Tony Fadell: commitment

Transcript context

…Well, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became successful. Well, anyone who knows if they remember iPod before iPhone, because iPhone swallowed everything. It's the black hole of everything. But iPod, the first generation was only successful with the Mac Geeks. And the Mac Geeks were less than 1% of the market. And then the second generation was also that way. We'd sell everything we could for the most part in the first quarter and then it would die, because it was just the Mac aficionados, the loyalists who'd come and buy everything. And it wasn't until the third generation where we made it work on Windows. And we had the iTunes music store. Did it actually start to take off? So sometimes you have to say, "We're on the right thing, but we need to make some changes to get this market going. And that was a real opinion-based decision. The team that I was running, we were really clear that we had to have Windows connectivity out of the gate, or not out of the gate, but just after the first iPod shipped. And Steve said, "Over my dead body, no way. This is going to help us sell more Macs." And then we're like, "Okay, we're making the second one. Oh, we're going to keep it with Mac only. We just got to fix a few of these things and then all of a sudden it'll take off." And it was like, it didn't take off. So then it was a long story about how we finally got Windows connectivity, but there was always this skunk works thing project behind the scenes doing that. I did the same thing with Stylus. Steve never wanted a stylist on the iPhone or the iPad. He never wanted it. He's like, "The finger is good enough. And we can't do it with the finger." And I'm like, "But we're going to have the B2B context and we're going to have form filling, and people are going to write." And he's like, "I don't care." That means we're going to get to Windows pen because he thought it was going to be like Windows pen, which was you had to use the pen for everything as opposed to using your finger. So it was like, "Instead of pen dominant, I want it finger dominant." But that's what he was saying. But then when we added the stylus, which was another skunk works project, all of a sudden it came out and it was like, "Well, we had to have stylus." And now it's a big feature of the product. Not everyone uses it, but it is a big feature for certain professionals who really want that, and artists and hobbyists and stuff. So sometimes you have to have those skunk works things that even if the opinion- based leader doesn't like it, you're like, "That seems like the right thing." Maybe not right now, but you can see it on the horizon so you just keep working on those things. But we had to, like I said, the iPhone wasn't a hit right away. It was like a, "Oh yeah, it worked on AT&T and it was two and a half G and it was this and that." It only worked in the US. So we had to get multiple versions till we got out. wasn't a hit right away. It was like a, "Oh yeah, it worked on AT&T and it was two and a half G and it was this and that." It only worked in the US. So we had to get multiple versions till we got out. And that's in my book, it's called, I think it's three generations. Everything needs three generations. Yes, Bill, there it is. Three generations. I've learned, you make the product, you fix the product, then you fix the business. I've never seen anyone get it all right the first time. You would like to, but you get close. But make the product, fix the product after you get customer feedback and then make the business, which means make the margins. Like on the first iPods, we weren't making any money. First iPhones, we weren't making any money. The second iPhone and second iPod, okay, we started getting a little bit better numbers, but we got more or less the features dialed. Third one was like, okay, Windows, we got the margins, we're getting up the volume, we got all the right [inaudible 00:31:48]. And like go. Reliability, whatever else it had to be. So you need to stick with your idea even if it's not necessarily going the first time, unless your brain-damaged about whatever it was, you have to restart. But sometimes you have to hang in there. And same thing with Nest. We had to hang in there with two generations of the smoke detector and a few generations of thermostat before we made the business work, not just make the product work. There's so many directions I can go here. One that's interesting is how often Steve Jobs was actually wrong and how many times you had to [inaudible 00:32:24].…

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