you like them. It should connect to your smartphone so you can control it from anywhere. It should turn itself down when you're not home to save energy. And of course it should be beautiful--something you're proud to put on your wall.

165

He was a real partner who could hsare the load, who'd work just as hard as me and care just as much. We already knew how to work together and saw eye-to-eye on how to make products. I didn't need another middle-aged executive with decades of experience telling me what we couldn't do. I needed a real cofounder.

165

What we pitched to investors was a connected thermostat. But we knew the company we were builidng--it wasn't going to stop at thermostats. We would create a slew of products, reinventing unloved but important objects everyone needed at home. And, most importantly, we were going to create a platform. We were going to build the connected home.

172

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they're not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. But you'll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller. Painkillers eliminate something that's constantly bothering you. A regular irritation you can't get rid of. And the best pain--so to speak--is one you experience in your own life. ..

Not every product idea has to come from your own life, but the "why" always has to be crisp and easy to articulate. You have to be able to easily, clearly, persuasively explain why people will need it. That's the only way to understand what features it should have, whether the timing is right for it to exist, whether the market for it will be tiny or enormous.

172-3

Once you have a really strong "why", you have the germ of a great idea. But you can't build a business on a germ. First you have to figure out if this idea is actually strong enough to carry a company. You need to build a business and implementation plan. And you have to understand if it's something you want to work on for the next five to ten years of your life. The only way to know is to see if it will chase you.

177

So I let the idea catch me. .. During this time, I'd also play a little game with myself and people I truly respected. They'd ask me, "What's keeping you busy now? What's interesting to you?" So I'd tell them I had an idea--maybe a great idea--and share a few details to get their reactions and thoughts and questions. .. Then as weeks of research and strategy began to come together, I stopped saying it was an idea and started saying I was building a product. Even though it wasn't quite true yet. But I wanted it to feel real--to get them, and especially me, to really dive to the details. I wanted to convince them and I wanted them to challenge it and I wanted to tell a story. ..

It took around nine to twelve months of making prototypes and interactive models, building bits of software, talking to users and experts, and testing it with friends before Matt and I decided to take the plunge and actually pitch investors.

178

...we didn't just present our vision when we pitched investors. We presented the why--told our story--and then we presented the risks. Too many startups don't know what they're getting into, or worse, try to cover up risks of failure. .. So we listed our risks: building an AI, compatibility with hundreds of different (and ancient) HVAC systems, customer installation, retail, and the really big one--would anyone even care? Would the world want a smart thermostat? The potential company-destroying problems--and the steps to mitigate them--went on and on. But listing them out, breaking them down, talking honestly about them, that's what ultimately convinced investors that we really knew what we were getting into. And that we could make it work.

196

...investors are swimming in pitches. .. You need some way to rise to the top and get their attention. The best way to do that is with a compelling story. ...most VCs won't be technical. So don't focus on the technology, focus on the "why". .. Pitching is hard. You'll need to constantly tune the deck up, change it around, tweak and revise. So you don't want your first pitch to be in front of the very top VC in your area. VCs talk to each other, so if one casts you aside, the others in that class may pass as well. .. Remember that you don't have to come in perfectly polished for that first meeting. You can say, "I'd l ike to give you an early look at this. Maybe it would be of interest to you. I'd love to get your comments on it."

206

There are two kinds of work/life balance:

  1. True work/life balance: A magical, quasi-mythical state where you have time for everything: work, family, hobbies, seeing friends, exercising, vacationing. Work is just one part of your life that doesn't intrude on any other part. This kind of balance is impossible when you're starting a company, leading a team that's trying to create innovative products or services on a competitive timeline, or just experiencing crunch time at work.
  1. Personal balance when you're working: Knowing you're going to be working or thinking about work most of the time and creating space to give your brain and body a break. To reach some level of personal balance, you need to design your schedule so you have time to eat well (hopefully with family and friends), exercise or meditate, sleep, and briefly think about something other than the current crisis at the office.

207

...do not vacation like Steve Jobs. Steve would typically take two weeks off, twice a year. We'd always dread those vacations at Apple. The first forty-eight hours were quite. After that it would be a storm of nonstop calls. He wasn't tied up in meetings, worrying about the day-to-day, so he was free. Free to dream about the future of Apple at all hours of the day and night. Free to call and get our thoughts about whatever crazy idea just occurred to him...

235

An interview isn't about carefree small talk. You're there for a reason. In an interview I'm always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they've done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: "What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?"

267

To be a great designer you can't lock yourself in a room--you have to connect with your team, with your customer and their environment, and other teams who may have innovative ideas to bring to the table. .. You have to look at a problem from all angles. You have to get a little creative. And you have to notice the problem in the first place. That last point doesn't sound like a big deal. But it's huge. It's the difference between a startup employee and its founder. .. You can't solve interesting problems if you don't notice they're there.

273

Re the pain table for messaging architecture

The whole product narrative should be in there--every pain, every painkiller, every rational and emotional impulse, every insight about your customer.

275

A messaging activation matrix:

The msessaging activation matrix should guide where and when you include certain information so you don't overwhelm or undereducate your customer as they move through multiple touchpoints along the customer journey.

292

Rather than focusing on rewarding salespeople immediately after a transaction, vest the commission over time so your sales team is incentivized to not only bring in new customers, but also work with existing customers to ensure they're happy and stay happy.

307

And I said, "No way. We are not launching our new product [Nest Cam] with a picture of a strangled baby."

310-2

Nest was building a platform--an ecosystem of our own and third party products all contolled by one application--that would elevate the connected home into something truly magical. We were going to weave a tapestry of technologies that would fundamentally change what home could be. That was the vision, anyway. The vision that Google bought for $3.2 billion in 2014. .. In 2013...I knew that if they were eager to buy Nest, it meant that they could be getting serious about building smart-home hardware. And if Google was serious...the other tech behemoths could be looking into it, too. Nest had started this snowball rolling and now it was causing an avalanche. If we weren't careful we could quickly get buried.

Nest was doing really well, selling our products as fast as we could make them. We could have just kept building the thermostat--its impact had already eclipsed our wildest expectations. .. But we were dead set on building a platform--a large and meaningful one that could last decades--and that would require vast resources. Huge companies like Google or Apple with other highly profitable revenue steams and tons of products could quickly displace us with their own platform. All they'd nee dto do was to announce a plan to enter the connected-home space. It wouldn't matter if their platform was any good--when a giant company makes an announcement, that alone puts a thumb on the scale. .. I had seen too many successful products and platforms from little startups die when bigger players moved in and sucked up all the oxygen in the room. But by joining Google we wouldn't just be protecting ourselves--we'd be accelerating our mission. ..

Within hours of the activation, Nest tried to calm a wave of bad press by publicly declaring our culture and systems completely separate from Google. After that, there was organ rejection. The natural antibodies at Google detected something new, different, foreign, and did everything they possibly could to avoid or ignore it. The would smile and smile but the promised meetings, the oversight from Google management, the plans we'd made to integrate--they all started to fall apart.

312

In 2014, just before the Google acquisition, Nest spent around $250,000 per employee per year. That included decent office space, good health insurance, the occasional free lunch, and fun perks from time to time. After we were acquired, that number shot up to $475,000 per person.

329

...Steve Jobs...told us five months before the first iPhone shipped that it needed a glass front face covering the display instead of plastic. .. He realized plastic wouldn't cut it. If we wanted it to be great, it would have to be glass. Even though we had absolutely no idea how to do it. Even though he knew we'd all have to work nonstop until we got it right, sacrificing our time with our families, our plans and vacations. But Steve was a parent CEO. A pushy parent. A tiger mom. He knew if we kept pushing, together, we'd figure it out. The sacrifices would be worth it. And he was right. That time. But not every time. ... But if you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough.

333-4

Good CEOs...tell the board what's working but they're also transparent about what isn't and how they're addressing it. They present a fully-formed plan that the board can question, object to, or try to modify.

Bill Campbell...would always say that if there was any potentially surprising or controversial topic, the CEO should go to every board member, one-on-one, to walk them through it before the meeting. .. There should only be good surprises in a board meeting...

348

When Larry told me during acquisition that Google would marshal the team and align their priorities with ours, he was 100 percent telling the truth. But what that looked like at Google was giving the team the skeleton of a plan and letting them fill in the rest as they went. .. But I had interpreted his words through an Apple lens. If Steve Jobs said he was going to marshal the team, that meant he was going to be there every step of the way--weekly, sometimes daily. .. Even though we were promised a full blits, nobody was going to drop any bombs at Google. They didn't even know the meaning of the word.

The moment I realized that, I could see how we'd been misaligned from the start. We hadn't prepared for this. We hadn't planned for no managerial air cover. We hadn't planned for organ rejection.

361

I wanted everyone to keep their focus on the things we were making, the vision we were trying to achieve. Not perks, not frills, not extras. So there was no [] way that we were going to spend company money giving people free massages. We needed that money--to build the business. To reach net margins. To make sure our fundamentals were strong and sound so that we could keep employing all these people in the first place. And we needed it to help people have the live they wanted outside work. Instead of making the office so luxe that employees would never leave, we spent our money on meaningful benefits for them and their families--better health care, IVF, the stuff that really changes people's lives.