Running The Tortuous 'Idea Maze'

"Build

By Tony Fadell

Harper Business, 394 pages, $32.50

Conventional wisdom states that innovation in technology-product creation comes in two stages. First, the aha! moment, when a visionary engineer stumbles upon a billion-dollar idea -- the entrepreneurial version of Hollywood's meet-cute. Second, the moment when the tech-firm CEO draws up the plans, lines up the materials and creates the crowd-pleasing, epoch-making product.

Tech innovation almost never happens that way. Rather, before a great gadget comes to market there are usually years, sometimes decades, of failed projects and false starts. Then there are still more years spent grinding away to get the gadget to customers.

Rarely do books give a full account of that tortuous "idea maze" (a phrase coined by entrepreneur and serial tech-founder Balaji Srinivasan). Tony Fadell, the author of more than 300 patents, has made a career of navigating such challenges: His credits include the Apple iPod, the Apple iPhone and the Nest Learning Thermostat. In "Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making," Mr. Fadell, who is now mentoring the next generation of startups at his Florida firm Future Shape, recounts his life in the idea maze.

"Build," which is less a memoir than an "advice encyclopedia," imparts nuggets of wisdom in six sections: Build Yourself, Your Career, Your Product, Your Business, Your Team -- and Be CEO. An engineer's engineer, Mr. Fadell presents a series of bullet-pointed chapters, numbered like a software product for easy cross-referencing (e.g., Chapter 5.4: "A Method to the Marketing"). Each chapter is eminently digestible on its own but also works as part of the overall narrative. Mr. Fadell details problems encountered over the course of his 30-year career, how he tried to solve them, what he did when his initial ideas failed, and what ultimately worked.

Tony Fadell began his Silicon Valley career in 1991 at General Magic, which he calls "the most influential startup nobody has ever heard of." He sketches his early persona as the all-too-typical engineering nerd dutifully donning an interview suit only to be told to ditch the jacket and tie before the meeting begins. He started at the bottom, building tools to check the work of others, many of whom just happened to be established legends from the original Apple Macintosh team.

General Magic failed at its ambitious goal: to create demand for its ingenious hand-held computer at a time when most people didn't know they needed a computer at all. In other words, though the company had a great product, the product didn't solve a pressing problem for consumers. Mr. Fadell offers candid reasons why such a smart group of people could have overlooked this basic market reality. Relaying the "gut punch of our failure," he describes what it's like "when you think you know everything then suddenly realize you have no idea what you're doing."

Four years later, Mr. Fadell landed as chief technology officer at Philips, the 300,000-employee Dutch electronics company, where he had a big title, a new team, a budget and a mission: The company was going to make a hand-held computer for now-seasoned desktop users who were beginning to see the need for a mobile device. Using Microsoft Windows CE as the operating system, it launched the Philips Velo in 1997. This was a $599.99 "personal digital assistant" -- keyboard, email, docs, calendar, the works -- in a friendly 14-ounce package. All the pieces were there, the author writes, except "a real sales and retail partnership." No one -- not Best Buy, not Circuit City, not Philips itself -- knew how to sell the product, or whom to sell it to. So here was another "lesson learned via gut punch": There is a lot more to a successful product than a good gadget, even an excellent one.

Many readers will come to this book specifically for the iPod and iPhone chapters. If you follow from the beginning, however, instead of skipping ahead to 2001, you'll see how Mr. Fadell had been building up to these Apple innovations by trying and failing for years -- not just as a designer of software and hardware but as a manager putting together teams, a business leader developing sales and marketing plans, and a founder building a company.

Writers of business books are often short on humility; failures are recounted simply to provide a sense of drama or settle old scores. Mr. Fadell presents his flops and false starts as integral to the story -- of both his career and his breakthrough products -- without belaboring them and with a wry sense of perspective.

The magic of the iPod as a product is well-known. Mr. Fadell treats us to the origin story with a firsthand account of what it took to create a product that singularly revolutionized music and then video, all but saving Apple along the way. Not one but 18 generations of iPods were released during his tenure as product manager, which ended in 2006.

Perhaps the secret to the iPod was not how much it did, but how well it did the few things that were revolutionary. Chapter 3.3, "Evolution Versus Disruption Versus Execution," details how easy it can be, when building a new product, to get too ambitious and "try to disrupt everything at once," as General Magic so fatally did. The first iPod, as you probably don't recall, came before the launch of the iTunes music store. Owners of the sleek white boxes were expected to transfer music not from the web but from their own CDs. Mr. Fadell and his colleagues understood the idea and value of a music marketplace, but they didn't have the time to execute it yet and had already "disrupted enough." (A counterexample, which proves that even Jeff Bezos makes mistakes, is Amazon's Fire Phone, released in 2014: As Mr. Fadell explains, it introduced innovative features -- the Firefly music-recognition function, for example -- and did everything Mr. Bezos promised, but "none of it well.")

The author's journey at Apple continued with the next project he tackled, the iPhone, where, in 2007-10, he led the hardware team and helped develop the phone's foundational software. Mr. Fadell recounts the deep divisions on the team about features like the keyboard. (At the time, the BlackBerry, with its physical rather than touch-screen keyboard, reigned supreme.) He describes the challenges of making decisions that are mostly data-driven. You can focus-test and focus-test in search of data, as Philips tried to do with their early device for "mobile professionals," only to find out that customers "will always be more comfortable with what already exists, even if it's terrible." ("You can't push people too far outside their mental model," he remarks. "Not at first.")

The creation of the iPhone proved to be an idea maze of its own. Starting from the idea of "iPod + phone" (of course), the team thought: Why not keep the iPod's iconic click-wheel interface but just change everything around it? The "rotary cell-phone" concept didn't work. Throw everything out, restart. Second attempt: Begin with the shape and hand-feel of the iPod Mini. But that concept ran into engineering problems due to the small size. Finally, in the third attempt, the Apple team "understood all the pieces well enough to create the right V1 [version one] device," what Apple CEO Steve Jobs called a combination iPod, phone and "internet communicator." Jobs stuck to this vision, and Mr. Fadell stuck to using data to prove that the vision could work. As a result, we all type on glass keys with emoji characters now.

After Mr. Fadell left Apple, he took time off for travel with his young family. In every rented room or house they stayed in, he wondered: Why are thermostats so difficult to use? With an engineer's curiosity, he recounts what he learned about a deeply entrenched, archaic and boring object. He uses his problem-solution-failure style to share stories about how he built the Nest thermostat and the Nest Labs company -- from fundraising, building a retail channel and navigating patent litigation to marketing, packaging and customer support.

The best moments in this section, and perhaps the most difficult for Mr. Fadell to write, are about the acquisition of Nest by Google. He pulls no punches in describing what an outsider might call a botched venture integration. Google paid $3.2 billion for Nest in 2014 but within two years began to consider selling. "In utter frustration," Mr. Fadell walked away. The lessons in these pages are as much for big companies acquiring startups as they are for the startups being acquired.

"Build" is a treasure box of anecdotes. It includes many illustrations of wonderful artifacts from the original iPod and iPhone projects, and a great reading list is provided as well. Mr. Fadell says the book is unorthodox because it is "old school."

So is he. When he recounts his early days at General Magic, he writes of working "ninety, 100, 120 hours a week," during which he "learned and screwed up and worked and worked and worked." He eventually "physically and mentally fell apart," he admits, because "humans cannot survive on stress and Diet Coke alone." Yet he believes that, early in your career, "if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time."

That Mr. Fadell still holds this view in today's corporate climate, in which some companies lavish employees with perks from their first day on the job, even before the company is successful, says much about the honesty of the author, as well as about what he believes it takes to excel at the craft of building. In a chapter called "F -- Massages," we learn what every cash-strapped founder knows, which is just how problematic it can be to spoil employees. Mr. Fadell was baffled that Google employees complained when a preferred yogurt flavor suddenly disappeared from the company pantry, or -- worse -- when they had to walk more than 200 feet for snacks. This account of Silicon Valley is as real and as candid as it gets.

But don't let Tony Fadell's admittedly "old school" grumbling about human nature get in the way of a wonderful read. His book is rich in unorthodox wisdom that could be put to good use today to build the new things of tomorrow.

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Mr. Sinofsky, the former president of Windows at Microsoft, is a mentor and investor and the author of "Hardcore Software," available on Substack." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Running The Tortuous 'Idea Maze'
Sinofsky, Steven. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 June 2022: C.7.