Lex Fridman Podcast - #294 – Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, and Nest

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Tony Fadell is an engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat, and author of the new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Mailgun: https://lexfridman.com/mailgun - Scale: https://scale.com/lex - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Tony's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfadell Tony's Website: https://tonyfadell.com Build (book): https://amzn.to/3xSReee Story (book): https://amzn.to/3Olzqhv PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:16) - Memories (14:13) - Apple II (22:51) - First business (26:55) - iPod (50:56) - Ideas (55:09) - Marketing (1:05:26) - PR and Comms (1:15:06) - Design (1:20:03) - Experts (1:26:04) - Steve Jobs (2:09:43) - Jony Ive (2:16:55) - Nest (2:27:13) - Advice for young people (2:31:30) - Startup (2:36:25) - Money (2:41:33) - Work-Life Balance (2:44:11) - Darkest moment (2:49:48) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Tony Fidel, a engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest Thermostat, and he's the author of the new book Build, an unorthodox guide to making things worth making. More than almost any human ever, he knows what it takes to create technology ideas, designs, products, and companies that revolutionize life for huge numbers of people in the world. So it truly is an honor and pleasure to sit down with Tony for a time and look back at one heck of an amazing life. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.

It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Mailgun for email campaigns, scale from a she learning, net suite for efficiency, simply safe for security and aid sleep for sweet sweet naps. Choose wise and my friends. And now onto the full lad reads. As always, no ads in the middle, I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will do. This show is brought to you by Mailgun by Sinch, an email delivery service. It has API for transactional and marketing.

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Asleep currently ships within the USA, Canada and the UK. This is the Lex Rebend podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fadal. When did you first fall in love with computers or let's say computer engineering and design. I first fell in love with computers and programming was it a summer school class. In fifth grade, in gross point farms Michigan, it was a simple basic programming class, but the basic programming class was not like you might think it was. It was bubble cards. So literally it was, you know, the cards, the stack of cards, and you would use a number two pencil

and you would put in your program line by line and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked and no errors and what have you. And you'd take that set of cards and you'd put it on this reader and it would go off to an IBM micro computer somewhere in the back then the cloud. And then you would sit on a Texas Instruments paper terminal and it would just literally, I could write things and I could program this machine to do stuff. And it was, you know, it was nowhere near sex. There was no graphics, right?

Oregon Trail was all in text, right? The cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong or out of order, it, or a disaster, or you dropped one card, it would all fall apart. So just doing that, you know, print, or it was, I can't even remember what it was. It was, you know, what the basic commands were. But also when you say basic, you mean basic programming language.

Okay. Basic programming. So you're writing basic programming language on paper. On paper. And you're calling it programming, though. It's called programming. Yeah, you're programming this computer in a remote location. And it came back. So it was truly cloud computing in a way.

So it was really terminal based computer. And the input and the program are separate. So the input to the program are they could go together. Or is no input to the program. It just runs and it gives you output. Yeah, it goes in and it says it says ready. And then you can say run. And then it would run.

But to program it, you didn't type it because it was a printer terminal. You would make the stack of cards. And that would get it into the computer's memory. Okay. So where was the magic? The magic was that you could create, you had a language and you could create what you wanted to create, right? You could create a world or what have you and have this interaction.

And you could compute things, you could, you know, do numbers, I was playing Oregon Trail, right? So you were less like, so you can play video games. Well, video. That's right. You could play text games and then imagine them in your brain, right?

Oregon Trail. There's this meme I saw recently, if you wanna feel bad about yourself as a programmer, realize that one person wrote Railroad Tycoon, I think that's the name of the game. This is cool little build their game. One person wrote it in assembly. So from scratch, and for people who don't know, it kind of looks like a

SIMCety type game. It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads. And there's a nice graphics, a three-dimensional, all that kind of stuff. All the things, all the rich colorful things you would imagine for a three-dimensional video game, all written in assembly, meaning the lowest level code next to binary, which is fascinating. And you had to notice the magic at that low level at that time. You didn't have all the graphics, you didn't have all the APIs and all the sample codes,

and all stack over flow and all the internet, and none of that. You had to know registers, you had to know the op codes, and you had to imagine the world in your brain with the memory structures and everything. Now, there's no visualization. You visualized it all yourself, right? And so that was magic, but then the next part of the magic of where I got hooked even further was like, I'm doing these little things.

And then electronic arts came out for the Apple too. So I got an Apple too. And electronic arts came out and I was programming and doing basic and making my own games. But then there were two games that really blew my mind. One was pinball construction set. And the other one was music construction set. And these were both places where I could create pinball games and I could create musical scores because I love music and I could then play them, right? And so when you had that, you were like, oh, this is something very different. So I could create myself, but then there was others that could create tools so you could

create at a visual level. And then you would read the back stories because electronics arts back in the day, it was one programmer who would program those things, you know, each of those things. And you could read the back stories because electronics arts back in the day, it was one programmer who would program those things, you know, each of those things. And you could read their back stories. It was literally like a musician or someone else, like you could read Rick Rubens, like here's the thing. They tell you all of that stuff. And there was one guy who wrote music construction set.

He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old. And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this and had published, right? And this amazing tool was created. I'm like, what could I do? And so then it just kept building off of that. But really, it was those seminal things, first the introduction and then the power through programming and turning these things into what you wanted to turn it into. And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old and have PhDs. And then I was like, okay, this is really cool. I wish we did that with programmers. We treated them like artists. We would know the backstory

these days today. Not just programmers, engineers, engineers, designers. Yeah. Like all the things about a product that I think we love are the little details. And there's probably a human being behind each of those details that had their little inkling of genius that they put in. And I wish we knew those stories. That's always sad to me when I, because I, obviously, I love engineering. And I interact with companies and they, you know, autonomous vehicles, something I'm really interested about. And I see that companies generally, and we'll probably talk about this, but they, they seem to want to hide their engineers like

engineers hold the secrets. Like the great secret. We did not speak of the great secret. But then the result of that is you don't get to hear their stories, the passion that is there behind the engineers, like, and also the genius, the little, there's a difference between the stuff that's patented, like the kernel of the idea, and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea. And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects a little bit more. But, so sorry for the distraction. So what you mentioned Apple to, what was the first computer you fell in love with, like the product, the thing before you, that was a personal computer.

It was the Apple to. So the Apple to was something I was just lusting over. I think it was at the time it was the person of the year. Maybe it was that year. I don't remember what. Well, Apple 2 was the person of the year. Yeah, for my magazine back. And I don't remember when. But it was around that same time. I was so young. But there was the Apple 2. And I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools because my grandfather taught me about tools and creating things, right?

And I saw this thing and I had that, you know, that IBM experience, that terminal experience, and I'm like, oh, I could have that at home, right? And so I need to have that at home, and the only thing that was really talked about in, you know, our circles was the apple too And I was just like that's it So I went jumped up and down. It was very expensive. I have to have this my parents like what? You know it was $2500 back then Well in the 1981 is like crazy, right? So I was like I'm gonna make as much money as I can this summer and my grandfather said because he he helped me

Learn all about tools and build things together. I will match whatever you make so you can get this computer. So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy, cadding actually for the, you know, the families in, you know, at the country clubs in the town where we lived. And did whatever I could. And that end of that summer, it was got my apple too. And you couldn't tear it away from me.

It was my friend, it was everything. From a product perspective, what do you remember that was brilliant? The design choices, the ideas behind it, or is it just that it exists? Or that very idea of a personal computer is the brilliant design choice? Yeah, it was that I could or that very idea of a person on computers that brilliant design choice? Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool

in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted. I could program it anyways. There was no internet connection. There was no, it was all just you. You either loaded software that you got from someone, right? Or you created yourself. And then there was the whole other thing which was started happening,

which we were doing, and this was kind of like MP3 and stuff. We were sharing software, right? So you built this community of sharing software, you would go and pirate, that was what it was called pirate all this software. You never use it all, but it was just that fun thing of like, I'm going to get all this other stuff and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it and see behind the scenes. So you really had a sense this this is your world and you owned it, right? And you could like literally go into every register. We didn't have all those security layers like we do not like, you could really touch bits and you could poke bits and you could make this light turn on.

And you know, in the geek and sign, we just lit up. Now you could there's, it's so abstract. You know, people don't even understand like usually, you know, some People don't even understand, like usually, you know, some programs don't even understand memory. They just think it's unlimited, right? Yeah. And security. It's like, now there's all this security that you should have,

but it's like the adults all showed up to the party. And now you can't have all the fun. Right? It's like, no, no. You know, this was the thing where, if the power went out, you lost your whole program. You might have worked a the thing where if you, if the power went out, you lost your whole program, you might have worked a whole day on it. And if you didn't press save at every other line,

and you were saved, save, save, save. And it would like, grrr, grrr, grrr, the disc drive or the tape drive, grrr, grrr, grrr. Like every single step was contemplated. Because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work. So a lot of the magic was in the software. The fact that you could have software, the fact that you could share software,

the community around the software, it wasn't necessarily the hardware. Well, that was the first step. The second step around the hardware was I got things like the mocking board, which the mocking board paired with the music construction set. You could now generate all kinds of tones and notes and it was a synth synthesizer in the Apple II. So you would plug in this card and you go, oh my God, look at this. And you could start generating cool sounds.

It was like a moge, like a moge in a way, early moge. What year were you talking about? This is 82, I think, 81, 82. And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds that are very cool in the 80s. Yeah, the eight-bit, you know, chip tunes, right? Chips-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. And then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick,

you had to pull a chip out and you had to like plug in a dip socket to put in a joystick. And then I was like, oh, and then I had to get more memory. How do we do that? And I wanted to speed up. So then that turned into a company actually from that, but it was in a hardware software knowing that that. But it was all about modifying this thing in every way.

First was software. And then you started gaining confidence. And then I got a little bit more money and stuff. And then you could get into the hardware and wire things. And then the Apple 2 came with all the schematics right so in the back in the early Apple 2's you could open up and all the schematics were there. Do you purchase the Apple 2 and the schematics come with it? Yeah, it came with it.

That's an interesting choice. That's an interesting choice from a company perspective. Right. It's just like a real maker kind of thing. Right. Oh, I wonder what they, so that was intentional. Like this is- Absolutely intentional.

This is for the cutting edge folks too. Or especially- It was only the cutting edge. It was geeks for geeks. Yeah. So we were like, oh, how did they make it? And then we got to learn through that. Apple won did the same thing, right?

It just Apple too became more packaged up and had a little bit better software, right? Came with basic and then, you know, so it was really, it was what we might think of as a raspberry pie today or something like that. But not with so much software. It was literally, and all the chips were out there, so you could inspect the buses and the, right?

Cause everything was just broken out So I guess that's the idea behind stable big projects and open source like on GitHub that you have this comedics there and It's it's kind of a product, but I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing like we're going to release this to a small set of people self-selected more companies don't do that kind of thing. Like, we're going to release this to a small set of people self-selected, perhaps, that are kind of the makers, the cutting edge folks, the builders, the at-home engineers.

Like, in some way, what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self-driving is kind of like that. It's like selecting a group of people, but that has to do more with you, how safe of a driver you are versus how much of a tinker you are because you don't get to tinker. I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do

for really cutting-edge technologies, especially you're interested in hardware stuff? Is that crazy? Why don't people, more companies do that kind of thing? You think? I think back then, it was about a community and serving that community of builders. Now, this is about people who want to take,

get the experience and want it really simple and easy. And they're like, and so the audience, or they believe the audience is small, who would value those other things that we're just talking about. But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi and all of these other little boards, right, there's a whole world more than I've seen. Like, it's amazing what you can do now

with these little kits and the software that's created. And so, there's a whole nother, I think another batch of makers and builders that are coming up through the ranks. And if you look at YouTube channels and stuff, right? They take these little boards, they hack them, then they print out parts on their 3D printer, assemble them and they create robots and what have you.

So I think it's happening. It's just not as, you know, it's just not as, I guess, raw as it used to be. But it's there, and it's really expanding around the world, and that's really nice to see, because, you know, it's a whole new generation who are empowered. I think there's a semi-dormant genius amongst millions. So the raspberry pie is revealing that a little bit. It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised if it's several million raspberry pies that have been sold. I think I should. And it's

kind of this quiet storm of genius, brewing of engineers. We don't get to hear it because they're not organized. I mean, we get to hear it through uncleans here and there. Like I said, YouTube, there's little communities that are local and so on, but if they were organized, if a leader would emerge, no. Okay, so when did you first start to dream about building your own things, designing your own products, designing your own systems, software and hardware. Well, in high school, there was a company that, a friend of mine founded it, and I was the second employee,

it was called Quality Computers. And it was a male order, male or because there's no e-commerce then, there's no internet again. You either mailed in your little coupon and you said, this is what I wanted to order, or you rode in to get a catalog and Delivered to you, you know turn around time and this stuff was like from the time you wanted to time you bought it was maybe eight to 12 weeks

That was just the normal way of getting things so quality computers was a mail order For apple two and it was software software and all kinds of accessories. So hardware accessories, so hardware plug-in cards, joysticks, all this stuff. And what we noticed was there were accelerators and memory cards. And to be able to use those cards, you had to actually go and change the software you used to access this new memory. So you literally have to go and you took the program that you had,

let's say, was Appleworks, which was like an early Microsoft office or something like that. And you had to literally change the code and you would install these patches to then take advantage of the hardware. So what we started creating was software on top of it to do the automatic installation of all of these patches. So we made it much easier to take new hardware, and then ants and the existing software you have, and expanded into this new world.

So it was creating tools and that really great customer support. And we started getting a lot of orders, because we had the software make it easier to install, to give them the superpower. And at the same time, they would be able to change their software and have a new world that wasn't existing from the companies that were creating the initial products. And so it was more of that and then that happened with hard drives. So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II to like read because you could get really fragmented.

So it wrote that piece of software when we sold that through the company along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties. So that all happened in 12th grade freshman year of college. You know, to hard drive optimizer in 12th grade. Yeah, between 12th and freshman year. What programming language do you remember? and 12th grade. Between 12th and freshman year. What programming language do you remember? Is that assemblies? There were certain interlupes were assembly

and other loops actually there were really early pass gals. No, see compilers. What was the motivation behind these? Is it to make people's lives easier? Is it to create a thing, experience that is simpler and simpler and simpler? They're by more accessible to a larger, your number of people.

Like what, or did you just like like the tinker? No, no, no, it was two things really because one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software, right? Yes. So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user. And then the other thing was because I was also manning the customer support line. People would call and they go, this doesn't work. And I'm like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware

and software, right? Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware and the installation process better. So my whole world was out of box experience from when I was in high school. Because I had a man, the customer support line, pack the boxes and write some of the code while we were doing, well, Joe, Joe Gleason

was the founder of Quality Computers. He was off doing the ads, placing the ads for the mail order, making sure we were running the credit cards, right? Yeah. It was two of us and then it turned into a third, and then we hired another person from high school to like pack boxes so I could stay on the customer support line

or doing the software, right? And it was all in his parents' basement, yeah, right? As it was all in his parents basement, right? As you were scaling exponentially. Scaling, right? Yeah, exactly. Bootsstrapping. So we'll jump around a little bit.

But what were the, you said you love music. What were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod if we jump forward? And how far back do those ideas stretch? You know, if you look at the history of technology, there's, I mean, not just the product, but the idea is truly revolutionary. Maybe it's time has come,

but just if you look at the arc of history, sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity, and to be able to put that in your pocket, make it truly portable, it's fascinating. In a way, that's truly portable. So it's digital, as opposed to sort of like a walkman or something like that. So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod? You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid.

Just love music from, I think, second grade when I got my first albums and stuff like that. What kind of music are we talking about, though? So this was Led Zeppelin. This was the Stones, Hendrics, erosmith, cheap trick, sticks, Ted Nugent, you know, just the real, you know, the real American and British Rock and World, right? There's a bunch of people listening right now. Who, Ted, who's that? Who's that? Led Zeppelin. What is that?

Who's that? Who's that? That's Zeppelin. What is that? Is that so? You're all of my parents crazy. Yeah. Just blasted. Loud. Loud. Just for her. And this was second, third, great fourth guy. I just fell in love. And then we move back to Detroit. And I love listening to the radio station because there was all kinds of crazy music. Because you'd have a malgum of rock and then funk and R&B, and I loved to listen at night. So I had a clock radio. But if I had the clock radio on, every wouldn't, parents go go to sleep, stop that, turn that stuff off. So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it.

Nice. Right. So I said, oh, they're like, okay, and then, and then I could listen to it all Nice. Right. So I said, oh, they're like, okay, and then and then I could listen to it all night. And no one could hear me, right? And I could just sit there and, you know, just huddling around the radio. Just listening to Zeppelin. There were to heaven. What would you say is the greatest rock, classic rock song of all time? Greatest classic rock song will pop into mind. Well, no, you know what? I mean, this has to be a really hard dude. This is a serious journalistic interview. You're

not going to back down from these kinds of questions. Oh my god. No, no, no. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to pay. But I to me, stairway to heaven is a safe fall. It's like, it's so often considered to be one of the greatest songs of all time that you almost don't want to pick it. Right. Exactly. But you've returned to a time and time and again, and it's like, yeah, this is something pretty special.

This is a rock opera, it's off sorts. Well, the rock opera that really blew me away and still continues to blow me away is all of Doc's out of the moon. Like that. I love that. Yeah, I love Zeppelin. I can't say which one's better. But Darksider Moon for me was, it was a, you know, audio experience, right? The whole thing for soup to nuts plus all the synthesizers, all of those things. Okay. So back to the iPod. So that's from the early age, you love music. Loved it. Absolutely loved it.

And you know, always was just around it and always, it was always playing, you know, I played it so loud that I actually hurt the hearing in my right ear and I still suffer from that today. And then, no regrets. No regrets whatsoever. Going to concerts and downtown Detroit and all the crazy stuff. So moving forward, so in college I was a DJ. So I would DJ and hang out and play all the tunes I love and whatever for the crowd.

And then I continue to do that in Silicon Valley when I moved right after school. And so I was be lugging all of these CDs around with me, a thousand CDs to write and at the same time, and so those were heavy. And at the same time I was doing the Phillips Nino and Velo. Those were Windows CE-based mobile computing products. The Nino was the first device to actually put audible books on tape. So we worked with Audible, we met in a conference and they were like, we don't wanna do hardware,

we just wanna do content. I was like, well, we have this device, let's get it together and we got Audible on that. And this was in 96 or 7. First Audible books. And it, you know, as I was, oh my God, that's audio. Well, what if we put music on it? Right? And so I, I, good, and the memory was very small at time, right? There was almost, there was almost no flash. It was all DRAM. When you did

audible, you started in DRAM. Right? So it was okay, probably, because how much books do you need is the idea. By the way, brilliant. I mean, just putting books. I know it's probably not the sexiest of things, but putting books on a mobile device is a brilliant step. I don't know. Sometimes can't measure how much human progress occurred because of an invention. Like, there's the sexy, big products. But you never know. Like, maybe like Wikipedia is one

of those things that doesn't get enough, I think credit for the transformational effects it has. It's not seen as the sexiest of products. But maybe it is. when you look at human history, Wikipedia arguably is one of the big things that basically unlocked human knowledge. Human knowledge. And human editing and human, you know, just the human nature of building something together. Yeah. So it's fascinating. Sometimes you can't measure those things, maybe until many, many decades later.

Anyway, sorry. So that was, that was the, you was so that was there and then there was audible the books Why not put music music and I'm carrying around the music for the DJ gigs and you're like wait a second Two and two together right like get let's get rid of this and so and then MP3 show up The the actual like in code the format the format MP3 showed up around 97, 98. So MP3 is compressed so you can have like the stories is reduced significantly. Right. So you could go from a, you know, a large full, full, a lossless, lossless, you know, digital track into something that can be stored in

four to eight megabytes, something like that for the audio. Now, you know, digital track into something that can be stored in four to eight megabytes, something like that for the audio. Now, you know, that's a reduced quality, but you could get it down there. And you're like, oh, okay. And now, if we have enough flash or DRAM, we can put 10, 15, what have you all in, and that's a memory. And it starts to replicate a CD. And then ultimately, if you put it on a hard drive, you could start to put, you know thousands of songs. Yeah that's that's also another brilliant invention. Like people don't realize I think I think people would be surprised how big in terms of storage raw audio is and the fact you can compress it like I don't know what the compression is, but it's like 10X is very significant compression and still it sounds almost lossless

Much of the chagrin of Neil Young who can't who does not like that, but even even Neil Young Even the stuff he talks about is still tiny files relative to the raw Right, so he wants us to increase it just a little bit more a little bit more But it's still, that's an invention. That's a thing that unlocks your ability to carry around a device that can you know and listen to music because without that, there's no way you can carry on a gigantic hard drive. Right.

Exactly. And so, so then that, so it was MP3 is the Nino and my, you know, my hatred of carrying around all this heavy stuff that then spawned fused and then ultimately became a lot of the ideas and things of that nature. And my passions were born into the iPod. It was too Apple needed something and I wanted to fix something and it all kind of came together at this right place, right time, plus the right technology came at this. It was just like the stars aligned.

So how did it come to life? The details of the stars aligning, but the actual design, the actual engineering of getting a device to be small, the storage, the interface, how it looks, the storage, the details of the software, all that kind of stuff. What are some interesting memories from that design process? What are some wisdoms you can... Yeah, well, art, from that process. Well, how long do you want to go? Because I have, I can go deep. So, let's go at least 20 hours. Go.

Okay. That's one of the lengthy documentaries. We're going to turn into the episodic binge, binge listening. Yeah, schema thrones. So, let's just start with, you know, after I was asked to be a consultant to put this thing together. So, I had already had knowledge of, you know, the space was asked to be a consultant to put this thing together. So I had already

had knowledge of, you know, the space and the technology and all that stuff, but I had to very quickly and a lot of the suppliers because of what I was doing at Fuse trying to create that thing. So at as a contractor, I was like, okay, what is the first thing you need to do? So after I showed a different architectures and what three different products could be to Steve about options for storage options, battery options, form factor options. There was three options. And as I was told, given very good advice,

give the two options you really do not like, but they're options and give the best option last, because Steve will shoot all those down and give the best option last, and then you could talk about that. And so that was the one that had a 1.8-inch hard drive and a small screen. You know it, and the original iPod, classic iPod. And then I had enough of the idea of the three or four different CPUs and processor suppliers and kind of systems that were out there that I had gone and found

and put together on power supplies, you know, disk drive interfaces, firewire interface, all that stuff. So I put together all of those schematics, or you know, block diagrams,, disk drive interfaces, firewire interface, all that stuff. So I put together all of those, those schematics or, you know, block diagrams, they weren't schematics yet, because it was just me. And coming up with a bill of materials, coming up with what it could look like, what would be the input output, how we could, uh, make a better headphone jack. Um, that was also on there screen suppliers, tearing apart calculators,

so calculators and all kinds of electronics to get the right sizes of small LCDs. So I got all kinds of different battery types. I got different types of, you know, in different battery sizes, double A's, triple A's, working through all the different, and there was lithium ion, nickel metal hydrates. So I took all the battery types. I took all of the memory types, processing types, LCD types,

and connectivity and all that stuff, not wireless, but wired, and laid out these things as Lego blocks. So literally, I had all of these things as just, and so I, it made them so I could like, you know, put them together and figure out what the compact, fat form factor would be. Oh, like, how do we shove them together? What's the smallest possible box you can get? So the, the questions without storage, so the hard drive, batteries, double A, triple A. Right. Screens, so screen size, and then for that, you're tearing apart calculators. Calculators, digital cameras, whatever,

and getting little things, right? So you can make it physical, right? If you can make the intangible tangible, like, and so I can say, look, we can make this, and I brought this whole bag of goods, and it's like, ch-ch-ch-ch, right? And like, here's this, here's this.

This is why double a's won't work and because it makes it too fat and everything. So just educate everybody through. Here's the parts that we can use. So not sheet of paper, it's physical. You're playing in the physical space. Oh, I would go back and forth. So truth be told,

because there weren't a good enough graphical tools on the Mac. I was using a PC with Visio and some 3D tools. And I was doing 3D design at the same time, I was taking all these physical parts and going, okay, what feels right? So, you have to go from the details, and then the rough, and you go back and forth,

and you iterate, right? And so, it was just a lot of fun, and then it ultimately ended up with a Styrofoam model, and printouts that came from Visio that I glued together and put my grandfather's fishing weights in because I also modeled the weights. Right? So I said, oh, this is this, this many ounces, this is this many ounces and grams.

And then I went and got all that and made the, waited these Styrofoam models to then match that. So when you picked it up, it felt more or less form factor right. And it also felt how much, you know, was it going to be dense enough? Is it going to feel solid and rigid in your hand, right? Why does it need to feel rigid? Because it has to feel substantial. It has to feel like I have like a, like a bar of gold in my hand, right?

You know, you, maybe you know this, when you open and close a car door, you know that thunk and you go, bam, and you go, that feels solid, that feels real. And then you get this tinny car that's like, ding! And you're like, does this feel safe? Does this feel like a value? And so when you have a device like that, and you want to make sure that there's not too much air in it,

that you distributed the density of the masses in the right way. So it feels like it's the right thing. So you have to model battery life, costs, you know, mass sizes of different things. And then you have to also think about what the UI is going to look like. Right. So you have all of these constraints you're working, variables you're working with. And you have to kind of, you know, you can't get the perfect of everything. What's the best, you know, local maximum of all of these components that come together

to provide an experience? Local max is always trade offs. What about buttons? Buttons, oh, there was also the buttons too, right? Oh, by the way, a lot of these battles fought inside your mind or is it with other people? Is it, is it with Steve? Is it lower, like what?

This was all independent. This was me before being able to present to Steve, because I had to feel really confident that if I was gonna put this in front of him, that it could be made, right? So I had to convince myself and ghosts work through all the details, through the very, very rough mechanical design,

electrical design, software things, because I didn't wanna present something that was gonna be fictional, right? My credibility would be like trashed, right? So you mentioned convince yourself you're painting this beautiful picture of a driven engineer, designer, futurist, how much doubt were you plagued by through that like this? This is even doable because it's not obvious that this is even doable Like to do this a scale to do this kind of thing to make it sexy to

Shuffle the screen the batteries the storage to make the interface the hardware and the software interface work all of that I mean, I don't know I would be overwhelmed by the doubt of that because so many things have to work, but the supply chain. Like, we at that point, I wasn't getting into any of those deotels or anything. You know, there's the basic stuff that you have to put together. And then you have to, you know, through my learnings at General Magic and my learnings at Philips and delivering, you know, multiple, you know delivering multiple large scale programs and manufacturing. You kind of get a rule of thumb and you know what to focus on at the beginning and what

not to worry about over time. When I was early in my career, I worried about everything on the engineering details so much so that I would be a nervous wreck. Sooner or later, you learn how to filter out and figure out what to prioritize. So 10 years later, I was able to do a much better job of filtering out the things of like, we'll get to that in you know, in weeks to come. But right now we got to like solve, you know, the very important things, which is, could this actually be something real and that you could deliver, you know, enough battery life, right? Enough of an interface. the right cost, right, in the right price

point. So you're already, you're sitting on a track record of successes and failures in your own mind, where you had sort of already a confidence, a calm, a calmness, but still was there a doubt that you can get this done? Always. Always. How hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence to a level where you could present it to Steve

and actually believe that this is doable? Like what do you remember when you just- Yeah, that moment. Yeah. I think it was after I tripled check, I couldn't bring anyone in, right? I couldn't let anyone in on this. So it was just me.

Are they gonna trample on it? That kind of thing? No, no, no, no, because I couldn't let anyone in on this. So it was just me. Are they going to trample on it? That kind of thing? Why? No, no, no, because I couldn't bring anyone, when I mean, bring anyone in on this, one, it was a highly confidential program inside Apple. There was like four people who knew about it, right? And so I couldn't bring anyone from Apple because I was a contractor. I couldn't bring anyone else from the outside world. I'm working for Apple and I'm under this crazy NDA, right? And this contract. So it was just, it was, so I'm, I'm doing this crazy NDA, right? And this contract. So it was just, so I'm doing this. Oh, and at the same time, I'm also buying every competitive

product MP3 player and tearing them all apart, right? Torum all apart and looking at them and trying to learn from those as well. So it was all of this stuff in six weeks. So I didn't sleep, right? Yeah. But I was like, because I was trying to make this, I was envisioning this since the Nino. Right? And I was like, Oh my God. Right? But there was another doubt that I had. And it wasn't just, could you make the product, but could Apple actually have the

balls to make it? Because Apple was not the same company that you know it today in 2001. Really? It was cautious, conservative, careful. It was barely break even. It was worth four or five billion dollar company. Oh, so the guts required there is not necessarily in the innovation. It's like, this is going to cost a lot of money and we're gonna potentially lose all of it because it'll be a flop. Well, there's not just that, but there was only the Mac. Yeah. And the Mac wasn't doing very well.

Yeah. There was less, it was about a 1% only in the US market share for the Mac, right? The company was in debt. Bill Gates had to give him a loan. Right? Michael Dell at the time was saying, shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders.

So this is not the company that, you know, that people, oh my God, the iPhone came out. It's a very different level of confidence and financial situation that the company was in versus the iPod. So given that, what was the conversation when you finally presented to Steve? What was that conversation like? The conversation was, well, we went through it, the presentation and all that

stuff happened. And he was just like, and you know, he never, he would flip through it real quick, throw the presentation aside and said, okay, let's talk about this, right? And so we went through it all. And one was a big conversation about Sony. And Sony was the number one in all audio categories, home, portable, what in the world, okay? I had been already gone through 10 years of failure and I was like, wait a second, how are we going to compete with Sony? And I was always worried that Sony was going to come out with whatever it was that we're

going to come out with, there are MP3 player and that was it, game over, right? And so I was like, Steve, and this is why it took me four weeks to finally sign on to join Apple after he greenlighted the iPod program in that meeting, was because I had built other things in the past that Phillips, the Nino and Velo, but they didn't know how to sell it or market it. They didn't know how to retail it, right? So I was like, we could build this. And I was like, Steve, I'm pretty sure I can build this. I've done this before.

But how are we going to sell it? You have all your marketing dollars on the Mac. And he looked at me and he goes, you build this with a team and our team and Apple, businesses and the meat, right? And I dedicate that we will make sure that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars will only go to this product and nothing else. Right, that was Mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company. So Steve saw something special here. Exactly. And he said, I'm going to commit all the marketing dollars if you can deliver the experience that we're all talking about.

If we can do that and that that was Jeff Robin as well, because iPod would have never happened without iTunes. You know, people don't understand, that was a bundle. You couldn't do one without the other and vice versa. So Jeff and I were, you know, if Jeff and you can present and bring that, bring that experience to life, I will put all the marketing dollars behind it. One did the marriage of iPod and iTunes. Sort of, what was that birth of ideas that made up iTunes? iTunes existed before the iPod. Okay. And so Jeff Robb and had his company, oh man, I can't remember the name, but it was bought.

He was making a MP3 player app for the Mac. Steve saw it because there was MP3 player apps like WinAm and other things that were on the PC, real player, and Steve saw that going on and saw that Jeff and his small team had this, this, I can't remember sound something. Anyways, he bought that and that became the basis of iTunes and then Jeff ran all of iTunes.

And so what happened specifically there was they were starting to hook up to all these third party MP3 players because there's a lot of Korean, the MP man, like Walkman, but MP man, all these, and they were trying to hook them up and they were like, these are horrible experiences. And through that, and they said iTunes was something that was going to help grow the Mac base because we were trying to get more people on the Mac. So this program would be a great new thing you could add to the Mac.

And there was also Internet connectivity at the time for the iMac. And so they did that and then they're trying to do these hookups. They weren't going well. And that's when they said, we need to build our own. Or Steve said, we need to build our own. Since these are such horrible experiences. People don't want to just burn CDs from iTunes. We need to get that music on the go,

but in an Apple fashion, that's when I was called to come in to do that, the iPod thing. After the six weeks, then he already envisioned, I'm sure he had an envision because they were trying to do this thing. Okay, now that's it. I tunes what, you know, it wasn't called iPod yet. You know, what would become the iPod? That is going to be the thing that then propels Apple into this new thing because you're bringing all these music lovers in that are going to need their their next generation or Sony Walkman version 2.0.

their next generation or Sony Walkman version 2.0. So when you look at again, apologies to linger on iPod, but it's one of the great inventions in tech history. What wisdom do you draw from that whole process about spotting an idea? This is something you talk about in your book build. How do you know that an idea is brilliant at which stage? When did you know it was a good idea? And maybe is there like some phase shifts, first you complete out then maybe, hmm, and then maybe it becomes more than a, a, and becomes like a little more confidence that kind of stuff. And also wisdom about who to talk to, right. So they don't trample the idea in the early stages that kind of stuff.

And he thought about this. We could go on again. How long do you want to go? This is a Netflix series. That's all the time. Multi-season. So a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure and success. But the first thing it starts with, there's a whole chapter called, Great Ideas Chase You.

And so it kind of goes into in-build. And you can go through kind of chapter and verse about all of those, how nest became into being. But let's talk about it specifically for iPod, right? So for me, I always had pain, the pain of carrying these CDs everywhere, right? And I had the joy of music, right? If you could say, all of a sudden, I could get the music I love all the time in a portable package, and I can have all the music I love all the time, I portable package and I can have all the music I love

all the time. I was solving a pain, which was, for me it was thousands of CDs, other people might be 10 or 15 CDs, right? And then I can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted. That was taking the pain, making a pain killer for it. And then at the end was a superpower an emotional superpower that said oh my This is something different so when you can actually focus on a pain not of not and and get a pain killer for it Not a vitamin so the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin is very clear one you need I got to get rid of this pain a vitamin

Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't maybe somebody needs it, maybe not. It's all marketing story, right? So you start with the pain, give them a painkiller, and hopefully if you can do it in the right way, you give them a superpower, an emotional superpower. That is always, and that's the way to know that you're hitting on something that's really powerful. The pain and the joy. Exactly. Are you always aware of the pain? So it seems like a lot of great products. It's like we do a lot of painful things

and we just kind of assume that's the way it's supposed to be. Like what's mentioned autonomous vehicles, we're all assume we're supposed to be driving. Right. And it doesn't, you don't think of it as a pain. Right. Well, you've, you've habituated it away. Yeah. You've habituated it.

For me, you know, when I go to other places, living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever, and I'm not driving, I'm walking or me using a scooter or what have you you different thing. And you go, oh my god, when you left that environment because everyone else is driving all the time, you're like, that's what you do. And you find out there's other ways of living and there's freedom. When you get rid of that, you're like, oh my god, I didn't know that this was so much better. So there's, there's something in the book that's called out and I and I deemed it the virus of doubt. And what the virus of doubt is, is when there's pain and it's been habituated away,

you use the right marketing messages to bring people back to that initial experience they had, or the initial experiences they had of that pain. Do you remember when the first time you did blah and it felt like this, right? And then you reawaken that habituated pain. And people, and it becomes visceral. And then you're like, Oh, yes, I hate that. And then you go, now I have the pain killer and the joy for you. Yes, that's when it all comes together and it goes, let me on this, on the pain and the joy that's brilliantly put. You mentioned selling and marketing, right? Marketing dollars.

I have a love-hate relationship with marketing. Like, with a lot of things that require artistic genius. To me, the best marketing, I suppose, is the product itself and then word of mouth. So like, create a thing that people love. Oh, absolutely. That's fundamental. Yeah. But, so, any other marketing requires genius to be any extra thing. Because to me, I don't... Yeah, maybe you can, by way of question, because you're... I'm just speaking off the top,

my head as a consumer, what is great marketing? What does it take to reveal the pain and the joy of a thing? Okay. It all starts at the beginning. And let me give you, I'm gonna give you a couple of different ways of looking at it, okay? And again, we're gonna mic go a little long here. So just stay tuned in.

So the first thing is, let's start at the beginning. In the early part of my career, you know, like general magic and Phillips and what have you. And especially when I was, you know, a teenager, when I was like doing, making my own chips and stuff like that, I really worried about just putting cool things together. I'm like that, when I put those two cool things together, there's an engineer, you go, that's cool. And then I would talk to the other friends who might be geeks too and they go, yeah, that's cool.

Because we knew the bits, so we put them together and that's a new way of doing it. And you're like, wow, that's all what? It's not why. Why are you doing this? We know what we're doing, but we don't know why we're doing it because we're not articulating it for ourselves because it's just something we're like putting it together and we're like, yeah, that's cool because we think we're solving some problem we have, but we're not really articulating it. So what normally happens

and this happens because we invest in so many companies around the world, you have these brilliant engineers, designers, scientists, researchers. They put together these, these watts. And then they develop, it develop, it develop, it and then at the end, they call in marketing and say, now tell a story about this and let's get it out to the world. Okay? What happens then is marketing is like, well, why do people need this? Tell us why people need it. And so they create a story around this product. But the product was born out of what's not wise. And so they start telling, marketing starts telling a story. And it turns out to be a fictional story usually. They say, Oh, this is going to do these things. The product comes in as delivered

and it falls flat on its face. Because the marketing doesn't match the product because they weren't both created at the beginning together. Right? There are watts when you create a product, but there's a lot more wires. And the wires inform the watts. And the wires also informed the what's, and the Ys also informed the marketing.

So at the, that's what you mean deeply at we should start at the beginning. So the designer should be also the marketer, the engineer should be the marketer. Exactly, stop impressing the geek next to you. What is the superpower you're bringing or the pain you're killing for the end customer, right? Now, let's give, let's contrast that. Think about a movie. A movie starts with a

treatment. It has an audience that says the audience. Here's the characters. Here's the storyline, the plot. Here's the, here's the, here's the arc of the story, right? It pulls that all out. Then there's a script that's written. And that script is then produced, and then you add all the flourishes and what heavy music and graphics and what have you, right? And then it comes out, and then there's the marketing of the movie. And that story was created at the beginning. What you need to do, if you're going to do a great product, is create that treatment for your product. And I call that the press release. Do the press release? Like the treatment, who's the audience? What features do you have? What pains are you solving for people? They have the virus of doubt there to remind them what pains they

have and why you're solving them, the price, all of those things. And you use that as the bar, the measuring stick for what you do during development. Because what happens that along the route, you know this, oh, we're not going to be able to get that feature done on time. Throw that one overboard. We have to hit the day. Oh, we're not sure this product's right yet. Add another feature.

Add another feature creep, right? If you don't have that story, you know you're going to tell it to be getting. You don't have that bar, right? And then at the end, you don't know when you're done if you don't have that story. So you can actually look at that Pee press release. You change it over time, that draft. But then when you're done, you know the what's in the why's, you have all the thing, the audience and everything. And then you can give that to marketing and say, well, a marketing

has been along the way. Let's be clear. But then everybody's in sync. And that's when you can tell a cohesive non-fiction story about, and the product delivers on that story, or hopefully over-delivers on that story. So in the drafting from the beginning to the end of the press release, what does a successful team look like? Who's part of the draft?

Is it engineers, designers? What's the purpose of a marketing department in a company? Small, let's say a small company, but more than two people. So from where does the why come from? Should it always come from the designer or should there be a marketing person that yeah, and ask the question. So I'll just keep asking random questions. I know these are great questions. Okay. So it's like, because you're just like, I'm like, I can't wait to tell you the answer. So it's in the book as well, but you have to separate out the various functions of marketing. When that's what I thought, I was like, marketing is marketing, you know, when I was, and

it's really not. There's so many disciplines, just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical software, and even software, you know, our use cloud services, firmware, applications. Marketing has that much diversity as well. Okay, and you have to honor that. And so there is marketing communications like PR, press, press, there is social marketing, there is a marketing creative, right, there's marketing activation. But there's another thing that also comes out and people

confuse it with marketing, which is called product marketing or product management. And product management or product marketing is the voice of the customer. They're the person who sits there and listens to what's going on and the competition in the marketplace, who sits there and listens to what's going on and the competition in the marketplace, understanding the needs and those pains of the customer, and they're representing them in every single meeting. So things don't get off track, right? So that, and they're creating the messages,

not the marketing, what happens is there's messages that product marketing creates. Well, like those are the deep messages. Like we need to save 20% of energy, let's say, right? And then marketing turns that into something that's with creative and everything and brings that message across. Maybe it doesn't say that, but it comes maybe visually or some other way. So product management does that and and and holds that press release along the route

and making sure that we're tracking. And then also marketing is tracking with that press release along the route and making sure that we're tracking. And then also marketing is tracking with that press release to make sure they're not telling an fictional story, right? Cause they can also add extra adjectives or something. And then the product can't deliver that. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Keeps everybody in the pet. Just to be grounded to the press release,

to the raw, to the customer needs, right? Cause they're always representing the customer. So you have to have a product manager. Typically that's the founder, to the customer needs, right? Because they're always representing the customer. So you have to have a product manager. Typically that's the founder, right? In the beginning. And then over time, you hire a product management team to then really watch over this the whole way and they are talking to customer support.

They're talking to engineering, they're talking to design, they're talking to sales and marketing, and they are always in the mix. And it's the hardest thing to hire for. Oh, yeah. So they have this very important job of developing and maintaining the why. Exactly. Why is it the hardest to hire for? Because you have to understand, first nobody reports to you. You're alone. So you're alone and you have to build great ties with all of these different functions. You have to understand what they do, have the empathetic with what they do. And you have to project the customers' empathy or empathy for the customer to them and tell them why.

And why this customer needs is, why this doesn't work and so that they learn more. They're not just doing, but they learn about the customer's point of view and sit in their, and stand in their shoes to be able to then make better decisions on the engineering details or the operational details, customer support details. So they understand the, if they're not the customer that it's intended for, they start to live through their eyes and see through their eyes of that customer, so they make better decisions. And there's probably fascinating, beautiful tensions between that and sort of the the engineers, oh, that's cool, sort of the, you know, developing the what?

Exactly. And which makes it an extra hard job, I'm sure. Exactly. Can I ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question? One subfield of marketing mentioned comms and PR. How do I ask this? I can hear your struggle in your thigh. Why or do the comms and PR folks sometimes kill the heart and soul of the magic that makes

a company or is that wrong to say? Give me an example. I will say the spirit of the example, which is it feels like often the jobs of communications is to provide caution. It almost works together with legal to say, yeah, we should probably not say say this. Well, let's be careful. Let's be careful. Now, that makes sense except in this modern world, authenticity is extremely valuable. And revealing the beauty that is in the engineering, the beauty of the the ideas, the chaos of the ideas, I think requires throwing caution

to the winter, some degree. I agree. And I just find that, boy, I mean, it's really, so to push back on myself, I think it's an extremely difficult job because people hold you responsible if you're doing communications when you take risks. Right. And especially when they fail. So it's a difficult job. So I understand why people become cautious. But to me, communications is about

taking big risks and throwing caution into the wind at his best because your job is to communicate in the long term, communicate the genius, the joy, the genius of the product. And that sometimes is attention with caution. So I, because I got the chance to meet a lot of very interesting people and interesting engineering teams and so on, I look at what they're doing and I look at what's being communicated

and it's just there's a mismatch because the communication is a lot more boring. It's like there's something very, like just straight up boring about the way their community came because of caution. Okay. And you have just teed me up or another diatribe, okay? I'm gonna get on my podium here.

Yes, please. It all comes out of the leader. If the leader doesn't know how to storytell, or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling, then you get even more conservatism from the PR and communications folks. So if you have a not a bold leader, they're always going to be a filter. They're always going to try to smooth things out and take off the rough edges. So they're going to be even more, right? They're always going to try to smooth things out and take off the rough edges and try... So they're going to be even more... If you have a conservative messaging leader,

you're going to have even a more conservative communications department. Why? Because they want to keep their jobs. Okay, it's really simple. They got to keep their jobs. If they say one wrong thing, it could be the end of it. So if you have very conservative leader, they're going to be even more conservative. If you have a bold leader, they will be, oh, they'll always take a little more conservative bed, but

you're still going to have bold communications. Yeah, that's brilliant. Okay. So it starts with the leader. Now that said, when you think about the messages and the joy and revealing things, right, many of these leaders don't tell great stories. So what we do at Future Shape, our investment firm, is we take those scientists, all of them, the great minds and everything. And what do we surround them with? Marketing and communication people and storytellers to give them the confidence, to tell a much broader story

about the impacts of what they're creating and how big the global change can be with those technologies. Because usually those leaders who created those technologies, they don't really know how to communicate really well usually they don't, those leaders who created those technologies, they don't really know how to communicate really well and they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak. Yeah, so it's interesting because stories, I'm a huge fan of stories. Have you ever read the book Story by Robert McKee? You should read this and this is what I read when it's 26. You should read this, and this is what I read when it's 26. Story by Robert McKee, and it's a book all about the

waste-do script writing, the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy, and how it's been shown over, you know, millennia, how these stories are done. It's a fascinating thing, and it gives you an insight to, and it's written for, you know, obviously Hollywood and movies and things like that, but it's incredibly useful for what we do as designers and engineers and technology, piano leaders. There's some aspect in this modern day where, you know, this podcast and so on, what I love is the humans behind the story too. So some part of the stories the human beings. So humor, drama, heartbreak, hope, emotions, emotions. That's not just about

a painting, a beautiful story that's flawless. It's vulnerability. Yeah. It's, you know, being a dreamer, like, over-promising, and then failing, relight, so changing your mind, realizing sort of just the whole of it, and then also being like, depending, of course, what your personality is, embracing the full richness and the complexity of the personality of the leader or the different people involved. I mean, that's all part of it. You can't just present this beautiful, always pleasant, ill view of a product. There has to be this humanity that's part of it, the full rollercoaster of the humanity, which I think has been very difficult for companies to embrace. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just an old school way of doing things

that people think that we present the facade. And we generate the story and we tell the story as opposed to sort of... Well, especially in the technical world, we present the story as opposed to sort of... Well, we learn, especially in the technical world, we present the story as it's faster, it's smaller, it's longer battery life, it's bits and numbers and metrics. That resonates, sure with other geeks, what resonates with the planet? it's all emotions, right?

And if you can bring a great emotional story, but with a great rational story at the same time, why you should do this? And it's like, oh my God, you bring that superpower, that joy, then it all hangs. And there's personal drama too, like the human, right? The pain I had, like the human. Right. The human. Here's the pain I had.

Remember that thing. And like, I mean, just, you know, you're obviously this extremely well-known human being that's behind a lot of these great inventions of the technology world. But you're also just a human being. You have a clearly, like, a distinct personality that comes through the like your eyes, like, just the way you communicate is you. Some people are more stoic. Some people are like Elon is, you know, all over the place, the chaos. Steve Jobs, you know, there's a very, I mean, it's hard to put into words, I can be poetic and so on, but there's a very distinct, it comes on the personality, that personality right there, that's not just the product, that's something

else too. Correct. And like, you have to reveal that a little bit and allow people to reveal that a little bit and just let them be themselves. Well, look, why do I think your podcast is so amazing? Because you are yourself. You talk about yourself, you bring your emotions into it, and you don't modulate it.

You're you, right? It comes through, it's true. It feels right. You are you, you dress the way you want to dress. You say this is me and this is all of me and you and you become vulnerable, right? It's much easier to do a podcast like that than run a very large company where a lot of people would feel the pain if you make if you say something stupid. So it's much more easy to be afraid and be careful. But nevertheless, the same applies.

Authenticity and risk-taking is the only way, unfortunately, to be successful in the long term. Let me just, because we're jumping all over the place, I just linger on the iPod. One of the great designs brought these speaking in the word design of all time. What does it take to design a great product? If you look who can jump around, look at NASA, look at iPod,

look at iPhone, and many of the great things you designed. But just looking at that one transformational thing, what can you say about what it takes to do a great design? Or maybe what makes a great design? Well, we talked about, you know, a pain killer and we talked about the, we talked about that, you know, joy that comes from it. But then there's the behind the scenes, there's the team, there's everyone who brings it to life, brings that story to life.

If you have a great story and you know the why, then you can communicate it to those people who are working on it. And then they bring their own thing into it, right? It becomes emotional for them too. It's not just a job, it's a mission. And so many of the details that are born out of these early prototypes, these things that you still haven't given full form to, there may be 80% done, or maybe even 60% done, but you can see enough in there. Then you take those great ideas and you give the

wise to the team. And so that they feel it, they can understand it, then they bring their best and their ideas to the table, and then you can select from those and you can then start to You know, it could be just a pixel change. It could be a slight change on how you do the audio for the feedback or maybe a curve on the mechanics or something like that of how it feels Because everybody brings themselves trying to you know feel this thing They're not just doing something that someone told them to do if you can can instill that mission and that Y into that team, it doesn't have to be big. You get, I feel a 10X. Everyone comes together in a special way. And the magic is created. You put the love into it. The customer feels the love on the other side. So the making the team like taking them in onto division onto the why now they feel the all the little details we think of the original iPod and all the many generations after all those little details are in them is the emotion of the engineers and the designers

that it's their baby. It's like a night's struggling. This isn't right. Like you said, changing little pixels here and there, changing the shape of things, changing the feel of things. Like the materials, the, I don't know, just everything on the self-conscious part of the packaging. The words on the packaging. Just everything. The words on the website. And always jumping from the very specific detail problem to the big picture, how the

thing feels, the overall. Always jumping back and forth. What does it look like to the customer? How are we going to implement it in the most efficient way? Because a lot of the stuff you don't know is some of that stuff is hacked in. Maybe hacked in at the end. It may not be the most beautiful architecture

that a geek would look at and go, oh my God, that's so beautiful. Because we can look at and visualize this incredible software stack or hardware stack. Some of it could just be hacked in. You make it better over time, but it was that brilliant thing and we got to get that in, because that's the way you do it now, and we'll make it more efficient later. Maybe this is a good moment to draw a distinction between design and engineering, and does such

a distinction even exist. These distinct disciplines or no? I don't think they're distinct. I think they're different types of design. I think there's, you know, there's always this, you know, this idea of this, oh, on the mount designer, and it all comes down, and it all flows down like some magic. It's not, there are electrical design, there's AI designers, there is data scientist designers Everybody has design and there's a chapter in the book all about that actually that it's not just You go to the mount and it comes down and you're enlightened

It's each person brings their their form of design and their craft because what if they're really good They're artists in their own right. They're not just engineers, they're not just design, they're artists, they're empathetic, they really want to bring their best. A lot of the best engineers I have are not the technical, or that I've worked with, are not the technical, got to get it exactly right. They're the artists, they came from music, or they came from other things, and they see that, right? When you work with very rigid engineers, this is the way, the only way, la la la.

Those are not the engineers I want to work with. They're all like a bit artist, the heart. Right. They understand the practical, practicalness. They don't have to have the rigidity of, this is the way it's done. Like, hmm, hmm. If you're building something new, all new and revolutionary, none of us are experts at it.

And if you come with that expert mindset, just tell me and I can give you a story. I should probably give you that story. About that, if you come with the expert and I'm the expert, when you're doing something no one's ever done before, I don't want you on the team. Because we all are learning about something that has never been in existence before.

And we have to bring that level of vulnerability and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things throughout the team. So you want people that are able to have like beginners mind or whatever, like don't commit as an expert. What's the story? You're not allowed to. Okay, all right.

I can tell. All right. So, you know, you asked what were these risks, you know, like on the early iPod and there was, there was a few big risks. Like one, and this doesn't go in the story, but like putting rotating media in your pocket and it could drop at any time,

what happens there and like you can damage because the heads and the hard drive media are so close, it smacks the, it's dead, right? So that was one big one, like it's holy shit, right? So that was something we, and we had a design special tests and everything and special software on that. But then there was another one which was at the early days, the way the first generations of iPods, I had to hack the IDE interface to the hard drive. So I was like, okay, what we're going to use is we're going to use this chip for hard drive,

to make a hard drive, you had to have a chip that did fire wire to a hard drive, okay, and then that would become a portable hard drive. Well, then we had a, we had the MP3 player and the user interface and everything. So there was times when it was just this hard drive and there was times when it was a MP3 player and I had to hot switch between what the hard drive thinks it was talking to, right? So design this thing, tour ititapart.all this stuff.

And I was like, you know, maybe I'm gonna screw up IDE and there's something, there's some holes I'm gonna see. So, I go, who's the expert at Apple who understands IDE and everything? So, this person comes over, the mass storage specialist comes over, and I put on the whiteboard and say, here's how we're gonna do this thing and here's the commands and this is how it hot switches

and everything, and he's like, that's never gonna work. Yeah. And I was like, what? Because it was never gonna work. I said, well, let me go over here and show you this right here. I have it prototyped and it's been working for days.

I just wanna see if you're gonna have it find any holes in the thing. Didn't even, and you just stormed out of the room and never, never even, yeah. Right, that's hilarious. I've had a lot of experience like this with experts. Like, for example, this ridiculous room, I had a person, and there's many people like this

that I showed them, here's the situation, you know. It's in acoustics or something. It's acoustics, yeah, they're like, no, no, no, no, this is horrible. This is not this is not going to work. The reflection, the curtains are not going to stop. The reflects there's a bunch of terminology they're telling me. It's a similar kind of situation as the idea, which I was like, no, listen, I just need to see there are major issues and they're like a low-hanging fruit that are fixable and major holes I should be aware of, not like, let's-

A hundred thousand dollars to upgrade. To upgrade for what exact purpose? What? Not why. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The why, the focusing on the story, on the content, on the, they are the why, the why, the why. And that actually, I've experienced that, unfortunately, in the artistic realms too,

which is like photography and videography, cinematography. It's interesting. I talked to photographers that are quote unquote experts. And it's always about, so much of the focus is on the equipment, the equipment behind the sensors and the lighting. And it's like, all right, all right. But what about the feeling of the story you create visually. The difference between a movie that's really well told and it doesn't have all the effects and everything,

versus maybe some of the superhero movies we see all the time, which is good luck if there's a story, but man, there's a lot of action and CGI. Well, that's right. And there's also value to the to those right CGI superhero can tell a better story, but you have to have a good story to begin with. Sure, exactly. But it's if you're focused on the story, I guess you need to start with a story. You need to start the story. And if you bring in experts, they can often be

detrimental, I guess, to the why. They're too good at doing the what. Well, you can bring in experts for Y. There's lots of experts for Y. Too many times we get experts for what? Yes. And then they only focus on the what. And so they come with the specs and feeds and the numbers and all the other stuff. But what you're really asking for is, I need somebody about the why and understanding what we're trying to get done here and fitting what's into that why. Right, that's why I do think that I, one of the qualities that I really enjoy

for people to work with is like humility for a particular problem in the approach here. Basically, I don't know how to solve this, but we're going to figure it out. As opposed to, oh, I've solved this thing many, many times before I know exactly what to do. Humility before the chaos, sort of having an open mind that this is going to require a totally new way of doing things. It's a really nice quality to see. You know, you're one of the fascinating humans in the history of Silicon Valley. Steve is another one of those. So those two humans came together for

time to work together. What was it like working with Steve Jobs? What aspect of his behavior and personality, let's say, brought out the best in in you, pushing you, really pushing you, relentless on the details, challenging you for the right reasons. It wasn't bullying, it wasn't a meaning. He would critique the work, not judge the person, at least not in front of them, or inside of, you know, in front of a group or anything like that. I know it was really that attention to detail. And he, when he would make a decision, you know, there are,

when you make the first version of anything, something revolutionary, there are a lot of opinion-based decisions. And there's only one or two people, three people who hold those opinion-based decisions and what they should be. And when you have those opinions, and you're trying to work with the team to implement those decisions,

you have to really tell the why of those decisions. Just don't go do it, but why it's there. So you can feel part of that decision. You can understand what were the trade-offs of the different other answers to that opinion, right? And say, this is the reason why we picked the route we picked because it's this for the customer or this for the whole overall story would have you, so that you felt really good because a lot of times most people want a data driven decision.

But with V1s, you don't get data. Right, maybe in a B2B, you could a little bit, because you can talk to customers, but you can't do that with a consumer product. V1, version 1, B2B, business to business versus what's the alternative? Business to consumer. V1. Okay. We're just defining some terms.

Yes, sure. Absolutely. And when you say data-driven decisions versus what? Opinion-based decisions. So like, you have to use, you don't have any, you can't fall back on any data or any previous history to kind of inform you of what's going on, right? And so if you look at most companies who are paralyzed and cannot make new innovations and new products It's because they're trying to turn and this is what I saw at Phillips

They're trying to turn opinion-based decisions into data-driven decisions so they don't lose their jobs So if you look at management consulting Management consulting is all about taking those opinion-based decisions, giving them to someone else to turn into data that comes back to them and says, they can blame the management consultants when something goes wrong. As opposed to, it wasn't me. Right? When you need to have to tell that story, you have to understand that, especially V1,

you need to be able to articulate those opinion-based decisions and you need to own them. If you fail with some of them, you didn't get it right, you then own them and fix them and move on. Version 1 of the iPod wasn't perfect. Version 1 of the iPhone wasn't perfect. We got a lot of opinion-based decisions wrong. But as you go through the, because you got more data,

because V2, you had data on those original opinions, and then you were able to then modulate off of that, right? And you still have new opinions, because those are differentiators that we call differentiators, the things that move the product forward in its evolution. But at the revolution stage, opinions, opinions, opinions, no data. And so you have this discussion, you and Steve, in the whole team, with opinions. And there you have to be harsh.

I wouldn't say harsh, but you have to be very determined, right? You know, there are two real opinion-based decisions that happen on the iPhone. One was the keyboard. Should we have a keyboard or should we have a virtual keyboard? The blackberry was the number one productivity messaging device of its time. It was called a crackberry for a reason because people loved it because it had, it was easy to type and, you know, they could get their work done. But when you're saying, we're going to move from that, everyone's talking about that in the market and you say, we're going to move to a virtual keyboard and it's not going to work as well as the

hardware keyboard. That's an opinion-based decision, right? Because the data is telling you, all the best sales are over here. God, that takes guts. It takes guts. But you have to look at it from a different point of view. And this is how I learned to come to understand this. Because I had been building virtual keyboards before.

And I knew the goodness and the badness in them right but he was like look those are productivity devices We're making it where ours is born out of it and then an entertainment device and productivity right we need to show full-screen videos We are gonna have apps you're not apps but our apps the Apple apps because there were no apps story yet Are gonna take over the whole screen you want a full screen web. You don't want one that's like half of the device is just a keyboard. Maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance. So we want that part of the screen to change based on the tool you may need at the time. And maybe it's just full view, right? So you have to go and understand it's a different type of device just because that's that and

it's successful for that reason, the crackberry for the keyboard. That's not the only thing you're going gonna do with this device because people only did messaging and maybe a few phone calls, right? This was gonna be so much more, it was gonna be an entertainment web browsing device so you wanted those tools to go away. But it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard, so that's an opinion.

Well, let me give you another opinion-based decision that got turned around before it shipped. Steve said, no sim slot. I don't want any slots. We're gonna make it very pure. Johnny was like, of course, no slots. Johnny out. And we all looked around and go,

that doesn't work. You can't do that. Well, why does Variety, and then he would always, and this was the magic of Steve, like when you said, no, that doesn't work, you go, well, why does Var Verizon not having any sim slots, right? They showed that you can do a mobile phone with those limbs on. You're like, okay, here we go.

And so a few days later, we come back with, you know, and so product marketing, voice to the customer, engineering, we all come back with all the data showing how many data networks and mobile networks required SIM cards versus did not. And what the trends were. And we showed the data. And that killed the or excuse me brought back the SIM slot on that original iPhone because we're like, because he was just like, we're going to tell AT&T to not use the SIM. Right? We're going to just tell him to do it differently. Right? But we were like, so fast. If we want this thing to go anywhere around the world,

you wanna put that friction in, people who are gonna move from place to place, you know, they have different sims because of the prices and all that stuff. We had to show all of that data and then that opinion-based decision got turned into a data-driven decision and the sim slot obviously showed up. So those are two very, at the very same time.

So interesting, yeah. Right? Opinion can hold and so can data overrule opinion when data does exist for a V1. But at the end of the day, you don't know what the right answer is. So doing no SIM card slot may have been the right decision. We won't know. doing no SIM card slot may have been the right decision.

We won't know because maybe if that was the decision, then like many times throughout Apple's history, you basically changed the tide of how technology is done. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you never know. Apple started Wi-Fi. People don't understand Wi-Fi came out of there. There was no Wi-Fi in 2001. Apple started Wi-Fi. People don't understand Wi-Fi came out of there. There was no Wi-Fi in 2001. Apple started Wi-Fi.

And then everyone else got on board. If you look at now where we're going, we're going to phones without sim slots. Because we have eSims, right? And now the sim slots becoming legacy, legacy, it's a legacy port. That legacy port will probably be gone by six, maybe 10 years. He'll be gone.

I'm pretty sure of that. Because it's so much easier for carriers, they don't have to have physical things to go out. And, right? So, right now it's just the early days. But it will happen, and it will go its way. It'll fall away. But it will take time.

You just couldn't do it back then. So, timing is a century here, but at the end of the day, it's opinions. And that's where the genius is. Sometimes the data tells you one thing, but the data at the end of the day does represent the past. Exactly. And the future may be different than the past, right? Sometimes there's wisdom in the past.

And sometimes it's actually representative of something that should be overcome and progress looks like leaving that stuff behind. Like the headphone jack. Right. I mean that when different folks were getting rid of the headphone jack, boy that I would love to be a fly in the wall of those. Oh, discussion. We had that. That was a, that was a discussion that happened almost every year. Yeah.

That was an every year that should be get rid of headphone jacks on the iPod. Yeah. Right. When or where else headsets going to happen? What did right? And it took years to build all the right protocols, the chips, all those things to make the experience that is the iPod's today, right? To say, have the confidence,

because Bluetooth was good, but it wasn't Apple-like. So that is like, we gotta make our own chips, we gotta make our own software stacks. Now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack and actually make you pay $200 more for your iPhone that you were just paying, because it's the head project. Now we've grown our revenue.

We've given a new experience to the user, right? And tada, you know, and it's just, it's magic. And now it's the world's transformed to everyone, you know, moving to that, right? But it took years to understand the problem, developed the technology to, and not just rush it to market, to get a half experience, but to get it right and refine it, then ship it, and only then after, it was probably four, five years

in development, just like the M1 processor, right? That was a work from 2008, right? Grinding way, grinding way, grinding way, then saying, okay, now we have the confidence we're doing our own silicon for all the iPhones and iPads and such. Now we're going to turn to the Mac and make sure we have theing everyone, making sure the softwares and the hardwares designed at the same time, making sure the kernels, all those things are gonna use the best efficiency, and then popping it out.

And then it feels seamless, it's magic. There were no, as far as I could tell, unless you were in real esoteric drivers or something like that, it just worked. It was magic. Like the transit, it just worked. It was magic. Like the transit, it was not even a speed bump. It was not even a crack in the road. So perhaps famously Steve had a bit of a temper.

Steve Jobs, would you say his particular personality in this aspect was constructive or destructive in the process of shaping these opinion-based ideas. So in build, I write a chapter called Asholes. Yes, and you lay out beautifully the types of assholes and maybe you could speak to the constructives and the destructive types of assholes. Okay. So there's really two delineations that I have found of real fundamental ones.

And that is, again, the why. Why do I feel this person is an asshole? Okay, they might not be. I feel this is a person who's an asshole. Are they motivated by their ego? Or are they motivated by their mission? Something they're trying to do that's and doing in service of something else, right? Sometimes those lines can be blurry, but it's usually pretty clear. When it's ego motivated, it's clear they're just trying to get up in the ranks, push people down, shove people aside. I think we saw a president do that on a stage once, you know, I'm the guy, right? And I'm going to prove it by pushing everyone away and being nefarious or what have you either passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive,

but they're doing about themselves. There's another one which is someone who's so attentive to detail and unrelenting that they're trying to get the right things for the customer or the service of their mission and they want to make sure we fulfill those things, right? And they really care. They don't micromanage all the details, but they micromanage the details where the customer it touches the customer in some way. People who work with those types of people who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset, a lot of times it's a knee-jerk reaction to go, they are an asshole. Get off my back, you're an ad-badadadadadadad protecting your ego because what's happening is that person is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries.

They see something that we can do or you can do that you're just either not wanting to do for whatever reason. You're not confident in that. You're like, I don't want to take the extra time and say, no, we need to get that done and pushing you. Okay. And so when we came to those areas, it wasn't just a one-on-one, but could be Steve against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iPhone. And we're going to do this.

And we're like, God, you know, and so we did it. And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details, but he could see in our minds that we're like, yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably, but man, it's really putting us in risk and we laid out the risks for him. And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks. We'll do that.

We're like, we might be three months like, he's like, this is so important. We need to stay on time. You know, but it would be all the time push, push, push. I remember, it reminds me of like kids growing up and me is growing up, you know, when your parents push you to make you grow beyond your boundaries, your personal boundaries.

And you're like, God damn it, I'm sorry. You know, but they do it for the right reasons. Now let's see, it's not bullying. It's not about bullying. It's not about demeaning. It's about either pushing you to another part of the mission that needs to get done, or it's about critiquing your work, but not judging you. Yes. Well, there's a lot to say there.

So one, it's fascinating. It's really,'s really is fascinating and you laid out a very nice picture, but it's It does feel like there's sometimes gray areas, which is why it makes all of this very complicated So one question I have for you in terms of glass on the iPhone How important is it that like Stephen that case is right? Because I could argue each side. It seems like in one sense, just having a strong vision and opinion is already going to make everybody grow, even if it turns out to be the wrong.

As long as you are sort of standing your ground, you know, in the pulling and invading rush or something in the winter, it's just not going to be good. It's not a good idea, but I'm going to hold to that. And then once you decide you go all in. And then from that, even if the whole team knows it's the wrong decision, just sticking by it, powering through, you will learn through the pain of it, like everybody will learn. So that's one side. The others, maybe the asshole, the vision driven asshole, gets to be more and more of an asshole, if they have a track record of through that process having built people up, haven't made the correct decisions. They can't, they're not allowed to be an asshole. They're in rare air and no one can challenge them.

Right. Steve was never that. That's the great thing. He was never unchallengeable. You could challenge him. Now, let's, now this, the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this. So at the beginning of the project, well before we were going, we had always had these things about, you know, plastic front iPods, these kinds of things, these scratches,

so we said, oh, we're going to have a glass or a plastic display, a cover for the display, because the display was glass underneath it. We argued back and forth about glass versus plastic, and then we all landed together on plastic. The original decision was plastic. And the reasons were, okay, we don't want to make a mistake, glass can break, you know, people drop them all the time. So we don't want to have a fragile device.

Because you're going to be using even more than a music player, right? You're going to be holding your head and putting your pocket and misses and all that stuff? So we went down the road with plastic. When it was shown, when the product was shown at Mac World in 2007, the first time, that was plastic. We had just enough of them in the field at the time. We started to start seeing light scratches on the plastic Reviewers who didn't have the device yet because it was behind glass if you if you remember 2007 the Jesus phone comes up And no one could even touch them You could just look at it in this beautiful museum quality box like it came from the future or whatever the past It was like oh and you just looked and that was all you got.

But then people said, well, what screen is, what covers on that, you know, reviewers who knew better, you know, and it's plastic. And they were like, really? And so there was enough of a doubt there. And then when we started to do it, and then Steve changed the frame of reference of the question or of the result of what the customer would think. And he was like, if we designed it with plastic and it's in their pocket all the time and

it gets scratched by coins, lightly scratched or by keys or something like that, that is a design problem. We need to fix the problem. That was our bad. If they go off and drop it or even slightly drop it and it cracks It's the customers fault and they have much lower they have a less likelihood to complain yes They'll complain but they're part of that of that failure Yes, oh, that's fascinating. And then,

that's true to that, right? Because then they were part of why it failed, whereas the design, they didn't do anything wrong, was just sitting in their pocket and scratching, and that's normal use. Abnormal use has been dropped, and we're like, oh, now we get it. And so we all moved to that mindset

when you framed the problem and the solution in that way versus the original framing where we all landed on plastic. So and then he was unrelenting on that, but we all had moved. And we have moved mindset and we understood the why and we marshaled together and then by the end of June and it was crazy, the mechanical product design teams sourcing all of us, all the partner corning pulled together to make that happen because it was the right reason, right? So this, you know, you look at these stories and you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways,

but that's not usually how it all happened. One leader was, that's not how Steve was. Now, I've seen leaders who were just pounding, you know, and just had no real empathy for the team and understanding the why. And it's just, it is the way I want it, right? I am the supreme leader. That wasn't like that. When he just said a very strong opinion, very strong opinion, but it was challengeable. It was challengeable. And if you came with the right thing, you know, you could you could modulate that, but you had to come with a team. It couldn't just be you had to come a team and data and to overcome because it was a very strong opinion. And there's personal quirks of character, like

you said, days and good days, bad days and good. And there's personal quirks of character, like you said. Bad days and good days. Bad days and good days. So there's also the three options you said. You notice that the third option is always going to be the one that's picked. Sure. Those kinds of... Idiocincuses.

Idiocincuses. And that, so that brings up another thing. Okay. You said challenge the idea not the person, you know, I'm somebody who has, you know, I have a temper, I've used colorful language and so on. When I'm on teams, I work in my private life, I'm much calmer and so on. But I get, when I get really passionate with engineering team, I've been called an asshole. I mean, I am distinctly aware that you cross lines up often. There's like levels, right? Sure. You know, you could, it has to do with language

and how language is heard. So for example, you could say a lot of stuff to me, you could swear, you could say stuff that sounds like, like, I don't know, like sometimes I think you're the dumbest human on the face of the earth or something, I don't know. The sounds very personal, right? But I'm not going to take that personally. I understand what's being said. And then I'm also noticed that there's other people that take stuff more personally. This has to do with teams and figuring out like, okay, who's going to take certain words personally and not and you have to know, that's what makes a great coach,

a great leader, a mentor, you have to, you have to like factor all that in. But it just, there's something about just being an asshole and, um, being passionate and really driven that sometimes you do cross lines and that's I don't know what to do with that because it feels like it comes with the territory like you have It seems like you can't just have a perfectly optimized no No, absolutely not there. We're humans. Yeah, we're humans. We don't have a program Everyone's program the same way to react the same way to given stimulus, right're humans, we don't have a program, everyone's program the same way to react, the same way to give in stimulus, right? So, you know, you said, I don't know if this was a real example,

but you said, oh, you're the dumbest human on earth or whatever, I would never say that. Absolutely never. And if someone said that to me or I saw someone else say that to another person on the team, absolutely not. That is not allowed because that's judging someone. You may be heated and you can get heated and you can say it in your intonation,

but to then try to put a label on it and put a label on a person, that is not allowed. So if you let that kind of culture happen and it becomes somewhat, you know, sometimes it's ingest, you know, it has to sometimes it's ingest. You know, it has to be very much ingest and those two people have to have a really good

working relationship. So, but other than that, I'm sorry, it's gonna be a lot more, you could say, a septic in that way that you're not gonna add that stuff in, but you can do it with all other types of ways without saying that because then people who do react to that kind of language

and don't have those shields because they don't might not have that extreme confidence level that you do and you can just brush it off, that can be very cancerous in a team because people then mean that and then they see, oh, that's the right way to be. You got to snuff that out and you got to be that change or that model that you want to show the team. Yes, it's to, even if it doesn't affect me, it's going to affect a significant enough fraction of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part of the culture. Exactly.

And other people see that happen, and then, oh, I guess that's acceptable, right? Just like politics in the workplace is that's acceptable or not. I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone, right? Just like politics in the workplace, is that's acceptable or not? I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone, right? Because it's just another ego-driven thing. You have to set the tone as a leader for what you want your organization to be and how to, it gets reflected in the world

and you have to uphold that. And you can't, sure, you can have an excursion outside of that but you have to go back and say, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. You have to go and apologize, heal, and said, I was not the person I wanted to be that day. I'm really sorry. Yeah.

This is, and even in front of the team, and have that humility and say, we're all human here. And just because I'm the leader doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. So have the self-awareness. Apologize. Exactly. And that's also part of the culture. Oh yeah. How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer? So you've spoken about sort

of what made you strong, which is he was able to challenge. He was able to push you to bring out the best. Well, I come from the technical angle, right? Deep technology, software, hardware, systems thinking, implementation, all that stuff. So I have a different bent. He wanted to be an engineer, started, but really he was much better at all the other things, the storytelling, the interfacing, and being the voice of the customer and being that product marketer in a way, right, that we talked about. I grew into being the product marketing and marketing.

He came really out the other way, right, and never got really deep technically. So that's two different mindsets. One's not better or worse, it's just that's how it is. And it takes all kinds to do great designs. Did it manifest itself differently? Just the fact that you came from those different places. Absolutely. Like what?

So like the discussion about glass on the iPhone was probably had a different flavor to it. Sure. When you started getting into the technical details, enough so you're getting the third order technical details and he can't argue with that anymore. And then with somebody he's like, okay, you know, at some point he's like, he can't argue with that anymore. And then with somebody, he's like, okay, you know, at some point he's like, I can't win this war. Like, and he learned that very early on

because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh board, the PCB was laid out. He wanted to be beautiful on the outside and on the inside. He's like, why are all these wires running this way? Why doesn't it have all this symmetry? And we have to make it beautiful on the inside. He's like, why are all these wires running this way? Why doesn't it have all this symmetry? And we have to make it beautiful on the inside and even the traces on the boards have to look a certain way. So the teams made the board they knew that would work and then they made the board the way Steve wanted it and that didn't work. And then Steve instantly figured out like at some point, don't micromanage every single detail. There's some things he doesn't know enough about,

and so you would get out of that. But that was one of those instances where he pushed really hard, and that's his opinion. So they said, okay, we're gonna make it a data driven decision, and we're gonna make both. I'm gonna show you the results, right? And then from there, he didn't get into those details. So from that, you could have a great challenge, right?

Because then you could get those data and say, we can't do that, and let me show you why. Or we can do that. And then Steve would go, you can't do that, you could have a great challenge, right? Because then you could get those data and say, we can't do that. And let me show you why or we can do that. And then Steve would go, you can't do that. And you're like, oh, we can do that. Let me show you. Right? So there's certain times when you were like bringing something to reality that he didn't think could exist. Right? So it was that it was always that creative tension, that interaction that was so successful, right?

I think, but there was one other fundamental interaction that was so successful, right? I think, but there was one other fundamental thing that was different, and that it graded on the team, and that I made sure, and I learned from to not do, and I over, maybe overdue now in the opposite direction, which is when there's a great idea that comes from the team, acknowledge that person, and go, that is a great idea. As the the team, acknowledge that person and go, that is a great idea, as the leader, the opinion driven, that's a great idea. Let's build on that.

Let's see if that can do that, or it's a great idea, but not for now, put it aside. But call out when people have great ideas because it's infectious. That means, no, you mean not ideas that come bubble up to the customer level, but inside the organization.

People like, they get rewarded for their ideas and say, that's a great one. Steve was always like, you give an idea. Anybody go, okay. I don't know. The next day, 24 hours later, it would come back with slight modifications. I've had this genius idea, right? And as soon or later we'd look around the table and we'd like roll our eyes and go, here we go again. So it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit. Well, you know, we got used to it, but you know, later on in the team, you know, it was just not, it just, it doesn't want to bring the best, right? Because if you're always like, the reaction is never, that's a genius idea.

It was always like, it was either negative or neutral, right? Then it doesn't have that same emotional effect that you want you to bring your best. Yeah. Sometimes it's fun when people get excited about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of build on top excitement. It could be, but coupled with sort of harshness when the idea is bad and you call out to bad ideas too. So it's the good and the bad. Oh, you can say, you don't have to say bad idea. You say, maybe not now, let's table that for later, let's discuss it, or say that's a decent idea,

but did you think about that idea this way? Not just no or yes, but let's talk about why that might not be applicable in this case so that they can learn. So the next time they bring the next idea, they can modulate and understand to start seeing through the opinion-based decision makers or the database to bring in and bring better formatted arguments or ideas so that you have better chance of success the next time. Right?

You got to train through those moments. You got to teach those or teaching moments. Yeah, right? You gotta train through those moments. You gotta teach those are teaching moments. Yeah, teaching for moments. I aspire to be that kind of person. I'll, you should say that, that idea is shit. That is the, like, like, and then you, that I remember that that, this brilliant person just gave that really shitty idea.

So I remember to make sure next time they give a good idea, I really compliment that, good idea. So I remember to make sure next time they give a good idea, I really compliment that, good idea. But I personally, I mean, it's emotion, but I call out the really shitty ideas. But you call it the really great ones. Yeah. If you let the pendulum swing both ways,

then everybody goes, he's balanced. Yeah, exactly. It's always one way. That's right. Why bring any idea? I'm all about the pendulum. Right. You gotta have both both the joy and the pain So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone so you wanted to not just the iPod not just nest

You you were one of the key figures in the creation of the iPhone What's the interesting aspects? What's the good to the bad and the ugly of the origin story of the iPhone? Again, this is a Netflix series that spans multiple seasons. But what changed my flight, please? Yeah. What was the interesting memories you have from the final? So the pain and the joy that was foundational to the iPod, all the CDs yet to lug around. What was the pain and the joy and the vision of the iPhone in your mind and the mind of the team, Steve's mind and so on? Well, you know, there's multiple pains. You have to also look, there's not just customer pain,

but there's business pain, okay? And it's about the, so Apple now is getting out of that place where it was in 2001. Now people are starting to pay attention. Apple's starting to get in the culture again. It's becoming relevant. Cash is starting to flow. iPod is 60% of the revenue, total revenue of Apple,

85% market share. You're starting to get a win at your back. You got confidence. Apple had been beaten down since probably the first time the Mac was, since the Mac, it was a beaten company ever since the Mac. So we're talking 15 years at that point, right? This is the first time you're seeing, like, and Steve would proudly came in front of us and said, today I can tell you all of the employees we are now out of debt. We paid off our debt.

It was a joyous moment for him, right? And then ultimately for our team because no more debt, Right and then ultimately for our team because no more debt Wonderful, right? So now what you have is you have this successful thing changing the face of Apple and You hear these heavy stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry Boom and it's the feature phones at that time. They're adding cameras. They're adding color displays They're seeing the success of the iPod and going, that's just music. We have some storage. We can load music on our phones,

and we can do what the iPod does plus more. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Right. And you're like, and how many hundreds of millions of them are being sold at that point? It wasn't billions yet, but it was still, you know, 100 million, 200 million a year.

I've had hadn't gotten there. It was for 20, 40, 50 million, something like that. So now you're like, okay, what are we gonna do about this, you know, Goliath, who wants to take our lunch, right? The school year bully. And so there was one, let's partner with them. So iTunes Music Store was there. All of these phones are going to need music. So they can come to the iTunes Music Store and get that music for those phones because it wasn't just about the hardware player at that point. It was about the software that you need on the desktop and the content that you needed to download. So now Apple had multiple legs of the stool as Steve would always refer to it. So now the mobile phone industry,

okay, we're going to work with them. They are going to make a red an iPod shuffle basically. Inside of a phone can have 99 songs total, and they're gonna come to our store, and you're gonna, it's like, okay, great. It's all gonna be well and good. And that became the Motorola rocker project. It was Apple Motorola getting together. There's gonna be software on this smartphone,

or not smartphone, but feature phone, to cook to iTunes to get your music. It wasn't even downloadable over a cloud or anything because that wasn't available yet. There wasn't, have due date and network shit. It was a disaster from the beginning. Two different cultures, two different types of leadership styles, not necessarily the most competent engineers on the other side. And it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster.

I watched the pains because I, luckily, I didn't have to be part of it. I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins face each time we would meet. And you would be like, these guys are just, you know, like, really? Do we have to do this, Steve? And he's like, we're kind of triaxially obligated. And when it came out on stage and Steve showed it, it was maybe a one minute, you know, Steve loves those extended, you know, like drawn up. It might have been a one minute, two minute kind of thing.

And he literally threw that phone out of his hand as fast as he could, right? Because it was horrible. So that, so there was the pain of, we're not going to partner. So if we can't partner with these guys, we have to become one of them to actually compete, to save the thing that is bringing Apple from, you know, that 15 years of malaise. So then from that, we were made a prototype of an iPod plus phone, a classic with, it was an iPod, but it had a phone inside with all the music and all the other stuff. And you use your headset, wired headset to do the audio, right?

There was another project at the same time because we were doing videos in the iTunes Music Store, iTunes Video Store, for music videos and movies. And it would be a full screen iPod. So instead of the classic the way you know it, it would be full screen and it would have a virtual click wheel. It would have a virtual like single touch touch screen that you could scroll, right? Think of maybe an iPhone like you knew it, right? And then there was a third project going on.

Not in those two were going on in my team, but the third project going on was the multi touchscreen technology to drive a Mac tablet. And so that Mac tablet, that touchscreen technology, there was just way too much you had to change on the software and everything to be able to use a tablet, right? We see this all the time like people like there's not enough tablet apps today that are modified for tablet They're just phone apps that are grown up, right? So then they would just be Mac touch stuff So you'd have to have a whole developer community know that probably wasn't the best place to take that technology first So you take that technology married with the full iPod, and the phone stuff we were working, because the iPod phone with a rotary dial was just like a rotary phone. We couldn't make that interface work well for data input.

You put those three together, and now it's where those three things that then created the form or the technology and the form inside what would become the iPhone married with a bunch of low-level software from the iPod and manufacturer software and drivers and communication stuff combined with a very reduced Frankenstein macOS. And I mean that in the best way. It means it wasn't mac OS just changed a little. It was totally, things were hacked out and changed. And I think new code was inserted.

And it really was a whole set of things from all different places to make that first iPhone OS. And then there was another team working on the apps. And then another team working on the design of how it looked overall between all that stuff. So all of those things came together to create what we know as the first generation iPhone. And those are all probably fascinating engineering challenges.

Correct. And great teams like the creating the Frankenstein OS, that's fascinating because you're simplifying simplifying, but then you're just pulling different stuff from, and you're basically inventing, I mean, they probably not thinking of it that way, but a new era of computing, a new kind of computer. It really is Frankenstein. Right. And you didn't have to run Mac software.

If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time, like, Matt, Windows and stuff, they were like, we need to make sure it runs Excel and it runs Word or something like that and some reduced thing. This was like, no, no, no, this was born out of entertainment. So we didn't have to go and take all the same application, you know, all those other ones was about compatibility. This was about a Steve Jobs presentation of the iPhone? The first iPhone, you know, phone, internet communicator, an iPod in your pocket? Yeah, they're going to sort of present the announcing three new products, kind of thing, and then saying that it's all in one.

Just, this is a good example, one of the sort of historic presentations of a product. Clearly, there's like some showmanship that works. Some reason it works. It doesn't always work. It often doesn't work. But it did, in this case, it often did for Steve. What, like how did that feel? What part of the actually,

the design process was that presentation? You know what I mean? Like from the early, because you said, so consider the why, the press release, at the very beginning. Steve was doing that the entire time. He was working on that story from day one.

Yeah. He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this. And then he would look at our faces, because most people wouldn't, at least if you're working for them, wouldn't tell them what you really thought of what he was saying. But he would look at your faces. And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidence outside of the, outside of the organization and see what they thought, right? And they could give him feedback on it and they could really challenge him,

but they could, he would also look at their faces and go, and so when you see that, then he would modulate it and change it slightly and change it. So he was working during all of that time on the story and the storytelling, right? And the wise, while we're working on that and helping us refine it, just like the switch from plastic, the glass, right, all the time working on that. So when he comes out on stage, he does something that every marketer is told not to do. Say, these three things are now combined in one. That is like the, they say that that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing.

Right? Yeah. Right. But it was the best one because of storytelling possible for marketing. Right? Yeah. Right. But it was the best one because it was all those pains. It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications, and I want my internet browsing because I wanted on the go so I can look up things because it was interformation. And when you were on the road, you had a laptop, you had an iPod, and you had a phone that and you had to carry

all of these things with you at once. Now we're going to solve that pain for you and put it all together. So he was just showing you the pain and beating that virus of doubt and going, it's now in this one magical thing. And he could come up and masterfully tell that story because he told it almost every day to all of these people inside, very quietly. And then it was just right. It was like a, you know, Tony award winning play that had been worked on for 10 years. But also the human came through of timing. It was all that. Yeah. And of course he was

dramatic at certain points and he would raise his voice and a rise smile or whatever. Right. That's right. All those matches. He was an actor as well as a storyteller. Yeah. But it was the truth. Right. The truth came through.

It was a nonfiction story. And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it to a dramatic effect. It's amazing. So there's a designer you mentioned, Johnny Av, you both are brilliant designers, great human beings. There were some battles fought in the distant past between the two of you. Looking back, what is the positive characteristics of Johnny that made you a better person and designer, having worked with him? Looking back, what is the positive characteristics of Johnny that made you a better person and designer?

Having worked with him. Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led. I don't know where because that was over years. I didn't see all of those things, but watching the design process of really, because it was really a team that was about materials. It was about form. It was about colors. It was about these physical characteristics. When we talked about this early, it was design. What is design? Designs everywhere. Okay. So what they were really focused on was form, But they were really focused on, was form, how the feel was, how it looked the aesthetics, the physical aesthetics. And watching going through that process, I learned so much in that process about how to do colors, how to do materials, how to think deeply about curves, shadows and how it would look not just in your hand, but how it would

look in the photograph you're going to take for marketing. So how it would look, how it would feel, all of it. It was all of those physical things around that and watching the process to get there. That was enlightening for me, right? It opened my mind to go, oh, okay, just like there's a process for all these other things, it wasn't just magic and you say, there it is. It was really a process of refinement, you know, of opening the funnel at the beginning and refining down over time to get to that final, Final and selecting and doing the selection and certain types you could certain times, they were opinion based design. Detailed. Yeah, but a lot of data, a lot of data driven designs of what can we, what can we deliver in volume? What can we do different things? So you always had these constraints that you had to work with under.

And sometimes they and the team, not just I would say, we need this. We're like, we can't deliver that. But maybe we were able to work together to find different design characteristics and different implementation characteristics that could get to that point without what they were describing. And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, let's find some other way to solve the problem together.

Yeah, and I've seen this in several companies have more closer interacted with like Tesla's an example, sometimes, you know, talking about curves. Sometimes is very painful on the engineering side to deliver a very specific kind of absolutely. And one question that comes up in my mind is like, well, how far should we go to try to deliver a tiny adjustment in a curve to deliver a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature, or in whatever the form factor is, in a color or the material, when the cost is like 10x to deliver, not financially, but just like in effort, like how many problems to have to solve. I don't know if you can say wisdom to that because when you're thinking about curves, you're designing in the space of ideas, you're like platonic forms kind of thing, not always grounded to like how much

this is, how much pain is going to be involved in delivering this, but that's as you should perhaps, because then if you're always thinking about the pain required to deliver this thing, you'll be too conservative. You wouldn't do the wild ideas. Right, exactly. But you have to understand, again, the why behind it. And at NEST, when we had limited resources, putting a screwdriver in the box, a custom design screwdriver in the box was born out designed screwdriver in the box, was born out of those

experiences I had at Apple and seeing how you can create something that's emotional. It's part of marketing and it's part of the product experience overall, even though it seems extraneous. I went back and made the design team and the mechanical team changed some curves on the Nest Protect, the Smoke and CEO detector we did at Nest, after they had already tooled it. And I said, they're saying, it's Cosmari. I said, it doesn't look right. There is a point, but they're like, oh, well, I said, no, you're going to go back and you're going to make that change.

I told you you want, we needed to do it. We had a better looking model that is going to get done. I know it's going to be a terrible cost to you, but we already had this discussion and that's the way it's going to have to be. I'm sorry, but it is what it is. Because it's better for the customer and it looks better in the pictures and all that other stuff. Then we did it and it was great.

Everyone agreed it was great at the end, but it was paying to get there. Those are where those little details are where the magic comes out, right? And you know, if you don't do, if you don't take those pains and put in the love, the customer is going to feel, it's going to, they're either going to feel the pain or they're going to feel the love if you put it in, right? So it depends on, you know, how much time and effort you want to put into something and what really matters to you. And so how you communicate what you do. We're human beings after all. Is there something you've learned from sort of the tensions that are natural or that happen in teams when they're passionate and they're trying to solve these problems. Is that the way of life? And there's the human drama.

Is that just, is that always good? Is that, it is what it is? Is that make you better? Actually, the drama, the tension between personalities and all that kind of stuff. Look, a roller coaster ride without ups and downs is no fun. It's the journey. It's the journey that brings, it brings out the best in everyone. We're forged, we're tempered by those experiences, not all the ups, but also the downs. And that's when you get the

humanity and the connection. And we can tell these stories till we're blue in the face and smile every time because we did something together that we each of us couldn't do apart but when your comes together, that's where all their motions happen. And that's where if it's born out of the right reasons and the right story and the right way, that's where the magic happens, not just for the customer but for how it transforms each person who is working on it and they will never forget those experiences in their life Positively and negatively that happened at the time, but they look back and it's only positive because they did something that mattered Yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life is nest

Nest thermostats and the big umbrella of nest Ness thermostats and the big umbrella of Ness. Again, as part of this Netflix series, season three. What was the most memorable, the most painful, the most incite lead and challenge yet to overcome to bring nest to life. Well, the first thing for me was making someone care about their thermostat. Right, no one considers it. They never had any customer choice. They didn't install it. They usually don't even use it because it's so complicated or what have you. They just like, they just, they bitch at it.

They hide it in the corner and then they just pay the bill, right, of whatever it is, right? It's totally unloved, unconsidered, right? So how do you wake up, like I said, the virus of doubt, how do you wake that up and get people going, you know, remember every day when you go in and it's like, you're just frustrated and then you get the bill and you pay the bill. So you have to do that. So that was one thing. I think the other big one was not delivering, you know, it was all

of it was hard, right? It was constrained. We had only so much stuff. We're bootstrapped. We didn't have massive funding. We didn't get hundreds of millions of dollars. It was, but we did it for the right reasons. But I think the other big part of it was not just building a disruptive product because a lot of the people on the team had done that. We knew what we were doing and that was, if we got the design right, we could deliver it with enough time. It was getting the disruptive go-to-market, in other words, how to take that product from the end of the production line and get it into the customer's hands.

Because there was no retail or customer choice in thermostats. No one even, it was never considered purchase. They never thought they had choice. Some guy, usually in suspenders and a butt crack, told them, looked around, looked at their house and said, and suspenders and a butt crack told them looked around, looked at their house and said, this looks like somebody who's got as well to do. This service that is now going to cost you $3,350. Thank you very much. And you're like, I'll take whatever you give me, right? And then then it goes into another house. It's worth $100. It was the same damn thing, right? So there's no price transparency. There was no choice. You just got what you were given. So how do you go and this was an entrenched industry? That's why there was no innovation in it.

Because it was doing just fine, because every house needed them. All the installers were programmed by the product deliverers, by bonuses. And bonuses to say, you're going to only carry our product, and if you sell this many, you're going to get a free trip to Hawaii. Right? And for these guys who install, I get a free trip to Hawaii, that's dream for them, right? So, this whole channel was fully controlled by the product, guys, and it was almost monopolistic

in a way. So, how do you go around that? So creating a disruptive go-to-market channel, one was direct to consumer, right? And all the marketing that was necessary to get that message across. Another one was getting the installation right. No one was self-installing, thermostats. So how do we get enough people who are early adopters to be able to self-install them confidently? So they didn't still have to call the guy to come and install it because he then he would say, this is a crap product.

No, I got the most better product, right? So you had to get rid of that friction. And then ultimately, how do you get the people who were not just early adopters, but people who needed to see it and touch it before they bought it? How do you get that into retail when the large brands of the time of thermostats in Home Depot and Lowe's had contracts that they couldn't bring in any other brands? They were owning the channel all the way to where there was any sort of slight customer choice and it was really in any sort of slight customer choice. And it was really contractor choice, more than it was, and consumer choice.

So all of that had to be innovated along with the product. And so to me, that was a huge challenge and something I had never done, most of us had never done, and we had to create, that was as much as a project as actually delivering the product itself.

So it turned out to be a giant hit. And it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. As a founder and leader just out of curiosity, in these cases of acquisition, is it always a good thing? Is there any part of you and the team that considered saying no? We considered saying no all the way along the process, right? We had all been in big companies before. We knew what it was like and the politics and all the other stuff and what I came to learn,

especially from Phillips, because Phillips was a very, it was 375,000 people. It was a big, massive company, right? And tons of politics. And I was like, do we want to go back into that work? Because I had so many negative experiences from that. But then going to Apple, which was, no, not big, but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics.

But then when you saw a leader rise up and get rid of those dynamics or not allow many of them to flourish, then you're like, oh, with the right leadership, this can be a beautiful marriage, right? And so for four months, we were working together with them with Google to make sure that we had the right leadership and we were going to be in the right environment that it felt right. So that happened. It absolutely happened.

We worked on all the details. We didn't even talk about price. We were talking about, how's the brand gonna work? Who's the team gonna work with? How are we gonna get IP? How are we gonna do exchanges? How are we gonna get budgets and all that stuff done?

So we worked through all of that before we actually sealed any kind of deal. Cause they were already investing in the company. So we already knew, they knew relatively where they're you know, the endpoint was for the price So working through all those prerequisites I knew that As a individual product company that was trying to create a platform No investors were going to invest in a platform that could take three, four years and many, many,

hundreds of millions of dollars to build without all kinds of new products at the same time. And products that we were having, which were successes, but they weren't even break even yet, right? We were still developing them. So how are you going to get more people to fund all of these things and this platform that I really want to create because my worry and I had seen this many times in Silicon Valley is these small startups have bravado and they said, I'm going to take on the big guys, right? With a platform. But when those platform guys show up and Apple says they're going to get in the ha at the

time, nobody cared. They were curiously, you guys curious, what's next? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Apple wasn't in the market, Google wasn't in the market yet, Amazon wasn't there, Microsoft, Samsung. They were not, they were all just, that's curious. Mm-hmm, right? Yeah.

And I had watched, if you said, I'm gonna go challenge them and I'm gonna build a platform, and then they all of a sudden, one by one, go, oh, well, we're building a platform now We're building a platform they've fight a Jew to death fear uncertainty doubt and the developers run away And you can't make that platform so I'm like before the landscape gets changed on us because we're tracked so much attention They announced something we need to change the landscape on them Let's go to the best place where we can build out the platform, have the right leadership behind us,

to help us grow this thing into what the vision it should be. And that's what we believe we were doing with the Google acquisition. Is it possible to take on the platforms? So you said there's a lot of startups with bravado and all that kind of stuff, right? It doesn't mean James Joyce, when he was 20, said, I'm going to be the greatest writer of the 20th century before he wrote anything of value. One of them might be actually right. This modern world, so first of all, people should definitely get your book build as just this giant number of advice

on this exact question of how to build cool things, how to build a startup, how to all the different stages of that team and hiring. It's mostly human nature. It's not technical. It's mostly human nature behind it. It turns out it's you know Turtles all the way down this human at the bottom Yes, so

Is it possible to build startups that take on the big guys? Whatever that is of the modern era. So for now it's these platforms of Apple Google Twitter. I don't even know Met I guess called called now. Sure. Is it possible to take them on? Absolutely. But you don't take them on on their same turf. You take them on on the turf, they're

going to want to have in the future. Right? Spotify is a platform. It started as an application. It's now a platform. Yeah. Right? Think of WeChat.

Think of all the super apps out there that are now wallets and delivery services and travel services and transportation services all within an app. They've innovated in a different level in a different space that the platform companies weren't. Google was an app company. It was solving search. And then it became a platform company. Apple was solving personal computing.

And then iPhone was doing, you know, solving internet browsing, all that stuff. And then it became a platform company when the app store was added. If you look at it, there's no such thing as building a platform company. You build a great app first and then you can expand it and have the right to become a platform.

Your whole book is just a bunch of advice for young people, but let me ask all other people. And well, everyone is young and hearted. And you should. If you're not, you should be. So what terms of picking a career, you have a device at this point, what advice would you give to a person on how to pick a career?

What is it you want to learn? And who is it you want to learn from? Just like you pick a university. You're like, I want to go here for this expertise. I've heard about these programs, especially graduate studies. You go for a certain program with a certain set of people. Why don't you do that when it comes to a job you just don't go or in a career. You just don't go and say, I just want to go work at Google or I just want to work at

Apple. You want to go to a certain team with a certain set of people and work with them on something that you're really curious about and you want to learn about. That's such a, I just wanted to comment that it's such a, it's a subtle but a brilliant framing of just ask the question, what do I want to learn? And then see what career path is going to maximize that. That's so interesting. It's the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me. When I say I'm going to bring somebody on the team, first question is,

what do you want to learn? I don't want the expert, like we talked about earlier, says, I'm the expert in this. You're going to hire me as the expert. We're doing something new. You're not an expert because we're not an expert either. What is it you want to learn? And on the topic of learning, what is the best way to learn?

What starting, you go into this new place, into this new world, into maybe V1, you said you're building V1. I mean, the whole world is full of V1s, or V0s waiting for the V1 to come along. Zero to one. Zero to one. What's the process of that look like? What's the process of learning? How do you learn? Well, let me put a framing and then we'll talk about that last piece. I have now looking back,

especially writing this book. I have a version one of myself, a version two, a version three, a version four. I had a lot of opinions about myself and what I wanted to do. Sometimes those opinions for certain people, those opinions are formed and they get the data from their parents and they go do what their parents told them to do or their surroundings. My opinions was like, I wanna go and learn this. I'm curious about that.

I made the zero to one move. And then over time, by doing, I was refining those things and learning what I was really curious about and what I was really good about because I was getting data. And then I was like, then I had another set of opinions to create version two of me. And then I would go and do it. So it's learning by doing. Starting with the opinion, you're not going to get any effects. You know, most are like, where do I make the most money for my position? They're trying to start with data. Start with the why. What's your curiosity? What do you want to learn? And then follow that. I took the lowest job on the totem pole at General Magic, because I wanted to get in there to work with the right team. I didn't even know what they were doing, right?

But I thought that it felt right, right? I was barely living above the poverty line, working there, working, you know, 80 hours a week, because it was so amazing to learn, just like a college student, right? That's what I was doing. And then I learned more from that, and then changed those opinions into data,

and then I found other opinions, and so it those opinions into data and then I found other opinions. And so it's the same thing, but it was by doing, right? The way you find out what you want to do in life is by figuring out what you don't want to do. And the only way you find that out is by doing it, but just doing a bunch of stuff and refining it. That's hilarious. Yeah, that's brilliant.

So in terms of the career path of leaping into the startup world and launching a startup, what does it take to successfully found a startup to have a chance to succeed? And maybe how do you decide to take that leap. Is there sort of having founded, having been part of many V1s, many of some of the most successful V1s ever? What's the take to take that leap? Maybe leave your job, a cushy job at a company and do the startup. What does it take? It takes belief in yourself. That's the first thing, belief that you can do it.

Not, but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around your coaches around you to make sure you know you're not crazy. It's a crazy smart idea, but you're not crazy and you're just working on something as a like a lone mad man or woman. You know, you have a great idea, and like I said, great ideas chase you.

You can, in this world, there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement. I used to be like that. I would like, oh my God, if this idea, if this idea, and you try to do all of them But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on and you shut out all those other things And you bring them other ideas into the thing you're trying to do. So I try to run away from a great idea

And then it stalks me. Yeah, it hunts you down because you're like, ah, that's gonna have this problem I'm gonna put it aside and then all of a sudden You know a few days later, oh, I think I know how to solve that problem, or I talk to somebody. And you're just always kind of niggling around the edges. And then at some point, it's like, it just becomes, it becomes like this black hole that just sucks you. And you're like, I can't think about anything else but this.

It's almost like a relationship in the world, right? You know, when you have it with a part, you find your partner. You know, you're like, hmm, Wade, hmm, something. And then you're trying to like, and then all of a sudden, it just, it comes together, right? It's kind of like that. Ultimately, it's you, folks. See, I'm different. I just dive right in. I used to do that too. I used to dive right in. Yeah. But I learned that you need more practice to run away from it. Run away from it. And so it chases you because it makes you think harder about that story.

This is not dating advice. We're talking about that. But ultimately, so you have achieved a focus on it. But you also said, so believing yourself, it's not necessarily even the idea, it's the human that, believe in the human being. You have to believe in yourself and the idea that you have, because if you don't have that belief, then you can't project that to other people to say, join the team. Let me ask you on the, because you mentioned mentors and you've talked about having had incredible

mentors in your life, you're also a mentor to a very large number of people. What does it take to find a mentor? How do you find a great mentor? Usually, they also find you. Is it like with the ideas? No, no, no, no. No, what happens is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, what happens is, is you're in the right, you have a community around you, okay? And because you've been building a network, you, because you can't do it alone. So you have to create

this network around you and a relationship that don't, it's not transactions, but relationships over time that you really cherish and people you talk to, okay? And you share vulnerable or nascent ideas with or crazy opinions with and then you argue them through. But you start to see resonate and it's not about age, it's just about this connection, right? I have mentors, obviously when I was young, all my mentors were older and as I get older, I have mentors who are younger than me, or the same age, right? They're not all just older, right? And so it's about that connection. It's about being on that same wavelength, but they also, they can counterbalance you.

They compliment you in some way. Like my best mentors had nothing to do with technology. They didn't know anything about technology, right? The way we know it. They were all about human nature and they could reflect that and help me get more human-focused and more empathetic because I was so detailed in the technology. I needed to see from other perspectives. But then they wanted to learn more about the technology, right?

They thought that this idea was so great that it should exist. Now, let's work together on that. So, it's really, they have to find you and you have to find them. And that's by sharing. You just don't go and look it up on, you know, on the internet and say, who are the best manners in the world. It just doesn't work that way. So form and network of people and see where, I mean, it's like finding relationships,

finding love and all that kind of friendship. Human nature. Venture capitalist, money. DVC's help or hurt a business in general. So like in those early stages in the chase of developing a V1, just what's the constructive and destructive power of money in the development of a brilliant idea and the deployment of a brilliant idea and the deployment of a brilliant idea.

I have seen brilliant venture capitalists. I have seen horrible ones. One's that care about their LPs more than they care about the entrepreneurs. Of course, everyone's in it, you know, at the end of the day, especially venture capital, they have to give a return to their limited partners, the people who invest in money that they have to shepherd that money and make sure it's watched over properly. But when there's not a balance, a pushback in a venture capital is between what the LP needs and what the entrepreneur needs, and that the entrepreneur might be trying really hard.

But if they don't see the VC doesn't see, the exit's gonna happen in two years and they just leave them hanging. When there's no, the value exchange is only money and not mentorship or ideas or other things when there's not a relationship but really a transaction. That's when money is toxic because you can get money everywhere.

Maybe it's a little harder today, you know, over the last month. But you can still find people with money who are on that, who want to enable your mission and can be mentors, not always, not all of them, but some of them can be mentors. But they're on your side, then it's incredibly powerful because not just one plus one equals two, right?

It's something bigger than that. Because then they can bring their networks of people and their networks of companies and other people they worked with that might want to join your mission. That's the kind of venture capitals and smart money that's out there. But you have to build a relationship. People go, oh, look at that valuation. Oh, it's the brand name of the VC that's investing me. No, it boils down to who's that partner

and how experienced are they? Don't just give me the brand, give me the person because that's the person I'm gonna be interacting with. I have to, man, this is a million questions. I wanna ask you, boy, we're on season five already. But let me ask you, it seems like out of all the brilliant things you write about, it seems like not an important question, but it's a fascinating one to me is lawyers. You write about this. So there's a company you need lawyers and why? And what kind? So you write about sort of the value of this game, I guess, for a game.

The big game. It's, it's, why do we need the lawyer? It sounds exasperated by lawyers. I don't have a good question, I guess. I, um, well, because the why of lawyers, the why, the why of lawyers is exactly the why of lawyer. Thank you. You even do the question. So why have lawyers? Yes, exactly. Okay, the why have lawyer. Thank you. You even do the question? We just have to put why in front of everything you ask and then we'll be there. Lawyers.

Why? Why? Even Mofiosos had lawyers. Okay. You know, Tony soprano, you know, Scarfay, all of them had lawyers, right? Why? Because there are things in this world that you don't always consider in the government,

in laws, in competitors, because you're so focused on what you're doing, they have to watch out for you, right? Now, the best kind of lawyers are the ones who try to work with you to enable what you're doing and see gray areas. Law is not black or white. It's how it's interpreted, right? And so they can help interpret things a certain way or help push on things a certain way to get changed happen or allow change happen because if you have lawyers who are always

just like you were talking about PR people, if you have lawyers who are always, just like you were talking about PR people, if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything, because their job is to really say no or maybe. They'll never say yes. And you also say, their job is to say no and bill you by the hour. Exactly. Exactly.

It's the person. Right? Yeah. If you don't want to know, don't ask them. Because you're going to get a no or maybe a minute. And you get charged for it. And you'll get charged for it anyways right. So, so to have a partner, to have you with them on your team, to help you see maybe some of the things you don't see, some consequences, they help to

rein that in or change your your language. Like, are you going to get sued for this ad? Just change this one word and it helps right? So you need to have a partner. Most of the times, especially engineers or designers, they see lawyers as only stifling. Lawyers can actually, if you do it right, and you have the right type, they can actually open up a whole new world for you because of the interpretation and how we go about doing things.

And they help you not get bogged down in the pain of little mistakes that didn't mean anything. Exactly. You shot yourself in the foot and you didn't even know it. You didn't know you're carrying the gun. Just to jump around Charles Bukowski once wrote, find what you love and let it kill you. So, the question is about work life balance. That's like finding an idea, let it chase you. Yes, but a little more aggressive. So what does work life balance look like that maximizes success and or happiness? Is there such a thing as work life balance? Can you speak? Went to this work is your life? And I mean that in the positive sense. When you're on a mission that really matters, and you know that you can really affect not just yourself, but other people's lives. And then that is very rewarding, right? That's not just, that's not work. That's

like I said, a mission, right? You adopt that. But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself. At General Magic, wonderful documentary, if no one's seeing it, you gotta see that. It's amazing. I was physically and mentally unhealthy, socially and healthy as well, because I put every waking minute into this thing,

every ounce of me into it. And when it was a spectacular disaster, we were making the iPhone 15 years too early. The bottom fell out. I had nothing left. I had to get healthy, socially, emotionally, physically after that, that trauma. I let everything go. I learned from that that you have to, even though you might put everything into your work, you need to find balance outside of it. Now, that doesn't mean you're always, you know, it's three days a week working and four days a week or whatever it was. You're still working as hard as ever, but what you're doing is you're making sure when you're thinking time is during work, that you're not ruminating at three in the morning.

You use the tools that you have to put those ideas into databases or on pages or somewhere else so you can go back and look at them. So you're not always having to remember because what happens is most people don't write the stuff down. So they just sit here and I got to remember this. I got to remember this. I got to remember this. If you just put it into the tools and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh.

A lot of the time is about ruminating about what I need to get done and remembering everything, instead of doing the work. That's fascinating, you see, if you just put it down on paper, you can actually escape it. Right, escape it for a time, to have peace for a time.

You mentioned, General Magic, let me ask you the Russian question. What's the darkest moments of your life? Where are some of the darkest places you've gone in your mind? You've talked about, you know, if you're doing these kinds of things with startups, you're going if you're doing these kinds of things with startups, you're gonna have to face a crisis. Right. Absolutely. If you're doing it right, you're gonna face it. So for you personally, where were some of the tough, tougher moments in your life? Growing up,

I went to 12 schools in 15 years. I was always the new kid. 15 years. I was always the new kid. Put yourself in those shoes, right? And we picked on. Well, absolutely, but even more so, I was the geek with the computer. Remember the nerds in the 80s? You probably don't know this, but believe me, we were made fun of. What were these computers? What were these things? You're often a cold. They're all partying or going whatever it was. And I'm sitting there like, the, they're like, this guy is just this alien, right? Who's this new guy who just showed up and, and then, you know, you would ask the smart questions.

And you couldn't be the smartest in the, because then you get picked on two. So it's, and you're the new kid. So you're in this environment that's ever changing. You don't fit in. And you are just asking questions because you think they're the right-ed questions to ask. But then they like, you're making us look bad. Don't ask these smart questions because you're going to make us do more work. So right there, it's pretty tough. And I'm moving cities, right? And I didn't have the internet to state it connected to people.

There was no internet. Phone calls were two dollars a minute. So it was lonely too. It was lonely right? Right. I was a latchkey kid. Right? I had my brother but he was a skateboarder and he had a he had a different social way of working. He loved to do that stuff and be outside. I loved the computer. So even in the computer, you were alone in the family, with the computer. Yeah, I was in the family, you were alone. I was absolutely alone. That was just me.

But then, you could find the other geeks, right? But there were just a few of us, and we made this little thing. But then when you moved away, then I had to use a BBS, a bulletin board system, and a dial-up modem, and then I started hacking the phone system to get free codes on MCI and Sprint back in the day to get long distance, to get free codes to call my friends, the geeks on the other side, right?

Or to dial into a BBS cheaply that was in another part of the world. So this was this subculture and that was not accepted anyway and not the heroes that you see today that are on the, you know, on, you know, the richest people in the world and everything. So that was the first set of trauma.

And then the next one really was General Magic, you know, the end of that, like I described before and pulling yourself out and going just because I got so insular in that world of geeking out and building stuff that I just tore all the social ties, right? Because it was just, it was a drug. I was hooked on that. I was a junkie. I had to get clean.

Yeah. And that made you who you are. I'm for tempered. That made that made you who you are tempered tempered So Steve Jobs is no longer with us One day you also will no longer be with us That's the the thing about this life it ends. Yeah So no matter how many incredible things you brought to this world no matter matter how many inventions you built, you too shall perish. Do you think about this?

Are you afraid of your death? I am not afraid of my death. I am an atheist. And I think about the soul. Because I do, even though I'm an atheist, I think about the soul. And the soul is the thing that you instill in others when you go that lives on. It's not this thing that's magically in space. It's the thing that you've imparted onto people that you worked with and those relationships you've had. And that soul lives on in the stories that they tell, right?

And through build, I'm hopeful that those stories stay relevant because they're human nature. They're not about who knows what the next iPhone thing is, or the next iPod thing is. The stuff that I have been able to privilege to make and work with people. Those are all ephemeral. The app had gone now, right? This week it was announced iPads and after 21 years. It is that those human connections, it's that growth that you've

helped someone just like they helped me. Just like Bill Campbell or Steve Jobs has gone, but they made me be better. That's the soul that I believe in. That's fascinating that you say that, yeah, so many of these products, I mean, to push back a little bit, so even though the iPod is an end of an era, using it every day. I think that, I mean, the number of people that impacted, it's just, so I suppose the soul is carried by the people. Exactly. Sometimes the products you create

is the sort of the transport mechanism. It's the vessel. And they felt the love, and they felt that love in a transform, even if they don't have the vessel anymore. Yeah. And that way the soul lives. Just like the body is the vessel. That's beautifully put.

Why do you think we're here? What's the meaning of life, Tony? Jesus. Man, we're going all around. Meeting a life? Why? Because you said it's important to have a press release. I know.

I know. So if humanity, life on earth, if this thing, the consciousness, the falling in love and building bridges and iPods and rockets and trying to extend out into the cosmos, why? Why do you think we're doing it? Is there any meaning? We are naturally curious. We are naturally curious individuals. And we are always looking for meaning. We're always trying to describe meaning to something or understanding of something something right and through that it's just

just like evolution right Darwinism it's just that thing that's baked into our being at the most fundamental level driven by curiosity driven by curiosity and creating some pretty cool things along the way Tony you you and speaking of cool things you've created some of the coolest things ever and on top of that you're just an amazing human being it's a huge honor to use it and Tony, you and speaking of cool things, you've created some of the coolest things ever. And on top of that, you're just an amazing human being. It's a huge honor to be here and talk to me today. This is a fun. This is great. I didn't know where I was going. And I'm, let's talk. I'm looking for seed. I would love to have an eight nine seven. Yeah. So hang out and have dinner and just wrap about all kinds of great. I'd love to continue this. I would too. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tony Fidel. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Tony Fidel himself. The most wonderful part of building something together with the team is that you're walking side by side with other people. You're all looking at your feet and scanning the horizon at the same time. Some people will see things you can't and you will see things that are invisible to

everyone else. So don't think doing the work just means locking yourself into a room, a huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together, or finding a new destination and bringing the team with you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you