Build

An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Tony Fadell, T. F.

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063046061
• eBook ISBN: 9780063046078
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Corporate Finance
• Index: Biological Sciences

**New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USAToday Bestseller for May 2022**

Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.

So that’s what this book is. An advice encyclopedia. A mentor in a box. 

Written for anyone who wants to grow at work—from young grads navigating their first jobs to CEOs deciding whether to sell their company—Build is full of personal stories, practical advice and fascinating insights into some of the most impactful products and people of the 20th century.

Each quick 5-20 page entry builds on the previous one, charting Tony’s personal journey from a product designer to a leader, from a startup founder to an executive to a mentor. Tony uses examples that are instantly captivating, like the process of building the very first iPod and iPhone. Every chapter is designed to help readers with a problem they’re facing right now—how to get funding for their startup, whether to quit their job or not, or just how to deal with the jerk in the next cubicle.

Tony forged his path to success alongside mentors like Steve Jobs and Bill Campbell, icons of Silicon Valley who succeeded time and time again. But Tony doesn’t follow the Silicon Valley credo that you have to reinvent everything from scratch to make something great. His advice is unorthodox because it’s old school. Because Tony’s learned that human nature doesn’t change. You don’t have to reinvent how you lead and manage—just what you make. 

And Tony’s ready to help everyone make things worth making. 

Part 1

Build Yourself

I tried to build the iPhone twice.

Everybody knows about the second time. The time we succeeded. Few people know about the first.

In 1989, an Apple employee and intellectual visionary named Marc Porat drew this:

Fig. 1.0.1

Marc’s 1989 sketch of the Pocket Crystal in his big red notebook. On the next page he wrote, “This is a very personal object. It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal.”

Marc Porat/Spellbound Productions II

The Pocket Crystal was a beautiful touchscreen mobile computer that combined a cell phone and fax machine, that let you play games and watch movies and buy plane tickets from anywhere.

This insanely prophetic vision was made more completely nuts by the fact that this was—I repeat—1989. The Web didn’t exist, mobile gaming meant carrying a Nintendo console to your friend’s house, and almost nobody owned—or even really understood the need for—a cell phone. There were pay phones everywhere, everyone’s got a pager—why lug around a giant plastic brick with you?

But Marc and two other geniuses and ex-Apple wizards, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, started a company to build the future. They called it General Magic.* I read about it in the “Mac The Knife” rumors section of (the now long-dead) MacWeek Magazine right around the time I realized that I had no real idea how to run my startup.

I’d started a few computer-related companies in high school and college, but I’d been focused on Constructive Instruments since my junior year at the University of Michigan. I founded it with one of my professors—the cherubic, “oy vey”-ing Elliot Soloway. Elliot was dedicated to educational technology and together we built a multimedia editor for kids. And we got pretty far—a product, employees, an office. But I was still going to the library to look up the difference between an S-corporation and a C. I was green, green, green. And I had no one to ask—there were no entrepreneurial meetups back then, no Y Combinators. Google wouldn’t exist for seven years.

General Magic was my chance to learn everything I could possibly want to know. To work with my heroes—the geniuses who made the Apple ][, the Lisa, the Macintosh. It was my first real job and my first real chance to change the world like Andy and Bill had.

When I talk to people fresh out of college or early in their careers, that’s what they’re looking for. An opportunity to make an impact and set themselves on a path to make something great.

But all the stuff they don’t and can’t teach you in college—how to thrive in the workplace, how to create something amazing, how to deal with managers and eventually become one—it all slaps you in the face the second you step off campus. No matter how much you learn in school, you still need to get the equivalent of a PhD in navigating the rest of the world and building something meaningful. You have to try and fail and learn by doing.

And that means pretty much every young graduate, entrepreneur, and dreamer asks me the same questions:

“What kind of job should I try to get?”

“What kinds of companies should I work for?”

“How do I build a network?”

There’s often an assumption that if you find the right job when you’re young, you can guarantee some level of success. That your first job out of college connects in a straight line to your second and your third, that at each stage of your career you’ll use your inevitable wins to propel yourself upward.

That’s what I thought too. I was 100 percent sure General Magic was going to make one of the most impactful devices in history. I poured everything into it. We all did. The team worked literally nonstop for years—we even gave out awards for sleeping in the office for consecutive nights.

Then General Magic imploded. After years of work, tens of millions invested, newspapers shouting that we were destined to beat Microsoft, we sold three to four thousand devices. Maybe five thousand. And that was mostly to family and friends.

The company failed. I failed.

And I spent the next ten years getting kicked in the stomach by Silicon Valley before I made something people actually wanted.

In the process I learned a lot of hard, painful, wonderful, stupid, useful lessons. So for anyone starting their career, or starting a new career, here’s what you need to know.

Chapter 1.1

Adulthood

Adulthood is commonly thought of as the time when learning is over and living begins. Yes! I’ve graduated! I’m done! But learning never ends. School has not prepared you to be successful for the rest of your life. Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something the world has never seen before.

So when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”

Not “How much money do I want to make?”

Not “What title do I want to have?”

Not “What company has enough name recognition that my mom can brutally crush the other moms when they boast about their kids?”

The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail. Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

* * *

I arrived in a cheap, ill-fitting midwestern suit for my interview at General Magic. Everyone was sitting on the floor. They looked up at me, utterly bewildered. Their faces read, “Who is this kid?” They told me to sit down and take off my tie and jacket for Christ’s sake.

Mistake #1.

Luckily it was a small one. I became employee #29 in 1991. I was a kid, twenty-one years old, and I gratefully took a job as a diagnostics software engineer. I was going to build software and hardware tools to check other people’s designs—the lowest person on the totem pole. But I didn’t care. I knew I just needed to get in the door to prove myself and move up.

A month before that, I’d been CEO of my own company. We were tiny—a startup of three, sometimes four people—and were inching along. But it felt more like treading water. And treading water felt like drowning. Either you’re growing or you’re done. There is no stasis.

So I went where I could grow. The title and the money weren’t important. The people were. The mission was. The opportunity was all that mattered.

I remember packing up my stuff to drive to California from Michigan, my belly full of butterflies, four hundred dollars to my name, and my parents trying to understand what the hell was going on.

They wanted me to succeed. They wanted me to be happy. But I truly seemed to be screwing everything up and had been for years. I loved computers, but I’d gotten thrown out of my first computer class in seventh grade nearly every day. I was always telling the teacher he was wrong, always insisting I knew better, never shutting up. I made the poor man cry until they dragged me out of that class and made me learn French instead.

Then I skipped my very first week of college at the University of Michigan to go to Apple Fest in San Francisco and work a booth for my startup. I told my parents after I landed back in Detroit. They were beside themselves. But I’d learned early on to ask for forgiveness, not permission. And I remember the revelation of sitting in my dorm, still digesting the dinner I’d eaten at the wharf in San Francisco, realizing I could be part of two worlds at once. That it wasn’t even that hard.

And now I was quitting the company that I had founded, that I had worked day and night to build, that had always seemed like an incredible risk but which was just starting to pay off. And I was going to go—where? General Magic? What the hell was General Magic? If I was going to get a regular job, why not at IBM? Why not Apple? Why not do something stable? Why couldn’t I choose a path they could understand?

I wish I’d known this quote then—maybe it would have helped:

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.”

—ANONYMOUS

I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it. And if it turned out to be the wrong move, well, making a mistake is the best way to not make that mistake again. Do, fail, learn.

The critical thing is to have a goal. To strive for something big and hard and important to you. Then every step you take toward that goal, even if it’s a stumble, moves you forward.

And you can’t skip a step—you can’t just have the answers handed to you and detour around the hard stuff. Humans learn through productive struggle, by trying it themselves and screwing up and doing it differently next time. In early adulthood you have to learn to embrace that—to know that the risks might not pan out but to take them anyway. You can get guidance and advice, you can choose a path by following someone else’s example, but you won’t really learn until you start walking down that path yourself and seeing where it takes you.

I give a speech at high schools sometimes—at graduations where a bunch of eighteen-year-old kids are heading out into the world, alone, for the first time.

I tell them that they probably make 25 percent of their decisions. If that.

From the moment you’re born until you move out of your parents’ house, almost all your choices are made, shaped, or influenced by your parents.

And I’m not just talking about the obvious decisions—which classes to take, which sports to play. I mean the millions of hidden decisions you’ll discover when you leave home and start doing things for yourself:

What type of toothpaste do you use?

What kind of toilet paper?

Where do you put the silverware?

How do you arrange your clothes?

What religion do you follow?

All these subtle things that you never made a decision about growing up are already implanted in your brain.

Most kids don’t consciously examine any of these choices. They mimic their parents. And when you’re a kid, that’s usually fine. It’s necessary.

But you’re not a kid anymore.

And after you move out of your parents’ house, there’s a window—a brief, shining, incredible window—where your decisions are yours alone. You’re not beholden to anyone—not a spouse, not kids, not parents. You’re free. Free to choose whatever you’d like.

That is the time to be bold.

Where are you going to live?

Where are you going to work?

Who are you going to be?

Your parents will always have suggestions for you—feel free to take them or ignore them. Their judgment is colored by what they want for you (the best, of course, only the best). You’ll need to find other people—other mentors—to give you useful advice. A teacher or cousin or an aunt or the older kid of a close family friend. Just because you’re on your own doesn’t mean you have to be alone with your decisions.

Because this is it. This is your window. This is your tim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Build Yourself
• Part II: Build Your Career
• Part III: Build Your Product
• Part IV: Build Your Business
• Part V: Build Your Team
• Part VI: Be CEO
• Acknowledgments
• Reading List
• Index
• Sustainability Information
• About the Author
• Praise for Build
• Copyright
• About the Publisher