back to indexTony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, Nest, Steve Jobs, Design, and Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #294
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 |
The following is a conversation with Tony Fadell,
link |
engineer and designer, co creator of the iPod,
link |
the iPhone and the Nest Thermostat.
link |
And he's the author of the new book, Build,
link |
an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.
link |
More than almost any human ever,
link |
he knows what it takes to create technology ideas,
link |
designs, products and companies that revolutionize life
link |
for huge numbers of people in the world.
link |
So it truly is an honor and pleasure
link |
to sit down with Tony for a time
link |
and look back at one heck of an amazing life.
link |
This is the Lex Readman podcast.
link |
To support it, please check out our sponsors
link |
in the description.
link |
And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fadell.
link |
When did you first fall in love with computers?
link |
Or let's say computer engineering and design?
link |
I first fell in love with computers and programming.
link |
Was it a summer school class in fifth grade
link |
in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan?
link |
It was a simple basic programming class,
link |
but the basic programming class
link |
was not like you might think it was.
link |
It was bubble cards.
link |
So literally it was the cards, the stack of cards,
link |
and you would use a number two pencil and you would put in
link |
your program line by line,
link |
and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked
link |
and no errors and what have you.
link |
And you would take that set of cards
link |
and you'd put it on this reader and it would zzzt, zzzt, zzzt.
link |
And it would go off to an IBM microcomputer
link |
somewhere in the, back then the cloud.
link |
And then you would sit on a Texas Instruments paper terminal.
link |
And it would just, literally I was just,
link |
I could write things and it would,
link |
I could program this machine to do stuff.
link |
And it was, you know, it was nowhere near sexy.
link |
There was no graphics, right?
link |
Oregon Trail was all in text, right?
link |
The cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong
link |
or out of order, or a disaster, or you dropped one card,
link |
it would all fall apart.
link |
So just doing that, you know, print f,
link |
I can only remember what it was.
link |
It was, you know, what the basic commands were, but.
link |
Oh, so when you say basic, you mean basic programming?
link |
Programming language.
link |
Basic programming.
link |
So you're writing basic programming language on paper.
link |
And you're calling it programming though.
link |
It's called programming.
link |
Yeah, you're programming this computer in, you know,
link |
in a remote location and it came back.
link |
So it was truly cloud computing in a way.
link |
So it was really terminal based computing.
link |
And the input and the program are separate.
link |
So the input to the program, or they could go together.
link |
Like, or there's no input to the program.
link |
It just runs and it gives you output.
link |
Yeah, it goes in and it says ready,
link |
and then you can say run, and then it would run.
link |
But to program it, you didn't type it
link |
because it was a printer terminal.
link |
You would make the stack of cards
link |
and that would get it into the computer's memory.
link |
Okay, so where was the magic?
link |
The magic was that you could create, you had a language
link |
and you could create what you wanted to create, right?
link |
You could create a world or what have you
link |
and have this interaction.
link |
And you could compute things, you could, you know,
link |
do numbers, you could, I was playing Oregon Trail, right?
link |
So you were less like.
link |
So you can play video games.
link |
Right, without the video.
link |
You could play text games
link |
and then imagine them in your brain, right?
link |
Oregon Trail, there's this meme I saw recently.
link |
If you wanna feel bad about yourself as a programmer,
link |
realize that one person wrote Railroad Tycoon.
link |
I think that's the name of the game.
link |
It's this cool little builder game.
link |
One person wrote it in assembly.
link |
So like from scratch and for people who don't know,
link |
it kind of looks like a Sim City type game.
link |
It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads.
link |
And there's a nice graphics, it's three dimensional,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
All the things, all the rich colorful things
link |
you would imagine for a three dimensional video game,
link |
all written in assembly,
link |
meaning the lowest level code next to binary,
link |
which is fascinating.
link |
And that's the, you had to notice the magic
link |
at that low level at that time.
link |
You didn't have all the graphics.
link |
You didn't have all the like APIs and all the sample codes,
link |
no stack overflow, no internet, none of that.
link |
You just had, you had to know registers.
link |
You know, had to know the op codes
link |
and you had to imagine the world in your brain
link |
and the memory structures and everything else.
link |
There's no visualization.
link |
You visualized it all yourself, right?
link |
And so that was magic.
link |
But then the next part of the magic
link |
of where I got hooked even further
link |
was like I'm doing these little things.
link |
And then Electronic Arts came out for the Apple II.
link |
So I got an Apple II and Electronic Arts came out
link |
and I was programming and doing basic
link |
and making my own games.
link |
But then there were two games that really blew my mind.
link |
One was pinball construction set.
link |
And the other one was music construction set.
link |
And these were both places where I could create pinball games
link |
and I could create musical scores
link |
because I love music and I could then play them, right?
link |
And so when you had that, you were like,
link |
oh, this is something very different.
link |
So I could create myself,
link |
but then there was others that create tools
link |
so you could create at a visual level.
link |
And then you would read the backstories
link |
because Electronics Arts back in the day,
link |
it was one programmer who would program those games
link |
program those things, each of those things.
link |
And you could read their backstories.
link |
It was literally like a musician or someone else.
link |
Like you could read Rick Rubens, like here's the thing.
link |
They tell you all of that stuff.
link |
And there was one guy who wrote music construction set.
link |
He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old.
link |
And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time.
link |
And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this
link |
and had published, right, and this amazing tool was created,
link |
I'm like, what could I do?
link |
And so then it just kept building off of that.
link |
But really it was those seminal things.
link |
First, the introduction and then the power
link |
through programming and turning these things
link |
into what you wanted to turn it into.
link |
And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old
link |
And then I was like, okay, this is really cool.
link |
I wish we did that with programmers
link |
where we treated them like artists.
link |
We would know the backstory these days today.
link |
Or not just programmers, engineers.
link |
Engineers, designers.
link |
Yeah, like all the things about a product
link |
that I think we love are the little details.
link |
And there's probably a human being
link |
behind each of those details
link |
that had their little inkling of genius that they put in.
link |
I wish we knew those stories.
link |
That's always sad to me when I,
link |
because obviously I love engineering
link |
and I interact with companies
link |
and they, you know, autonomous vehicles,
link |
something I'm really interested about.
link |
And I see that companies generally,
link |
and we'll probably talk about this,
link |
but they seem to want to hide their engineers.
link |
Like engineers hold the secrets.
link |
Like the great secret,
link |
we did not speak of the great secret.
link |
But then the result of that is you don't get
link |
to hear their stories.
link |
The passion that is there behind the engineers.
link |
Like, and also the genius, the little,
link |
there's a difference between the stuff that's patented,
link |
like the kernel of the idea
link |
and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea.
link |
And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects
link |
a little bit more, but sorry for the distraction.
link |
So what, you mentioned Apple II.
link |
What was the first computer you fell in love with?
link |
Like the product, the thing before you
link |
that was a personal computer?
link |
It was the Apple II.
link |
So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over.
link |
You know, it was, I think it was at the time,
link |
it was the, you know, the person of the year.
link |
Maybe it was that year.
link |
I don't remember what, but.
link |
Well, Apple II was the person of the year?
link |
Yeah, for my magazine back in, I don't remember when,
link |
but it was around that same time.
link |
I was so young, but I had, there was the Apple II
link |
and I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools
link |
because my grandfather taught me about tools
link |
and creating things, right?
link |
And I saw this thing and I had the, you know,
link |
that IBM experience, that terminal experience.
link |
And I'm like, oh, I could have that at home, right?
link |
And so I need to have that at home.
link |
And the only thing that was really talked about
link |
in our circles was the Apple II.
link |
And I was just like, that's it.
link |
So I went, jumped up and down.
link |
It was very expensive.
link |
I have to have this.
link |
My parents were like, what?
link |
You know, it was $2,500 back then in the 1981.
link |
It was like crazy, right?
link |
So I was like, I'm gonna make as much money
link |
as I can this summer.
link |
And my grandfather said,
link |
cause he helped me learn all about tools
link |
and build things together.
link |
I will match whatever you make
link |
so you can get this computer.
link |
So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy.
link |
Caddying actually for the, you know,
link |
the families in, you know, at the country clubs
link |
in the town where we lived.
link |
And did whatever I could.
link |
And that end of that summer, we got my Apple II.
link |
And you couldn't tear it away from me.
link |
It was everything.
link |
From a product perspective,
link |
what do you remember that was brilliant?
link |
The design choices, the ideas behind it,
link |
or is it just that it exists?
link |
Or the very idea of a personal computer
link |
is the brilliant design choice.
link |
Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool
link |
in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted.
link |
I could program it anyways.
link |
There was no, you know, there was no internet connection.
link |
There was no, it was all just you.
link |
You either loaded software that you got from someone, right?
link |
Or you created it yourself.
link |
And then there was the whole other thing
link |
which was started happening, which we were doing.
link |
And this was kind of like MP3 and stuff.
link |
We were sharing software, right?
link |
So you built this community of sharing software.
link |
You would go and pirate.
link |
That was what it called, pirate all this software.
link |
You'd never use it all, but it was just that fun thing
link |
of like, I'm gonna get all this other stuff
link |
and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it
link |
and see behind the scenes.
link |
So you really had a sense this was your world
link |
and you owned it, right?
link |
And you could like literally go into every register.
link |
We didn't have all those security layers.
link |
Like we do not like,
link |
you could really touch bits and you could poke bits
link |
and you can make this light turn on.
link |
And the geek assignment just lit up.
link |
Now there's, it's so abstract.
link |
People don't even understand.
link |
Like usually some programs don't even understand memory.
link |
They just think it's unlimited, right?
link |
And security, it's like,
link |
now there's all this security you should have,
link |
but it's like the adults all showed up to the party
link |
and now you can't have all the fun, right?
link |
It's like, no, no.
link |
This was the thing where if you, if the power went out,
link |
you lost your whole program,
link |
you might've worked a whole day on it.
link |
And if you didn't press save at every other line
link |
and you were to save, save, save,
link |
and it would like, the disk drive or the tape drive.
link |
Like every single step was contemplated
link |
because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work.
link |
So a lot of the magic was in the software.
link |
The fact that you could have software,
link |
the fact that you could share software,
link |
the community around the software,
link |
it wasn't necessarily the hardware.
link |
Well, that was the first step.
link |
The second step around the hardware
link |
was I got things like the mocking board,
link |
which the mocking board
link |
paired with the music construction set,
link |
you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes
link |
and it was a synthesizer in the Apple II.
link |
So you would plug in this card and you go,
link |
oh my God, look at this.
link |
And it would, you know,
link |
you could start generating cool sounds.
link |
You know, like it was a Moog, you know,
link |
like a Moog in a way, early Moog.
link |
What year are we talking about?
link |
This is 82, I think, 81, 82.
link |
And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds
link |
that are very cool in the 80s.
link |
Yeah, the 8 bit, you know, chip tunes, right?
link |
Chip tune, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
link |
And then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick,
link |
you had to pull a chip out
link |
and you had to like plug in a dip socket
link |
to put in a joystick.
link |
And then I was like, oh,
link |
and then I had to get more memory.
link |
How do we do that?
link |
And now I wanted to speed up progress.
link |
So then that turned into a company actually from that,
link |
but it was, and a hardware software went at that.
link |
But it was all about, you know,
link |
modifying this thing in every way, first with software.
link |
And then you started gaining confidence.
link |
And then I got a little bit more money and stuff.
link |
And then you could get into the hardware
link |
and, you know, wire things.
link |
And then the Apple II came with all the schematics, right?
link |
So in the back, in the early Apple IIs,
link |
you could open up and all the schematics were there.
link |
So you purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it.
link |
Yeah, it came with it.
link |
That's an interesting choice.
link |
That's an interesting choice from a company perspective.
link |
Right, it was like a real maker kind of thing.
link |
Ah, I wonder what they, so that was intentional.
link |
Like this is. Absolutely intentional.
link |
This is for the cutting edge folks too,
link |
or especially for the cutting edge.
link |
It was only the cutting edge.
link |
It was geeks for geeks.
link |
So we were like, oh, how did they make it?
link |
And then we got to learn through that.
link |
Apple I did the same thing, right?
link |
It just Apple II became more packaged up
link |
and had, you know, a little bit better software, right?
link |
Came with basic and then, you know,
link |
so it was really, it was what we might think of
link |
as a raspberry pie today or something like that,
link |
but not with so much software.
link |
It was literally, and all the chips were out there
link |
so you could inspect the buses and the, right?
link |
Cause everything was just broken out.
link |
So I guess that's the idea behind stable big projects
link |
and open source, like on GitHub,
link |
that you have the schematics there
link |
and it's kind of a product,
link |
but I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing.
link |
Like we're going to release this to a small set of people,
link |
self selected, perhaps that are kind of the makers,
link |
the cutting edge folks, the builders,
link |
the at home engineers, like in some way,
link |
what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self driving
link |
is kind of like that.
link |
It's like selecting a group of people,
link |
but that has to do more with you,
link |
how safe of a driver you are
link |
versus how much of a tinkerer you are
link |
because you don't get to tinker.
link |
I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do
link |
for really cutting edge technologies,
link |
especially you're interested in like hardware stuff.
link |
Why don't more companies do that kind of thing, you think?
link |
I think back then it was about a community
link |
and serving that community of builders.
link |
Now this is about people who want to take,
link |
get the experience and want it really simple and easy.
link |
And they're like, and so there's the audience
link |
or they believe the audience is small
link |
who would value those other things
link |
that we're just talking about.
link |
But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi
link |
and all of these other little boards, right?
link |
There's a whole world more than I've seen.
link |
Like it's amazing what you can do now
link |
with these little kits and the software that's created.
link |
And so there's a whole nother,
link |
I think another batch of makers and builders
link |
that are coming up through the ranks.
link |
And if you, we look at YouTube channels and stuff, right?
link |
They take these little boards, they hack them,
link |
then they print out parts on their 3D printer,
link |
assemble them and they create robots and what have you.
link |
So I think it's happening.
link |
It's just not as, you know, as,
link |
it's just not as, I guess, raw as it used to be,
link |
but it's there and it's really expanding around the world.
link |
And that's really nice to see
link |
cause you know, it's a whole new generation
link |
who can, who are empowered.
link |
I think there's a semi dormant genius amongst millions.
link |
So like Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit.
link |
It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised
link |
if it's several million Raspberry Pis
link |
that have been sold.
link |
I think more than that.
link |
And it's kind of this quiet storm of genius,
link |
brewing of engineers who don't get to hear
link |
because they're not organized.
link |
I mean, we get to hear their inklings here and there.
link |
Like I said, YouTube, there's little communities
link |
that are local and so on.
link |
But if they were organized,
link |
if a leader would emerge, no.
link |
Okay, so when did you first start to dream
link |
about building your own things,
link |
designing your own products,
link |
designing your own systems and software and hardware?
link |
Well, in high school, there was a company
link |
that a friend of mine founded
link |
and I was the second employee,
link |
it was called Quality Computers.
link |
And it was a mail order,
link |
mail order cause there's no eCommerce then,
link |
there was no internet again.
link |
You either mailed in your little coupon
link |
and you said, this is what I wanted to order
link |
or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you.
link |
Turn around time and this stuff was like,
link |
from the time you wanted, the time you bought it
link |
was maybe eight to 12 weeks.
link |
That was just the normal way of getting things.
link |
So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple too
link |
and it was software and all kinds of accessories.
link |
So hardware accessories, so hardware,
link |
plug in cards, joysticks, all this stuff.
link |
And what we noticed was there were accelerators
link |
And to be able to use those cards,
link |
you had to actually go and change the software you use
link |
to access this new memory.
link |
So you literally had to go and you took the program
link |
that you had, let's say it was Apple works,
link |
which was like an early Microsoft office
link |
or something like that.
link |
And you had to literally change the code
link |
and you would install all these patches
link |
to then take advantage of the hardware.
link |
So what we started creating was software on top of it
link |
to do the automatic installation of all of these patches.
link |
So we made it much easier to take new hardware
link |
and the existing software you have
link |
and expand it into this new world.
link |
So it was creating tools
link |
and the really great customer support.
link |
And we started getting a lot of orders
link |
because we had the software make it easier to install,
link |
to give them the superpower.
link |
And at the same time, they would be able
link |
to change their software and have a new world
link |
that wasn't existing from the companies
link |
that were creating the initial products.
link |
And so it was more of that.
link |
And then that happened with hard drives.
link |
So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II
link |
to like read, because you could get really fragmented.
link |
So I wrote that piece of software
link |
and we sold that through the company
link |
along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties.
link |
So that all happened in 12th grade,
link |
freshman year of college.
link |
You wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade
link |
Between 12th and freshman year.
link |
What programming language do you remember?
link |
There were certain inner loops were assembly
link |
and other loops actually there were really early Pascal,
link |
What was the motivation behind these?
link |
Is it to make people's lives easier?
link |
Is it to create a thing experience
link |
that is simpler and simpler and simpler,
link |
thereby more accessible to a larger number of people?
link |
Or did you just like to tinker?
link |
No, no, no, it was two things really.
link |
Cause one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software.
link |
So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user.
link |
And then the other thing was,
link |
because I was also manning the customer support line,
link |
people would call in and go, this doesn't work.
link |
And I'm like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware and software.
link |
Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware
link |
and the installation process better.
link |
So my whole world was out of box experience
link |
from when I was in high school.
link |
Cause I had to man the customer support line,
link |
pack the boxes and write some of the code
link |
while we were doing, while Joe, Joe Gleason,
link |
who was the founder of Quality Computers,
link |
he was off doing the mark, the ads,
link |
placing the ads for the mail order,
link |
making sure we were running the credit cards, right?
link |
And then it turned into a third,
link |
and then we hired another person from high school
link |
to like pack boxes so I could stay
link |
on the customer support line or doing the software, right?
link |
And it was all in his parents basement, right?
link |
As you were scaling exponentially.
link |
Scaling, right, exactly, bootstrapping.
link |
So we'll jump around a little bit,
link |
but what were the, you said you love music.
link |
What were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod
link |
if we jump forward and how far back do those ideas stretch?
link |
If you look at the history of technology,
link |
there's, I mean, not just the product,
link |
but the idea is truly revolutionary.
link |
Maybe it's time has come,
link |
but just if you look at the arc of history,
link |
sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity.
link |
And to be able to put that in your pocket,
link |
make it truly portable is fascinating
link |
in a way that's truly portable.
link |
So it's digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman
link |
or something like that.
link |
So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod?
link |
You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid.
link |
Just loved music from, I think, second grade
link |
when I got my first albums and stuff like that.
link |
What kind of music are we talking about?
link |
So this was Led Zeppelin.
link |
This was the Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith,
link |
Cheap Trick, Stix, Ted Nugent,
link |
just the real American and British rock and roll, right?
link |
There's a bunch of people listening right now.
link |
Is that some kind?
link |
It drove my parents crazy.
link |
You just blasted loud.
link |
And this was second, third grade, fourth grade.
link |
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.
link |
How important is it that like Steve in that case is right?
link |
Because I could argue each side.
link |
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.
link |
Like everybody will learn.
link |
So that's one side.
link |
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.
link |
That's the great thing.
link |
He was never unchallengeable.
link |
You could challenge him.
link |
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,
link |
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.
link |
Okay, the original decision was plastic.
link |
And the reasons were, okay, we don't wanna make a mistake.
link |
Glass can break, you know,
link |
people drop them all the time.
link |
So we don't wanna have a fragile device
link |
because you're gonna be using even more
link |
than a music player, right?
link |
And you're gonna be holding your head
link |
and putting it in your pocket and misses and all that stuff.
link |
So we went down the road with plastic.
link |
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.
link |
Reviewers who didn't have the device yet,
link |
cause it was behind glass.
link |
If you remember 2007, the Jesus phone comes up
link |
and no one could even touch them.
link |
You could just look at it
link |
in this beautiful museum quality box.
link |
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,
link |
what covers on that, you know, reviewers who knew better,
link |
you know, it's plastic.
link |
And they were like, really?
link |
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,
link |
with plastic and it's in their pocket all the time
link |
and it gets scratched by coins, slightly scratched
link |
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
link |
and it cracks, it's the customer's fault.
link |
And they have much lower,
link |
they have less likelihood to complain.
link |
Yes, they'll complain,
link |
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
link |
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.
link |
It really is Frankenstein.
link |
Right, and you didn't have to run Mac software.
link |
If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time,
link |
like Windows and stuff, they were like,
link |
we need to make sure it runs Excel
link |
and it runs Word or something like that
link |
in some reduced thing.
link |
This was like, no, no, no, no.
link |
This was born out of entertainment.
link |
So we didn't have to go and take all the same application,
link |
you know, all those other ones was about compatibility.
link |
This was about a whole new way of being.
link |
What did you think about the Steve Jobs presentation
link |
of the iPhone, the sort of, the first iPhone, you know.
link |
Phone, internet communicator, and the iPod in your pocket.
link |
Yeah, that you're going to sort of present,
link |
announcing three new products kind of thing
link |
and then saying that it's all in one.
link |
Just, this is a good example,
link |
one of the sort of historic presentations of a product.
link |
Clearly there's like some showmanship that works,
link |
some reason it works.
link |
It doesn't always work, it often doesn't work,
link |
but it did in this case, it often did for Steve.
link |
What, like, how did that feel?
link |
What part of the actually the design process
link |
was that presentation?
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
In the early, because you said,
link |
should consider the why, the press release
link |
at the very beginning.
link |
Steve was doing that the entire time.
link |
He was working on that story from day one.
link |
He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this.
link |
And then he would look at our faces
link |
because you wouldn't, most people wouldn't,
link |
at least if you're working for him,
link |
wouldn't tell him what you really thought
link |
of what he was saying, but he would look at your faces.
link |
And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidence
link |
outside of the organization.
link |
And see what they thought, right?
link |
And they could give him feedback on it
link |
and they could really challenge him,
link |
but he would also look at their faces and go, hmm.
link |
And so when you see that, hmm,
link |
then he would modulate it and change it slightly
link |
So he was working during all of that time
link |
on the story and the storytelling, right?
link |
And the whys, while we're working on that
link |
and helping us refine it,
link |
just like the switch from plastic to glass, right?
link |
All the time working on that.
link |
So when he comes out on stage,
link |
he does something that every marketer is told not to do.
link |
Say these three things are now combined in one.
link |
That is like the, they say that that is the laziest form
link |
of storytelling possible for marketing, right?
link |
But it was the best one because it was all those pains.
link |
It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications
link |
and I want my internet browsing because I want it on the go
link |
so I can look up things because it was information.
link |
And when you were on the road, you had a laptop,
link |
you had an iPod and you had a phone that,
link |
and you had to carry all of these things with you at once.
link |
Now we're gonna solve that pain for you
link |
and put it all together.
link |
So he was just showing you the pain
link |
and beating that virus of doubt and going,
link |
it's now in this one magical thing.
link |
And he could come up and masterfully tell that story
link |
because he told it almost every day
link |
to all of these people inside very quietly.
link |
And then it was just, right?
link |
It was like a Tony award winning play
link |
that had been worked on for 10 years.
link |
But also the human came through, the timing.
link |
It was all that, it was all of it.
link |
And of course he was dramatic at certain points
link |
and he would raise his voice and a wry smile
link |
or whatever it was.
link |
Right, that wry smile was magic.
link |
It was all those touches.
link |
He was an actor as well as a storyteller.
link |
But it was the truth, right?
link |
The truth came through.
link |
It was a nonfiction story.
link |
And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it
link |
for dramatic effect.
link |
So there's a designer you mentioned, Johnny Ave.
link |
You both are brilliant designers, great human beings.
link |
There were some battles fought in the distant past
link |
between the two of you.
link |
Looking back, what is the positive characteristics
link |
of Johnny that made you a better person and designer
link |
having worked with him?
link |
Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led.
link |
I don't know where, cause that was over years.
link |
I didn't see all of those things.
link |
But watching the design process of really,
link |
cause it was really a team that was about materials.
link |
It was about form.
link |
It was about colors.
link |
It was about these physical characteristics.
link |
When we talked about this earlier was design.
link |
Design's everywhere, okay?
link |
So what they were really focused on was form,
link |
how the feel was, how it looked, the aesthetics,
link |
the physical aesthetics.
link |
And watching, going through that process,
link |
I learned so much in that process about how to do colors,
link |
how to do materials, how to think deeply about curves,
link |
and shadows, and how it would look, not just in your hand,
link |
but how it would look in the photograph
link |
you were gonna take for marketing, right?
link |
So how it would look, how you would feel, all of it.
link |
It was all of those physical things around that
link |
and watching the process to get there,
link |
that was enlightening for me, right?
link |
It opened my mind to go, oh, okay.
link |
Just like there's a process for all these other things,
link |
it wasn't just magic and you say,
link |
ha, ha, ha, there it is.
link |
It was really a process of refinement,
link |
you know, of opening the funnel at the beginning
link |
and refining down over time to get to that final,
link |
the final and selecting and doing the selection.
link |
And certain types you could,
link |
certain times there were opinion based design details.
link |
But a lot of data, a lot of data driven designs
link |
of what can we deliver in volume?
link |
What can we do different things?
link |
So you always had these constraints
link |
that you had to work with under.
link |
And sometimes they, and the team,
link |
not just I, would say, we need this.
link |
And we're like, we can't deliver that.
link |
But maybe we were able to work together
link |
to find different design characteristics
link |
and different implementation characteristics
link |
that could get to that point
link |
without what they were describing.
link |
And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no,
link |
let's find some other way to solve the problem together.
link |
Yeah, is, and I've seen this in several companies
link |
I've more closely interacted with, like Tesla is an example.
link |
Sometimes, you know, talking about curves,
link |
sometimes it's very painful on the engineering side
link |
to deliver a very specific kind of thing.
link |
And one question that comes up in my mind is like,
link |
well, how far should we go to try to deliver
link |
a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature,
link |
or in like whatever the form factor is,
link |
or the color of the material,
link |
when the cost is like 10X to deliver,
link |
not financially, but just like in effort,
link |
like how many problems to have to solve.
link |
I don't know if you can say any wisdom to that,
link |
because when you're thinking about curves,
link |
you're designing in the space of ideas,
link |
you're like platonic forms kind of thing,
link |
not always grounded to like how much this is,
link |
how much pain is gonna be involved in delivering this,
link |
but that's as you should perhaps,
link |
because then if you're always thinking about the pain
link |
required to deliver this thing, you'll be too conservative,
link |
you wouldn't do the wild ideas.
link |
Right, exactly, but you have to understand again
link |
the why behind it.
link |
And at Nest, when we had limited resources,
link |
you know, putting a screwdriver in the box,
link |
a custom designed screwdriver in the box,
link |
was born out of those experiences I had at Apple,
link |
and seeing how you can create something
link |
that's emotional, it's part of marketing,
link |
and it's part of the product experience overall,
link |
even though it seems extraneous.
link |
I went back and made the design team,
link |
and the mechanical team change some curves
link |
on the Nest Protect, the smoke and CO detector
link |
we did at Nest, after they had already tooled it.
link |
And I said, they're saying these cost more,
link |
I said, it doesn't look right.
link |
There is a, but they're like, oh, well we had,
link |
I said, no, you're gonna go back,
link |
and you're gonna make that change,
link |
I told you we needed to do it,
link |
we had a better looking model, that is gonna get done,
link |
I know it's gonna be a terrible cost to you,
link |
but we already had this discussion,
link |
and that's the way it's gonna have to be,
link |
and I'm sorry, but it is what it is.
link |
And you know, because it's better for the customer,
link |
and it looks better in the pictures,
link |
and all the other stuff.
link |
And then we did it, and it was great,
link |
and everyone agreed it was great at the end,
link |
but it was pain to get there.
link |
Those are where, those little details
link |
are where the magic comes out, right?
link |
And if you don't do, if you don't take those pains
link |
and put in the love, the customer's gonna feel,
link |
it's gonna, they're either gonna feel the pain,
link |
or they're gonna feel the love,
link |
if you put it in, right?
link |
So it depends on how much time and effort
link |
you wanna put into something,
link |
and what really matters to you,
link |
and so how you communicate what you do.
link |
We're human beings after all,
link |
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,
link |
and they're trying to solve these problems?
link |
Is that the way of life?
link |
And there's the human drama.
link |
Is that just, is that always going,
link |
is that, it is what it is?
link |
Is that make you better?
link |
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.
link |
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,
link |
with Google, to make sure that we had the right leadership
link |
and we were gonna be in the right environment
link |
that it felt right.
link |
It absolutely happened.
link |
We worked on all the details.
link |
We didn't even talk about price.
link |
We were talking about how's the brand gonna work?
link |
Who's the team gonna work with?
link |
How are we gonna get IP?
link |
How are we gonna do exchanges?
link |
How are we gonna get budgets and all that stuff done?
link |
So we worked through all of that
link |
before we actually sealed any kind of deal
link |
because they were already an investor in the company.
link |
So we already knew,
link |
they knew relatively where the end point was for the price.
link |
So working through all of those prerequisites,
link |
I knew that as a individual product company
link |
that was trying to create a platform,
link |
no investors were gonna invest in a platform
link |
that could take three, four years
link |
and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars to build
link |
without all kinds of new products at the same time.
link |
And products that we were having, which were successes,
link |
but they weren't even break even yet, right?
link |
We were still developing them.
link |
So how are we gonna get more people to fund
link |
all of these things and this platform
link |
that I really wanna create?
link |
Because my worry, and I had seen this many times
link |
in Silicon Valley, is these small startups have bravado
link |
and they said, I'm gonna take on the big guys, right?
link |
But when those platform guys show up
link |
and Apple says they're gonna get in the,
link |
at the time, nobody cared.
link |
They were curious, what's next?
link |
But Apple wasn't in the market,
link |
Google wasn't in the market yet,
link |
Amazon wasn't there, Microsoft, Samsung,
link |
they were all just, that's curious, right?
link |
And I had watched, if you said,
link |
I'm gonna go challenge them
link |
and I'm gonna build a platform,
link |
and then they all of a sudden one by one go,
link |
oh, well, we're building a platform now,
link |
we're building a platform.
link |
They flooded you to death, fear, uncertainty, doubt,
link |
and the developers run away
link |
and you can't make that platform.
link |
So I'm like, before the landscape gets changed on us,
link |
because we've tracked so much attention,
link |
they announced something,
link |
we need to change the landscape on them.
link |
Let's go to the best place
link |
where we can build out the platform,
link |
have the right leadership behind us
link |
to help us grow this thing into what the vision it should be.
link |
And that's what we believed we were doing
link |
with the Google acquisition.
link |
Is it possible to take on the platforms?
link |
So you said there's a lot of startups
link |
with bravado and all that kind of stuff.
link |
It doesn't mean, James Joyce, when he was 20,
link |
he said, I'm gonna be the greatest writer
link |
of the 20th century before he wrote anything of value.
link |
One of them might be actually right.
link |
Yeah, in this modern world,
link |
when you, so first of all, people should definitely
link |
get your book built as just this giant number of advice
link |
on this exact question of how to build cool things,
link |
how to build a startup,
link |
how to all the different stages of that team and hiring.
link |
It's mostly human nature.
link |
It's not technical.
link |
It's mostly human nature behind it.
link |
And it turns out it's,
link |
turtles all the way down this human at the bottom.
link |
Yes, so is it possible to build startups
link |
that take on the big guys,
link |
whatever that is of the modern era?
link |
So for now, it's these platforms of Apple, Google, Twitter,
link |
I don't even know, Meta I guess called now.
link |
Is it possible to take them on?
link |
Absolutely, but you don't take them on on their same turf.
link |
You take them on on the turf
link |
they're gonna want to have in the future, right?
link |
Spotify is a platform.
link |
It started as an application, is now a platform, right?
link |
Think of all the super apps out there
link |
that are now wallets and delivery services
link |
and travel services and transportation services
link |
all within an app.
link |
They've innovated in a different level,
link |
in a different space that the platform companies weren't.
link |
Google was an app company.
link |
It was solving search.
link |
And then it became a platform company.
link |
Apple was solving personal computing.
link |
And then iPhone was solving internet browsing,
link |
And then it became a platform company
link |
when the app store was at it.
link |
If you look at it,
link |
there's no such thing as building a platform company.
link |
You build a great app first,
link |
and then you can expand it
link |
and have the right to become a platform.
link |
Your whole book is just a bunch of advice for young people.
link |
And old, well, everyone is young at heart.
link |
And if you're not, you should be.
link |
So what, in terms of picking a career,
link |
you have advice on this point.
link |
What advice would you give to a person
link |
on how to pick a career?
link |
What is it you want to learn?
link |
And who is it you want to learn from?
link |
Just like you pick a university.
link |
You're like, I wanna go here for this expertise.
link |
I've heard about these programs, especially graduate,
link |
graduate studies, you go for a certain program
link |
with a certain set of people.
link |
Why don't you do that when it comes to a job?
link |
You just don't go, or in a career,
link |
you just don't go and say,
link |
I just wanna go work at Google,
link |
or I just wanna work at Apple.
link |
You wanna go to a certain team
link |
with a certain set of people
link |
and work with them on something
link |
that you're really curious about
link |
and you wanna learn about.
link |
That's such, I just wanted to comment that,
link |
that's such a, it's a subtle but a brilliant framing
link |
of just ask the question, what do I want to learn?
link |
And then see what career path is going to maximize that.
link |
That's so interesting.
link |
It's the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me.
link |
When I say I'm gonna bring somebody on the team,
link |
first question is, what do you wanna learn?
link |
I don't want the expert, like we talked about earlier,
link |
says, I'm the expert in this.
link |
You're gonna hire me as the expert.
link |
We're doing something new.
link |
You're not an expert,
link |
cause we're not an expert either.
link |
What is it you wanna learn?
link |
And on the topic of learning,
link |
what is the best way to learn?
link |
What, starting, you go into this new place,
link |
into this new world, into maybe V1,
link |
you said you're building V1.
link |
I mean, the whole world is late, is full of V1s
link |
or V0s waiting for the V1 to come along.
link |
What's the process of that look like?
link |
What's the process of learning?
link |
Well, let me put a framing
link |
and then we'll talk about that last piece.
link |
I have now looking back, especially writing this book,
link |
I have a version one of myself, a version two,
link |
a version three, a version four.
link |
I had a lot of opinions about myself
link |
and what I wanted to do.
link |
Sometimes those opinions for certain people,
link |
those opinions are formed
link |
and they get the data from their parents
link |
and they go do what their parents told them to do
link |
or their surroundings.
link |
My opinions was like, I wanna go and learn this.
link |
I'm curious about that.
link |
I made the zero to one move.
link |
And then over time by doing,
link |
I was refining those things
link |
and learning what I was really curious about
link |
and what I was really good about
link |
because I was getting data.
link |
And then I was like, then I had another set of opinions
link |
to create version two of me.
link |
And then I would go and do it.
link |
So I was learning by doing,
link |
starting with the opinion,
link |
you're not gonna get any facts.
link |
Most people are like,
link |
where do I make the most money for my position?
link |
They're trying to start with data.
link |
Start with the why, what's your curiosity?
link |
What do you wanna learn?
link |
And then follow that.
link |
I took the lowest job on the totem pole at General Magic
link |
because I wanted to get in there
link |
to work with the right team.
link |
I didn't even know what they were doing, right?
link |
But I thought that it felt right, right?
link |
I was barely living above the poverty line working there,
link |
working 80 hours a week
link |
because it was so amazing to learn
link |
just like a college student, right?
link |
That's what I was doing.
link |
And then I learned more from that
link |
and then changed those opinions into data.
link |
And then I found other opinions.
link |
So it's the same thing, but it was by doing, right?
link |
The way you find out what you wanna do in life
link |
is by figuring out what you don't wanna do.
link |
And the only way you find that out
link |
is by doing a bunch of stuff.
link |
Doing a bunch of stuff and refining it.
link |
Yeah, that's brilliant.
link |
So in terms of the career path
link |
of leaping into the startup world and launching a startup,
link |
what does it take to successfully found a startup,
link |
to have a chance to succeed?
link |
And maybe how do you decide to take that leap?
link |
Is there sort of having founded,
link |
having been part of many V1s,
link |
many of some of the most successful V1s ever,
link |
what's it take to take that leap?
link |
Maybe leave your job, cushy job at a company
link |
and do the startup.
link |
What does it take?
link |
It takes belief in yourself.
link |
That's the first thing.
link |
Belief that you can do it.
link |
Not, but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around you
link |
or coaches around you to make sure you know
link |
It's a crazy smart idea, but you're not crazy
link |
and you're just working on something
link |
as like a lone mad man or woman.
link |
You have a great idea.
link |
And like I said, great ideas chase you.
link |
In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas
link |
than they have time to implement.
link |
I used to be like that.
link |
I would like, oh my God, if this idea, this idea,
link |
and you try to do all of them,
link |
but the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on
link |
and you shut out all those other things
link |
and you bring them other ideas
link |
into the thing you're trying to do.
link |
So I try to run away from a great idea
link |
and then it stalks me.
link |
It hunts you down because you're like,
link |
ah, that's gonna have this problem.
link |
I'm gonna put it aside.
link |
And then all of a sudden, you know, a few days later,
link |
oh, I think I know how to solve that problem.
link |
Or I talk to somebody and you're just always kind of
link |
niggling around the edges of it.
link |
And then at some point it's like,
link |
it just becomes like this black hole
link |
that just sucks you in and you're like,
link |
I can't think about anything else but this.
link |
It's almost like a relationship in the world, right?
link |
You know, when you have it with a, you find your partner.
link |
You know, you're like, mm, mm, wait, mm, something.
link |
And then you're trying to like,
link |
and then all of a sudden it just,
link |
it comes together, right?
link |
It's kind of like that.
link |
Ultimately achieved focus.
link |
See, I'm different.
link |
I just dive right in.
link |
I used to do that too.
link |
I used to dive right in.
link |
But I learned that you'd need time.
link |
It's more effective to run away from it.
link |
And so it chases you because it makes you think harder
link |
This is not dating advice.
link |
We're talking about stardom.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
But ultimately, so you have achieved a focus on it.
link |
But you also said to believe in yourself.
link |
So it's not necessarily even the idea.
link |
It's the human that believe in the human being.
link |
You have to believe in yourself and the idea that you have.
link |
Because if you don't have that belief,
link |
then you can't project that to other people
link |
to say, join the team.
link |
Let me ask you on, because you mentioned mentors
link |
and you've talked about having had incredible mentors
link |
You're also a mentor to a very large number of people.
link |
What does it take to find a mentor?
link |
How do you find a great mentor?
link |
Usually they also find you.
link |
Is it like with the ideas?
link |
No, no, no, no, no, no.
link |
No, what happens is you're in the right,
link |
you have a community around you, okay?
link |
And because you've been building a network,
link |
because you can't do it alone.
link |
So you have to create this network around you
link |
of relationships, not transactions,
link |
but relationships over time that you really cherish
link |
and people you talk to, okay?
link |
And you share vulnerable or nascent ideas with
link |
or crazy opinions with, and then you argue them through.
link |
But you start to see resonate, and it's not about age.
link |
It's just about this connection, right?
link |
Obviously when I was young, all my mentors were older.
link |
And as I get older, I have mentors who are younger than me
link |
or the same age, right?
link |
They're not all just older, right?
link |
And so it's about that connection.
link |
It's about being on that same wavelength,
link |
but they also, they can counterbalance you.
link |
They compliment you in some way.
link |
Like my best mentors had nothing to do with technology.
link |
They didn't know anything about technology, right?
link |
The way we know it.
link |
They were all about human nature and they could reflect that
link |
and help me get more human focused and more empathetic
link |
because I was so detailed in the technology.
link |
I needed to see from other perspectives,
link |
but then they wanted to learn more about the technology,
link |
Or they thought that this idea was so great
link |
that it should exist.
link |
Now let's work together on that.
link |
So it's really, they have to find you
link |
and you have to find them.
link |
And that's by sharing.
link |
You just don't go and look it up on the internet
link |
and say, who are the best mentors in the world?
link |
It just doesn't work that way.
link |
So form a network of people and see where,
link |
I mean, it's like finding relationships, finding love,
link |
all that kind of friendship.
link |
Venture capitalists, money.
link |
Do VCs help or hurt a business in general?
link |
So like in those early stages in the chase
link |
of developing a V1, just what's the constructive
link |
and destructive power of money
link |
in the development of a brilliant idea
link |
and the deployment of a brilliant idea?
link |
I have seen brilliant venture capitalists.
link |
I have seen horrible ones.
link |
Ones that care about their LPs more
link |
than they care about the entrepreneurs.
link |
Of course, everyone's in it, at the end of the day,
link |
especially venture capital, they have to give a return
link |
to their limited partners, the people who invest in money
link |
that they have to shepherd that money
link |
and make sure it's watched over properly.
link |
But when there's not a balance, a pushback
link |
in a venture capitalist between what the LPs
link |
needs and what the entrepreneur needs,
link |
and that the entrepreneur might be trying really hard,
link |
but if they don't see, the VC doesn't see,
link |
the exit's gonna happen in two years
link |
and they just leave them hanging,
link |
when there's no, the value exchange is only money
link |
and not mentorship or ideas or other things,
link |
when there's not a relationship, but really a transaction,
link |
that's when money is toxic.
link |
Because you can get money everywhere.
link |
Maybe it's a little harder today,
link |
over the last month, but you can still find people
link |
with money who are on that, who wanna enable your mission
link |
and can be mentors, not always, not all of them,
link |
but some of them can be mentors, but they're on your side,
link |
then it's incredibly powerful
link |
because it's not just one plus one equals two, right?
link |
It's something bigger than that
link |
because then they can bring their networks of people
link |
and their networks of companies
link |
and other people they worked with
link |
that might wanna join your mission, right?
link |
That's the kind of venture capitalist
link |
and smart money that's out there, right?
link |
But you have to build a relationship.
link |
People go, oh, look at that valuation.
link |
Oh, it's the brand name of the VC that's investing me.
link |
No, it boils down to who's that partner
link |
and how experienced are they?
link |
Don't just give me the brand, give me the person
link |
because that's the person I'm gonna be interacting with.
link |
I have to, there's a million questions I wanna ask you,
link |
but we're on season five already.
link |
But let me ask you, it seems like
link |
out of all the brilliant things you write about,
link |
it seems like not an important question,
link |
but it's a fascinating one to me as lawyers.
link |
You write about this.
link |
So does the company need lawyers and why?
link |
So you write about sort of the value of this game, I guess.
link |
Right, the legal game.
link |
Why do we need lawyers?
link |
You sound exasperated by lawyers.
link |
I don't have a good question, I guess.
link |
The why of lawyers is what you're asking.
link |
The why of lawyers, yes, exactly.
link |
Okay, the why of lawyers.
link |
You even do the question.
link |
We just have to put why in front of everything you ask
link |
and then we'll be there.
link |
Lawyers, why, why?
link |
Even mafiosos had lawyers.
link |
Okay, you know, Tony Soprano, you know, Scarface,
link |
all of them had lawyers, right?
link |
Because there are things in this world
link |
that you don't always consider in the government,
link |
in laws, in competitors,
link |
because you're so focused on what you're doing,
link |
they have to watch out for you, right?
link |
Now, the best kind of lawyers are the ones
link |
who try to work with you to enable what you're doing
link |
and see gray areas.
link |
Law is not black or white, it's how it's interpreted, right?
link |
And so they can help interpret things a certain way
link |
or help push on things a certain way
link |
to get change to happen or allow change to happen.
link |
Because if you have lawyers who are always,
link |
just like you were talking about PR people,
link |
if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything,
link |
because their job is to really say no or maybe,
link |
they'll never say yes.
link |
And you also say their job is to say no
link |
and bill you by the hour.
link |
If you don't wanna know, don't ask them,
link |
because you're gonna get a no,
link |
And you'll get charged for it.
link |
And you'll get charged for it anyways, right?
link |
So to have a partner, to have them on your team,
link |
to help you see maybe some of the things you don't see,
link |
some consequences, they help to rein that in
link |
or change your language.
link |
Like, are you gonna get sued for this ad?
link |
Just change this one word and it helps.
link |
So you need to have a partner.
link |
Most of the times, especially engineers or designers,
link |
they see lawyers as only stifling.
link |
Lawyers can actually, if you do it right
link |
and you have the right type,
link |
they can actually open up a whole new world for you
link |
because of the interpretation
link |
and how we go about doing things.
link |
And they help you not get bogged down
link |
in the pain of little mistakes that didn't mean anything.
link |
Exactly, you shot yourself in the foot
link |
and you didn't even know it.
link |
You didn't even know you were carrying the gun.
link |
Just to jump around, Charles Bukowski once wrote,
link |
"'Find what you love and let it kill you.'"
link |
So the question is about work life balance.
link |
That's like finding an idea and let it chase you.
link |
Yes, but a little more aggressive.
link |
So what does work life balance look like
link |
that maximizes success and or happiness?
link |
Is there such a thing as work life balance?
link |
Is, can you speak to this?
link |
When your work is your life,
link |
and I mean that in the positive sense.
link |
When you're on a mission that really matters
link |
and you know that you can really affect,
link |
not just yourself, but other people's lives,
link |
and then that is very rewarding, right?
link |
That's, like I said, a mission, right?
link |
But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself.
link |
At General Magic, wonderful documentary,
link |
if no one's seen it, you gotta see that.
link |
I was physically and mentally unhealthy,
link |
socially unhealthy as well,
link |
because I put every waking minute into this thing,
link |
every ounce of me into it.
link |
And when it was a spectacular disaster,
link |
we were making the iPhone 15 years too early,
link |
the bottom fell out.
link |
I had nothing left.
link |
I had to get healthy socially, emotionally, physically
link |
after that, that trauma.
link |
I let everything go.
link |
I learned from that that you have to,
link |
even though you might put everything into your work,
link |
you need to find balance outside of it.
link |
Now that doesn't mean you're always,
link |
you know, it's three days a week working
link |
and four days a week or whatever it was.
link |
You're still working as hard as ever,
link |
but what you're doing is you're making sure
link |
when your thinking time is during work,
link |
that you're not ruminating at three in the morning.
link |
You use the tools that you have to put those ideas
link |
into databases or on pages or somewhere else
link |
so you can go back and look at them.
link |
So you're not always having to remember,
link |
because what happens is most people
link |
don't write this stuff down.
link |
So they just sit here and got to remember this,
link |
I got to remember this, I got to remember this.
link |
If you just put it into the tools
link |
and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh.
link |
A lot of the time is about ruminating
link |
about what I need to get done and remembering everything
link |
instead of doing the work.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
So if you just put it down on paper,
link |
you can actually escape it.
link |
Escape it for a time, to have peace for a time.
link |
You mentioned General Magic.
link |
Let me ask you the Russian question.
link |
The Russian question.
link |
What's been the darkest moments of your life?
link |
Where are some of the darkest places
link |
you've got in your mind?
link |
You talked about if you're doing these kinds of things
link |
with startups, you're gonna have to face a crisis.
link |
Right, absolutely.
link |
If you're doing it right, you're gonna face it.
link |
So for you personally, where were some
link |
of the tougher moments in your life?
link |
Growing up, I went to 12 schools in 15 years.
link |
I was always the new kid.
link |
Put yourself in those shoes, right?
link |
You picked on, what were you picked on?
link |
Well, absolutely, but even more so,
link |
I was the geek with the computer.
link |
Remember the nerds in the 80s?
link |
You probably don't know this, but believe me,
link |
we were made fun of.
link |
What were these computers?
link |
What were these things?
link |
You're off in a cold.
link |
They're all off partying or going, whatever it was,
link |
and I'm sitting there like,
link |
and they're like, this guy is just this alien, right?
link |
Who's this new guy who just showed up and,
link |
and then you would ask the smart questions
link |
and you couldn't be the smartest in the,
link |
because then you get picked on too.
link |
And you're the new kid.
link |
So you're in this environment that's ever changing.
link |
You don't fit in and you are just asking questions
link |
because you think they're the right questions to answer,
link |
but then they like, you're making us look bad.
link |
Don't ask these smart questions
link |
because you're gonna make us do more work.
link |
So right there, it's pretty tough.
link |
And I'm moving cities, right?
link |
And I didn't have the internet
link |
to stay connected to people.
link |
There was no internet.
link |
Phone calls were $2 a minute.
link |
So it was lonely too.
link |
It was lonely, right?
link |
I was a latchkey kid, right?
link |
I had my brother, but he was a skateboarder
link |
and he had a different social way of working.
link |
He loved to do that stuff and be outside.
link |
I loved the computer.
link |
So even in the computer, you were alone in the family.
link |
With the computer in the family, you were alone.
link |
I was absolutely alone.
link |
But then, then you could find the other geeks, right?
link |
But there were just a few of us
link |
and we made this little thing.
link |
But then when you moved away,
link |
you know, then I had to use a BBS
link |
and a bulletin board system and a dial up modem.
link |
And then I started hacking the phone system
link |
to get free codes on MCI and Sprint back in the day
link |
to get long distance, to get free codes to call my friends,
link |
the geeks on the other side, right?
link |
Or to dial into a BBS cheaply
link |
that was in another part of the world.
link |
So this was this subculture
link |
and that was not accepted in any way.
link |
And not the heroes that you see today
link |
that are on the richest people in the world and everything.
link |
So that was the first set of trauma.
link |
And then the next one really was general magic.
link |
You know, the end of that, like I described before.
link |
And pulling yourself out and going just,
link |
cause I got so insular in that world
link |
of geeking out and building stuff
link |
that I just tore all the social ties, right?
link |
Because it was just, it was a drug.
link |
I was hooked on that.
link |
I had to get clean.
link |
Yeah, and that made you who you are.
link |
Tempered, tempered.
link |
So Steve Jobs is no longer with us.
link |
One day you also will no longer be with us.
link |
That's the thing about this life, it ends.
link |
So no matter how many incredible things
link |
you brought to this world,
link |
no matter how many inventions you built,
link |
you too shall perish.
link |
Do you think about this?
link |
Are you afraid of your death?
link |
I am not afraid of my death.
link |
And I think about the soul.
link |
Because I do, even though I'm an atheist,
link |
I think about the soul.
link |
And the soul is the thing that you instill in others
link |
when you go that lives on.
link |
It's not this thing that's magically in space.
link |
It's the thing that you've imparted onto people
link |
that you worked with and those relationships you've had.
link |
And that soul lives on in the stories that they tell, right?
link |
And through Build, I'm hopeful that those stories
link |
stay relevant because they're human nature.
link |
They're not about who knows what the next iPhone thing is
link |
or the next iPod thing is.
link |
The stuff that I have been able, the privilege to make
link |
and work with people, those are all ephemeral.
link |
The iPod's gone now, right?
link |
This week, it was announced iPod's dead after 21 years.
link |
It is those human connections.
link |
It's that growth that you've helped someone
link |
just like they helped me.
link |
Just like Bill Campbell or Steve Jobs is gone,
link |
but they made me be better.
link |
That's the soul that I believe in.
link |
That's fascinating that you say that.
link |
Yeah, so many of these products,
link |
I mean, to push back a little bit,
link |
so even though the iPod is an end of an era.
link |
Using it every day.
link |
I think that, I mean, the number of people that impacted
link |
is just, so I suppose the soul is carried by the people.
link |
Sometimes the products you create
link |
is the sort of the transport mechanism.
link |
They felt the love, and they felt that love,
link |
and it transformed them,
link |
even if they don't have the vessel anymore.
link |
Yeah, and in that way, the soul lives on.
link |
Just like the body is the vessel.
link |
That's beautifully put.
link |
Why do you think we're here?
link |
What's the meaning of life, Tony?
link |
We're going all around.
link |
Because you said it's important to have a press release.
link |
If humanity, if life on earth,
link |
if this thing, the consciousness,
link |
the falling in love, and building bridges,
link |
and iPods, and rockets,
link |
and trying to extend out into the cosmos, why?
link |
Why do you think we're doing it?
link |
Is there any meaning to it?
link |
We are naturally curious.
link |
We're, we are naturally curious individuals.
link |
And we are always looking for meaning.
link |
We're always trying to ascribe meaning to something,
link |
or understanding of something, right?
link |
And through that, it's just like evolution, right?
link |
It's just that thing that's baked into our being
link |
at the most fundamental level.
link |
Driven by curiosity.
link |
Driven by curiosity.
link |
You're creating some pretty cool things along the way.
link |
Tony, you, and speaking of cool things,
link |
you've created some of the coolest things ever.
link |
And on top of that, you're just an amazing human being.
link |
It's a huge honor that you'll sit and talk to me today.
link |
Lex, this is great.
link |
I didn't know where I was going,
link |
and I'm, let's talk, I'm looking for season.
link |
Seven, eight, nine.
link |
Let's go hang out and have dinner,
link |
and just rap about all kinds of crazy,
link |
I'd love to continue this.
link |
Thank you so much, Tony.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tony Fadal.
link |
To support this podcast,
link |
please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
from Tony Fadal himself.
link |
The most wonderful part of building something together
link |
with a team is that you're walking side by side
link |
with other people.
link |
You're all looking at your feet
link |
and scanning the horizon at the same time.
link |
Some people will see things you can't,
link |
and you will see things that are invisible to everyone else.
link |
So don't think doing the work just means
link |
locking yourself into a room.
link |
A huge part of it is walking with your team.
link |
The work is reaching your destination together
link |
or finding a new destination
link |
and bringing the team with you.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.