Ted talks tony fadell biography

Texts Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.

Sign up Log in. It seems that Tony has followed his own advice throughout his career, from his time creating portable electronic devices at General Magic to his work on making the iPod, iPhone, and Nest Thermostat. He iterated, made mistakes, surrounded himself with other driven people, and found incredible success in developing some of our favorite products.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that's what makes this book so great. It's part autobiography, part strategy session, and entirely his lived experience that we can all benefit from reading. Subscribe to the 24 Newsletter, designed to help you learn and grow in the areas of your life that matter most. Delivered once a month, it features stories, links, tips, and ideas about journaling, reading, focus, productivity, leadership, and tech.

Because I was starved for knowledge, starved for any kind of connection. So I just banged on the door and all that stuff. And what we were creating when you look back now, was we were creating the iPhone 15 years too early. So literally we were making the iPhone. So we had downloadable games and you could buy travel online, you could send emails.

Most people didn't even have emails at the time with emojis. Even early emojis were in it. You could obviously make phone calls. It wasn't mobile phone. Well, there was one version that was kind of a mobile phone, and it was all touchscreen based and all graphical based. If you look at it and you squint and you go, oh my God, everything's there.

We'd even have community where you could go and you know, socialize and stuff like that. Now the big thing to understand this was 19 91, 92, 93, 94, this was pre-internet. So there was no internet, there was no mobile phone network really, no, definitely no mobile data. And the best we had was a phone line, an analog phone line, you know, beep beep like a fax machine, right?

So we're talking 56 K modem, and we had gray scale screens, big batteries. The very first lithium ion battery was in that general magic device that ever le was on the planet. So this is where, you know, we started, but what really came to be was that it was a tremendous failure. Everybody said it was gonna be an incredible success, but what we were doing was we were solving problems that even we didn't have, we were just impressing each other as geeks.

So we were doing, Hey, look at this. Isn't this cool? Yeah, that's cool. Ooh, that's cool, that's cool. And this project that was supposed to be a year, year and a half turned into four years because we couldn't help ourselves. Oh, this would be cool, let's do that, let's do this. So we'd add more and more to this product. But frankly, we didn't know who we were making it for.

We were making it to impress ourselves. And at the end of the day, nobody had the same problems. We didn't even have the same teds talks tony fadell biography we were trying to solve. It took 15 years later when the iPhone came out, when people had a laptop, they were carrying a laptop with them for productivity tools and internet browsing.

They had iPod for mobile entertainment, music and videos. And they also had a cell phone, a mobile phone for messaging and voice communication. And there was wifi and there was the internet and people knew who, what eTailing was. And so when we showed the iPhone, all of these problems for many people were solved in this one package.

But 15 years earlier, we didn't have any of that technology. Nobody knew what the problems were we were solving and why they needed. And so at General Magic, we had the wrong timing technology wise, we had the wrong timing societal wise because we were solving problems that no one had. And so we had the right vision, we just didn't have the right timing.

And two very fundamental aspects. Let's go deeper on that because I think you of all human beings on this planet have a very unique view on the delta between creativity and innovation and being able to create innovative teams, create new technology, new ideas, and your time at General Magic and your time at Apple. There's a lot of overlap in terms of like the people that you worked with, maybe some of the methodologies and so forth.

But it seems like the constraints are one of the dimensions that might have led to innovation.

Ted talks tony fadell biography: As human beings, we get

So creativity, making new things, new ideas, kind of chasing those new things. Innovation where it's like applying that to people's actual needs. That is, there's a story to how this fits into the world and how people are gonna use it. What's the delta between r and d and innovation at General Magic and at Apple? Okay, well, you know, between General Magic and Apple and Apple has changed a lot, even from my first early days there.

And that was 20 years ago. So Apple's changed over time cuz it's matured and figured these things out, especially without Steve there now you have to really figure it out. So I think the biggest difference that I learned was understanding the why. Now we didn't do the why like I do the why today, but back then Steve innately had the, why are we building this thing in his gut?

And we didn't have all the tools we have today, but back then it was like, what is the problem we are solving? Who are we solving it for? So in the case of the iPod, it was, everybody loves music, so that's not a problem. What's the pain? The pain is taking all of your music with you or at least a thousand songs in your pocket, and ultimately a lot more than that 10, songs in your pocket.

So you could go around and it was a Pocketable device that had long battery leg. So right there it was like, we are making this product for the world. Everybody loves music and everybody wants to have the music they love with them all the time, not just, you know, couple CDs or cassettes with it or whatever. They wanna have all their music. And the digital music revolution was just starting with MP three s, but it was so geeky, it was Geeks for Geeks designed by Geeks for Geeks.

It was literally bits and bites. So what we were able to do was create the digital music experience, not just the iPod, but iTunes and the iTunes music store over the, you know, first three, four years to package that all together to bring digital music to everyone. And so understanding your audience, understanding the why and the pain behind the why is so important.

And so at General Magic, we didn't know who we were making it for, right? We didn't understand the why because nobody had the pain. It was just interesting. And so if I look at most companies in Silicon Valley and around the world, cuz we're at Build Collective, we've invested in companies all around the world. So we see this all the time.

And what normally happens is you have incredible engineers, scientists, researchers who are ted talks tony fadell biography lots of what's, they're combining lots of new what's, and they're creating what's, and they're putting all these what things pieces together, but they don't really understand the why. And so, let me give you an analogy.

In the case of making a movie, you start with a treatment and then you write a script and then you go and shoot the movie and then you edit the movie to hopefully hit the script slash the treatment to make it all work. And you, so you make sure you lay this all out in the world of technology, usually you start with all these technology bits and bites and you put 'em all together like jigsaw puzzle and go, oh that's cool.

And then at the end you go, who's it for? What's it about? And I see it in so many instances, what you have to do is you have to rethink it and you have to think more like a movie, make that treatment, who's the audience, what's the pain? What are all the details of it, what is the story arc? And then go off and create a press release. I love creating the press release cuz it's a page or a page and a half of incredibly condensed information that sets that North star for the entire project.

So you know, whether you should have this feature or not, what the timeframe is, what the pricing or go to market is, who the audience is. You need to have that upfront, just like a movie does. Too many types, people leave that to the end. They need to spend much more time on that while making the prototypes or whatever they're doing to make sure they're in lockstep, right?

Just like their storyboards in movies and all that stuff. You do this same thing, you need storyboards for your website, storyboards for the overall design and user interface make the intangible tangible. And so that's what I'm always advocating and what we did much better at Apple in the early days and what's being done really professionally now 10 years later and now 20 years later, about really understanding what you're crafting, who you're crafting and the pain you're trying to solve and what's that painkiller.

So that's really the difference between those two eras in my world.

Ted talks tony fadell biography: talk, the man behind

How do you discover that? Why though? So you can articulate it, but are a lot of why's out there. In fact, there were a whole lot of things that you could have worked on at Apple. Why is, you know, 10, songs in a pocket the most important why? And how do you stay connected to the consumer to discover that.

Ted talks tony fadell biography: As the originator of

The things that I work on and the things that I'm most passionate about are problems that I can see and I can feel right? Usually the teams are making things that they can also see the problems. Okay, so you first start from where's the pain, where's the pain and what's the new technology that you can bring to that pain that then can change the way the products work?

And so in this case, digital music obviously was one thing and compressed audio. So it's not just digital music cuz that was on CDs, but it was compressed audio. You could take a song and make it much smaller and then there was a pocketable hard drive that came out in January, from Shiba. And now all of a sudden here's a hard drive that fits in your pocket.

You can take this compressed audio and put it on this little tiny hard drive and you can wrap it in a user interface, right? And people were now just starting to rip CDs. So all of these things came together and you're like, of course I, I can't tell you how many times I was frustrated my car had 10 CDs and I never had all the CDs.

I wanted to listen the same stuff over and over. So it was something we could feel. But always when I look at all of the companies that we invest in or we work with, it's always what is the pain you're trying to solve. Some people can invent new things and, and maybe it's not addressing a pain cuz it's a whole new market, but I always like to start from pain.

And when it's pain then you understand other people have the pain, how big the market is. And then you can figure out how technology and new user interface, new customer journey, all that stuff can solve that pain, make it a painkiller and hopefully make it a superpower, right? A superpower that it's just amazed, you know, you're just blown away that you can do this stuff now.

And it's so easy to use. It's not superpower for geeks, it's a superpower for the rest of us. And so start with the pain, understand the new technologies, understand the societal timing as well, understand the technology, the infrastructure on it, and you bring all of those things together and you wanna be slightly early, not too early, but you also don't wanna be late because that means other people are getting there.

So you wanna be slightly earlier when you're educating, you're the leader in it and everyone else is the followers and they're defined by the product that you're creating. That's really kind of in a nutshell how you do that. And you know, there's just, so whether it was Nest, you know, in terms of that pain or iPhone pain, which I described earlier, you can feel it and the way you feel that pain is by staying a beginner, not letting habituation take over.

I have a TED Talk all about this and too many times when we try a new product or new service or whatever it is, those first few days you're like, oh, that isn't right. That isn't right. Oh that did, that didn't feel right. And then we say, but it gives me enough of a painkiller that I'm willing to put that other pain aside that these new pains that come up.

And so what you really wanna do is you wanna tap into that beginner's mindset and remember those ted talks tony fadell biography bumps along the way and smooth those out and make sure they're not there. That's really important. Tony, during your time at Apple you had the chance to work with some really influential folks, Steve Jobs obviously, and then Johnny Ive, and we've been lucky enough to have Johnny, ive in our class a few times and he's mentioned that he always starts his projects with writing, which kind of surprised me.

And I'm curious and I, I wanted to read a little snippet from your book, the early chapter, you talk about having to build the iPhone twice and there's a, a little sketch and a drawing from Mark Perra and it says, describing the phone, this is a very personal object. It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction to find piece of jewelry brings.

It will have a perceived value even when it's not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal. Obviously all those things would be really, really hard to convey in a sketch or rendering. During your time at Apple, did you learn how to convey things through writing or is that something that you lean on other people for?

Or what, what did you learn during your time there about that part of the craft? I have to use all forms. I have to use visual forms, I have to write down adjectives like I talked about writing down the press release and really kind of getting that language of what you're trying to do. The other things that I do with my teams is I actually go off and say what are the key reviews that we want people to say?

So we actually go off and we draft what uh, Joanna Stern at Wall Street Journal might say about the product. Teamed up with Google, Nest is hoping to bring us one step closer to a truly smart home. In this insightful talk, the product designer shares how he fights back against the human tendency towards habituation — our natural penchant for internalizing everyday patterns and behaviors into habits, even if they are unpleasant or not user-friendly.

He uses the example of the tiny sticker on fruit: the first time you had to find the sticker, dig it out of your fruit and flick it off your finger, it was pretty annoying. First we need to see them.