A biography for Tony Fadellhasn’t been written yet.
“You need to set near-term milestones. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. Your team has to understand where they're going. Your partners need to understand where they're going.”
“Usually, the biggest companies are not the most dynamic.”
“If you don't have an emotionally engaging design for a device, no one will care about it.”
“Your television has changed, your phone has changed. Why don't these other things you need, that the government tells you you must have in your home, change?”
“I say homes are for families, and you have to make sure you design for the family, not just one person: kids, your wife, your grandparents need to be able to use it.”
“It can't be that difficult to build a great thermostat. So I decided to figure out: What would the thermostat for the iPhone generation look like? I got this bug. It really infected my brain. I kept thinking about it. This could be a cool product that matters and a cool product that has a great business.”
“I've been working with contractors designing and building a house on a nonstop basis since 2005. I learned about all these systems of audio, construction, electricity, energy, water systems.”
“Google has the business resources, global scale and platform reach to accelerate Nest growth across hardware, software and services for the home globally.”
“I don't want the iPod to be my defining thing.”
“Studies have shown that children are less likely to wake up to a horn than the sound of a mother's voice.”
“When I was four or five years old, my grandfather showed me how to build things, paint, saw. Through years of fixing bikes, repairing lawn mowers, I learned how things work.”
“Thermostats are made by very large companies with no incentive to innovate. Their customers are contractors or HVAC wholesalers, not consumers. So why spend to make them better? It's a good business.”
“Typical mergers happen when there are two competitors coming together, and they reduce overhead.”
“I look at the world and peer into products and think, 'What's wrong with these products?'”
“If you look at where the tried and true of Silicon Valley VC's are investing, it's in people who understand what it takes, who've been through it and have a network of people they can tap and resources to pull together.”
“There are two different types of prototyping. First, the gut sense. You know how far you can take it. Second, you need experts to figure out whether or not it is attainable.”
“It's not just about turning up or down the heat, it's about the other experiences that come with turning up or down the heat - what are we doing about energy, what are we doing about your health and safety.”
“Well, you can say there is a self driving car. I'm seeing the automation of vehicles. Really, computer-assisted driving. I think that is really interesting to us because we are taking all of the sensors technologies and putting them in cars and making people safer.”
“Computers are great tools, but they need to be applied to the physical world.”
“It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.”