back to indexTony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, Nest, Steve Jobs, Design, and Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #294
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It wasn't just a one on one.
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It could be Steve against the team going,
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we need glass instead of plastic
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on the front face of the iPhone.
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And we're going to do this.
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And we're like, God, you know, and so we did it.
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And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details,
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but he could see in our minds that we're like,
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yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably,
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but man, it's really putting us in risk.
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And we laid out the risks for him.
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And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks.
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The following is a conversation with Tony Fadell,
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engineer and designer, co creator of the iPod,
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the iPhone and the Nest Thermostat.
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And he's the author of the new book, Build,
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an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.
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More than almost any human ever,
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he knows what it takes to create technology ideas,
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designs, products and companies that revolutionize life
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for huge numbers of people in the world.
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So it truly is an honor and pleasure
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to sit down with Tony for a time
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and look back at one heck of an amazing life.
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This is the Lex Readman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fadell.
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When did you first fall in love with computers?
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Or let's say computer engineering and design?
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I first fell in love with computers and programming.
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Was it a summer school class in fifth grade
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in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan?
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It was a simple basic programming class,
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but the basic programming class
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was not like you might think it was.
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It was bubble cards.
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So literally it was the cards, the stack of cards,
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and you would use a number two pencil and you would put in
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your program line by line,
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and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked
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and no errors and what have you.
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And you would take that set of cards
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and you'd put it on this reader and it would zzzt, zzzt, zzzt.
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And it would go off to an IBM microcomputer
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somewhere in the, back then the cloud.
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And then you would sit on a Texas Instruments paper terminal.
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And it would just, literally I was just,
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I could write things and it would,
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I could program this machine to do stuff.
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And it was, you know, it was nowhere near sexy.
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There was no graphics, right?
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Oregon Trail was all in text, right?
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The cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong
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or out of order, or a disaster, or you dropped one card,
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it would all fall apart.
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So just doing that, you know, print f,
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I can only remember what it was.
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It was, you know, what the basic commands were, but.
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Oh, so when you say basic, you mean basic programming?
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Programming language.
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Basic programming.
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So you're writing basic programming language on paper.
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And you're calling it programming though.
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It's called programming.
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Yeah, you're programming this computer in, you know,
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in a remote location and it came back.
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So it was truly cloud computing in a way.
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So it was really terminal based computing.
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And the input and the program are separate.
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So the input to the program, or they could go together.
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Like, or there's no input to the program.
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It just runs and it gives you output.
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Yeah, it goes in and it says ready,
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and then you can say run, and then it would run.
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But to program it, you didn't type it
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because it was a printer terminal.
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You would make the stack of cards
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and that would get it into the computer's memory.
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Okay, so where was the magic?
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The magic was that you could create, you had a language
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and you could create what you wanted to create, right?
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You could create a world or what have you
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and have this interaction.
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And you could compute things, you could, you know,
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do numbers, you could, I was playing Oregon Trail, right?
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So you were less like.
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So you can play video games.
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Right, without the video.
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You could play text games
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and then imagine them in your brain, right?
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Oregon Trail, there's this meme I saw recently.
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If you wanna feel bad about yourself as a programmer,
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realize that one person wrote Railroad Tycoon.
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I think that's the name of the game.
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It's this cool little builder game.
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One person wrote it in assembly.
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So like from scratch and for people who don't know,
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it kind of looks like a Sim City type game.
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It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads.
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And there's a nice graphics, it's three dimensional,
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all that kind of stuff.
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All the things, all the rich colorful things
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you would imagine for a three dimensional video game,
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all written in assembly,
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meaning the lowest level code next to binary,
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which is fascinating.
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And that's the, you had to notice the magic
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at that low level at that time.
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You didn't have all the graphics.
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You didn't have all the like APIs and all the sample codes,
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no stack overflow, no internet, none of that.
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You just had, you had to know registers.
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You know, had to know the op codes
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and you had to imagine the world in your brain
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and the memory structures and everything else.
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There's no visualization.
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You visualized it all yourself, right?
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And so that was magic.
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But then the next part of the magic
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of where I got hooked even further
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was like I'm doing these little things.
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And then Electronic Arts came out for the Apple II.
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So I got an Apple II and Electronic Arts came out
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and I was programming and doing basic
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and making my own games.
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But then there were two games that really blew my mind.
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One was pinball construction set.
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And the other one was music construction set.
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And these were both places where I could create pinball games
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and I could create musical scores
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because I love music and I could then play them, right?
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And so when you had that, you were like,
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oh, this is something very different.
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So I could create myself,
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but then there was others that create tools
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so you could create at a visual level.
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And then you would read the backstories
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because Electronics Arts back in the day,
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it was one programmer who would program those games
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program those things, each of those things.
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And you could read their backstories.
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It was literally like a musician or someone else.
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Like you could read Rick Rubens, like here's the thing.
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They tell you all of that stuff.
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And there was one guy who wrote music construction set.
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He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old.
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And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time.
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And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this
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and had published, right, and this amazing tool was created,
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I'm like, what could I do?
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And so then it just kept building off of that.
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But really it was those seminal things.
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First, the introduction and then the power
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through programming and turning these things
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into what you wanted to turn it into.
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And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old
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And then I was like, okay, this is really cool.
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I wish we did that with programmers
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where we treated them like artists.
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We would know the backstory these days today.
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Or not just programmers, engineers.
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Engineers, designers.
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Yeah, like all the things about a product
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that I think we love are the little details.
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And there's probably a human being
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behind each of those details
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that had their little inkling of genius that they put in.
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I wish we knew those stories.
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That's always sad to me when I,
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because obviously I love engineering
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and I interact with companies
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and they, you know, autonomous vehicles,
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something I'm really interested about.
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And I see that companies generally,
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and we'll probably talk about this,
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but they seem to want to hide their engineers.
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Like engineers hold the secrets.
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Like the great secret,
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we did not speak of the great secret.
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But then the result of that is you don't get
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to hear their stories.
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The passion that is there behind the engineers.
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Like, and also the genius, the little,
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there's a difference between the stuff that's patented,
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like the kernel of the idea
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and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea.
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And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects
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a little bit more, but sorry for the distraction.
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So what, you mentioned Apple II.
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What was the first computer you fell in love with?
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Like the product, the thing before you
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that was a personal computer?
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It was the Apple II.
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So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over.
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You know, it was, I think it was at the time,
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it was the, you know, the person of the year.
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Maybe it was that year.
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I don't remember what, but.
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Well, Apple II was the person of the year?
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Yeah, for my magazine back in, I don't remember when,
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but it was around that same time.
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I was so young, but I had, there was the Apple II
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and I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools
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because my grandfather taught me about tools
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and creating things, right?
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And I saw this thing and I had the, you know,
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that IBM experience, that terminal experience.
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And I'm like, oh, I could have that at home, right?
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And so I need to have that at home.
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And the only thing that was really talked about
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in our circles was the Apple II.
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And I was just like, that's it.
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So I went, jumped up and down.
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It was very expensive.
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I have to have this.
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My parents were like, what?
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You know, it was $2,500 back then in the 1981.
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It was like crazy, right?
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So I was like, I'm gonna make as much money
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as I can this summer.
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And my grandfather said,
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cause he helped me learn all about tools
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and build things together.
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I will match whatever you make
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so you can get this computer.
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So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy.
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Caddying actually for the, you know,
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the families in, you know, at the country clubs
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in the town where we lived.
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And did whatever I could.
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And that end of that summer, we got my Apple II.
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And you couldn't tear it away from me.
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It was everything.
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From a product perspective,
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what do you remember that was brilliant?
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The design choices, the ideas behind it,
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or is it just that it exists?
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Or the very idea of a personal computer
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is the brilliant design choice.
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Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool
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in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted.
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I could program it anyways.
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There was no, you know, there was no internet connection.
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There was no, it was all just you.
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You either loaded software that you got from someone, right?
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Or you created it yourself.
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And then there was the whole other thing
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which was started happening, which we were doing.
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And this was kind of like MP3 and stuff.
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We were sharing software, right?
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So you built this community of sharing software.
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You would go and pirate.
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That was what it called, pirate all this software.
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You'd never use it all, but it was just that fun thing
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of like, I'm gonna get all this other stuff
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and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it
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and see behind the scenes.
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So you really had a sense this was your world
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and you owned it, right?
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And you could like literally go into every register.
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We didn't have all those security layers.
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Like we do not like,
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you could really touch bits and you could poke bits
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and you can make this light turn on.
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And the geek assignment just lit up.
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Now there's, it's so abstract.
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People don't even understand.
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Like usually some programs don't even understand memory.
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They just think it's unlimited, right?
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And security, it's like,
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now there's all this security you should have,
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but it's like the adults all showed up to the party
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and now you can't have all the fun, right?
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It's like, no, no.
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This was the thing where if you, if the power went out,
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you lost your whole program,
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you might've worked a whole day on it.
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And if you didn't press save at every other line
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and you were to save, save, save,
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and it would like, the disk drive or the tape drive.
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Like every single step was contemplated
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because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work.
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So a lot of the magic was in the software.
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The fact that you could have software,
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the fact that you could share software,
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the community around the software,
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it wasn't necessarily the hardware.
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Well, that was the first step.
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The second step around the hardware
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was I got things like the mocking board,
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which the mocking board
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paired with the music construction set,
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you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes
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and it was a synthesizer in the Apple II.
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So you would plug in this card and you go,
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oh my God, look at this.
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And it would, you know,
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you could start generating cool sounds.
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You know, like it was a Moog, you know,
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like a Moog in a way, early Moog.
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What year are we talking about?
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This is 82, I think, 81, 82.
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And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds
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that are very cool in the 80s.
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Yeah, the 8 bit, you know, chip tunes, right?
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Chip tune, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
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And then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick,
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you had to pull a chip out
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and you had to like plug in a dip socket
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to put in a joystick.
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And then I was like, oh,
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and then I had to get more memory.
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How do we do that?
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And now I wanted to speed up progress.
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So then that turned into a company actually from that,
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but it was, and a hardware software went at that.
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But it was all about, you know,
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modifying this thing in every way, first with software.
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And then you started gaining confidence.
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And then I got a little bit more money and stuff.
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And then you could get into the hardware
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and, you know, wire things.
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And then the Apple II came with all the schematics, right?
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So in the back, in the early Apple IIs,
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you could open up and all the schematics were there.
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So you purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it.
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Yeah, it came with it.
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That's an interesting choice.
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That's an interesting choice from a company perspective.
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Right, it was like a real maker kind of thing.
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Ah, I wonder what they, so that was intentional.
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Like this is. Absolutely intentional.
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This is for the cutting edge folks too,
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or especially for the cutting edge.
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It was only the cutting edge.
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It was geeks for geeks.
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So we were like, oh, how did they make it?
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And then we got to learn through that.
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Apple I did the same thing, right?
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It just Apple II became more packaged up
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and had, you know, a little bit better software, right?
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Came with basic and then, you know,
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so it was really, it was what we might think of
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as a raspberry pie today or something like that,
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but not with so much software.
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It was literally, and all the chips were out there
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so you could inspect the buses and the, right?
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Cause everything was just broken out.
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So I guess that's the idea behind stable big projects
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and open source, like on GitHub,
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that you have the schematics there
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and it's kind of a product,
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but I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing.
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Like we're going to release this to a small set of people,
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self selected, perhaps that are kind of the makers,
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the cutting edge folks, the builders,
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the at home engineers, like in some way,
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what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self driving
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is kind of like that.
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It's like selecting a group of people,
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but that has to do more with you,
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how safe of a driver you are
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versus how much of a tinkerer you are
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because you don't get to tinker.
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I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do
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for really cutting edge technologies,
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especially you're interested in like hardware stuff.
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Why don't more companies do that kind of thing, you think?
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I think back then it was about a community
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and serving that community of builders.
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Now this is about people who want to take,
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get the experience and want it really simple and easy.
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And they're like, and so there's the audience
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or they believe the audience is small
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who would value those other things
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that we're just talking about.
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But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi
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and all of these other little boards, right?
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There's a whole world more than I've seen.
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Like it's amazing what you can do now
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with these little kits and the software that's created.
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And so there's a whole nother,
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I think another batch of makers and builders
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that are coming up through the ranks.
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And if you, we look at YouTube channels and stuff, right?
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They take these little boards, they hack them,
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then they print out parts on their 3D printer,
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assemble them and they create robots and what have you.
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So I think it's happening.
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It's just not as, you know, as,
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it's just not as, I guess, raw as it used to be,
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but it's there and it's really expanding around the world.
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And that's really nice to see
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cause you know, it's a whole new generation
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who can, who are empowered.
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I think there's a semi dormant genius amongst millions.
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So like Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit.
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It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised
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if it's several million Raspberry Pis
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that have been sold.
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I think more than that.
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And it's kind of this quiet storm of genius,
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brewing of engineers who don't get to hear
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because they're not organized.
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I mean, we get to hear their inklings here and there.
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Like I said, YouTube, there's little communities
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that are local and so on.
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But if they were organized,
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if a leader would emerge, no.
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Okay, so when did you first start to dream
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about building your own things,
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designing your own products,
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designing your own systems and software and hardware?
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Well, in high school, there was a company
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that a friend of mine founded
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and I was the second employee,
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it was called Quality Computers.
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And it was a mail order,
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mail order cause there's no eCommerce then,
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there was no internet again.
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You either mailed in your little coupon
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and you said, this is what I wanted to order
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or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you.
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Turn around time and this stuff was like,
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from the time you wanted, the time you bought it
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was maybe eight to 12 weeks.
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That was just the normal way of getting things.
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So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple too
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and it was software and all kinds of accessories.
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So hardware accessories, so hardware,
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plug in cards, joysticks, all this stuff.
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And what we noticed was there were accelerators
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And to be able to use those cards,
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you had to actually go and change the software you use
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to access this new memory.
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So you literally had to go and you took the program
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that you had, let's say it was Apple works,
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which was like an early Microsoft office
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or something like that.
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And you had to literally change the code
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and you would install all these patches
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to then take advantage of the hardware.
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So what we started creating was software on top of it
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to do the automatic installation of all of these patches.
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So we made it much easier to take new hardware
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and the existing software you have
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and expand it into this new world.
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So it was creating tools
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and the really great customer support.
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And we started getting a lot of orders
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because we had the software make it easier to install,
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to give them the superpower.
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And at the same time, they would be able
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to change their software and have a new world
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that wasn't existing from the companies
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that were creating the initial products.
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And so it was more of that.
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And then that happened with hard drives.
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So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II
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to like read, because you could get really fragmented.
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So I wrote that piece of software
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and we sold that through the company
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along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties.
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So that all happened in 12th grade,
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freshman year of college.
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You wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade
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Between 12th and freshman year.
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What programming language do you remember?
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There were certain inner loops were assembly
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and other loops actually there were really early Pascal,
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What was the motivation behind these?
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Is it to make people's lives easier?
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Is it to create a thing experience
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that is simpler and simpler and simpler,
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thereby more accessible to a larger number of people?
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Or did you just like to tinker?
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No, no, no, it was two things really.
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Cause one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software.
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So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user.
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And then the other thing was,
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because I was also manning the customer support line,
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people would call in and go, this doesn't work.
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And I'm like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware and software.
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Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware
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and the installation process better.
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So my whole world was out of box experience
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from when I was in high school.
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Cause I had to man the customer support line,
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pack the boxes and write some of the code
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while we were doing, while Joe, Joe Gleason,
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who was the founder of Quality Computers,
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he was off doing the mark, the ads,
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placing the ads for the mail order,
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making sure we were running the credit cards, right?
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And then it turned into a third,
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and then we hired another person from high school
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to like pack boxes so I could stay
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on the customer support line or doing the software, right?
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And it was all in his parents basement, right?
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As you were scaling exponentially.
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Scaling, right, exactly, bootstrapping.
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So we'll jump around a little bit,
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but what were the, you said you love music.
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What were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod
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if we jump forward and how far back do those ideas stretch?
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If you look at the history of technology,
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there's, I mean, not just the product,
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but the idea is truly revolutionary.
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Maybe it's time has come,
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but just if you look at the arc of history,
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sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity.
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And to be able to put that in your pocket,
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make it truly portable is fascinating
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in a way that's truly portable.
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So it's digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman
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or something like that.
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So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod?
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You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid.
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Just loved music from, I think, second grade
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when I got my first albums and stuff like that.
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What kind of music are we talking about?
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So this was Led Zeppelin.
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This was the Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith,
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Cheap Trick, Stix, Ted Nugent,
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just the real American and British rock and roll, right?
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There's a bunch of people listening right now.
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Is that some kind?
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It drove my parents crazy.
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You just blasted loud.
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And this was second, third grade, fourth grade.
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I just fell in love.
link |
And then we moved back to Detroit
link |
and I loved listening to the radio station
link |
because there was all kinds of crazy music
link |
because you'd have an amalgam of rock and then funk
link |
and R&B and I loved to listen at night.
link |
So I had a clock radio.
link |
But if I had the clock radio on,
link |
everyone, parents would go, go to sleep.
link |
Turn that stuff off.
link |
So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it.
link |
So I said, oh, they're like, okay.
link |
And then I could listen to it all night
link |
and no one could hear me, right?
link |
And I could just sit there and, you know.
link |
Just huddling around the radio.
link |
Just listening to Zeppelin.
link |
Stairway to Heaven, what would you say
link |
is the greatest classic rock song of all time?
link |
Greatest classic rock song of all time?
link |
What pops into mind?
link |
Well, no, you know what?
link |
I mean, this has to be objectively number one.
link |
That's really hard, dude.
link |
This is a serious journalistic interview.
link |
You're not going to back down from these kinds of questions.
link |
Yeah, it's hard to pick.
link |
But to me, Stairway to Heaven is a safe fall.
link |
It's like, it's so often considered
link |
to be one of the greatest songs of all time
link |
that you almost don't want to pick it.
link |
But you've returned to it time and time again.
link |
It's like, yeah, this is something pretty special.
link |
This is a rock opera of sorts.
link |
Well, the rock opera that really blew me away
link |
and still continues to blow me away
link |
is all of Dark Side of the Moon.
link |
Like that, I love Zeppelin.
link |
I can't say which one's better.
link |
But Dark Side of the Moon for me was,
link |
it was a, you know, audio experience, right?
link |
The whole thing from soup to nuts,
link |
plus all the synthesizers, all of those things.
link |
Okay, so back to the iPod.
link |
So that's, from the early age, you loved music.
link |
Absolutely loved it.
link |
And, you know, always was just around it
link |
and always, I just, it was always playing, you know.
link |
I played it so loud that I actually hurt the earring
link |
And I still suffer from that today.
link |
No regrets whatsoever.
link |
Going to concerts in downtown Detroit
link |
and all the crazy stuff.
link |
So moving forward.
link |
So in college, I was a DJ.
link |
So I would DJ and hang out and play all the tunes I love
link |
and whatever for the crowd.
link |
And then I continued to do that in Silicon Valley
link |
when I moved right after school.
link |
And so I was be lugging all of these CDs around with me.
link |
A thousand CDs to, right?
link |
And at the same time, and so those were heavy.
link |
And at the same time I was doing the Philips Nino and Velo.
link |
Those were Windows CE based mobile computing products.
link |
Nino was the first device
link |
to actually put Audible books on tape.
link |
So I worked with Audible.
link |
We met in a conference and they were like,
link |
we don't want to do hardware.
link |
We just want to do content.
link |
I was like, well, we have this device.
link |
Let's get it together.
link |
And we got Audible on that.
link |
And this was in 96 or seven, first Audible books.
link |
And it, you know, I was like, oh my God, that's audio.
link |
Well, what if we put music on it, right?
link |
And so I, and the memory was very small at the time, right?
link |
There was almost no flash.
link |
When you did Audible, you stored it in DRAM, right?
link |
Which was okay probably
link |
because how much books do you need is the idea.
link |
By the way, brilliant, I mean, just putting books.
link |
I know it's probably not the sexiest of things,
link |
but putting books on a mobile device is a brilliant step.
link |
Sometimes can't measure how much human progress occurred
link |
because of an invention.
link |
Like there's the sexy big products, but you never know.
link |
Like, like Wikipedia is one of those things
link |
that doesn't get enough, I think, credit
link |
for the transformational effects it has.
link |
It's not seen as the sexiest of products, but maybe it is.
link |
When you look at human history, Wikipedia arguably
link |
is one of the big things
link |
that basically unlocked human knowledge.
link |
Human knowledge and human editing and human, you know,
link |
just the human nature of building something together.
link |
So it's fascinating.
link |
Sometimes you can't measure those things,
link |
maybe until many, many decades later.
link |
So that was, that was, you know, that was, so that was there.
link |
And then there was Audible,
link |
that you put books, why not put music?
link |
Music, and I'm carrying around the music for the DJ gigs.
link |
And you're like, wait a second, two and two together, right?
link |
Like, let's get rid of this.
link |
And so, and then MP3 show up.
link |
The actual, like in COVID?
link |
The format, the format, MP3 showed up around 97, 98.
link |
So MP3 is compressed so you can have,
link |
like the storage is reduced significantly.
link |
Right, so you could go from a, you know,
link |
a large full lossless, you know,
link |
digital track into something that can be stored
link |
in four to eight megabytes,
link |
something like that for the audio.
link |
Now, you know, that's a reduced quality,
link |
but you could get it down there and you're like, oh, okay.
link |
And now if we have enough flash or DRAM,
link |
we can put 10, 15, what have you all in that same memory.
link |
And it starts to replicate a CD.
link |
And then ultimately, if you put it on a hard drive,
link |
you could start to put, you know, thousands of songs.
link |
Yeah, that's also another brilliant invention.
link |
But like, people don't realize,
link |
I think people would be surprised how big
link |
in terms of storage raw audio is.
link |
And the fact that you can compress it,
link |
like, I don't know what the compression is,
link |
but it's like 10X, it's very significant compression.
link |
And still it sounds almost lossless.
link |
Much to the chagrin of Neil Young,
link |
who does not like that.
link |
But even Neil Young, even the stuff he talks about
link |
is still tiny files relative to the raw.
link |
So he wants us to increase it just a little bit more,
link |
a little bit more.
link |
But it's still, that's an invention.
link |
That's a thing that unlocks your ability
link |
to carry around a device like a Nino and listen to music.
link |
Because without that, there's no way
link |
you can carry on a gigantic hard drive.
link |
And so then that, so it was MP3s, the Nino,
link |
and my, you know, my hatred of carrying around
link |
all this heavy stuff that then spawned, you know,
link |
fuse and then ultimately, you know,
link |
became a lot of that, the ideas and things of that nature
link |
were, and my passions were born into then the iPod.
link |
You know, it was too, Apple needed something
link |
and I wanted to fix something and it all kind of,
link |
you know, came together at the right place, right time,
link |
plus the right technology came at this.
link |
It was just like the stars aligned.
link |
So how did it come to life?
link |
The details of the stars aligning, but the actual design,
link |
the actual engineering of getting a device to be small,
link |
the storage of the, you know, the interface, how it looks,
link |
the storage, the details of the software,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
What are some interesting memories from that design process?
link |
What are some wisdoms you can impart from that process?
link |
Okay, well, you know, how long do you want to go?
link |
Cause I have, I can go deep.
link |
So, let's go at least 20 hours.
link |
Let's go, this is one of the lengthy documentaries.
link |
Are you going to turn it into episodic binge listening?
link |
Yeah, it's Game of Thrones.
link |
So let's just start with, you know,
link |
after I was asked to be a consultant
link |
to put this thing together.
link |
So I already had knowledge of, you know,
link |
the space and the technology and all that stuff,
link |
but I had to very quickly, and a lot of the suppliers,
link |
because of what I was doing at Fuse,
link |
trying to create that thing.
link |
So as a contractor, I was like, okay,
link |
what is the first thing they need to do?
link |
So after I showed a, you know, different architectures
link |
and what three different products could be to Steve
link |
about options for storage options, battery options,
link |
form factor options, there was three options.
link |
And as I was told, given very good advice,
link |
give the two options you really do not like,
link |
but they're options, and give the best option last,
link |
because Steve will shoot all those down
link |
and give the best option last,
link |
and then you could talk about that.
link |
And so that was the one that had a 1.8 inch hard drive
link |
and a small screen, like the screen, you know it,
link |
and the original iPod, classic iPod.
link |
And then I had enough of the idea of the three
link |
or three or four different CPUs and processor suppliers
link |
and kind of systems that were out there
link |
that I had gone and found and put together on power supplies,
link |
you know, disk drive interfaces,
link |
firewire interface, all that stuff.
link |
So I put together all of those schematics
link |
or, you know, block diagrams.
link |
They weren't schematics yet, because it was just me.
link |
And coming up with a bill of materials,
link |
coming up with what it could look like,
link |
what would be the input, output,
link |
how we could make a better headphone jack.
link |
That was also on there.
link |
Screen suppliers, tearing apart calculators.
link |
So got all calculators and all kinds of electronics
link |
to get the right size, different sizes of small LCDs.
link |
So I got all kinds of different battery types.
link |
I got different types of, you know,
link |
in different battery sizes, double A's, triple A's,
link |
working through all the different,
link |
and there was lithium ion, nickel metal hydride.
link |
So I took all the battery types.
link |
I took all of the memory types, processing types,
link |
LCD types, and connectivity and all that stuff,
link |
not wireless, but wired,
link |
and laid out these things as Lego blocks.
link |
So literally had all of these things as just,
link |
and so it made them so I could like, you know,
link |
put them together and figure out
link |
what the compact form factor would be.
link |
Oh, like how do we shove them together?
link |
What's the smallest possible box you can get?
link |
So the questions was on storage, so the hard drive,
link |
batteries, double A, triple A, screens.
link |
So screen size, and then for that,
link |
you're tearing apart calculators.
link |
Calculators, digital cameras, whatever,
link |
and getting little things, right?
link |
So you can make it physical, right?
link |
If you can make the intangible tangible,
link |
like, and so I can say, look, we can make this,
link |
and I brought this whole bag of goods,
link |
and it was like, right?
link |
And like, here's this, here's this,
link |
this is why double A's won't work,
link |
and because it makes it too fat and everything.
link |
So just educate everybody through,
link |
here's the parts that we can use.
link |
You should not sheet of paper, it's physical.
link |
You're playing in the physical space.
link |
Oh, I would go back and forth.
link |
because there weren't a good enough graphical tools
link |
on the Mac, I was using a PC with Visio and some 3D tools,
link |
and I was doing 3D design at the same time
link |
I was taking all these physical parts and going,
link |
okay, what feels right?
link |
Because you have to go from, you know,
link |
the details and then the rough,
link |
and you go back and forth and you iterate, right?
link |
And so it was just a lot of fun.
link |
And then it ultimately ended up with a styrofoam model
link |
and printouts that came from Visio
link |
that I glued together and put my grandfather's
link |
fishing weights in,
link |
because I also modeled the weights, right?
link |
So I said, oh, this is this many ounces,
link |
this is this many ounces and grams.
link |
And then I went and got all that
link |
and made the, weighted these styrofoam models
link |
to then match that.
link |
So when you picked it up,
link |
it felt more or less form factor, right?
link |
And it also, you felt how much, you know,
link |
was it gonna be dense enough?
link |
Is it gonna feel solid and rigid in your hand, right?
link |
Why does it need to feel rigid?
link |
Because it has to feel substantial.
link |
It has to feel like I have like a,
link |
like a bar of gold in my hand, right?
link |
You know, maybe you know this,
link |
when you open and close a car door,
link |
you know that thunk and you go, bam,
link |
and you go, that feels solid, that feels real.
link |
And then you get this tinny car that's like ding,
link |
and you're like, does this feel safe?
link |
Does this feel like a value?
link |
And so you, when you have a device like that,
link |
and you wanna make sure that there's not too much air in it,
link |
that you distributed the density of the masses
link |
So it feels like it's the right thing.
link |
So you have to model battery life, costs,
link |
you know, mass, sizes of different things.
link |
And then you have to also think about
link |
what the UI is gonna look like, right?
link |
You have all of these constraints you're working,
link |
variables you're working with,
link |
and you have to kind of, you know,
link |
you can't get the perfect of everything.
link |
What's the best, you know, local maximum
link |
of all of these components that come together
link |
to provide an experience?
link |
Local maximum, it's always trade offs.
link |
What about buttons?
link |
Buttons, well, there was also the buttons too, right?
link |
Oh, by the way, a lot of these battles
link |
fought inside your mind, or is it with other people?
link |
Is it with Steve, is it lower, like what?
link |
This was all independent.
link |
This was me before being able to present to Steve,
link |
because I had to feel really confident
link |
that if I was gonna put this in front of him,
link |
that it could be made, right?
link |
So I had to convince myself
link |
and go work through all the details,
link |
through like the very, very rough mechanical design,
link |
electrical design, software things,
link |
because I didn't wanna present something
link |
that was gonna be fictional, right?
link |
My credibility would be like trashed, right?
link |
So you mentioned convince yourself.
link |
You're painting this beautiful picture
link |
of a driven engineer, designer, futurist.
link |
How much doubt were you plagued by through that?
link |
Like this is even doable,
link |
because it's not obvious that this is even doable.
link |
Like to do this at scale, to do this kind of thing,
link |
to make it sexy, to shovel the screen,
link |
the batteries, the storage, to make the interface,
link |
the hardware and the software interface work, all of that.
link |
I mean, I don't know.
link |
I would be overwhelmed by the doubt of that,
link |
because so many things have to work, plus the supply chain.
link |
Like at that point,
link |
I wasn't getting into any of those details or anything.
link |
There's the basic stuff that you have to put together.
link |
And then you have to,
link |
through my learnings at General Magic
link |
and my learnings at Phillips
link |
and delivering multiple large scale programs
link |
and manufacturing, you kind of get a rule of thumb
link |
and you know what to focus on at the beginning
link |
and what not to worry about over time.
link |
Like when I was early in my career,
link |
I worried about everything on the engineering details
link |
so much so that I would be a nervous wreck.
link |
Sooner or later, you learn how to filter out
link |
and figure out what to prioritize.
link |
And so 10 years later,
link |
I was able to do a much better job
link |
of filtering out the things of like,
link |
we'll get to that in weeks to come.
link |
But right now we gotta solve the very important things,
link |
which is could this actually be something real
link |
and that you could deliver enough battery life, right?
link |
Enough of an interface of the right cost, right?
link |
And the right price point.
link |
So you were sitting on a track record
link |
of successes and failures in your own mind
link |
where you had sort of already a confidence,
link |
a calmness, but still,
link |
was there a doubt that you can get this done?
link |
How hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence
link |
to a level where you could present it to Steve
link |
and actually believe that this is doable?
link |
Like what, do you remember when you felt?
link |
Yeah, that moment?
link |
I think it was after I triple checked my,
link |
I couldn't bring anyone in, right?
link |
I couldn't let anyone in on this.
link |
So it was just me.
link |
Are they gonna trample on it, that kind of thing?
link |
Why? No, no, no, no,
link |
because I couldn't bring any,
link |
when I mean bring anyone in on this,
link |
one, it was a highly confidential program inside Apple.
link |
There was like four people who knew about it, right?
link |
And so I couldn't bring anyone from Apple
link |
because I was a contractor.
link |
I couldn't bring anyone else from the outside world.
link |
I'm working for Apple and I'm under this crazy NDA, right?
link |
So it was just, so I'm doing this.
link |
Oh, and at the same time,
link |
I'm also buying every competitive product, MP3 player
link |
and tearing them all apart, right?
link |
Tore them all apart and looking at them
link |
and trying to learn from those as well.
link |
So it was all of this stuff in six weeks.
link |
So I didn't sleep, right?
link |
But I was like, because I was trying to make this,
link |
I was envisioning this since the Nino, right?
link |
And I was like, oh my God, right?
link |
But there was another doubt that I had
link |
and it wasn't just, could you make the product?
link |
But could Apple actually have the balls to make it?
link |
Because Apple was not the same company
link |
that you know it today in 2001.
link |
Really, it was cautious, conservative, careful?
link |
No, no, it was barely break even.
link |
It was a four or $5 billion company.
link |
So the guts required there is not necessarily
link |
in the innovation.
link |
It's like, this is gonna cost a lot of money
link |
and we're gonna potentially lose all of it
link |
because it'll be a flop.
link |
Well, there's not just that, but there was only the Mac.
link |
And the Mac wasn't doing very well.
link |
There was less, it was about a 1%
link |
only in the US market share for the Mac, right?
link |
The company was in debt.
link |
Bill Gates had to give him a loan, right?
link |
Michael Dell at the time was saying,
link |
shut down the company and give the money back
link |
to the shareholders.
link |
So this is not the company that people,
link |
oh my God, the iPhone came out.
link |
It's a very different level of confidence
link |
and financial situation that the company was in
link |
So given that, what was the conversation
link |
when you finally presented to Steve?
link |
Steve, what was that conversation like?
link |
The conversation was, well, we went through it,
link |
the presentation and all that stuff happened.
link |
And he was just like, and he never,
link |
he would flip through it real quick,
link |
throw the presentation aside and said,
link |
okay, let's talk about this, right?
link |
And so we went through it all.
link |
And one was a big conversation about Sony.
link |
And Sony was the number one in all audio categories,
link |
home, portable, whatever, in the world, okay?
link |
I had been already gone through 10 years of failure.
link |
And I was like, wait a second,
link |
how are we gonna compete with Sony?
link |
And I was always worried that Sony
link |
was gonna come out with whatever it was
link |
that they were gonna come out with, their MP3 player.
link |
And that was it, game over, right?
link |
And so I was like, Steve,
link |
Steve, and this is why it took me four weeks
link |
to finally sign on to join Apple
link |
after he green lighted the iPod program in that meeting,
link |
was because I had built other things in the past
link |
at Phillips, the Nino and Velo,
link |
but they didn't know how to sell it or market it.
link |
They didn't know how to retail it, right?
link |
So I was like, we could build this.
link |
And I was like, Steve, I'm pretty sure I can build this.
link |
I've done this before, but how are we gonna sell it?
link |
You have all your marketing dollars on the Mac.
link |
And he looked at me and he goes, you build this
link |
with, you know, a team and our team and Apple
link |
and this and this and the me, right?
link |
And I dedicate that we will make sure
link |
that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars
link |
will only go to this product and nothing else.
link |
Right, Mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company.
link |
So Steve saw something special here.
link |
Exactly, and he said, I'm going to commit
link |
all the marketing dollars if you can deliver
link |
the experience that we're all talking about,
link |
if we can do that, and that was Jeff Robin as well,
link |
because iPod would have never happened without iTunes.
link |
You know, people don't understand that was a bundle.
link |
You couldn't do one without the other and vice versa.
link |
So Jeff and I were, you know, if Jeff and you can present
link |
and bring that experience to life,
link |
I will put all the marketing dollars behind it.
link |
When did the marriage of iPod and iTunes sort of,
link |
what was that birth of ideas that made up iTunes?
link |
iTunes existed before the iPod, okay?
link |
And so Jeff Robin had his company,
link |
oh man, I can't remember the name, but it was bought.
link |
He was making a MP3 player app for the Mac.
link |
Steve saw it because there was MP3 player apps
link |
like Winamp and other things that were on the PC,
link |
real player, and Steve saw that going on
link |
and saw that Jeff and his small team had this,
link |
I can't remember, sound something.
link |
Anyways, he bought that and that became the basis of iTunes
link |
and then Jeff ran all of iTunes.
link |
And so what happened specifically there was
link |
they were starting to hook up
link |
to all these third party MP3 players
link |
because there's a lot of Korean, the MP man,
link |
like Walkman, but MP man, all these,
link |
and they were trying to hook them up
link |
and they were like, these are horrible experiences.
link |
And through that, and they said,
link |
iTunes was something that was gonna help grow the Mac base
link |
because we were trying to get more on the Mac.
link |
So this program would be a great new thing
link |
you could add to the Mac.
link |
And there was also internet connectivity at the time
link |
And so they did that
link |
and then they're trying to do these hookups.
link |
They weren't going well.
link |
And that's when they said, we need to build our own.
link |
Or Steve said, we need to build our own
link |
since these are such horrible experiences.
link |
People don't wanna just burn CDs from iTunes.
link |
We need to get that music on the go,
link |
but in an Apple fashion.
link |
That's when I was called to come in to do that,
link |
the iPod thing after the six weeks.
link |
Then he already envisioned, I'm sure he had it envisioned
link |
because they were trying to do this thing.
link |
Okay, now that's it.
link |
iTunes, it wasn't called iPod yet.
link |
What would become the iPod?
link |
That is gonna be the thing that then propels Apple
link |
into this new thing
link |
because you're gonna bring all these music lovers in
link |
that are gonna need their next generation
link |
or Sony Walkman version 2.0.
link |
So when you look at, again, apologies to linger on iPod,
link |
but it's one of the great inventions in tech history.
link |
What wisdom do you draw from that whole process
link |
about spotting an idea?
link |
This is something you talk about in your book, Build.
link |
How do you know that an idea is brilliant?
link |
When did you know it was a good idea?
link |
And maybe is there like some phase shifts?
link |
First you complete out, then maybe,
link |
and then maybe it becomes more than a hmm
link |
and becomes like a little more confidence,
link |
that kind of stuff.
link |
And also wisdom about who to talk to
link |
so they don't trample the idea in their early stages,
link |
that kind of stuff.
link |
Any thoughts about this?
link |
We could go on again.
link |
How long do you wanna go?
link |
20, this is a Netflix series, I told you.
link |
So a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure
link |
and success, but the first thing it starts with,
link |
there's a whole chapter called Great Ideas Chase You.
link |
And so it kind of goes into in Build
link |
and it goes through kind of chapter and verse
link |
about all of those, how Nest became into being.
link |
But let's talk about it specifically for iPod, right?
link |
So for me, I always had pain,
link |
the pain of carrying these CDs everywhere, right?
link |
And I had the joy of music, right?
link |
If you could say, all of a sudden I could get
link |
the music I love all the time in a portable package
link |
and I can have all the music I love all the time,
link |
I was solving a pain, which was,
link |
for me it was thousands of CDs,
link |
other people might be 10 or 15 CDs, right?
link |
And then I can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted.
link |
That was taking the pain, making a painkiller for it.
link |
And then at the end was a superpower,
link |
an emotional superpower that said,
link |
oh my, this is something different.
link |
So when you can actually focus on a pain,
link |
not and get a painkiller for it, not a vitamin.
link |
So the difference between a painkiller
link |
and a vitamin is very clear.
link |
One, you need, I gotta get rid of this pain.
link |
A vitamin, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't,
link |
maybe somebody needs it, maybe not,
link |
it's all marketing story, right?
link |
So you start with the pain, give them a painkiller,
link |
and hopefully if you can do it in the right way,
link |
you give them a superpower, an emotional superpower.
link |
That is always, and that's the way to know
link |
that you're hitting on something that's really powerful.
link |
The pain and the joy, are you always aware of the pain?
link |
So it seems like a lot of great products,
link |
it's like we do a lot of painful things
link |
and we just kind of assume that's the way it's supposed
link |
to be, like with autonomous vehicles,
link |
we'll all assume we're supposed to be driving.
link |
And it doesn't, you don't think of it as a pain.
link |
Right, well, you've habituated it away.
link |
You've habituated it away.
link |
For me, when I go to other places,
link |
living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever,
link |
and I'm not driving, I'm walking or I'm using a scooter
link |
or what have you, different thing,
link |
and you go, oh my God, when you left that environment,
link |
because everyone else is driving all the time,
link |
you're like, that's what you do.
link |
And you find out there's other ways of living
link |
and there's freedom when you get rid of that,
link |
you're like, oh my God, I didn't know
link |
that this was so much better.
link |
So there's something in the book that's called out
link |
and I deemed it the virus of doubt.
link |
And what the virus of doubt is, is when there's pain
link |
and it's been habituated away,
link |
you use the right marketing messages
link |
to bring people back to that initial experience they had
link |
or the initial experience that they had of that pain.
link |
Do you remember when the first time you did blah
link |
and it felt like this, right?
link |
And then you reawaken that habituated pain
link |
and people, and it becomes visceral
link |
and then they're like, oh, yes, I hate that.
link |
And then you go, now I have the painkiller
link |
and the joy for you.
link |
That's when it all comes together and it goes.
link |
Let me, on this, on the pain and the joy
link |
that's brilliantly put, you mentioned selling
link |
and marketing, right?
link |
Marketing dollars.
link |
I have a love, hate relationship with marketing,
link |
like with a lot of things that require artistic genius.
link |
To me, the best marketing, I suppose,
link |
is the product itself and then word of mouth.
link |
So like create a thing that people love.
link |
Oh, absolutely, that's fundamental.
link |
Yeah, so any other marketing requires genius
link |
to be any extra thing.
link |
Because to me, I don't, yeah, maybe you can,
link |
by way of question, I'm just speaking off the top
link |
of my head as a consumer, what is great marketing?
link |
What does it take to reveal the pain
link |
and the joy of a thing?
link |
It all starts at the beginning.
link |
And let me give you, I'm gonna give you a couple
link |
of different ways of looking at it, okay?
link |
And again, we might go a little long here.
link |
So just stay tuned in.
link |
So the first thing is.
link |
Start at the beginning.
link |
Let's start at the beginning.
link |
In the early part of my career, like General Magic
link |
and Philips and what have you,
link |
and especially when I was a teenager,
link |
when I was making my own chips and stuff like that,
link |
I really worried about just putting cool things together.
link |
I'm like that, when I put those two cool things together
link |
as an engineer, you go, that's cool.
link |
And then I would talk to the other friends
link |
who might be geeks too, and they go, yeah, that's cool.
link |
Because we knew the bits, so we put them together
link |
and that's a new way of doing it.
link |
And you're like, wow, that's all what?
link |
Why are you doing this?
link |
We know what we're doing, but we don't know
link |
why we're doing it, because we're not articulating it
link |
for ourselves, because it's just something
link |
we're like putting it together and like, yeah, that's cool
link |
because we think we're solving some problem we have,
link |
but we're not really articulating it.
link |
So what normally happens, and this happens
link |
because we invest in so many companies around the world,
link |
you have these brilliant engineers, designers,
link |
scientists, researchers, they put together these what's.
link |
And then they develop it, develop it, develop it.
link |
And then at the end, they call in marketing
link |
and say, now tell a story about this
link |
and let's get it out to the world, okay?
link |
What happens then is marketing is like,
link |
well, why do people need this?
link |
Tell us why people need it.
link |
And so they create a story around this product,
link |
but the product was born out of what's, not why's.
link |
And so they start telling, marketing starts telling a story
link |
and it turns out to be a fictional story usually.
link |
They say, oh, this is going to do these things.
link |
The product comes in as delivered.
link |
And it falls flat on its face
link |
because the marketing doesn't match the product
link |
because they weren't both created
link |
at the beginning together, right?
link |
There are what's when you create a product,
link |
but there's a lot more why's
link |
and the why's help inform the what's.
link |
And the why's also inform the marketing.
link |
So that's what you mean deeply
link |
at we should start at the beginning.
link |
So the designer should be also the marketer.
link |
The engineer should be the marketer.
link |
Stop impressing the geek next to you.
link |
What is the superpower you're bringing
link |
or the pain you're killing for the end customer, right?
link |
Now let's contrast that.
link |
Think about a movie.
link |
A movie starts with a treatment.
link |
It has an audience.
link |
This has the audience.
link |
Here's the characters.
link |
Here's the storyline, the plot.
link |
Here's the arc of the story, right?
link |
It pulls that all out.
link |
Then there's a script that's written.
link |
And that script is then produced.
link |
And then you add all the flourishes
link |
and what have you music and graphics
link |
and what have you, right?
link |
And then it comes out
link |
and then there's the marketing of the movie.
link |
And that story was created at the beginning.
link |
What you need to do if you're gonna do a great product
link |
is create that treatment for your product.
link |
And I call that the press release.
link |
Do the press release like the treatment.
link |
Who's the audience?
link |
What features do you have?
link |
What pains are you solving for people?
link |
Have the virus of doubt there to remind them
link |
what pains they have and why you're solving them.
link |
The price, all of those things.
link |
And you use that as the bar, the measuring stick
link |
for what you do during development.
link |
Because what happens that along the route, you know this.
link |
Oh, we're not gonna be able
link |
to get that feature done on time.
link |
Throw that one overboard.
link |
We gotta hit the, we have to hit the date.
link |
Oh, we're not sure this product's right yet.
link |
Add another feature.
link |
Add another feature creep, right?
link |
If you don't have that story
link |
you know you're gonna tell at the beginning,
link |
you don't have that bar, right?
link |
And then at the end, you don't know when you're done
link |
if you don't have that story.
link |
So you can actually look at that press release.
link |
You know, you change it over time, that draft.
link |
But then when you're done, you know the what's and the whys.
link |
You have all the things, the audience and everything.
link |
And then you can give that to marketing and say,
link |
well, and marketing has been along the way, let's be clear.
link |
But then everybody's in sync.
link |
And that's when you can tell a cohesive,
link |
non fictional story about,
link |
and the product delivers on that story
link |
or hopefully over delivers on that story.
link |
So in the drafting from the beginning
link |
to the end of the press release,
link |
what does a successful team look like?
link |
Who's part of the draft?
link |
Is it engineers, designers?
link |
What's the purpose of a marketing department
link |
in a company, small, let's say small company,
link |
but more than two people?
link |
So from where does the why come from?
link |
Should it always come from the designer
link |
or should there be a marketing person
link |
that yeah, steps in and ask the question.
link |
So I'll just keep asking random questions.
link |
No, these are great questions.
link |
So, cause you're just like, I'm like,
link |
I can't wait to tell you the answer.
link |
So it's in the book as well,
link |
but you have to separate out
link |
the various functions of marketing.
link |
That's what I thought, I was like,
link |
marketing's marketing, and it's really not.
link |
There's so many disciplines,
link |
just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical, software,
link |
and even software, it's cloud services,
link |
firmware applications,
link |
marketing has that much diversity as well.
link |
Okay, and you have to honor that.
link |
And so there is marketing communications like PR, press,
link |
there is social marketing,
link |
there is a marketing creative, right?
link |
There's marketing activation,
link |
but there's another thing that also comes out
link |
and people confuse it with marketing,
link |
which is called product marketing or product management.
link |
And product management or product marketing
link |
is the voice of the customer.
link |
They're the person who sits there and listens
link |
to what's going on in the competition, in the marketplace,
link |
understanding the needs and those pains of the customer,
link |
and they're representing them in every single meeting
link |
so things don't get off track, right?
link |
So that, and they're creating the messages,
link |
not the marketing.
link |
What happens is there's messages
link |
that product marketing creates,
link |
like those are the deep messages,
link |
like we need to save 20% of energy, let's say, right?
link |
And then marketing turns that into something
link |
that's with creative and everything
link |
and brings that message across.
link |
Maybe it doesn't say that,
link |
but it comes maybe visually or some other way.
link |
So product management does that
link |
and holds that press release along the route
link |
and making sure that we're tracking.
link |
And then also marketing is tracking with that press release
link |
to make sure they're not telling a fictional story, right?
link |
Because they can also add extra adjectives or something,
link |
and then the product can't deliver that.
link |
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
link |
Keeps everybody in check.
link |
It has to be grounded to the press release, to the raws.
link |
Right, to the customer needs, right?
link |
Cause they're always representing the customer.
link |
So you have to have a product manager.
link |
Typically that's the founder, right?
link |
And then over time you hire a product management team
link |
to then really watch over this the whole way.
link |
And they are talking to customer support.
link |
They're talking to engineering, they're talking to design,
link |
they're talking to sales and marketing.
link |
And they are always in the mix.
link |
And it's the hardest thing to hire for.
link |
So they have this very important job
link |
of developing and maintaining the why.
link |
Why is it the hardest to hire for?
link |
Because you have to understand,
link |
first, nobody reports to you.
link |
So you're alone and you have to build great ties
link |
with all of these different functions.
link |
You have to understand what they do,
link |
be empathetic with what they do.
link |
And you have to project the customer's empathy
link |
or empathy for the customer to them and tell them why
link |
and why this customer needs this, why this doesn't work.
link |
And so that they learn more.
link |
They're not just doing,
link |
but they learn about the customer's point of view
link |
and sit in there and stand in their shoes
link |
to be able to then make better decisions
link |
on the engineering details or the operational details,
link |
customer support details.
link |
So they understand that if they're not the customer
link |
that it's intended for,
link |
they start to live through their eyes
link |
and see through their eyes of that customer
link |
so they make better decisions.
link |
And there's probably fascinating, beautiful tensions
link |
between that and sort of the engineers.
link |
Sort of the developing the what.
link |
Which makes it an extra hard job, I'm sure.
link |
Can I ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question
link |
on the one subfield of marketing you mentioned,
link |
How do I ask this?
link |
I can hear your struggle in your sigh.
link |
Why or do the comms and PR folks sometimes
link |
kill the heart and soul of the magic
link |
that makes a company or is that wrong to say?
link |
Give me an example.
link |
I will say the spirit of the example,
link |
which is it feels like often the jobs of communications
link |
is to provide caution.
link |
It almost works together with legal to say.
link |
Yeah, we probably should not say this.
link |
Let's be careful, let's be careful.
link |
Now, that makes sense except in this modern world,
link |
authenticity is extremely valuable
link |
and revealing the beauty that is in the engineering,
link |
the beauty of the ideas, the chaos of the ideas,
link |
I think requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree.
link |
And I just find that, boy, to push back on myself,
link |
I think it's an extremely difficult job
link |
because people hold you responsible
link |
if you're doing communications when you take risks.
link |
And especially when they fail.
link |
So it's a difficult job,
link |
so I understand why people become cautious,
link |
but to me, communications is about taking big risks
link |
and throwing caution to the wind at its best
link |
because your job is to communicate in the long term,
link |
communicate the genius, the joy,
link |
the genius of the product.
link |
And that sometimes is a tension with caution.
link |
Sorry, so because I've gotten the chance
link |
to meet a lot of very interesting people
link |
and interesting engineering teams and so on,
link |
I look at what they're doing
link |
and I look at what's being communicated
link |
and it's just, there's a mismatch
link |
because the communication is a lot more boring.
link |
It's like, there's something very like,
link |
just straight up boring
link |
about the way they're communicating because of caution.
link |
Okay, you have just teed me up for another diatribe, okay?
link |
I'm gonna get on my podium here.
link |
Yeah, it all comes out of the leader.
link |
If the leader doesn't know how to storytell
link |
or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling,
link |
then you get even more conservatism
link |
from the PR and communications folks
link |
because they're always,
link |
so if you have a, not a bold leader,
link |
they're always going to be a filter, right?
link |
They're always gonna try to smooth things out
link |
and take off the rough edges and try,
link |
so they're gonna be even more,
link |
if you have a conservative messaging leader,
link |
you're gonna have an even more
link |
conservative communications department.
link |
Because they wanna keep their jobs.
link |
Okay, it's really simple.
link |
They gotta keep their jobs.
link |
If they say one wrong thing, it could be the end of it.
link |
So if you have very conservative leader,
link |
they're going to be even more conservative.
link |
If you have a bold leader,
link |
they'll always take a little more conservative bent,
link |
but you're still gonna have bold communications.
link |
Yeah, that's brilliant.
link |
Okay, so it starts with the leader.
link |
when you think about the messages
link |
and the joy and revealing things, right?
link |
Many of these leaders don't tell great stories.
link |
So what we do at FutureShape, our investment firm,
link |
is we take those scientists all of,
link |
and the great minds and everything,
link |
and what do we surround them with?
link |
Marketing and communication people
link |
and storytellers to give them the confidence
link |
to tell a much broader story
link |
about the impacts of what they're creating
link |
and how big the global change can be
link |
with those technologies.
link |
Because usually they don't,
link |
those leaders who created those technologies,
link |
they don't really know how to communicate really well
link |
and they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak.
link |
Yeah, so it's interesting
link |
because stories, I'm a huge fan of stories.
link |
Have you ever read the book, Story?
link |
You should read this.
link |
And this is what I read when I was 26.
link |
Story by Robert McKee,
link |
and it's a book all about the ways to do script writing,
link |
the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy,
link |
and how it's been shown over millennia,
link |
how these stories are done.
link |
It's a fascinating thing
link |
and it gives you an insight to,
link |
and it's written for obviously Hollywood
link |
and movies and things like that,
link |
but it's incredibly useful for what we do
link |
as designers and engineers and technology leaders.
link |
There's some aspect in this modern day
link |
where this podcast and so on,
link |
what I love is the humans behind the story too.
link |
So some part of the story is the human beings.
link |
That's not just about painting a beautiful story
link |
that's flawless, it's...
link |
It's being a dreamer, like overpromising,
link |
and then failing, so changing your mind,
link |
realizing sort of just the whole of it.
link |
And then also being like,
link |
depending of course where your personality is,
link |
embracing the full richness and the complexity
link |
of the personality of the leader
link |
or the different people involved.
link |
I mean, that's all part of it.
link |
Like you can't just present this beautiful,
link |
always pleasant view of a product.
link |
There has to be this humanity that's part of it,
link |
the full roller coaster of the humanity,
link |
which I think has been very difficult for companies
link |
to embrace, I'm not sure why.
link |
Maybe it's just an old school way of doing things
link |
that people think that we present a facade
link |
and we generate the story and we tell the story
link |
as opposed to sort of...
link |
Well, we learn, especially in the technical world,
link |
we present the story as it's faster, it's smaller,
link |
it's longer battery life, it's bits and numbers
link |
and metrics, that resonates sure with other geeks.
link |
What resonates with the planet?
link |
It's all emotions, right?
link |
And if you can bring a great emotional story,
link |
but with a great rational story at the same time,
link |
why you should do this, and it's like,
link |
oh my God, you bring that superpower, that joy,
link |
then it all hangs.
link |
And there's personal drama too, like the human.
link |
Right, here's the pain I had, remember that thing.
link |
And I mean, you're obviously this extremely well known
link |
human being that's behind a lot of these great inventions
link |
of the technology world, but you're also just
link |
a human being, you have clearly a distinct personality
link |
that comes through, like your eyes light up,
link |
just the way you communicate, it's you.
link |
Some people are more stoic, some people are,
link |
like Elon is all over the place, the chaos.
link |
Steve Jobs, I mean, it's hard to put into words,
link |
I can be poetic and so on, but there's a very distinct,
link |
comes on stage, you know, that personality is right there.
link |
That's not just the product, that's something else too.
link |
And like, you have to reveal that a little bit,
link |
and allow people to reveal that a little bit,
link |
and just let them be themselves.
link |
Well, look, why do I think your podcast is so amazing?
link |
Because you are yourself.
link |
You talk about yourself, you bring your emotions into it,
link |
and you don't modulate it, you're you, right?
link |
It comes through, it's true, it feels right.
link |
You are you, you dress the way you wanna dress,
link |
you say this is me, and this is all of me,
link |
and you become vulnerable, right?
link |
It's much easier to do a podcast like that
link |
than run a very large company,
link |
where a lot of people would feel the pain if you make,
link |
if you say something stupid.
link |
So it's much more easy to be afraid and be careful.
link |
But nevertheless, the same applies.
link |
Authenticity and risk taking is the only way, unfortunately,
link |
to be successful in the long term.
link |
Let me, just because we're jumping all over the place,
link |
just link on the iPod.
link |
One of the great designs, broadly speaking,
link |
in the word design of all time,
link |
what does it take to design a great product?
link |
If you look, we can jump around, we can look at Nest,
link |
we can look at iPod, we can look at iPhone,
link |
and many of the great things you design,
link |
but just looking at that one transformational thing,
link |
what can you say about what it takes to do a great design?
link |
Or maybe what makes a great design?
link |
Well, we talked about a painkiller,
link |
and we talked about the,
link |
we talked about that joy that comes from it.
link |
But then there's the behind the scenes,
link |
there's the team, there's everyone who brings it to life,
link |
brings that story to life.
link |
If you have a great story, and you know the why,
link |
then you can communicate it
link |
to those people who are working on it.
link |
And then they bring their own thing into it, right?
link |
It becomes emotional for them too.
link |
It's not just a job, it's a mission.
link |
And so many of the details that are born
link |
out of these early prototypes,
link |
these things that you still haven't given full form to,
link |
there may be 80% done, or maybe even 60% done,
link |
but you can see enough in there.
link |
Then you take those great ideas,
link |
and you give the whys to the team.
link |
And so that they feel it, they can understand it,
link |
then they bring their best and their ideas to the table,
link |
and then you can select from those,
link |
and you can then start to, you know,
link |
it could be just a pixel change.
link |
It could be a slight change on how you do the audio
link |
for the feedback, or maybe a curve on the mechanics,
link |
or something like that, of how it feels.
link |
Because everybody brings themselves
link |
trying to feel this thing.
link |
They're not just doing something
link |
that someone told them to do.
link |
If you can instill that mission and that why into that team,
link |
it doesn't have to be big, you get, I feel, a 10X.
link |
Everyone comes together in a special way,
link |
and the magic is created.
link |
You put the love into it,
link |
the customer feels the love on the other side.
link |
So the, making the team,
link |
like taking them in onto the vision, onto the why,
link |
now they feel, all the little details we think of,
link |
the original iPod, and all the many generations after,
link |
all those little details are,
link |
in them is the emotion of the engineers and the designers,
link |
that working nights, struggling, this isn't right.
link |
Like you said, changing little pixels here and there,
link |
changing the shape of things, changing the feel of things,
link |
like the materials, the, I don't know,
link |
just everything on the software part of the packaging.
link |
Then the words on the packaging.
link |
The words on the website.
link |
And always jumping from the very specific detail problem
link |
to the big picture, how the thing feels, the overall.
link |
Always jumping back and forth.
link |
What does it look like to the customer?
link |
How are we gonna implement it in the most efficient way?
link |
Because a lot of the stuff you don't know is,
link |
some of that stuff is hacked in, maybe hacked in at the end.
link |
It may not be the most beautiful architecture
link |
that a geek would look at and go, oh my God,
link |
that's so beautiful, because we can look at it
link |
and visualize this incredible software stack
link |
or hardware stack.
link |
Some of it could just be hacked in.
link |
You make it better over time,
link |
but it was that brilliant thing and we gotta get that in,
link |
because that's the way you do it now,
link |
and we'll make it more efficient later.
link |
Maybe this is a good moment to draw a distinction
link |
between design and engineering,
link |
and does such a distinction even exist?
link |
Are these distinct disciplines or no?
link |
I don't think they're distinct.
link |
I think they're different types of design.
link |
I think there's always this idea of this,
link |
oh, on the mount, designer, and it all comes down
link |
and it all flows down like some magic.
link |
There are electrical designers, there's AI designers,
link |
there is data scientist designers.
link |
Everybody has design, and there's a chapter in the book
link |
all about that, actually.
link |
That it's not just you go to the mount
link |
and it comes down and you're enlightened.
link |
It's each person brings their form of design
link |
and their craft, because if they're really good,
link |
they're artists in their own right.
link |
They're not just engineers, they're not just designers,
link |
they're artists, they're empathetic,
link |
they really wanna bring their best.
link |
A lot of the best engineers I have
link |
are not the technical, or that I've worked with,
link |
are not the technical gotta get it exactly right.
link |
They're the artists, they came from music
link |
or they came from other things, and they see that.
link |
When you work with very rigid engineers,
link |
this is the way, the only way, la la la,
link |
those are not the engineers I wanna work with.
link |
They're all like a bit artists at heart.
link |
Right, they understand the practicalness.
link |
They don't have to have the rigidity of,
link |
this is the way it's done.
link |
If you're building something new,
link |
all new and revolutionary, none of us are experts at it.
link |
And if you come with that expert mindset, just tell me,
link |
and I can give you a story,
link |
I should probably give you that story,
link |
about that if you come with the expert and I'm the expert,
link |
when you're doing something no one's ever done before,
link |
I don't want you on the team.
link |
Because we all are learning about something
link |
that has never been in existence before.
link |
And we have to bring that level of vulnerability
link |
and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things
link |
throughout the team.
link |
So you want people that are able to have like
link |
beginner's mind or whatever, like don't come in as an expert.
link |
Okay, here's the story.
link |
No, I can tell it for sure.
link |
So, you know, you asked what were these risks,
link |
you know, like on the early iPod,
link |
and there was a few big risks.
link |
Like one, and this doesn't go in the story,
link |
but like putting rotating media in your pocket
link |
and it could drop at any time,
link |
what happens there?
link |
And like you can damage,
link |
because the heads and the hard drive media are so close,
link |
it smacks, it's dead, right?
link |
So that was one big one, like, holy shit, right?
link |
So that was something we,
link |
and we had to design special tests and everything
link |
and special software on that.
link |
But then there was another one,
link |
which was at the early days,
link |
the way the first generations of iPods,
link |
I had to hack the IDE interface to the hard drives.
link |
So I was like, okay, what we're gonna use
link |
is we're gonna use this chip for hard drive,
link |
hard drive, to make a hard drive,
link |
you had to have a chip that did FireWire to a hard drive.
link |
Okay, and then that would become a portable hard drive.
link |
Well, then we had the MP3 player
link |
and the user interface and everything.
link |
So there was times when it was just this hard drive
link |
and there was times when it was a MP3 player
link |
and I had to hot switch between
link |
what the hard drive thinks it was talking to, right?
link |
So designed this thing, tore it apart,
link |
did all this stuff.
link |
And I was like, you know,
link |
maybe I'm gonna screw up IDE and there's something,
link |
there's some holes I'm gonna see.
link |
So I go, who's the expert at Apple
link |
who understands IDE and everything?
link |
So this person comes over,
link |
the mass storage specialist comes over
link |
and I put on the whiteboard and say,
link |
here's how we're gonna do this thing
link |
and here's the commands and da da,
link |
and this is how it hot switches and everything.
link |
He's like, that's never gonna work.
link |
And I was like, what?
link |
It was never gonna work.
link |
I said, well, let me go over here
link |
and show you this right here.
link |
I have it prototyped and it's been working for days.
link |
I just wanna see if you're gonna have it,
link |
find any holes in the thing.
link |
Didn't even, and he just stormed out of the room
link |
and never even, right?
link |
I've had a lot of experience like this with experts.
link |
Like for example, this ridiculous room.
link |
I had a person and there's many people like this
link |
that I showed them, here's the situation, you know.
link |
For acoustics or something?
link |
For acoustics, yeah.
link |
They're like, no, no, no, no, this is horrible.
link |
This is not, this is not gonna work.
link |
The reflection, the curtains are not gonna stop.
link |
There's a bunch of terminology they're telling me.
link |
It's a similar kind of situation as the ID,
link |
which I was like, no, listen,
link |
I just need to see is there major issues
link |
and they're like a low hanging fruit that are fixable
link |
and major holes I should be aware of.
link |
$100,000 to upgrade.
link |
To upgrade for what exact purpose?
link |
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
link |
The why, the focusing on the story, on the content,
link |
on the, the why, the why, the why.
link |
And that actually I've experienced that unfortunately
link |
in the artistic realms too, which is like photography
link |
and videography, cinematography.
link |
It's interesting, I talk to photographers
link |
that are quote unquote experts.
link |
And it's always about so much of the focus
link |
is on the equipment.
link |
The equipment behind the sensors and the lighting.
link |
And it's like, all right, all right.
link |
But what about, what about the feeling
link |
of the story you create visually?
link |
The difference between a movie that's really well told
link |
and it doesn't have all the effects and everything
link |
versus maybe some of the superhero movies
link |
we see all the time, which is good luck if there's a story
link |
but man, there's a lot of action and CGI, right?
link |
And there's also value to those, right?
link |
Can tell a better story
link |
but you have to have a good story to begin with.
link |
But if you're focused on the story,
link |
I guess you need to start with a story.
link |
You need to start with a story.
link |
And if you bring in experts,
link |
they can often be detrimental, I guess, to the why.
link |
They're too good at doing the what.
link |
Well, you can bring in experts for why.
link |
There's lots of experts for why.
link |
Too many times we get experts for what.
link |
And then they only focus on the what.
link |
And so they come with the specs and feeds
link |
and the numbers and all the other stuff.
link |
But what you're really asking for is I need somebody
link |
about the why and understanding
link |
what we're trying to get done here
link |
and fitting the what's into that why, right?
link |
That's why I do think that one of the qualities
link |
that I really enjoy for people to work with
link |
is like humility for a particular problem
link |
when you approach it.
link |
Basically, I don't know how to solve this
link |
but we're going to figure it out.
link |
As opposed to, oh, I've solved this thing many, many times
link |
before I know exactly what to do.
link |
Humility before the chaos.
link |
So having an open mind that this is going to require
link |
a totally new way of doing things.
link |
It's a really nice quality to see.
link |
You're one of the fascinating humans
link |
in the history of Silicon Valley.
link |
Steve is another one of those.
link |
So those two humans came together for a time
link |
What was it like working with Steve Jobs?
link |
What aspect of his behavior and personality,
link |
let's say, brought out the best in you?
link |
Pushing you, really pushing you,
link |
relentless on the details,
link |
challenging you for the right reasons.
link |
It wasn't bullying, it wasn't demeaning.
link |
He would critique the work, not judge the person,
link |
at least not in front of them.
link |
Or inside of a, you know, in front of a group
link |
or anything like that.
link |
I know it was really that attention to detail.
link |
And he, when he would make a decision, you know,
link |
there are, when you make the first version of anything,
link |
something revolutionary,
link |
there are a lot of opinion based decisions.
link |
And there's only one or two people, three people
link |
who hold those opinion based decisions
link |
and what they should be.
link |
And when you have those opinions
link |
and you're trying to work with the team
link |
to implement those decisions,
link |
you have to really tell the why of those decisions.
link |
Just don't go do it, but why it's there.
link |
So you can feel part of that decision.
link |
You can understand what were the trade offs
link |
of the different other answers to that opinion, right?
link |
And say, this is the reason why we picked the route we picked
link |
because it's this for the customer
link |
or this for the whole world story, what have you.
link |
So that you felt really good
link |
because a lot of times most people
link |
want a data driven decision,
link |
but with the ones you don't get data, right?
link |
Maybe in a B2B, you could a little bit
link |
cause you can talk to customers,
link |
but you can't do that with a consumer product.
link |
V1, version one, B2B, business to business
link |
versus what's the alternative?
link |
Business to consumer, V1.
link |
Okay, we're just defining some terms.
link |
Yes, you're absolutely.
link |
And when you say data driven decisions versus what?
link |
Opinion based decisions.
link |
So like gut, you have to use, you don't have any.
link |
You can't fall back on any data or any previous history
link |
to kind of inform you of what's going on, right?
link |
And so if you look at most companies who are paralyzed
link |
and cannot make new innovations and new products,
link |
it's because they're trying to turn,
link |
and this is what I saw at Phillips,
link |
they're trying to turn opinion based decisions
link |
into data driven decisions so they don't lose their jobs.
link |
So if you look at management consulting,
link |
management consulting is all about
link |
taking those opinion based decisions,
link |
giving them to someone else to turn into data
link |
that comes back to them and says,
link |
they can blame the management consultants
link |
when something goes wrong,
link |
as opposed to it wasn't me, right?
link |
When you need to have to tell that story,
link |
you have to understand that, especially V1,
link |
you need to be able to articulate
link |
those opinion based decisions and you need to own them.
link |
And if you fail with some of them, you didn't get it right,
link |
you then own them and fix them and move on, right?
link |
Version one of the iPod wasn't perfect.
link |
Version one of the iPhone wasn't perfect.
link |
We got a lot of opinion based decisions wrong.
link |
But as you go through that, because you got more data,
link |
because V2, you had data on those original opinions
link |
and then you were able to then modulate off of that, right?
link |
And you'll still have new opinions
link |
because those are differentiators
link |
that we call differentiators,
link |
the things that move the product forward in its evolution.
link |
But at the revolution stage,
link |
opinions, opinions, opinions, no data.
link |
And so you have this discussion, you and Steve
link |
in the stage and the whole team with opinions.
link |
And there you have to be harsh.
link |
And I wouldn't say harsh,
link |
but you have to be very determined, right?
link |
You know, there are two real opinion based decisions
link |
that happened on the iPhone.
link |
One was the keyboard.
link |
Should we have a hardboard keyboard
link |
or should we have a virtual keyboard?
link |
The Blackberry was the number one
link |
productivity messaging device of its time.
link |
It was called a Crackberry for a reason
link |
because people loved it because it was easy to type
link |
and they could get their work done.
link |
But when you're saying we're gonna move from that,
link |
everyone's talking about that in the market
link |
and you say we're gonna move to a virtual keyboard
link |
and it's not gonna work as well as the hardware keyboard,
link |
that's an opinion based decision, right?
link |
Because the data is telling you
link |
all the best sales are over here.
link |
God, that takes guts.
link |
It takes guts, but you have to look at it
link |
from a different point of view.
link |
And this is how I learned to come to understand this
link |
because I had been building virtual keyboards before
link |
and I knew the goodness and the badness in them, right?
link |
But he was like, look, those are productivity devices.
link |
We're making it, ours is born out of an entertainment device
link |
and productivity, right?
link |
We need to show full screen videos.
link |
We are gonna have apps, not apps, but our apps,
link |
the Apple apps, cause there were no app store yet,
link |
are gonna take over the whole screen.
link |
You want a full screen web browser.
link |
You don't want one that's like half of the device
link |
is just a keyboard.
link |
Maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance.
link |
So we want that part of the screen to change
link |
based on the tool you may need at the time.
link |
And maybe it's just full view, right?
link |
So you have to go and understand
link |
it's a different type of device,
link |
just cause that's that and it's successful for that reason,
link |
the crackberry for the keyboard.
link |
That's not the only thing you're gonna do with this device
link |
cause people only did messaging
link |
and maybe a few phone calls, right?
link |
This was gonna be so much more.
link |
It was gonna be an entertainment web browsing device.
link |
So you wanted those tools to go away,
link |
but it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard.
link |
So that's an opinion.
link |
But let me give you another opinion based decision
link |
that got turned around before it shipped.
link |
Steve said, no SIM slot.
link |
I don't want any slots.
link |
We're gonna make it very pure.
link |
Johnny was like, of course, no slots.
link |
And we all looked around and go, that doesn't work.
link |
You can't do that.
link |
Well, why does Varite?
link |
And then he would always, and this was the magic of Steve,
link |
like when you said, no, that doesn't work,
link |
you'd go, well, why does Verizon not have any SIM slots?
link |
They showed that you can do a mobile phone
link |
with no SIM slots.
link |
And you're like, okay, here we go.
link |
And so a few days later, we come back with,
link |
so product marketing, voice of the customer, engineering,
link |
we all come back with all the data
link |
showing how many data networks and mobile networks
link |
required SIM cards versus did not and what the trends were.
link |
And so we showed the data and that killed the,
link |
or excuse me, brought back the SIM slot
link |
on the original iPhone.
link |
Because we're like, because he was just like,
link |
we're gonna tell AT&T to not use a SIM, right?
link |
We're gonna just tell them to do it differently, right?
link |
if we want this thing to go anywhere around the world,
link |
you wanna put that friction in.
link |
People are gonna move from place to place.
link |
They have different SIMs
link |
because of the prices and all that stuff.
link |
We had to show all of that data.
link |
And then that opinion based decision got turned
link |
into a data driven decision.
link |
And the SIM slot obviously showed up.
link |
So those are two very, at the very same time, right?
link |
Opinion can hold and so can data overrule opinion
link |
when data does exist for a V1.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
you don't know what the right answer is.
link |
So doing no SIM card slot
link |
may have been the right decision.
link |
Because maybe if that was the decision,
link |
then like many times throughout Apple's history,
link |
you basically changed the tide of how technology is done.
link |
Absolutely, you never know.
link |
Apple started WiFi.
link |
People don't understand WiFi came out of there.
link |
There was no WiFi in 2001.
link |
Apple started WiFi.
link |
And then everyone else got on board.
link |
If you look at now where we're going,
link |
we're going to phones without SIM slots.
link |
Cause we have eSIMs, right?
link |
And now the SIM slots becoming legacy, legacy.
link |
It's a legacy port.
link |
That legacy port will probably be gone
link |
by six, maybe 10 years.
link |
I'm pretty sure of that.
link |
Because it's so much easier for carriers.
link |
They don't have to have physical things to go out and right.
link |
So right now it's just the early days,
link |
but it will happen and it will go its way.
link |
It'll fall away, but it will take time.
link |
You just couldn't do it back then.
link |
So timing is essential here, but at the end of the day,
link |
it's opinions and that's where the genius is.
link |
Sometimes the data tells you one thing,
link |
but the data at the end of the day does represent the past.
link |
And the future may be different than the past.
link |
Sometimes there's wisdom in the past
link |
and sometimes it's actually representative
link |
of something that should be overcome
link |
and progress looks like leaving that stuff behind.
link |
Like the headphone jack.
link |
I mean that when different folks were getting rid
link |
of the headphone jack, boy, I would love to be a fly
link |
in the wall of those discussions.
link |
We had that, oh, that was a discussion
link |
that happened almost every year.
link |
That was an every year,
link |
should we get rid of headphone jacks on the iPod, right?
link |
When are wireless headsets gonna happen, right?
link |
And it took years to build all the right protocols,
link |
the chips, all those things to make the experience
link |
that is the iPods today, right?
link |
To say, have the confidence,
link |
cause Bluetooth was good, but it wasn't Apple like.
link |
So that is like, we gotta make our own chips,
link |
we gotta make our own software stacks.
link |
Now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack
link |
and actually make you pay $200 more for your iPhone
link |
that you were just paying because of the headphone jack.
link |
Now we've grown our revenue,
link |
we've given a new experience to the user, right?
link |
And ta da, you know, and it's just, it's magic.
link |
And now the world's transformed to everyone,
link |
you know, moving to that, right?
link |
But it took years to understand the problem,
link |
develop the technology and not just rush it to market
link |
to get a half experience, but to get it right
link |
and refine it, then ship it.
link |
And only then after it was probably four
link |
or five years in development,
link |
just like the M1 processor, right?
link |
That was a work from 2008, right?
link |
Grinding away, grinding away, grinding away,
link |
then saying, okay, now we have the confidence
link |
we're doing our own silicon for all the iPhones
link |
and iPads and such.
link |
Now we're gonna turn to the Mac
link |
and make sure we have the best processor, right?
link |
Not just that we have the best integrated design team.
link |
And then saying we're gonna, you know,
link |
and then besting everyone, making sure the softwares
link |
and the hardware is designed at the same time,
link |
making sure the kernels, all those things
link |
are gonna use the best efficiency and then popping it out.
link |
And then it feels seamless.
link |
There were no, as far as I could tell,
link |
unless you were in real esoteric drivers
link |
or something like that, it just worked.
link |
Like the transition, it was not even a speed bump.
link |
It was not even a crack in the road.
link |
So perhaps famously Steve had a bit of a temper.
link |
Steve Jobs, would you say his particular personality
link |
in this aspect was constructive or destructive
link |
in the process of shaping these opinion based ideas?
link |
So in Build, I write a chapter called Assholes.
link |
Yes, and you lay out beautifully the types of assholes
link |
and maybe you could speak to the constructive
link |
and the destructive types of assholes.
link |
So there's really two delineations that I've found
link |
of real fundamental ones.
link |
And that is again, the why.
link |
Why do I feel this person is an asshole?
link |
They might not be.
link |
I feel this is a person who's an asshole.
link |
Are they motivated by their ego
link |
or are they motivated by their mission?
link |
Something they're trying to do
link |
and doing in service of something else, right?
link |
Sometimes those lines can be blurry,
link |
but it's usually pretty clear.
link |
When it's ego motivated, it's clear they're just trying
link |
to get up in the ranks, push people down,
link |
shove people aside.
link |
I think we saw a president do that on a stage once.
link |
I'm me and I'm the guy, right?
link |
And I'm gonna prove it by pushing everyone away
link |
and being nefarious or what have you.
link |
Either passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive,
link |
but they're doing about themselves.
link |
There's another one, which is someone who's so attentive
link |
to detail and unrelenting that they're trying to get
link |
the right things for the country.
link |
They're trying to get the right things for the customer
link |
or in service of their mission.
link |
And they wanna make sure we fulfill those things, right?
link |
And they really care.
link |
They don't micromanage all the details,
link |
but they micromanage the details where the customer,
link |
it touches the customer in some way.
link |
People who work with those types of people
link |
who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset.
link |
A lot of times it's a knee jerk reaction to go,
link |
they are an asshole.
link |
Get off my back, you're an ass, blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
Right, and you're protecting your ego
link |
because what's happening is that person
link |
is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries.
link |
They see something that we can do or you can do
link |
that you're just either not wanting to do
link |
for whatever reason, you're not confident in that.
link |
You're like, I don't wanna take the extra time
link |
and saying, no, we need to get that done and pushing you.
link |
Okay, and so when we came to those areas,
link |
it wasn't just a one on one,
link |
it could be Steve against the team going,
link |
we need glass instead of plastic
link |
on the front face of the iPhone,
link |
and we're going to do this.
link |
And we're like, God, you know, and so we did it.
link |
And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details,
link |
but he could see in our minds that we're like,
link |
yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably,
link |
but man, it's really putting us in risk.
link |
And we laid out the risks for him.
link |
And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks.
link |
We're like, we might be three months late.
link |
He's like, this is so important.
link |
We need to stay on time.
link |
You know, but it would be all the time, push, push, push.
link |
It reminds me of like kids growing up and me as growing up,
link |
you know, when your parents push you
link |
to make you grow beyond your boundaries,
link |
your personal boundaries.
link |
And you're like, God damn it, I'm so, you know,
link |
but they do it for the right reasons.
link |
Now let's see, it's not bullying.
link |
It's not about bullying.
link |
It's not about demeaning.
link |
It's about either pushing you to another part of the mission
link |
that needs to get done, or it's about critiquing your work,
link |
but not judging you.
link |
Well, there's a lot to say there.
link |
So one, it's fascinating.
link |
It really is fascinating.
link |
And you laid out a very nice picture,
link |
but it does feel like there's sometimes gray areas,
link |
which is why it makes all of this very complicated.
link |
So one question I have for you
link |
in terms of glass on the iPhone.
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How important is it that like Steve in that case is right?
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Because I could argue each side.
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It seems like in one sense,
link |
just having a strong vision and opinion
link |
is already going to make everybody grow,
link |
even if it turns out to be the wrong.
link |
As long as you are sort of standing your ground,
link |
you know, Napoleon invading Russia or something
link |
in the winter, like it's just not gonna be a good idea.
link |
It's not a good idea, but I'm gonna hold to that.
link |
And then once you decide, you go all in.
link |
And then from that, even if the whole team knows
link |
it's the wrong decision, just sticking by it,
link |
powering through, you will learn through the pain of it.
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Like everybody will learn.
link |
So that's one side.
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The other is maybe the asshole, the vision driven asshole
link |
gets to be more and more of an asshole
link |
if they have a track record of through that process,
link |
having built people up, having made the correct decisions.
link |
They can't, they're not allowed to be an asshole.
link |
They're in rare air and no one can challenge them.
link |
Steve was never that.
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That's the great thing.
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He was never unchallengeable.
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You could challenge him.
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Now the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this.
link |
So at the beginning of the project,
link |
well before we were going,
link |
we had always had these things about plastic front iPods,
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these kinds of things, scratches and all that stuff.
link |
So we said, oh, we're gonna have a glass or a plastic,
link |
a cover for the display.
link |
Cause the display was glass underneath it.
link |
We argued back and forth about glass versus plastic.
link |
And then we all landed together on plastic.
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Okay, the original decision was plastic.
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And the reasons were, okay, we don't wanna make a mistake.
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Glass can break, you know,
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people drop them all the time.
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So we don't wanna have a fragile device
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because you're gonna be using even more
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than a music player, right?
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And you're gonna be holding your head
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and putting it in your pocket and misses and all that stuff.
link |
So we went down the road with plastic.
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When it was shown, when the product was shown
link |
at Mac World in 2007, the first time, that was plastic.
link |
We had just enough of them in the field at the time.
link |
We started to start seeing light scratches on the plastic.
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Reviewers who didn't have the device yet,
link |
cause it was behind glass.
link |
If you remember 2007, the Jesus phone comes up
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and no one could even touch them.
link |
You could just look at it
link |
in this beautiful museum quality box.
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Like it came from the future or whatever, the past.
link |
And it was just plastic.
link |
And it was like, oh, and you just looked
link |
and that was all you got.
link |
But then people said, well, what screen is,
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what covers on that, you know, reviewers who knew better,
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you know, it's plastic.
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And they were like, really?
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And so there was enough of a doubt there.
link |
And then when we started to do it,
link |
and then Steve changed the frame of reference
link |
of the question or of the result
link |
of what the customer would think.
link |
And he was like, if we designed it with plastic,
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with plastic and it's in their pocket all the time
link |
and it gets scratched by coins, slightly scratched
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or by keys or something like that.
link |
That is a design problem.
link |
We need to fix the problem.
link |
If they go off and drop it or even slightly drop it
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and it cracks, it's the customer's fault.
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And they have much lower,
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they have less likelihood to complain.
link |
Yes, they'll complain,
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but they're part of that, of that failure.
link |
Oh, that's fascinating.
link |
There's truth to that.
link |
Because then they were part of why it failed.
link |
Whereas the design, they didn't do anything wrong.
link |
It was just sitting in their pocket and it's scratching
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and that's normal use.
link |
Abnormal use has been dropped.
link |
And we're like, oh, now we get it.
link |
And so we all moved to that mindset
link |
when you framed the problem and the solution in that way
link |
versus the original framing
link |
where we all landed on plastic.
link |
So, and then he was unrelenting on that,
link |
but we all had moved and we had moved mindset
link |
and we understood the why and we marshaled together.
link |
And then by the end of June, and it was crazy,
link |
the mechanical product design teams sourcing,
link |
all of us, the partner Corning pulled together
link |
to make that happen because it was the right reason.
link |
So this, you look at these stories
link |
and you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways,
link |
but that's not usually how it all happened
link |
of like one leader was, that's not how Steve was.
link |
Now I've seen leaders who are just pounding
link |
and just had no real empathy for the team
link |
and understanding the why.
link |
And it's just, it is the way I want it, right?
link |
I am the supreme leader.
link |
That wasn't like that when.
link |
He just had a very strong opinion.
link |
Very strong opinion.
link |
But it was challengeable.
link |
It was challengeable and if you came with the right thing,
link |
you know, it was, you could modulate that,
link |
but you had to come with a team.
link |
It couldn't just be you.
link |
It had to become a team and data and to overcome
link |
because it was a very strong opinion.
link |
And there's personal quirks of character, like you said.
link |
Bad days and good days.
link |
Bad days and good days.
link |
So there's also the three options you said.
link |
You noticed that the third option is always going
link |
to be the one that's picked.
link |
And that, so that brings up another thing.
link |
You said challenge the idea, not the person.
link |
I'm somebody who has a, you know, I have a temper.
link |
I use colorful language and so on.
link |
In my private life I'm much calmer and so on.
link |
But I get, when I get really passionate
link |
with engineering teams.
link |
I've been called an asshole.
link |
And you get, I mean, I am distinctly aware
link |
that you cross lines often.
link |
There's like levels, right?
link |
You know, you could, it has to do with language
link |
and how language is heard.
link |
So for example, you could say a lot of stuff to me.
link |
You could say stuff that sounds, like, I don't know.
link |
Lex, sometimes I think you're the dumbest human
link |
on the face of the earth or something.
link |
That sounds very personal, right?
link |
But I'm not gonna take that personally.
link |
I understand what's being said.
link |
And then I also notice that there's other people
link |
that take stuff more personally.
link |
This has to do with teams and figuring out like,
link |
okay, who's going to take certain words personally
link |
and not, and you have to know.
link |
That's what makes a great coach, a great leader,
link |
a mentor, you have to like factor all that in.
link |
But it just, there's something about just being an asshole
link |
and being passionate and really driven
link |
that sometimes you do cross lines.
link |
And that's, I don't know what to do with that
link |
because it feels like it comes with the territory.
link |
Like you have, it seems like you can't just have
link |
a perfectly optimized.
link |
No, no, absolutely not.
link |
We're humans, we don't have a program.
link |
Everyone's programmed the same way to react the same way
link |
to given stimulus, right?
link |
So, you know, you said, I don't know
link |
if this was a real example, but you said,
link |
oh, you're the dumbest human on earth or whatever.
link |
I would never say that.
link |
And if someone said that to me or I saw someone else say
link |
that to another person on the team, absolutely not.
link |
That is not allowed because that's judging someone.
link |
You may be heated and you can get heated
link |
and you can say it in your intonation,
link |
but to then try to put a label on it
link |
and put a label on a person, that is not allowed.
link |
So if you let that kind of culture happen
link |
and it becomes somewhat, you know, sometimes it's ingest,
link |
you know, it has to be very much ingest
link |
and those two people have to have
link |
a really good working relationship.
link |
But other than that, I'm sorry,
link |
it's gonna be a lot more, you could say a septic
link |
in that way that you're not gonna add that stuff in,
link |
but you can do it with all other types of ways
link |
without saying that because then people who do react
link |
to that kind of language and don't have those shields
link |
because they might not have that stream confidence level
link |
that you do and you can just brush it off,
link |
that can be very cancerous in a team
link |
because people then mean that and then they see,
link |
oh, that's the right way to be.
link |
You gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that,
link |
you gotta be that change or that model
link |
that you wanna show the team.
link |
Yes, it's too, even if it doesn't affect me,
link |
it's going to affect a significant enough fraction
link |
of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part
link |
Exactly, and other people see that happen
link |
and then, oh, I guess that's acceptable, right?
link |
Just like politics in the workplace,
link |
is that acceptable or not?
link |
I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone,
link |
right, because it's just another ego driven thing.
link |
You have to set the tone as a leader
link |
for what you want your organization to be
link |
and how it gets reflected in the world
link |
and you have to uphold that and you can't,
link |
sure, you can have an excursion outside of that,
link |
but you have to go back and say, I'm sorry.
link |
You have to go and apologize, heal and said,
link |
I was not the person I wanted to be that day,
link |
This is, and even in front of the team
link |
and have that humility and say, we're all human here
link |
and just cause I'm the leader
link |
doesn't mean I don't make mistakes.
link |
So have the self awareness, apologize.
link |
And that's also part of the culture.
link |
How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer?
link |
So you've spoken about sort of what made you strong,
link |
which is he was able to challenge,
link |
he was able to push you to bring out the best.
link |
Well, I come from the technical angle, right?
link |
Deep technology, software, hardware, systems thinking,
link |
implementation, all that stuff.
link |
So I have a different bent.
link |
He wanted to be an engineer, started,
link |
but really he was much better at all the other things,
link |
the storytelling, the interfacing
link |
and being the voice of the customer
link |
and being that product marketer in a way, right?
link |
That we talked about.
link |
I grew into being the product marketing, then marketing.
link |
He came really out the other way, right?
link |
And never got really deep technically.
link |
So that's two different mindsets.
link |
One's not better or worse.
link |
It's just, that's how it is.
link |
And it takes all kinds and all kinds can do great designs.
link |
Did it manifest itself differently?
link |
Just the fact that you came from those different places.
link |
Like what, so like the discussion about glass on the iPhone
link |
was probably had a different flavor to it.
link |
When you started getting into the technical details,
link |
enough so you're getting the third order technical details
link |
and he can't argue with that anymore.
link |
Then with somebody he's like, okay.
link |
At some point he's like, I can't win this war.
link |
And he learned that very early on
link |
because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh
link |
board, the PCB was laid out.
link |
He wanted it to be beautiful on the outside
link |
and on the inside.
link |
He's like, why are all these wires running this way?
link |
Why doesn't it have all this symmetry?
link |
And we have to make it beautiful on the inside.
link |
And even the traces on the boards
link |
have to look a certain way.
link |
So the teams made the board they knew that would work.
link |
And then they made the board that the way Steve wanted it.
link |
And that didn't work.
link |
And then Steve instantly figured out like at some point
link |
don't micromanage every single detail.
link |
There's some things he doesn't know enough about.
link |
And so he would get out of that.
link |
But that was one of those instances
link |
where he pushed really hard and that's his opinion.
link |
So they said, okay, we're gonna make it
link |
a data driven decision and we're gonna make both.
link |
I'm gonna show you the results, right?
link |
And then from there, he didn't get into those details.
link |
So from that, you could have a great challenge, right?
link |
Cause then you could get those data and say,
link |
And let me show you why, or we can do that.
link |
And then Steve would go, you can't do that.
link |
And you're like, oh, we can do that.
link |
Let me show you, right?
link |
So there's certain times when you were like
link |
bringing something to reality
link |
that he didn't think could exist, right?
link |
So it was always that creative tension,
link |
that interaction that was so successful, right?
link |
I think, but there was one other fundamental thing
link |
that was different and that it graded on the team
link |
and that I made sure and I learned from to not do.
link |
And I maybe overdue now in the opposite direction,
link |
which is when there's a great idea that comes from the team,
link |
acknowledge that person and go, that is a great idea.
link |
As the leader, the opinion driven, that's a great idea.
link |
Let's build on that.
link |
Let's see if that can do that.
link |
Or it's a great idea, but not for now, put it aside.
link |
But call out when people have great ideas
link |
because it's infectious.
link |
And that means maybe not ideas that come bubble up
link |
to the customer level, but inside the organization.
link |
People like they get rewarded for their ideas
link |
and say, that's a great one.
link |
Steve was always like, you give an idea
link |
and he would go, okay, I don't know.
link |
The next day, 24 hours later,
link |
it would come back with slight modifications.
link |
I've had this genius idea, right?
link |
And it's sooner or later we'd look around the table
link |
and we'd like roll our eyes and go, here we go again.
link |
So it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit.
link |
Well, we got used to it,
link |
but later on in the team, it was just not,
link |
it doesn't want to bring the best, right?
link |
Cause if you're always like, the reaction is never,
link |
that's a genius idea.
link |
It was always like, it was either negative or neutral.
link |
Then it doesn't have that same emotional effect
link |
that you want you to bring your best.
link |
Yeah, sometimes it's fun when people get excited
link |
by just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
You kind of build on top excitement.
link |
It could be, but coupled with sort of harshness
link |
when the idea is bad and you call out the bad ideas too.
link |
So it's the good and the bad.
link |
Oh, you could say, you don't have to say bad idea.
link |
You say, maybe not now.
link |
Let's table that for later.
link |
Let's discuss it or say, that's a decent idea.
link |
But did you think about that idea this way?
link |
Not just no or yes,
link |
but let's talk about why that might not be applicable
link |
in this case so that they can learn.
link |
So the next time they bring the next idea,
link |
they can modulate and understand
link |
to start seeing through the opinion based decision makers
link |
or the databases to bring it
link |
and bring better formatted arguments or ideas
link |
so that you have better chance of success the next time.
link |
You got to train through those moments.
link |
You got to teach, those are teaching moments.
link |
I aspire to be that kind of person.
link |
I'll usually just say that idea is shit.
link |
That is the like, and then you,
link |
I remember that this brilliant person
link |
just gave that really shitty idea.
link |
So I remember to make sure the next time
link |
they give a good idea, I really compliment that good idea.
link |
But I personally, I mean, it's emotion,
link |
but I call out the really shitty ideas.
link |
But you should call it the really great ones.
link |
If you let the pendulum swing both ways,
link |
then everybody goes, he's balanced.
link |
It's always one way.
link |
Why bring any idea?
link |
I'm all about the pendulum.
link |
You got to have both, the joy and the pain.
link |
Don't you give me pain all the time.
link |
So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone.
link |
So you wanted to, not just the iPod, not just Nest.
link |
You were one of the key figures
link |
in the creation of the iPhone.
link |
What's the interesting aspects?
link |
What's the good, the bad, and the ugly
link |
of the origin story of the iPhone?
link |
Again, this is a Netflix series
link |
that spans multiple seasons.
link |
Change my flight, please.
link |
Yeah, what was the, what interesting memories
link |
you have from the finding?
link |
So the pain and the joy that was foundational
link |
to the iPod, all the CDs you had to lug around.
link |
What was the pain and the joy and the vision
link |
of the iPhone in your mind, in the mind of the team,
link |
in Steve's mind, and so on?
link |
Well, you know, there's multiple pains.
link |
You have to also look, there's not just customer pain,
link |
but there's business pain, okay?
link |
And it's about the, so Apple now is getting out
link |
of that place where it was in 2001.
link |
Now people are starting to pay attention.
link |
Apple's starting to get in the culture again.
link |
It's becoming relevant.
link |
Cash is starting to flow.
link |
iPod is 60% of that, of the revenue,
link |
total revenue of Apple doing an 85% market share.
link |
You're starting to get a wind at your back.
link |
You got confidence.
link |
Like Apple had been beaten down since probably
link |
the first time the Mac was, since the Mac,
link |
it was a beaten company ever since the Mac.
link |
So we're talking 15 years at that point, right?
link |
This is the first time you're seeing like,
link |
and Steve would proudly came in front of us and said,
link |
today I can tell you all of the employees,
link |
we are now out of debt.
link |
We paid off our debt.
link |
It was a joyous moment for him, right?
link |
And then ultimately for our team
link |
because no more debt, wonderful, right?
link |
So now what you have is you have this successful thing
link |
changing the face of Apple and you hear these
link |
heavy stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry.
link |
And it's the feature phones at that time.
link |
They're adding cameras.
link |
They're adding color displays.
link |
They're seeing the success of the iPod and going,
link |
that's just music, we have some storage.
link |
We can load music on our phones
link |
and we can do what the iPod does plus more.
link |
Boom, boom, boom, right?
link |
And you're like, and how many hundreds of millions
link |
of them are being sold at that point?
link |
It wasn't billions yet, but it was still,
link |
a hundred million, 200 million a year.
link |
iPod hadn't gotten there.
link |
It was for 20, 40, 50 million, something like that.
link |
So now you're like, okay,
link |
what are we gonna do about this Goliath
link |
who wants to take our lunch, right?
link |
The schoolyard bully.
link |
And so there was one, let's partner with them.
link |
So iTunes music store was there.
link |
All of these phones are gonna need music
link |
so they can come to the iTunes music store
link |
and get that music for those phones
link |
because it wasn't just about the hardware player
link |
It was about the software that you need on the desktop
link |
and the content that you needed to download.
link |
So now Apple had multiple legs of the stool
link |
as Steve would always refer to it.
link |
So now the mobile phone industry,
link |
okay, we're gonna work with them.
link |
They are going to make an iPod shuffle basically
link |
inside of a phone, can have 99 songs total.
link |
And they're gonna come to our store and you're gonna,
link |
I was like, okay, great.
link |
It's all gonna be well and good.
link |
And that became the Motorola rocker project.
link |
It was Apple and Motorola getting together.
link |
There's gonna be software on this smartphone
link |
or not smartphone, but feature phone
link |
to hook to iTunes to get your music.
link |
It wasn't even downloadable over a cloud or anything
link |
because that wasn't available yet.
link |
There wasn't data networks yet.
link |
It was a disaster from the beginning.
link |
Two different cultures,
link |
two different types of leadership styles,
link |
not necessarily the most competent engineers
link |
on the other side.
link |
And it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster.
link |
I watched the pains,
link |
cause luckily I didn't have to be part of it.
link |
I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins face
link |
each time we would meet.
link |
And he would be like, these guys are just like, really?
link |
Do we have to do this, Steve?
link |
And he's like, we're contractually obligated.
link |
And when it came out on stage and Steve showed it,
link |
it was maybe a one minute,
link |
Steve loves those extended, like drawn up.
link |
It might've been a one minute, two minute kind of thing.
link |
And he literally threw that phone out of his hand
link |
as fast as he could, right?
link |
Cause it was horrible.
link |
So there was the pain of we're not gonna partner.
link |
So if we can't partner with these guys,
link |
we have to become one of them to actually compete,
link |
to save the thing that is bringing Apple
link |
from that 15 years of malaise, right?
link |
So then from that, we were made a prototype
link |
of an iPod plus phone, a classic with it was an iPod,
link |
but it had a phone inside with all the music
link |
and all the other stuff.
link |
And you use your headset,
link |
wired headset to do the audio, right?
link |
There was another project at the same time
link |
cause we were doing videos in the iTunes music store,
link |
iTunes video store for music videos and movies.
link |
And it would be a full screen iPod.
link |
So instead of the classic, the way you know it,
link |
but it would be full screen
link |
and it would have a virtual click wheel.
link |
You'd have a virtual, like single touch touchscreen
link |
that you could scroll, right?
link |
Think of maybe an iPhone, like you knew it, right?
link |
And then there was a third project going on,
link |
not in, those two were going on in my team,
link |
but the third project going on
link |
was the multi touchscreen technology
link |
to drive a Mac tablet.
link |
And so that Mac tablet, that touchscreen technology,
link |
there was just way too much you had to change
link |
on the software and everything
link |
to be able to use a tablet, right?
link |
We see this all the time.
link |
Like people are like, there's not enough tablet apps today
link |
that are modified for tablet.
link |
They're just phone apps that are grown up, right?
link |
So then they would just be Mac touch stuff.
link |
So you'd have to have a whole developer community.
link |
That probably wasn't the best place
link |
to take that technology first.
link |
So you take that technology,
link |
marry it with the full screen,
link |
that technology, marry it with the full screen iPod
link |
and the phone stuff we were working
link |
because the iPod phone with a rotary dial
link |
was just like a rotary phone.
link |
We couldn't make that interface work well for data input.
link |
You put those three together.
link |
And now is where those three things
link |
that then created the form or the technology
link |
and the form inside what would become the iPhone,
link |
married with a bunch of low level software
link |
from the iPod and manufacturing software
link |
and drivers and communication stuff,
link |
combined with a very reduced Frankenstein Mac OS.
link |
And I mean that in the best way.
link |
It means it wasn't Mac OS just changed a little.
link |
It was totally, things were hacked out and changed
link |
and new code was inserted.
link |
And it really was a whole set of things
link |
from all different places to make that first iPhone OS.
link |
And then there was another team working on the apps
link |
and then another team working on the design
link |
of how it looked overall between all that stuff.
link |
So all of those things came together
link |
to create what we know as the first generation iPhone.
link |
And those are all probably fascinating
link |
engineering challenges.
link |
And great teams like creating the Frankenstein OS.
link |
That's fascinating because you're simplifying and simplifying
link |
but then you're just pulling different stuff from,
link |
and you're basically inventing,
link |
I mean, they're probably not thinking of it that way,
link |
but a new era of computing, a new kind of computer.
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It really is Frankenstein.
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Right, and you didn't have to run Mac software.
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If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time,
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like Windows and stuff, they were like,
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we need to make sure it runs Excel
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and it runs Word or something like that
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in some reduced thing.
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This was like, no, no, no, no.
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This was born out of entertainment.
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So we didn't have to go and take all the same application,
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you know, all those other ones was about compatibility.
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This was about a whole new way of being.
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What did you think about the Steve Jobs presentation
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of the iPhone, the sort of, the first iPhone, you know.
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Phone, internet communicator, and the iPod in your pocket.
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Yeah, that you're going to sort of present,
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announcing three new products kind of thing
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and then saying that it's all in one.
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Just, this is a good example,
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one of the sort of historic presentations of a product.
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Clearly there's like some showmanship that works,
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some reason it works.
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It doesn't always work, it often doesn't work,
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but it did in this case, it often did for Steve.
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What, like, how did that feel?
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What part of the actually the design process
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was that presentation?
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You know what I mean?
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In the early, because you said,
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should consider the why, the press release
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at the very beginning.
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Steve was doing that the entire time.
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He was working on that story from day one.
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He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this.
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And then he would look at our faces
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because you wouldn't, most people wouldn't,
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at least if you're working for him,
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wouldn't tell him what you really thought
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of what he was saying, but he would look at your faces.
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And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidence
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outside of the organization.
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And see what they thought, right?
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And they could give him feedback on it
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and they could really challenge him,
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but he would also look at their faces and go, hmm.
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And so when you see that, hmm,
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then he would modulate it and change it slightly
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So he was working during all of that time
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on the story and the storytelling, right?
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And the whys, while we're working on that
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and helping us refine it,
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just like the switch from plastic to glass, right?
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All the time working on that.
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So when he comes out on stage,
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he does something that every marketer is told not to do.
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Say these three things are now combined in one.
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That is like the, they say that that is the laziest form
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of storytelling possible for marketing, right?
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But it was the best one because it was all those pains.
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It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications
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and I want my internet browsing because I want it on the go
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so I can look up things because it was information.
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And when you were on the road, you had a laptop,
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you had an iPod and you had a phone that,
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and you had to carry all of these things with you at once.
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Now we're gonna solve that pain for you
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and put it all together.
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So he was just showing you the pain
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and beating that virus of doubt and going,
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it's now in this one magical thing.
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And he could come up and masterfully tell that story
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because he told it almost every day
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to all of these people inside very quietly.
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And then it was just, right?
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It was like a Tony award winning play
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that had been worked on for 10 years.
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But also the human came through, the timing.
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It was all that, it was all of it.
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And of course he was dramatic at certain points
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and he would raise his voice and a wry smile
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or whatever it was.
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Right, that wry smile was magic.
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It was all those touches.
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He was an actor as well as a storyteller.
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But it was the truth, right?
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The truth came through.
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It was a nonfiction story.
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And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it
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for dramatic effect.
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So there's a designer you mentioned, Johnny Ave.
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You both are brilliant designers, great human beings.
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There were some battles fought in the distant past
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between the two of you.
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Looking back, what is the positive characteristics
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of Johnny that made you a better person and designer
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having worked with him?
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Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led.
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I don't know where, cause that was over years.
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I didn't see all of those things.
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But watching the design process of really,
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cause it was really a team that was about materials.
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It was about form.
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It was about colors.
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It was about these physical characteristics.
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When we talked about this earlier was design.
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Design's everywhere, okay?
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So what they were really focused on was form,
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how the feel was, how it looked, the aesthetics,
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the physical aesthetics.
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And watching, going through that process,
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I learned so much in that process about how to do colors,
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how to do materials, how to think deeply about curves,
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and shadows, and how it would look, not just in your hand,
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but how it would look in the photograph
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you were gonna take for marketing, right?
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So how it would look, how you would feel, all of it.
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It was all of those physical things around that
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and watching the process to get there,
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that was enlightening for me, right?
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It opened my mind to go, oh, okay.
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Just like there's a process for all these other things,
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it wasn't just magic and you say,
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ha, ha, ha, there it is.
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It was really a process of refinement,
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you know, of opening the funnel at the beginning
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and refining down over time to get to that final,
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the final and selecting and doing the selection.
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And certain types you could,
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certain times there were opinion based design details.
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But a lot of data, a lot of data driven designs
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of what can we deliver in volume?
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What can we do different things?
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So you always had these constraints
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that you had to work with under.
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And sometimes they, and the team,
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not just I, would say, we need this.
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And we're like, we can't deliver that.
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But maybe we were able to work together
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to find different design characteristics
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and different implementation characteristics
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that could get to that point
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without what they were describing.
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And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no,
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let's find some other way to solve the problem together.
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Yeah, is, and I've seen this in several companies
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I've more closely interacted with, like Tesla is an example.
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Sometimes, you know, talking about curves,
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sometimes it's very painful on the engineering side
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to deliver a very specific kind of thing.
link |
And one question that comes up in my mind is like,
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well, how far should we go to try to deliver
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a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature,
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or in like whatever the form factor is,
link |
or the color of the material,
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when the cost is like 10X to deliver,
link |
not financially, but just like in effort,
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like how many problems to have to solve.
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I don't know if you can say any wisdom to that,
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because when you're thinking about curves,
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you're designing in the space of ideas,
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you're like platonic forms kind of thing,
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not always grounded to like how much this is,
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how much pain is gonna be involved in delivering this,
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but that's as you should perhaps,
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because then if you're always thinking about the pain
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required to deliver this thing, you'll be too conservative,
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you wouldn't do the wild ideas.
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Right, exactly, but you have to understand again
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the why behind it.
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And at Nest, when we had limited resources,
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you know, putting a screwdriver in the box,
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a custom designed screwdriver in the box,
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was born out of those experiences I had at Apple,
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and seeing how you can create something
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that's emotional, it's part of marketing,
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and it's part of the product experience overall,
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even though it seems extraneous.
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I went back and made the design team,
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and the mechanical team change some curves
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on the Nest Protect, the smoke and CO detector
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we did at Nest, after they had already tooled it.
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And I said, they're saying these cost more,
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I said, it doesn't look right.
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There is a, but they're like, oh, well we had,
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I said, no, you're gonna go back,
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and you're gonna make that change,
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I told you we needed to do it,
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we had a better looking model, that is gonna get done,
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I know it's gonna be a terrible cost to you,
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but we already had this discussion,
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and that's the way it's gonna have to be,
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and I'm sorry, but it is what it is.
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And you know, because it's better for the customer,
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and it looks better in the pictures,
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and all the other stuff.
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And then we did it, and it was great,
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and everyone agreed it was great at the end,
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but it was pain to get there.
link |
Those are where, those little details
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are where the magic comes out, right?
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And if you don't do, if you don't take those pains
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and put in the love, the customer's gonna feel,
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it's gonna, they're either gonna feel the pain,
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or they're gonna feel the love,
link |
if you put it in, right?
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So it depends on how much time and effort
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you wanna put into something,
link |
and what really matters to you,
link |
and so how you communicate what you do.
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We're human beings after all,
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is there something you've learned
link |
from sort of the tensions that are natural,
link |
or that happen in teams when they're passionate,
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and they're trying to solve these problems?
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Is that the way of life?
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And there's the human drama.
link |
Is that just, is that always going,
link |
is that, it is what it is?
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Is that make you better?
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Actually, the drama, the tension between personalities,
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Look, a rollercoaster ride without ups and downs
link |
It's the journey, it's the journey that brings,
link |
it brings out the best in everyone.
link |
We're forged, we're tempered by those experiences,
link |
not all the ups, but also the downs,
link |
and that's when you get the humanity and the connection,
link |
and we can tell these stories till we're blue in the face,
link |
and smile every time, because we did something together
link |
that each of us couldn't do apart,
link |
but when it comes together,
link |
that's where all the emotions happen,
link |
and that's where, if it's born out of the right reasons,
link |
and the right story, and the right way,
link |
that's where the magic happens,
link |
not just for the customer,
link |
but for how it transforms each person
link |
who is working on it,
link |
and they will never forget those experiences in their life,
link |
positively and negatively, that happened at the time,
link |
but they look back, and it's only positive,
link |
because they did something that mattered.
link |
Yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life
link |
is Nest, Nest thermostats, and the big umbrella of Nest.
link |
Again, as part of this Netflix series, season three,
link |
what was the most memorable, the most painful,
link |
the most insight leading challenge
link |
you had to overcome to bring Nest to life?
link |
Well, the first thing for me was making someone care
link |
about their thermostat.
link |
No one considers it.
link |
They never had any customer choice.
link |
They didn't install it.
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They usually don't even use it,
link |
because it's so complicated, or what have you,
link |
they just, they bitch at it, they hide it in the corner,
link |
and then they just pay the bill, right,
link |
of whatever it is, right?
link |
It's totally unloved, unconsidered, right?
link |
So how do you wake up, like I said, the virus of doubt,
link |
how do you wake that up and get people going,
link |
remember every day when you go in and it's like,
link |
you're just frustrated, and then you get the bill
link |
and you pay the bill, so you have to do that.
link |
So that was one thing.
link |
I think the other big one was not delivering,
link |
all of it was hard, right?
link |
It was constrained, we had only so much stuff,
link |
we were bootstrapped, we didn't have massive funding,
link |
we didn't get hundreds of millions of dollars,
link |
but we did it for the right reasons.
link |
But I think the other big part of it was
link |
not just building a disruptive product,
link |
because a lot of the people on the team had done that,
link |
we knew what we were doing, and that was,
link |
if we got the design right, we could deliver it
link |
It was getting the disruptive go to market,
link |
in other words, how to take that product
link |
from the end of the production line
link |
and get it into the customer's hands,
link |
because there was no retail or customer choice
link |
No one even, it was never considered purchase.
link |
They never thought they had choice.
link |
Some guy, usually in suspenders and a butt crack,
link |
told them, looked around, looked at their house
link |
and said, this looks like somebody who's got,
link |
This thermostat is now gonna cost you $350,
link |
thank you very much.
link |
And you're like, I'll take whatever you give me, right?
link |
And then it goes into another house,
link |
it's worth $100, it was the same damn thing, right?
link |
So there was no price transparency,
link |
there was no choice, you just got what you were given.
link |
So how do you go, and this was an entrenched industry,
link |
that's why there was no innovation in it,
link |
because it was doing just fine
link |
because every house needed them.
link |
All the installers were programmed by the product deliverers,
link |
by bonuses to say, you're gonna only carry our product,
link |
and if you sell this many,
link |
you're gonna get a free trip to Hawaii, right?
link |
And for these guys who install,
link |
I get a free trip to Hawaii, that's dream for them, right?
link |
So this whole channel was fully controlled
link |
by the product guys,
link |
and it was almost monopolistic in a way.
link |
So how do you go around that?
link |
So creating a disruptive go to market channel,
link |
one was direct to consumer, right?
link |
And all the marketing that was necessary
link |
to get that message across.
link |
Another one was getting the installation right.
link |
No one was self installing thermostats.
link |
So how do we get enough people who are early adopters
link |
to be able to self install them confidently?
link |
So they didn't still have to call the guy
link |
to come and install it,
link |
because then he would say, this is a crap product.
link |
No, I got the most better product, right?
link |
So you had to get rid of that friction.
link |
And then ultimately, how do you get the people
link |
who were not just early adopters,
link |
but people who needed to see it
link |
and touch it before they bought it?
link |
How do you get that into retail
link |
when the large brands of the time of thermostats
link |
and Home Depot and Lowe's had contracts
link |
that they couldn't bring in any other brands?
link |
They were owning the channel all the way
link |
to where there was any sort of slight customer choice.
link |
And it was really contractor choice
link |
more than it was in consumer choice.
link |
So all of that had to be innovated along with the product.
link |
And so to me, that was a huge challenge
link |
and something I had never done,
link |
most of us had never done.
link |
And we had to create, that was as much as a project
link |
as actually delivering the product itself.
link |
So it turned out to be a giant hit.
link |
And it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion.
link |
As a founder and leader, just out of curiosity,
link |
in these cases of acquisition, is it always a good thing?
link |
Is there any part of you and the team
link |
that considered saying no?
link |
Oh, we considered saying no
link |
all the way along the process, right?
link |
We'd all been in big companies before.
link |
We knew what it was like and the politics
link |
and all the other stuff and what I came to learn,
link |
especially from Phillips,
link |
because Phillips was a very, it was 375,000 people.
link |
It was a big, it was massive company, right?
link |
And tons of politics.
link |
And I was like, do we wanna go back into that world?
link |
Because I had so many negative experiences from that.
link |
But then going to Apple, which was not big,
link |
but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics.
link |
But then when you saw a leader rise up
link |
and get rid of those dynamics or not,
link |
allow many of them to flourish,
link |
then you're like, oh, with the right leadership,
link |
this can be a beautiful marriage, right?
link |
And so for four months, we were working together with them,