It wasn't just a one-on-one, but it could be Steve
against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic
on the front face of the iPhone.
And we're going to do this.
And we're like, God, you know, and so we did it.
And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details,
but he could see in our minds that we're like,
yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably,
but man, it's really putting us in risk.
And we laid out the risks for him.
And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks.
The following is a conversation with Tony Fidel,
engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, the iPhone,
and the Nest thermostat.
And he's the author of the new book, Build,
an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.
More than almost any human ever.
He knows what it takes to create technology ideas,
designs, products, and companies that revolutionize life
for huge numbers of people in the world.
So it truly is an honor and pleasure
to sit down with Tony for a time
and look back at one heck of an amazing life.
This is the Luxrubin podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fidel.
When did you first fall in love with computers?
Or let's say computer engineering and design?
I first fell in love with computers and programming.
Was it a summer school class?
In fifth grade in Gross Point Farms, Michigan,
it was a simple basic programming class.
But the basic programming class was not
like you might think it was.
It was bubble cards.
So literally it was, you know, the stack of cards
and you would use a number two pencil
and you would put in your program line by line
and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked
and no errors and what have you.
And you would take that set of cards
and you'd put it on this reader and it would go off
to an IBM microcomputer somewhere in the back vendor cloud.
And then you would sit
on a Texas Instruments paper terminal.
And it would just literally, I was just, I could write things
and it would, I could program this machine to do stuff.
And it was, you know, it was nowhere near six.
There was no graphics, right?
Oregon Trail was all in text, right?
The cards were so cumbersome
that if you got one thing wrong or out of order or disaster
or you dropped one card, it would all fall apart.
So just doing that, you know, print F or what was it?
I can only remember what it was.
It was, you know, what the basic commands were.
But also when you say basic, you mean basic programming language.
Okay.
Basic programming.
You're writing basic programming language on paper.
On paper.
And you're calling it programming though.
It's called programming.
Yeah, you're programming this computer in, you know,
in a remote location and it came back.
So it was truly cloud computing in a way.
It was really terminal based computer.
And the input and the program are separate.
So the input to the program or they could go together.
Like, or there's no input to the program.
It just runs and it gives you output.
Yeah, it goes in and it says, it says ready.
And then you can say run and then it would run.
But to program it, you didn't type it
because it was a printer terminal.
You would make the stack of cards
and that would get it into the computer's memory.
Okay.
So where was the magic?
The magic was that you could create, you had a language
and you could create what you wanted to create, right?
You could create a world or what have you
and have this interaction.
And you could compute things.
You could, you know, do numbers.
You could, I was playing Oregon Trail, right?
So you were less like-
So you can play video games.
Wow, video.
That's right.
You could play text games
and then imagine them in your brain, right?
Oregon Trail.
There's a, this meme I saw recently,
if you want to feel bad about yourself as a programmer,
realize that one person wrote railroad tycoon,
I think that's the name of the game.
This is cool little builder game.
One person wrote it in assembly.
So from like from scratch and for people who don't know,
it kind of looks like a SimCity type game.
It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads.
And there's a nice graphics of three-dimensional
and all that kind of stuff.
All the things, all the rich, colorful things
you would imagine for a three-dimensional video game,
all written in assembly,
meaning the lowest level code next to binary,
which is fascinating.
And that's, you had to notice the magic
at that low level at that time.
You didn't have all the graphics.
You didn't have all the like APIs and all the sample codes
and no stack overflow and no internet, none of that.
You just had, you had to know registers.
You know, had to know the op codes.
And you had to imagine the world in your brain
of the memory structures and everything of,
there's no visualization.
You visualized it all yourself, right?
And so that was magic.
But then the next part of the magic
of where I got hooked even further
was like I'm doing these little things.
And then electronic arts came out for the Apple II.
So I got an Apple II and electronic arts came out.
And I was programming and doing basic
and making my own games.
But then there were two games that really blew my mind.
One was pinball construction set.
And the other one was music construction set.
And these were both places where I could create pinball games
and I could create musical scores because I love music.
And I could then play them, right?
And so when you had that, you were like,
oh, there's something very different.
So I could create myself.
But then there was others that create tools
so you could create at a visual level.
And then you would read the back stories
because electronics arts back in the day,
it was one programmer who would program those
things, you know, each of those things.
And you could read their back stories.
It was literally like a musician or someone else.
Like you could read Rick Rubin's like, here's the thing.
They tell you all of that stuff.
And there was one guy who wrote music construction set.
He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old.
And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time.
And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this
and had published, right?
And this amazing tool was created.
I'm like, what could I do?
And so then it just kept building off of that.
But really it was those seminal things.
First the introduction and then, you know,
the power through programming and turning these things
into what you wanted to turn it into.
And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old
and have, you know, PhDs.
And then I was like, okay, this is really cool.
I wish we did that with programmers
where we treated them like artists.
We would know the backstory these days today.
Or not just programmers, engineers.
Engineers, designers.
Yeah, like all the things about a product
that I think we love are the little details.
And there's probably a human being
behind each of those details
that had their little inkling of genius that they put in.
And I wish we knew those stories.
That's always sad to me when I,
because obviously I love engineering
and I interact with companies.
And they, you know, autonomous vehicles,
something I'm really interested about.
And I see that companies generally,
and we'll probably talk about this,
but they seem to want to hide their engineers.
Like engineers hold the secrets.
Like the great secret.
We did not speak of the great secret.
But then the result of that is you don't get to hear
their stories, the passion that is there
behind the engineers.
Like, and also the genius, the little,
there's a difference between the stuff that's patented.
Like the kernel of the idea.
And the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea.
And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects
a little bit more.
But sorry for the distraction.
So what, you mentioned Apple II.
What was the first computer you fell in love with?
Like the product, the thing before you
that was a personal computer?
It was the Apple II.
So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over.
You know, it was, I think it was,
at the time it was the person of the year.
Maybe it was that year.
I don't remember what, but.
Well, Apple II was the person of the year?
Yeah, for my magazine back.
And I don't remember when,
but it was around that same time.
I was so young.
But I had, there was the Apple II
and I didn't know what it was,
but I knew about tools.
Cause my grandfather taught me all about tools
and creating things, right?
And I saw this thing.
And I had the, you know, that IBM experience,
that terminal experience.
And I'm like, oh, I could have that at home.
Right?
And so I need to have that at home.
And the only thing that was really talked about
in our circles was the Apple II.
And I was just like, that's it.
So I jumped up and down.
It was very expensive.
I have to have this.
My parents like, what?
You know, it was $2,500 back then.
In the 1981 it was like crazy, right?
So I was like, I'm gonna make as much money
as I can this summer.
And my grandfather said,
cause he helped me learn all about tools
and build things together.
I will match whatever you make
so you can get this computer.
So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy,
cadding actually for the, you know,
that the families in, you know,
at the country clubs in the town where we lived
and did whatever I could.
And that end of that summer was got my Apple II.
And you couldn't tear it away from me.
It was my friend.
It was everything.
From a product perspective,
what do you remember that was brilliant?
The design choices, the ideas behind it?
Or is it just that it exists?
Or the very idea of a personal computer
is the brilliant design choice.
Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool
in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted.
I could program it anyways.
There was no, you know, there was no internet connection.
There was no, it was all just you.
You either loaded software that you got from someone, right?
Or you created yourself.
And then there was the whole other thing,
which was started happening, which we were doing.
And this was kind of like MP3 and stuff.
We were sharing software, right?
So you built this community of sharing software.
You would go and pirate.
That was what we called pirate all this software.
You never use it all, but it was just that fun thing of like,
I'm gonna get all this other stuff
and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it
and see behind the scenes.
So you really had a sense this was your world
and you owned it, right?
And you could like literally go into every register.
We didn't have all those security layers.
Like we do not like,
you could really touch bits and you could poke bits
and you can make this light turn on.
And, you know, and the geek assignment just lit up.
Now there's, it's so abstract, you know,
people don't even understand.
Like usually, you know, some programs
don't even understand memory.
They just think it's unlimited, right?
Yeah.
And security, it's like now there's all this security
that you should have, but it's like the adults
all showed up to the party
and now you can't have all the fun, right?
It's like, no, no.
You know, this was the thing where
if you, if the power went out,
you lost your whole program.
You might've worked a whole day on it.
And if you didn't press save at every other line
and you were to save, save, save.
And it would like grind, grind the disc drive
or the tape drive.
Rrr, rrr, rrr.
Like every single step was contemplated
because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work.
So a lot of the magic was in the software.
The fact that you could have software,
the fact that you could share software,
the community around the software,
it wasn't necessarily the hardware.
Well, that was the first step.
The second step around the hardware
was I got things like the mocking board,
which the mocking board paired with the music construction
said you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes
and it was a synthesizer in the Apple II.
So you would plug in this card and you go, oh my God,
look at this.
And it would, you know, you could start generating cool sounds.
You're like, it was a Moog, you know,
like a Moog in a way, early Moog.
What year are we talking about?
This is 82, I think, 81, 82.
And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds
that are very cool in the 80s.
Yeah, the eight bit, you know, chip tunes, right?
Chip tunes, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
And then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick,
you had to pull a chip out and you had to like plug in
a dip socket to put in a joystick.
And then I was like, oh, and then I had to get more memory.
How do we do that?
And now I wanted to speed up product.
So then that turned into a company, actually, from that.
But it was in a hardware software, no one at that.
But it was all about, you know, modifying this thing
in every way.
First was software.
And then you started gaining confidence.
And then I got a little bit more money and stuff.
And then you could get into the hardware and, you know,
wire things.
And then the Apple II came with all the schematics, right?
So in the back, in the early Apple IIs,
you could open up and all the schematics were there.
You purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it.
Yeah, came with it.
That's an interesting choice.
That's an interesting choice from a company perspective.
Right, it was like a real maker kind of thing.
Right.
I wonder what they, so that was intentional.
Like this is- Absolutely intentional.
This is for the cutting edge folks too.
Or especially- It was only the cutting edge.
It was geeks for geeks.
Yeah.
So we were like, oh, how did they make it?
And then we got to learn through that.
Apple I did the same thing, right?
It just, Apple II became more packaged up
and had, you know, a little bit better software, right?
Came with basic and then, you know, so it was really,
it was what we might think of as a Raspberry Pi today
or something like that, but not with so much software.
It was literally, and all the chips were out there,
so you could inspect the buses and the, right?
Cause everything was just broken out.
So I guess that's the idea behind stable, big projects
and open source like on GitHub.
That you have the schematics there
and it's kind of a product.
But I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing.
Like we're going to release this to a small set of people,
self-selected, perhaps, that are kind of the makers,
the cutting edge folks, the builders, the at-home engineers.
Like in some way, what Tesla is doing with the beta
for the full self-driving is kind of like that.
It's like selecting a group of people,
but that has to do more with you,
how safe of a driver you are versus how much
of a tinkerer you are because you don't get to tinker.
I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do
for really cutting edge technologies,
especially you're interested in like hardware stuff.
Is that crazy?
Why don't more companies do that kind of thing you think?
I think back then it was about a community
and serving that community of builders.
Now this is about people who want to get the experience
and want it really simple and easy.
And they're like, and so there's the audience
or they believe the audience is small
who would value those other things
that we're just talking about.
But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi
and all of these other little boards, right?
There's a whole world more than I've seen.
Like it's amazing what you can do now
with these little kits and the software that's created.
And so there's a whole nother, I think another batch
of makers and builders that are coming up through the ranks.
And if we look at YouTube channels and stuff, right?
They take these little boards, they hack them,
then they print out the parts on their 3D printer,
assemble them and they create robots and what have you.
So I think it's happening.
It's just not as I guess raw as it used to be.
But it's there and it's really expanding around the world.
And that's really nice to see
because it's a whole new generation who are empowered.
I think there's a semi-dormant genius amongst millions.
So like Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit.
It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised
if it's several million Raspberry Pi's
that have been sold.
I think more than that.
And it's kind of this quiet storm of genius,
brewing of engineers.
We don't get to hear it because they're not organized.
I mean, we get to hear it through inklings here and there.
Like I said, YouTube, there's little communities
that are local and so on.
But if they were organized,
if a leader would emerge, no.
Okay, so when did you first start to dream
about building your own things,
designing your own products,
designing your own systems and software and hardware?
Well, in high school, there was a company
that a friend of mine founded
and I was the second employee.
It was called Quality Computers.
And it was a mail order, mail order,
cause there's no e-commerce then.
There was no internet again.
You either mailed in your little coupon
and you said, this is what I wanted to order
or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you.
Turn around time and this stuff was like,
from the time you wanted, the time you bought,
it was maybe eight to 12 weeks.
And that was just the normal way of getting things.
So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple too.
And it was software and all kinds of accessories.
So hardware accessories, so hardware,
plug-in cards, joysticks, all this stuff.
And what we noticed was
there were accelerators or memory cards.
And to be able to use those cards,
you had to actually go and change the software you used
to access this new memory.
So you literally have to go and you took the program
that you had, let's say it was Appleworks,
which was like an early Microsoft office
or something like that.
And you had to literally change the code
and you would install all these patches
to then take advantage of the hardware.
So what we started creating was software on top of it
to do the automatic installation of all of these patches.
So we made it much easier to take new hardware
and then end the existing software you have
and expand it into this new world.
So it was creating tools
and that really great customer support.
And we started getting a lot of orders
because we had the software make it easier to install,
to give them the superpower.
And at the same time,
they would be able to change their software
and have a new world that wasn't existing
from the companies that were creating the initial products.
And so it was more of that.
And then that happened with hard drives.
So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple too
to like read, cause you could get really fragmented.
So I wrote that piece of software
and we sold that through the company
along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties.
So that all happened in 12th grade
of freshman year of college.
You wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade
for the Apple too.
Yeah, between 12th and freshman year.
What programming language do you remember?
Is it assemblies?
Is it supposed to?
There were certain inner loops were assembly
and other loops actually there were really early pass,
no, C compilers.
What was the motivation behind these?
Is it to make people's lives easier?
Is it to create a thing,
experience that is simpler and simpler and simpler,
thereby more accessible to a larger number of people?
Like what?
Or did you just like the Tinker?
No, no, no, it was two things really.
Cause one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software,
right?
So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user.
And then the other thing was,
because I was also manning the customer support line,
people would call in and go, this doesn't work.
And I'm like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware and software,
right?
Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware
and the installation process better.
So my whole world was out of box experience
from when I was in high school.
Cause I had a man, the customer support line,
pack the boxes and write some of the code while we were doing,
while Joe, Joe Gleason,
who was the founder of quality computers,
he was off doing the mark, the ads,
placing the ads for the mail order,
making sure we were running the credit cards, right?
Yeah.
It was two of us.
And then it turned into a third,
and then we hired another person from high school
to like pack boxes so I could stay on the customer support
line or doing that software, right?
And it was all in his parents' basement, right?
As you were scaling exponentially.
Scaling, right, exactly, bootstrapping.
So we'll jump around a little bit,
but what were the, you said you love music,
what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod
if we jumped forward?
And how far back to those ideas stretch?
You know, if you look at the history of technology,
there's, I mean, not just the product,
but the idea is truly revolutionary.
Maybe it's time has come,
but just if you look at the arc of history,
instead of music is so fundamental to who we are
as a humanity and to be able to put that in your pocket,
make it truly portable is fascinating
in a way that's truly portable.
So it's digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman
or something like that.
So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod?
You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid.
Just love music from I think second grade
when I got my first albums and stuff like that.
What kind of music were we talking about?
So this was Led Zeppelin.
This was the Stones, Hendricks, Aerosmith,
Cheap Trick, Sticks, Ted Nugent, you know,
just the real American and British rock and roll, right?
There's a bunch of people listening right now.
Who, Ted, who's that?
Who's that?
Led Zeppelin, what is that?
Is that for me?
It's your all of my parents crazy.
Yeah, just blast it loud.
Loud, just.
And this was second, third grade, fourth grade.
I just fell in love.
And then we moved back to Detroit
and I love listening to the radio station
because there was all kinds of crazy music
because you'd have an amalgam of rock and then funk and R&B.
And I loved to listen at night.
So I had a clock radio.
But if I had the clock radio on, everyone,
parents go, go to sleep, stop that, turn that stuff off.
So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it.
Nice.
Right?
So I said, oh, they're like, okay.
And then I could listen to it all night
and no one could hear me, right?
And I could just sit there and, you know.
Just huddling around the radio.
Groove out.
Just listening to Zeppelin.
There we're to heaven.
What would you say is the greatest
rock classic rock song of all time?
Greatest classic rock song of all time.
Well, pops into mind.
Well, no, you know what?
I mean, this has to be objectively not the one.
That's really hard, dude.
This is so hard.
This is a serious journalistic interview.
You're not going to back down
from these kinds of questions.
Oh my God.
No, no, no.
What a challenge.
Yeah, it's hard to pick.
But to me, stairway to heaven is a safe fall.
It's like, it's so often considered
to be one of the greatest songs of all time
that you almost don't want to pick it.
Right, exactly.
But you've returned to it time and time again.
And it's like, yeah, this is something pretty special.
This is a rock opera of sorts.
Well, the rock opera that really blew me away
and still continues to blow me away
is all of Dark Side of the Moon, like that.
I love Zeppelin.
I can't say which one's better.
But Dark Side of the Moon for me was,
it was a audio experience, right?
The whole thing from soup to nuts,
plus all the synthesizers, all of those things.
OK, so back to the iPod.
So from the early age, you loved music.
Loved it.
Absolutely loved it.
And always was just around it and always,
it was always playing.
I played it so loud that I actually
hurt the earring in my right ear.
And I still suffer from that today.
And then, no regrets.
No regrets whatsoever.
Going to concerts in downtown Detroit
and all that crazy stuff.
So moving forward, so in college, I was a DJ.
So I would DJ and hang out and play all the tunes I love
and whatever for the crowd.
And then I continued to do that in Silicon Valley
when I moved right after school.
And so I was belugging all of these CDs around with me.
1,000 CDs to write.
And at the same time, and so those were heavy.
And at the same time, I was doing the Philips Nino and Velo.
Those were Windows CE-based mobile computing products.
The Nino was the first device to actually put
Audible books on tape.
So I worked with Audible.
We met in a conference.
And they were like, we don't want to do hardware.
We just want to do content.
I was like, well, we have this device.
Let's get it together.
And we got Audible on that.
And this was in 96 or 7, first Audible books.
And it was, oh my god, that's audio.
Well, what if we put music on it, right?
And so, and the memory was very small at the time, right?
There was almost no flash.
It was all DRAM.
When you did Audible, you stored it in DRAM, right?
Which is OK, probably, because how much books do you need
is the idea.
By the way, brilliant.
I mean, just putting books.
I know it's probably not the sexiest of things,
but putting books on a mobile device is a brilliant step.
I don't know.
Sometimes, you can't measure how much human progress occurred
because of an invention.
Like, there's the sexy, big products.
But you never know.
Like, Wikipedia is one of those things
that doesn't get enough, I think,
credit for the transformational effects it has.
It's not seen as the sexiest of products.
But maybe it is.
When you look at human history, Wikipedia arguably
is one of the big things that basically
unlocked human knowledge.
Human knowledge and human editing and human, you know,
just the human nature of building something together.
Yeah.
So it's fascinating.
Sometimes, you can't measure those things, maybe
until many, many decades later.
Anyway, sorry.
So that was the Nino.
That was there.
And then there was Audible.
They put books, why not put music?
Music.
And I'm carrying around the music for the DJ gigs.
And you're like, wait a second.
Two and two together, right?
Like, let's get rid of this.
And so, and then MP3 show up.
The actual encode?
The format.
MP3 showed up around 97, 98.
So MP3 is compressed so you can have, like,
the storage is reduced significantly.
Right.
So you could go from a, you know, a large full lossless,
you know, digital track into something
that can be stored in four to eight megabytes,
something like that for the audio.
Now, you know, that's a reduced quality,
but you could get it down there.
And you're like, oh, OK.
And now, if we have enough flash or DRAM,
we can put 10, 15, what have you, all in that same memory.
And it starts to replicate a CD.
And then ultimately, if you put it on a hard drive,
you could start to put, you know, thousands of songs.
Yeah, that's also another brilliant invention.
Like, people don't realize, I think,
I think people would be surprised how big
in terms of storage raw audio is.
And the fact that you can compress it, like,
I don't know what the compression is,
but it's like 10X, it's a very significant compression.
And still, it sounds almost lossless.
Much of the chagrin of Neil Young, who does not like that.
But even Neil Young, even the stuff he talks about,
is still tiny files relative to the raw.
So he wants us to increase it just a little bit more.
A little bit more.
But it's still, that's an invention.
That's a thing that unlocks your ability
to carry around a device like a Nino and listen to music.
Because without that, there's no way
you can carry on a gigantic hard drive.
Right, exactly.
And so then that, so it was MP3 is the Nino.
And my hatred of carrying around all this heavy stuff,
that then spawned fuses.
And then ultimately became a lot of the ideas
and things of that nature.
And my passions were born into then the iPod.
It was too, Apple needed something
and I wanted to fix something.
And it all kind of came together at this right place,
right time, plus the right technology came.
It was just like the stars aligned.
So how did it come to life?
The details of the stars aligning,
but the actual design, the actual engineering
of getting a device to be small,
the storage of the interface, how it looks,
the storage, the details of the software,
all that kind of stuff.
What are some interesting memories
from that design process?
What are some wisdoms you can part from that process?
Well, how long do you wanna go?
Cause I have, I can go deep.
So...
Let's go at least 20 hours, let's go.
Okay, 20 hours.
This is one of the lengthy documentaries
that make it happen.
We're gonna turn it into the episodic binge listening.
Yeah, scheme of thrones.
So let's just start with, after I was asked
to be a consultant to put this thing together.
So I already had knowledge of the space
and the technology and all that stuff,
but I had to very quickly, and a lot of the suppliers
because of what I was doing at Fuse,
trying to create that thing.
So as a contractor, I was like,
okay, what is the first thing you need to do?
So after I showed a different architectures
and what three different products could be
to Steve about options for storage options,
battery options, form factor options,
there was three options.
And as I was told, given very good advice,
give to the two options you really do not like,
but their options and give the best option last,
cause Steve will shoot all those down
and give the best option last.
And then you could talk about that.
And so that was the one that had a 1.8 inch hard drive
and a small screen.
Like the screen you know it on the original iPod,
classic iPod.
And then I had enough of the idea
of the three or four different CPUs and processor suppliers
and kind of systems that were out there
that I had gone and found and put together on power supplies,
you know, disk drive interfaces,
firewire interface, all that stuff.
So I put together all of those schematics
or block diagrams, they weren't schematics yet
cause it was just me.
And coming up with a bill of materials,
coming up with what it could look like,
what would be the input output,
how we could make a better headphone jack.
That was also on there.
Screen suppliers, tearing apart calculators.
So got all, calculators and all kinds of electronics
to get the right size, different sizes of small LCDs.
So I got all kinds of different battery types.
I got different types of, you know,
in different battery sizes, double A's, triple A's,
working through all the different,
and there was lithium ion, nickel metal hydrate.
So I took all the battery types.
I took all of the memory types, processing types, LCD types
and connectivity and all that stuff,
not wireless but wired,
and laid out these things as Lego blocks.
So literally had all of these things as just,
and so it made them so I could like, you know,
put them together and figure out
what the compact fact form factor would be.
Oh, like how do we shove them together?
What's the smallest possible box you can get?
So the questions was on storage, so the hard drive,
batteries, double A, triple A.
Right.
Screens, so screen size and then for that,
you're tearing apart calculators.
Calculators, digital cameras, whatever,
and getting little things, right?
So you can make it physical, right?
If you can make the intangible, tangible.
Like, and so I can say, look, we can make this.
And I brought this whole bag of goods
and it's like, right?
And like, here's this, here's this.
This is why double A's won't work
and because it makes it too fat and everything.
So just educate everybody through,
here's the parts that we can use.
You should not cheat a paper, it's physical.
You're playing in the physical space.
Oh, well, I would go back and forth.
So truth be told, because there weren't a good enough
graphical tools on the Mac,
I was using a PC with Visio and some 3D tools
and I was doing 3D design at the same time,
I was taking all these physical parts
and going, okay, what feels right?
So because you have to go from, you know, the details
and then the rough and you go back and forth
and you iterate, right?
And so it was just a lot of fun.
And then I ultimately ended up with a Styrofoam model
and printouts that came from Visio
that I glued together and put my grandfather's fishing weights
in because I also modeled the weights, right?
So I said, oh, this is this many ounces,
this is this many ounces in grams.
And then I went and got all that
and made the weighted these Styrofoam models
to then match that.
So when you picked it up,
it felt more or less form factor, right?
And it also, you felt how much, you know,
was it going to be dense enough?
Is it going to feel solid and rigid in your hand, right?
Why does it need to feel rigid?
Because it has to feel substantial.
It has to feel like I have like a,
like a bar of gold in my hand, right?
You know, maybe you know this,
when you open and close a car door,
you know that thunk and you go bam,
and you go, that feels solid, that feels real.
And then you get this tinny car that's like ding
and you're like, does this feel safe?
Does this feel like a value?
And so when you have a device like that
and you want to make sure that there's not too much air in it
that you distributed the density of the masses
in the right way.
So it feels like it's the right thing.
So you have to model battery life costs, you know, mass, sizes
of different things, and then you have to also think
about what the UI is going to look like, right?
So you have all of these constraints you're working,
variables you're working with, and you have to kind of,
you know, you can't get the perfect of everything.
What's the best, you know, local maximum
of all of these components that come together
to provide an experience?
Local maximums, it's always trade-offs.
What about buttons?
Buttons, oh, there was also the buttons too, right?
Oh, by the way, a lot of these battles fought inside your mind
or is it with other people?
Is it with Steve?
Is it lower? Like what?
This was all independent.
This was me before being able to present to Steve
because I had to feel really confident
that if I was going to put this in front of him,
that it could be made, right?
So I had to convince myself and go work through all the details
through like the very, very rough mechanical design,
electrical design, software things.
Because I didn't want to present something
that was going to be fictional, right?
My credibility of you would be like trashed, right?
So you mentioned convince yourself,
you're painting this beautiful picture
of a driven engineer, designer, futurist.
How much doubt were you plagued by through that?
Like this is even doable.
Because it's not obvious that this is even doable.
Like to do this at scale, to do this kind of thing,
to make it sexy, to shovel the screen, the batteries,
the storage, to make the interface,
the hardware and the software interface work, all of that.
I mean, I don't know, I would be overwhelmed
by the doubt of that because so many things have to work,
but the supply chain.
Like at that point, I wasn't getting into
any of those D-utils or anything.
You know, there's the basic stuff
that you have to put together.
And then you have to, you know,
through my learnings at General Magic
and my learnings at Phillips and delivering, you know,
multiple large scale programs and manufacturing,
you kind of get a rule of thumb
and you know what to focus on at the beginning
and what not to worry about over time.
Like when I was early in my career,
I worried about everything on the engineering details
so much so that, you know, I would be a nervous wreck.
Sooner or later, you learn how to filter out
and figure out what to prioritize.
And so 10 years later, you know,
I was able to do a much better job of filtering out
the things of like, we'll get to that in weeks to come.
But right now we got to like solve, you know,
the very important things which is,
could this actually be something real
and that you could deliver, you know, enough battery life,
right, enough of an interface, the right cost, right?
And the right price point.
So you were sitting on a track record of successes
and failures in your own mind
where you had sort of already a confidence, a calmness,
but still, was there a doubt that you can get this done?
Like, always, always.
How hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence
to a level where you could present it to Steve
and actually believe that this is doable?
Like what, do you remember when you felt-
Yeah, that moment.
Yeah.
I think it was after I triple check,
I couldn't bring anyone in, right?
I couldn't let anyone in on this.
So it was just me.
Are they gonna trample on it?
That kind of thing, why?
No, no, no, because I couldn't bring any,
when I mean bring anyone in on this,
one, it was a highly confidential program inside of Apple.
There was like four people who knew about it, right?
And so I couldn't bring anyone from Apple
because I was a contractor.
I couldn't bring anyone else from the outside world.
I worked for Apple and I'm under this crazy NDA, right?
In this contract.
So it was just, so I'm doing this.
Oh, and at the same time, I'm also buying
every competitive product, MP3 player
and tearing them all apart, right?
Tore them all apart and looking at them
and trying to learn from those as well.
So it was all of this stuff in six weeks.
So I didn't sleep, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But I was like, because I was trying to make this,
I was envisioning this since the Nino, right?
And I was like, oh my God, right?
But there was another doubt that I had
and it wasn't just, could you make the product?
But could Apple actually have the balls to make it?
Because Apple was not the same company
that you know it today in 2001.
Really?
It was cautious, conservative, careful.
It was barely breakeven.
It was what, four or $5 billion company.
Oh, so the guts required there is not necessarily
in the innovation.
It's like, this is gonna cost a lot of money
and we're gonna potentially lose all of it
because it'll be a flop.
Well, there's not just that, but there was only the Mac.
And the Mac wasn't doing very well.
There was about a 1% only in the US market share
for the Mac, right?
The company was in debt.
Bill Gates had to give him a loan, right?
Michael Dell at the time was saying,
shut down the company and give the money
back to the shareholders.
So this is not the company that people go,
oh my God, the iPhone came out.
It's a very different level of confidence
and financial situation that the company was in
versus the iPod.
So given that, what was the conversation
when you finally presented to Steve?
What was that conversation like?
The conversation was, well, we went through it,
the presentation and all that stuff happened.
And he was just like, and he never,
he would flip through it real quick,
throw the presentation aside and said,
okay, let's talk about this, right?
And so we went through it all.
And one was a big conversation about Sony.
And Sony was the number one in all audio categories,
home, portable, in the world, okay?
I had been already gone through 10 years of failure
and I was like, wait a second,
how are we gonna compete with Sony?
And I was always worried that Sony was gonna come out
with whatever it was that they were gonna come out with,
with their MP3 player, and that was it, game over, right?
And so I was like, Steve,
and this is why it took me four weeks
to finally sign on to join Apple
after he green-lighted the iPod program in that meeting,
was because I had built other things in the past
at Philips, the Nino and Vilo,
but they didn't know how to sell it or market it.
They didn't know how to retail it, right?
So I was like, we could build this.
And I was like, Steve, I'm pretty sure I can build this.
I've done this before,
but how are we gonna sell it?
You have all your marketing dollars on the Mac,
and he looked at me and he goes,
you build this with a team,
and our team, and Apple, and just isn't a me, right?
And I dedicate that we will make sure
that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars
will only go to this product and nothing else.
Wow.
Right?
Mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company.
So Steve saw something special here.
Exactly.
And he said, I'm going to commit all the marketing dollars
if you can deliver the experience
that we're all talking about.
If we can do that, and that was Jeff Robin as well,
because iPod would have never happened without iTunes.
People don't understand, that was a bundle.
You couldn't do one without the other and vice versa.
So Jeff and I, if Jeff and you can present
and bring that experience to life,
I will put all the marketing dollars behind it.
When did the marriage of iPod and iTunes sort of,
what was that birth of ideas that made up iTunes?
iTunes existed before the iPod, okay?
And so Jeff Robin had his company,
oh man, I can't remember the name, but it was bought.
He was making a MP3 player app for the Mac.
Steve saw it because there was MP3 player apps
like Winamp and other things that were on the PC, real player.
And Steve saw that going on and saw that Jeff
and his small team had this,
I can't remember, sound something.
Anyways, he bought that and that became the basis
of iTunes and then Jeff ran all of iTunes.
And so what happened specifically there was,
they were starting to hook up
to all these third party MP3 players.
Because there was a lot of Korean, the MP man,
like Walkman, but MP man, all these,
and they were trying to hook them up.
And they were like, these are horrible experiences.
And through that, and they said,
iTunes was something that was gonna help grow the Mac base
because we were trying to get more people on the Mac.
So this program would be a great new thing
you could add to the Mac.
And there was also internet connectivity
at the time for the iMac.
And so they did that.
And then they're trying to do these hookups.
They weren't going well.
And that's when they said, we need to build our own.
Or Steve said, we need to build our own
since these are such horrible experiences.
People don't wanna just burn CDs from iTunes.
We need to get that music on the go.
But in an Apple fashion, that's when I was called
to come in to do that, the iPod thing.
After the six weeks, then he already envisioned,
I'm sure he had it envisioned
because they were trying to do this thing.
Okay, now that's it.
iTunes, what, you know, it wasn't called iPod yet.
You know, what would become the iPod?
That is gonna be the thing that then propels Apple
into this new thing.
Because you're gonna bring all these music lovers in
that are gonna need their next generation
or Sony Walkman version 2.0.
So when you look at, again, apologies to Linger on iPod,
but it's one of the great inventions in tech history.
What wisdom do you draw from that whole process
about spotting an idea?
This is something you talk about in your book, Build.
How do you know that an idea is brilliant?
At which stage?
When did you know it was a good idea?
And maybe is there like some phase shifts?
First, your complete doubt that maybe,
and then maybe it becomes more than a hmm
and becomes like a little more confidence,
that kind of stuff.
And also wisdom about who to talk to.
Right.
So they don't trample the idea in the early stages,
that kind of stuff.
Any thoughts about this?
We could go on, again, how long do you wanna go?
20, this is a Netflix series,
I apologize, multi-season.
So a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure
and success, but the first thing it starts with,
there's a whole chapter called Great Ideas Chase You.
And so kind of goes into, in Build.
And you can go, and it goes through kind of chapter
and verse about all of those, how nest became into being.
But let's talk about it specifically for iPod, right?
So for me, I always had pain,
the pain of carrying the CDs everywhere, right?
And I had the joy of music, right?
If you could say all of a sudden I could get
the music I love all the time in a portable package
and I can have all the music I love all the time,
I was solving a pain, which was, for me,
there was thousands of CDs, other people might be 10
or 15 CDs, right?
And then I can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted.
That was taking the pain, making a painkiller for it.
And then at the end was a superpower,
an emotional superpower that said, oh my,
this is something different.
So when you can actually focus on a pain,
not of, and get a painkiller for it, not a vitamin.
So the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin
is very clear.
The vitamin you need, I gotta get rid of this pain.
A vitamin, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't,
maybe somebody needs it, maybe not,
it's all marketing story, right?
So you start with the pain, give them a painkiller,
and hopefully, if you can do it in the right way,
you give them a superpower, an emotional superpower.
That is always, and that's the way to know
that you're hitting on something that's really powerful.
The pain and the joy.
Exactly.
Are you always aware of the pain?
So it seems like a lot of great products,
it's like we do a lot of painful things,
and we just kind of assume that's the way it's supposed to be.
Like with much autonomous vehicles,
we're all assume we're supposed to be driving.
Right.
And it doesn't, you don't think of it as a pain.
Right.
Well, you've habituated it away.
Yeah.
You've habituated it away.
For me, when I go to other places,
living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever,
and I'm not driving, I'm walking,
or I'm reusing a scooter or what have you, different thing.
And you go, oh my God, when you left that environment,
because everyone else is driving all the time,
you're like, that's what you do.
And you find out there's other ways of living
and there's freedom.
When you get rid of that, you're like, oh my God,
I didn't know that this was so much better.
So there's something in the book that's called
and I deemed it the virus of doubt.
And what the virus of doubt is, is when there's pain
and it's been habituated away,
you use the right marketing messages
to bring people back to that initial experience they had
or the initial experience that they had of that pain.
Do you remember when the first time you did blah
and it felt like this?
Right.
And then you reawaken that habituated pain.
And people, and it becomes visceral.
And then they're like, oh, yes, I hate that.
And then you go, now I have the painkiller
and the joy for you.
That's when it all comes together and it goes.
Let me, on this, on the pain and the joy
that's brilliantly put, you mentioned selling
and marketing, right?
Marketing dollars.
I have a love-hate relationship with marketing
like with a lot of things that require artistic genius.
To me, the best marketing, I suppose,
is the product itself and then word of mouth.
So like create a thing that people love.
Oh, absolutely.
That's fundamental.
Yeah, but so any other marketing requires genius
to be any extra thing.
Because to me, I don't, yeah,
maybe you can, by way of question,
because you're, I'm just speaking off the top of my head
as a consumer, what is great marketing?
What does it take to reveal the pain and the joy of a thing?
Okay.
It all starts at the beginning.
And let me give you, I'm gonna give you a couple
of different ways of looking at it, okay?
And again, we're gonna, might go a little long here.
So just stay tuned in.
So the first thing is, let's start at the beginning.
In the early part of my career,
like General Magic and Phillips and what have you.
And especially when I was a teenager,
when I was making my own chips and stuff like that,
I really worried about just putting cool things together.
I'm like, that, when I put those two cool things together
as an engineer, you go, that's cool.
And then I would talk to some of the other friends
who might be geeks too, and they go, yeah, that's cool.
Because we knew the bits.
So we put them together and that's a new way of doing it.
And you're like, wow, that's all what, it's not why.
Why are you doing this?
We know what we're doing, but we don't know why we're doing it
because we're not articulating it for ourselves.
Cause it's just something we're like putting it together
and like, yeah, that's cool because we think
we're solving some problem we have,
but we're not really articulating it.
So what normally happens, and this happens
because we invest in so many companies around the world,
you have these brilliant engineers,
designers, scientists, researchers,
they put together these, these what's.
And then they develop it, develop it, develop it.
And then at the end, they call in marketing
and say, now tell a story about this
and let's get it out to the world.
Okay, what happens then is marketing is like,
well, why do, why do people need this?
Tell us why people need it.
And so they create a story around this product,
but the product was born out of what's not wise.
And so they start telling,
marketing starts telling a story
and it turns out to be a fictional story usually.
They say, oh, this is going to do these things.
The product comes in and is delivered
and it falls flat on its face
because the marketing doesn't match the product
because they weren't both created
at the beginning together, right?
There are what's when you create a product,
but there's a lot more why's
and the why's help inform the what's
and the why's also inform the marketing.
So at the, that's what you mean deeply
at we should start at the beginning.
So the designer should be also the marketer,
the engineer should be the marketer.
Exactly, stop impressing the geek next to you.
What is the superpower you're bringing
or the pain you're killing for the end customer, right?
Now let's contrast that.
Think about a movie.
A movie starts with a treatment.
It has an audience that says the audience,
here's the characters, here's the storyline, the plot,
here's the arc of the story, right?
It pulls that all out.
Then there's a script that's written.
And that script is then produced
and then you add all the flourishes
and what have you music and graphics and what have you, right?
And then it comes out
and then there's the marketing of the movie
and that story was created at the beginning.
What you need to do if you're gonna do a great product
is create that treatment for your product.
And I call that the press release.
Do the press release like the treatment,
who's the audience?
What features do you have?
What pains are you solving for people?
Do you have the virus of doubt there
to remind them what pains they have
and why you're solving them?
The price, all of those things.
And you use that as the bar,
the measuring stick for what you do during development
because what happens that along the route, you know this,
oh, we're not gonna be able to get that feature done on time.
Throw that one overboard.
We gotta hit the, we have to hit the date.
Oh, we're not sure this product's right yet.
Add another feature.
Add another feature creep, right?
If you don't have that story
you know you're gonna tell at the beginning,
you don't have that bar, right?
And then at the end, you don't know when you're done
if you don't have that story.
So you can actually look at that press release.
You might, you know, you change it over time, that draft.
But then when you're done, you know the what's and the why's.
You have all the things, the audience and everything.
And then you can give that to marketing and say,
well, and marketing's been along the way, let's be clear.
But then everybody's in sync.
And that's when you can tell a cohesive,
non-fictional story about,
and the product delivers on that story
or hopefully over delivers on that story.
So in the drafting from the beginning to the end
of the press release,
what does a successful team look like?
Who's part of the draft?
Is it engineers, designers?
What's the purpose of a marketing department
in a company small, let's say small company
but more than two people.
So from where does the why come from?
Should it always come from the designer
or should there be a marketing person that steps in
and asks the question?
So I'll just keep asking random questions.
No, these are great questions.
So, cause you're just like, I'm like,
I can't wait to tell you the answer.
So it's in the book as well.
But you have to separate out the various functions
of marketing when that's what I thought I was like,
marketing's marketing, you know, and it's really not.
There's so many disciplines,
just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical,
software and even software, it's, you know,
our use cloud services, firmware, applications.
Marketing has that much diversity as well.
Okay, and you have to honor that.
And so there is marketing communications like PR,
press, press, there is social marketing.
There is a marketing creative, right?
There's marketing activation,
but there's another thing that also comes out
and people confuse it with marketing,
which is called product marketing or product management.
And product management or product marketing
is the voice of the customer.
They're the person who sits there
and listens to what's going on and the competition
in the marketplace, understanding the needs
and those pains of the customer.
And they're representing them in every single meeting.
So things don't get off track, right?
So that, and they're creating the messages,
not the marketing.
What happens is there's messages
that product marketing creates.
Like those are the deep messages.
Like we need to save 20% of energy, let's say, right?
And then marketing turns that into something
that's with creative and everything
and brings that message across.
Maybe it doesn't say that,
but it comes maybe visually or some other way.
So product management does that
and holds that press release along the route
and making sure that we're tracking.
And then also marketing is tracking with that press release
to make sure they're not telling a fictional story, right?
Cause they can also add extra adjectives or something.
And then the product can't deliver that.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
It keeps everybody grounded to the press release,
to the raw, to the customer needs, right?
Cause they're always representing the customer.
So you have to have a product manager.
Typically that's the founder, right?
In the beginning.
And then over time you hire a product management team
to then really, you know, watch over this the whole way.
And they are talking to customer support.
They're talking to engineering.
They're talking to design.
They're talking to sales and marketing.
And they are always in the mix.
And it's the hardest thing to hire for.
Ooh, yeah.
So they have this very important job
of developing, maintaining the why.
Exactly.
Why is it the hardest to hire for?
Because you have to understand,
first nobody reports to you.
You're alone?
So you're alone and you have to build great ties
with all of these different functions.
You have to understand what they do,
have be empathetic with what they do.
And you have to project the customer's empathy
or empathy for the customer to them and tell them why
and why this customer needs us, why this doesn't work.
And so that they learn more.
They're not just doing,
but they learn about the customer's point of view
and sit in there and stand in their shoes
to be able to then make better decisions
on the engineering details or the operational details,
customer support details.
So they understand that if they're not the customer
that it's intended for,
they start to live through and through their eyes
and see through their eyes of that customer.
So they make better decisions.
And there's probably fascinating, beautiful tensions
between that and sort of the engineers,
oh, that's cool, sort of the developing the what.
Exactly.
And which makes it an extra hard job, I'm sure.
Exactly.
Can I ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question?
One subfield of marketing, you mentioned comms and PR.
How do I ask this?
I can hear your struggle in your thigh.
Why or do the comms and PR folks sometimes
kill the heart and soul of the magic that makes a company?
Or is that wrong to say?
Give me an example.
I will say the spirit of the example,
which is it feels like often the jobs of communications
is to provide caution.
It almost works together with legal to say.
A shield.
Yeah, we probably should not say this.
Let's be careful, let's be careful.
Now, that makes sense, except in this modern world,
authenticity is extremely valuable
and revealing the beauty that is in the engineering,
the beauty of the ideas, the chaos of the ideas,
I think requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree.
I agree.
And I just find that, boy, I mean, it's really,
so to push back on myself,
I think it's an extremely difficult job
because people will hold you responsible
if you're doing communications when you take risks.
And especially when they fail.
So it's a difficult job.
So I understand why people become cautious,
but to me, communications is about taking big risks
and throwing caution to the wind at its best
because your job is to communicate in the longterm,
communicate the genius, the joy,
the genius of the product.
So that sometimes is a tension with caution.
Sorry, so I, because I've gotten a chance
to meet a lot of very interesting people
and interesting engineering teams and so on,
I look at what they're doing
and I look at what's being communicated
and it's just, there's a mismatch
because the communication is a lot more boring.
It's like, there's something very,
like just straight up boring
about the way they're communicating because of caution.
Okay, you have just teed me up for another diatribe.
Okay, I'm gonna get on my podium here, please.
It all comes out of the leader.
If the leader doesn't know how to storytell
or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling,
then you get even more conservatism
from the PR and communications folks
because they're always,
so if you have a, not a bold leader,
they're always going to be a filter, right?
They're always gonna try to smooth things out
and take off the rough edges and try,
so they're gonna be even more,
if you have a conservative messaging leader,
you're gonna have even a more conservative
communications department.
Why?
Because they wanna keep their jobs, okay?
It's really simple.
They gotta keep their jobs.
If they say one wrong thing,
it could be the end of it.
So if you have very conservative leader,
they're going to be even more conservative.
If you have a bold leader,
they'll always take a little more conservative bet,
but you're still gonna have bold communications.
Yeah, that's brilliant.
Okay, so it starts with the leader.
Now, that said,
when you think about the messages
and the joy and revealing things, right?
Many of these leaders don't tell great stories.
So what we do at Future Shape, our investment firm,
is we take those scientists all of,
and the great minds and everything,
and what do we surround them with?
Marketing and communication people and storytellers
to give them the confidence
to tell a much broader story
about the impacts of what they're creating
and how big the global change can be
with those technologies.
Because usually those leaders
who created those technologies,
they don't really know how to communicate really well
and they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak.
Yeah, so it's interesting
because stories, I'm a huge fan of stories.
Have you ever read the book Story by Robert McKee?
You should read this.
And this is what I read when it's 26.
Story by Robert McKee,
and it's a book all about the ways to do script writing,
the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy,
and how it's been shown over millennia,
how these stories are done.
It's a fascinating thing
and it gives you an insight to,
and it's written for obviously Hollywood
and movies and things like that,
but it's incredibly useful for what we do
as designers and engineers and technology, piano leaders.
There's some aspect in this modern day
where this podcast and so on,
what I love is the humans behind the story too.
So some part of the story is the human beings.
So humor, drama, heartbreak, hope.
Emotions.
Emotions.
That's not just about a painting, a beautiful story
that's flawless.
It's vulnerability.
Yep.
It's being a dreamer, like over promising,
and then failing, so changing your mind,
realizing sort of just the whole of it.
And then also being like,
depending of course what your personality is,
embracing the full richness and the complexity
of the personality of the leader
or the different people involved.
I mean, that's all part of it.
Like you can't just present this beautiful,
always pleasantville view of a product.
There has to be this humanity that's part of it,
the full roller coaster of the humanity,
which I think has been very difficult for companies
to embrace, I'm not sure why.
Maybe it's just an old school way of doing things
that people think that we present the facade
and we generate the story and we tell the story
as opposed to sort of...
Well, we learn, especially in the technical world,
we present the story as it's faster, it's smaller,
it's longer battery life, it's bits and numbers
and metrics, that resonates sure with other geeks.
What resonates with the planet?
It's all emotions, right?
And if you can bring a great emotional story,
but with a great rational story at the same time,
why you should do this?
And it's like, oh my God, you bring that superpower,
that joy, then it all hangs.
And there's personal drama too.
Like, the human, right?
Here's the pain I had, remember that thing?
And like, I mean, just, you know,
you're obviously this extremely well-known human being
that's behind a lot of these great inventions
of the technology world,
but you're also just a human being.
You have a clearly like a distinct personality
that comes through, like your eyes light up,
just the way you communicate is you.
Some people are more stoic.
Some people are like, Elon is all over the place,
the chaos, Steve Jobs, you know, there's a very,
I mean, it's hard to put into words,
I can be poetic and so on,
but there's a very distinct comes on stage,
you know, that personality is right there.
That's not just a product, that's something else too.
And like, you have to reveal that a little bit
and allow people to reveal that a little bit
and just let them be themselves.
Well, look, why do I think your podcast is so amazing?
Because you are yourself.
You talk about yourself, you bring your emotions into it
and you don't modulate it, you're you, right?
It comes through, it's true, it feels right.
You are you, you dress the way you wanna dress.
You say, this is me and this is all of me.
And you become vulnerable, right?
It's much easier to do a podcast like that
than run a very large company
where a lot of people would feel the pain if you make,
if you say something stupid.
So it's much more easy to be afraid and be careful.
So, but nevertheless, the same applies.
Authenticity and risk-taking is the only way,
unfortunately, to be successful in the long term.
Let me, just cause we're jumping all over the place.
I just link her on the iPod.
One of the great designs brought these speaking
and the word design of all time.
What does it take to design a great product?
If you look, who can jump around?
We can look at Nest, we can look at iPod,
we can look at iPhone and many of the great things you design
but just looking at that one transformational thing,
what can you say about what it takes
to do a great design?
Or maybe what makes a great design?
Well, we talked about, you know, a painkiller
and we talked about the,
we talked about that, you know, joy that comes from it.
But then there's the behind the scenes, there's the team.
There's everyone who brings it to life,
brings that story to life.
If you have a great story and you know the why,
then you can communicate it to those people
who are working on it.
And then they bring their own thing into it, right?
It becomes emotional for them too.
It's not just a job, it's a mission.
And so many of the details that are born
out of these early prototypes,
these things that you still haven't given full form to,
there may be 80% done or maybe even 60% done,
but you can see enough in there.
Then you take those great ideas
and you give the whys to the team.
And so that they feel it, they can understand it,
then they bring their best and their ideas to the table
and then you can select from those
and you can then start to, you know,
it could be just a pixel change.
It could be a slight change on how you do the audio
for the feedback or maybe a curve on the mechanics
or something like that of how it feels.
Because everybody brings themselves trying to,
you know, feel this thing.
They're not just doing something
that someone told them to do.
If you can instill that mission
and that why into that team, it doesn't have to be big.
You get, I feel a 10X.
Everyone comes together in a special way
and the magic is created.
You put the love into it,
the customer feels the love on the other side.
So the making the team,
like taking them in onto the vision, onto the why.
Now they feel the, all the little details we think of,
the original iPod and all the many generations
after all those little details are in them
is the emotion of the engineers and the designers that.
It's their baby.
Working nights, struggling.
This isn't right.
Like you said, changing little pixels here and there,
changing the shape of things, changing the feel of things
like the materials, the, I don't know,
just everything on the soft part of the packaging.
The words on the packaging.
Just everything.
The words on the website.
And always jumping from the very specific detail problem
to the big picture, how the thing feels, the overall.
Always jumping back and forth.
What does it look like to the customer?
How are we going to implement it in the most efficient way?
Cause a lot of the stuff you don't know
is some of that stuff is hacked in.
Maybe hacked in at the end.
It might, it may not be the most beautiful architecture
that a geek would look at and go, oh my God,
that's so beautiful.
Cause we can look at and visualize this incredible
software stack or hardware stack.
Some of it could just be hacked in.
You make it better over time,
but it was that brilliant thing and we got to get that in
because that's the way you do it now.
And we'll make it more efficient later.
Maybe this is a good moment to draw distinction
between design and engineering
and does such a distinction even exist?
Are these distinct disciplines or no?
I don't think they're distinct.
I think they're different types of design.
I think there's, you know, there's always this,
you know, this idea of this,
oh, on the mounts designer and it all comes down
and it all flows down like some magic.
It's not, there are electrical designers,
there's AI designers, there is data scientist designers.
Everybody has design and there's a chapter in the book
all about that actually.
That it's not just you go to the mounts
and it comes down and you're enlightened.
It's each person brings their,
their form of design and their craft.
Cause what, if they're really good,
they're artists in their own right.
They're not just engineers.
They're not just design, they're artists.
They're empathetic.
They really want to bring their best.
A lot of the best engineers I have
are not the technical or that I've worked with
are not the technical gotta get it exactly right.
They're the artists.
They came from music or they came from other things
and they see that, right?
When you work with very rigid engineers,
this is the way, the only way, la, la, la.
Those are not the engineers I want to work with.
They're all like a bit artist's heart.
Right.
They understand the practical, practicalness.
They don't have to have the rigidity of
this is the way it's done.
Like, mm-mm.
If you're building something new,
all new and revolutionary,
none of us are experts at it.
And if you come with that expert mindset, just tell me
and I can give you a story.
I should probably give you that story about that.
If you come with the expert and I'm the expert,
when you're doing something no one's ever done before,
I don't want you on the team.
Because we all are learning about something
that has never been in existence before.
And we have to bring that level of vulnerability
and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things
throughout the team.
So you want people that are able to have
like beginner's mind or whatever,
like don't come in as an expert.
What's the story?
Okay.
You know a lot.
No, I can tell it.
All right.
So, you know, you ask what were these risks,
you know, like on the early iPod
and there was a few big risks.
Like one, and this doesn't go in the story,
but like putting rotating media in your pocket
and it could drop at any time.
What happens there and like you can damage
because the heads and the hard drive media are so close.
It smacks, it's dead, right?
So that was one big one.
Like, holy shit, right?
So that was something we,
and we had to design special tests and everything
and special software on that.
But then there was another one,
which was at the early days,
the way the first generations of iPods,
I had to hack the IDE interface to the hard drives.
So I was like, okay, what we're gonna use
is we're gonna use this chip for hard drive,
hard drive, to make a hard drive,
you had to have a chip that did firewire to a hard drive.
Okay.
And then that would become a portable hard drive.
Well, then we had the MP3 player
and the user interface and everything.
So there was times when it was just this hard drive
and there was times when it was a MP3 player
and I had to hot switch
between what the hard drive thinks it was talking to, right?
So designed this thing, tore it apart,
did all this stuff.
And it was like, you know,
maybe I'm gonna screw up IDE
and there's something, there's some holes I'm gonna see.
So I go, who's the expert at Apple
who understands IDE and everything.
So this person comes over,
the mass storage specialist comes over
and I put on the whiteboard and said,
here's how we're gonna do this thing
and here's the commands and this is how it hot switches
and everything and he's like, that's never gonna work.
Yeah.
And I was like, what?
It was never gonna work.
I said, well, let me go over here
and show you this right here.
I have it prototyped and it's been working for days.
I just wanna see if you're gonna have it,
find any holes in the thing.
Didn't even, and he just stormed out of the room
and never even.
Yeah. Right.
That's hilarious.
I've had a lot of experience like this with experts.
Like for example, this ridiculous room
I had a person and there's many people like this
that I showed them, here's the situation.
You know.
For acoustics or something.
For acoustics, yeah.
They're like, no, no, no, no, no.
This is horrible.
This is not gonna work.
The reflection,
the curtains are not gonna stop.
There's a bunch of terminology they're telling me.
It's a similar kind of situation as the ID,
which I was like, no, listen.
I just need to see is there major issues
and they're like a low-hanging fruit that are fixable
and major holes I should be aware of.
Not like, let's-
$100,000 to upgrade.
To upgrade for what exact purpose?
What? Not why?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Why? The focusing on the story, on the content, on the,
the why, the why, the why.
And that actually I've experienced that,
unfortunately in the artistic realms too,
which is like photography and videography, cinematography.
It's interesting.
I talked to photographers that are quote unquote experts.
And it's always about,
so much of the focus is on the equipment.
The equipment behind the sensors and the lighting.
And it's like, all right, all right.
But what about,
what about the feeling of the story you create visually?
The difference between a movie that's really well told
and it doesn't have all the effects and everything
versus maybe some of the superhero movies we see all the time,
which is good luck if there's a story,
but man, there's a lot of action and CGI.
Well, that's right.
And there's also value to those right, CGI, superhero.
Oh, sure.
Can tell a better story,
but you have to have a good story to begin with.
Sure, exactly.
But if you're focused on the story,
I guess you need to start with a story.
You need to start with a story.
And if you bring in experts,
they can often be detrimental,
I guess to the why.
They're too good at doing the what.
Well, you can bring in experts for why.
There's lots of experts for why.
Too many times we get experts for what.
Yes.
And then they only focus on the what.
And so they come with the specs and feeds
and the numbers and all the other stuff.
But what you're really asking for
is I need somebody about the why
and understanding what we're trying to get done here
and fitting the what's into that why, right?
That's why I do think that one of the qualities
that I really enjoy for people to work with
is like humility for a particular problem
when you approach it.
Basically, I don't know how to solve this,
but we're going to figure it out as opposed to,
oh, I've solved this thing many, many times before.
I know exactly what to do.
Humility before the chaos.
So having an open mind that this is going to require
a totally new way of doing things.
It's a really nice quality to see.
You're one of the fascinating humans
in the history of Silicon Valley.
Steve is another one of those.
So those two humans came together for a time
to work together.
What was it like working with Steve Jobs?
What aspect of his behavior and personality,
let's say, brought out the best in you?
Pushing you.
Really pushing you.
Relentless on the details.
Challenging you for the right reasons.
It wasn't bullying.
It wasn't demeaning.
He would critique the work, not judge the person,
at least not in front of them,
or in front of a group or anything like that.
I know it was really that attention to detail.
And when he would make a decision,
when you make the first version of anything,
something revolutionary,
there are a lot of opinion-based decisions.
And there's only one or two people,
three people who hold those opinion-based decisions
and what they should be.
And when you have those opinions,
and you're trying to work with the team
to implement those decisions,
you have to really tell them why of those decisions.
Just don't go do it, but why it's there.
So you can feel part of that decision.
You can understand what were the trade-offs
of the different other answers to that opinion, right?
And say, this is the reason why we picked what we picked,
because it's this for the customer,
or this for the overall story, what have you,
so that you felt really good,
because a lot of times,
most people want a data-driven decision.
But with V1s, you don't get data, right?
Maybe in a B2B, you could a little bit,
because you can talk to customers,
but you can't do that with a consumer product.
V1, version one, B2B, business to business,
versus what's the alternative?
Business to consumer, V1.
Okay.
We're just defining some terms.
Yes, sure, absolutely.
And when you say data-driven decisions versus what?
Opinion-based decisions.
So like gut, you have to use, you don't have any...
You can't fall back on any data or any previous history
to kind of inform you of what's going on, right?
And so if you look at most companies
who are paralyzed and cannot make new innovations
and new products, it's because they're trying to turn,
and this is what I saw at Phillips,
they're trying to turn opinion-based decisions
into data-driven decisions so they don't lose their jobs.
So if you look at management consulting,
management consulting is all about
taking those opinion-based decisions,
giving them to someone else to turn into data
that comes back to them and says,
they can blame the management consultants
when something goes wrong, as opposed to, it wasn't me, right?
When you need to have to tell that story,
you have to understand that, especially V1,
you need to be able to articulate those opinion-based decisions
and you need to own them.
And if you fail with some of them, you didn't get it right,
you then own them and fix them and move on, right?
Version one of the iPod wasn't perfect,
version one of the iPhone wasn't perfect,
we got a lot of opinion-based decisions wrong.
But as you go through, because you got more data,
because V2, you had data on those original opinions
and then you were able to then modulate off of that, right?
And you still have new opinions
because those are differentiators
that we call differentiators,
the things that move the product forward in its evolution.
But at the revolution stage,
opinions, opinions, opinions, no data.
And so you have this discussion, you and Steve
and the whole team.
In the stage and the whole team with opinions.
And there you have to be harsh.
I wouldn't say harsh,
but you have to be very determined, right?
There are two real opinion-based decisions
that happened on the iPhone.
One was the keyboard.
Should we have a hardboard keyboard
or should we have a virtual keyboard?
The BlackBerry was the number one
productivity messaging device of its time.
It was called a CrackBerry for a reason
because people loved it because it was easy to type
and they could get their work done.
But when you're saying we're gonna move from that,
everyone's talking about that in the market,
and you say we're gonna move to a virtual keyboard
and it's not gonna work as well as the hardware keyboard,
that's an opinion-based decision, right?
Because the data is telling you all the best sales
are over here.
God, that takes guts.
It takes guts, but you have to look at it
from a different point of view.
And this is how I learned to come to understand this
because I had been building virtual keyboards before
and I knew the goodness and the badness in them, right?
But he was like, look, those are productivity devices.
We're making it, ours is born out of an entertainment device
and productivity, right?
We need to show full screen videos.
We are gonna have apps, they're not apps,
but our apps, the Apple apps,
because there were no app store yet,
are gonna take over the whole screen.
You want a full screen web browser.
You don't want one that's like half of the device
is just a keyboard.
Maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance.
So we want that part of the screen to change
based on the tool you may need at the time.
And maybe it's just full view, right?
So you have to go and understand
it's a different type of device
just because that's that and it's successful
for that reason, the crack barrier for the keyboard.
That's not the only thing you're gonna do with this device
because people only did messaging
and maybe a few phone calls, right?
This was gonna be so much more.
It was gonna be an entertainment web browsing device.
So you wanted those tools to go away,
but it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard.
So that's an opinion.
Well, let me give you another opinion-based decision
that got turned around before it shipped.
Steve said, no SIM slot.
I don't want any slots.
We're gonna make it very pure.
Johnny was like, of course, no slots.
Johnny and I.
And we all looked around and go, that doesn't work.
You can't do that.
Well, why does Verizon, and then he would always,
and this was the magic of Steve,
like when you said, no, that doesn't work,
you'd go, well, why does Verizon not have any SIM slots?
Right?
They showed that you can do a mobile phone
with those limbs.
They were like, okay, here we go.
And so a few days later, we come back with,
and so product marketing, voice of the customer,
engineering, we all come back with all the data,
showing how many data networks
and mobile networks required SIM cards versus did not.
And what the trends were.
And so we showed the data and that killed the,
or excuse me, brought back the SIM slot
on that original iPhone.
Because he was just like,
we're gonna tell AT&T to not use a SIM, right?
We're gonna just tell them to do it differently.
But we were like, if we want this thing
to go anywhere around the world,
you wanna put that friction in,
people who are gonna move from place to place,
they have different SIMs because of the prices
and all that stuff.
We had to show all of that data.
And then that opinion-based decision got turned
into a data-driven decision,
and the SIM slot obviously showed up.
So those are two very, at the very same time.
So much thing, yeah.
Opinion can hold and so can data overrule opinion
when data does exist for a V1.
But at the end of the day,
you don't know what the right answer is.
So doing no SIM card slot
may have been the right decision.
We won't know.
Because maybe if that was the decision,
then like many times throughout Apple's history,
you basically changed the tide of how technology is done.
Absolutely, you never know.
Apple started Wi-Fi.
People don't understand.
Wi-Fi came out of there.
There was no Wi-Fi in 2001.
Apple started Wi-Fi.
And then everyone else got on board.
If you look at now where we're going,
we're going to phones without SIM slots.
Because we have eSIMs, right?
And now the SIM slot's becoming legacy, legacy,
as a legacy port.
That legacy port will probably be gone
by six, maybe 10 years.
It'll be gone.
I'm pretty sure of that.
Because it's so much easier for carriers.
They don't have to have physical things to go out.
So right now it's just the early days.
But it will happen and it will go its way.
It'll fall away.
But it will take time.
We just couldn't do it back then.
So timing is essential here.
But at the end of the day, it's opinions.
And that's where the genius is.
Sometimes the data tells you one thing,
but the data at the end of the day
does represent the past.
And the future may be different than the past.
Sometimes there's wisdom in the past.
And sometimes it's actually representative
of something that should be over common.
Progress looks like leaving that stuff behind.
Like the headphone jack.
Right.
I mean, that when different folks
are getting rid of the headphone jack, boy,
I would love to be a fly in the wall of those discussions.
We had that, oh, that was a discussion
that happened almost every year.
That was an every year that should we
get rid of headphone jacks on the iPod, right?
When are wireless headsets going to happen?
What did it, right?
And it took years to build all the right protocols,
the chips, all those things to make the experience
that is the iPods today, right?
To say have the confidence, because Bluetooth was good,
but it wasn't Apple-like.
So that is like, we got to make our own chips.
We got to make our own software stacks.
Now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack
and actually make you pay $200 more for your iPhone
that you were just paying because of the headphone jack.
Now we've grown our revenue.
We've given a new experience to the user, right?
And ta-da, you know, and it's magic.
And now the world's transformed to everyone,
you know, moving to that, right?
But it took years to understand the problem,
develop the technology and not just rush it to market
to get a half experience, but to get it right
and refine it, then ship it.
And only then after, it was probably four or five years
in development, just like the M1 processor, right?
That was a work from 2008, right?
Grinding away, grinding away, grinding away.
Then saying, okay, now we have the confidence
we're doing our own silicon for all the iPhones
and iPods and such.
Now we're going to turn to the Mac
and make sure we have the best processor, right?
Not just that we have the best integrated design team.
And then saying we're going to, you know,
and then besting everyone, making sure the softwares
and the hardware is designed at the same time,
making sure the kernels, all those things
are going to use the best efficiency.
And then popping it out.
And then it feels seamless.
It's magic.
There were no, as far as I could tell,
unless you were in real esoteric drivers
or something like that, it just worked.
It was magic.
Like the transient, it was not even a speed bump.
It was not even a crack in the road.
So perhaps famously, Steve had a bit of a temper.
Sure.
Steve Jobs.
Would you say his particular personality in this aspect
was constructive or destructive in the process
of shaping these opinion-based ideas?
So in Build, I write a chapter called Assholes.
Yes.
And you lay out beautifully the types of assholes.
And maybe you could speak to the constructive
and the destructive types of assholes.
So there's really two delineations
that I have found of real fundamental ones.
And that is, again, the why.
Why do I feel this person is an asshole?
They might not be.
I feel this is a person who's an asshole.
So are they motivated by their ego?
Or are they motivated by their mission?
Something they're trying to do that's
and doing in service of something else, right?
Sometimes those lines can be blurry,
but it's usually pretty clear.
When it's ego-motivated, it's clear
they're just trying to get up in the ranks, push people down,
shove people aside.
I think we saw a president do that on a stage once.
I'm me, and I'm the guy.
And I'm going to prove it by pushing everyone away
and being nefarious or what have you,
either passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive.
But they're doing about themselves.
There's another one, which is someone
who's so attentive to detail and unrelenting
that they're trying to get the right things for the customer
or in service of their mission, and they
want to make sure we fulfill those things, right?
And they really care.
They don't micromanage all the details,
but they micromanage the details where the customer,
it touches the customer in some way.
People who work with those types of people
who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset,
a lot of times, it's a knee-jerk reaction to go,
they are an asshole.
Get off my back.
You're an ass.
Right?
And you're protecting your ego, because what's happening
is that person is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries.
They see something that we can do or you can do
that you're just either not wanting to do for whatever reason.
You're not confident in that.
You're like, I don't want to take the extra time.
And saying, no, we need to get that done and pushing you, OK?
And so when we came to those areas,
it wasn't just a one-on-one, but could be Steve
against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic
on the front face of the iPhone.
And we're going to do this.
And we're like, god, you know?
And so we did it.
And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details,
but he could see in our minds that we're like, yeah,
we could probably, yeah, we could probably go, but man,
it's really putting us in risk.
And we laid out the risks for him.
And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks.
We'll do that.
We're like, we might be three months late.
He's like, this is so important.
We need to stay on time.
But it would be all the time, push, push, push.
It reminds me of kids growing up and me is growing up.
When your parents push you to make you grow beyond your
boundaries, your personal boundaries.
And you're like, god damn it, I'm sad.
You know, but they do it for the right reasons.
Now let's see, it's not bullying.
It's not about bullying.
It's not about demeaning.
It's about either pushing you to another part of the mission
that needs to get done, or it's about critiquing your work,
but not judging you.
Yes.
Well, there's a lot to say there.
So one, it's fascinating, it really is fascinating.
And you laid out a very nice picture,
but it does feel like there's sometimes gray areas, which
is why it makes all of this very complicated.
So one question I have for you in terms of glass on the iPhone.
How important is it that Steven that case is right?
Because I could argue each side.
It seems like in one sense, just having a strong vision
and opinion is already going to make everybody grow,
even if it turns out to be the wrong.
As long as you are sort of standing your ground,
you know, Napoleon invading Russia or something in the winter,
like it's just not going to be a good idea.
It's not a good idea, but I'm going to hold to that.
And then once you decide, you go all in.
And then from that, even if the whole team knows
it's the wrong decision, just sticking by it,
powering through, you will learn through the pain of it.
Everybody will learn.
So that's one side.
The other is maybe the asshole, the vision-driven asshole,
gets to be more and more of an asshole
if they have a track record of through that process,
having built people up, having made the correct decisions.
They're not allowed to be an asshole.
And they're in rare air and no one can challenge them.
Right, right.
Steve was never that.
That's the great thing.
He was never unchallengeable.
You could challenge him.
Now, the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this.
So at the beginning of the project,
well, before we were going, we had always
had these things about plastic front iPods,
these kinds of things.
These scratches and all that stuff.
So we said, are we going to have a glass or a plastic
cover for the display?
Because the display was glass underneath it.
We argued back and forth about glass versus plastic.
And then we all landed together on plastic.
OK, the original decision was plastic.
And the reasons were, OK, we don't want to make a mistake.
Glass can break.
People drop them all the time.
So we don't want to have a fragile device.
Because you're going to be using even more than a music player.
And you're going to be holding your head and putting
in your pocket and misses and all that stuff.
So we went down the road with plastic.
When it was shown, when the product was
shown at Mac World in 2007, the first time, that was plastic.
We had just enough of them in the field at the time.
We started to start seeing light scratches on the plastic.
Reviewers who didn't have the device yet,
because it was behind glass, if you remember 2007,
the Jesus phone comes up.
And no one could even touch them.
You could just look at it in this beautiful museum quality
box, like it came from the future or whatever, the past.
And it was like, oh, and you just looked,
and that was all you got.
But then people said, well, what screen is,
what covers on that?
Reviewers who knew better.
It's plastic.
And they were like, really?
And so there was enough of a doubt there?
And then when we started to do it,
and then Steve changed the frame of reference of the question,
or of the result of what the customer would think.
And he was like, if we designed it with plastic,
and it's in their pocket all the time,
and it gets scratched by coins, lightly scratched,
or by keys, or something like that,
that is a design problem.
We need to fix the problem.
That was our bad.
If they go off and drop it, or even slightly drop it,
and it cracks, it's the customer's fault.
And they have much lower, they have less likelihood
to complain.
Yes, they'll complain.
But they're part of that failure.
Yes.
Oh, that's fascinating.
And then.
That's true to that.
Right?
Because then they were part of why it failed,
whereas the design, they didn't do anything wrong,
was just sitting in their pocket, and it's scratching,
and it's normal use.
Abnormal use has been dropped.
And we're like, oh, now we get it.
And so we all moved to that mindset
when you framed the problem and the solution in that way
versus the original framing, where we all landed on plastic.
And then he was unrelenting on that, but we all had moved.
And we had moved mindset, and we understood the why.
And we marshaled together.
And then by the end of June, and it was crazy,
the mechanical product design teams,
sourcing, all of us, the partner corning,
pulled together to make that happen,
because it was the right reason.
So this, you look at these stories,
and you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways.
But that's not usually how it all happened,
of one leader was, that's not how Steve was.
Now, I've seen leaders who were just pounding
and just had no real empathy for the team
and understanding the why.
And it's just, it is the way I want it.
I am the supreme leader.
That wasn't like that.
He just had a very strong opinion.
A very strong opinion.
But it was challengeable.
It was challengeable, and if you came with the right thing,
you could modulate that.
But you had to come with a team.
It couldn't just be you.
And you had to come a team and data to overcome,
because it was a very strong opinion.
And there's personal quirks of character, like you said.
Bad days and good days.
Bad days and good days.
So there's also the three options, you said.
You notice that the third option is always going
to be the one that's picked.
Those kinds of.
Idiosyncrasies.
Idiosyncrasies.
And that, so that brings up another thing.
You said challenge the idea, not the person.
I'm somebody who has a, I have a temper.
I use colorful language and so on.
On teams I work.
In my private life, I'm much calmer and so on.
But I get, when I get really passionate with engineering teams.
And I've been called an asshole.
And you get, I mean, I am distinctly aware
that you cross lines often, there's like levels, right?
Sure.
You know, you could, it has to do with language
and how language is heard.
So for example, you could say a lot of stuff to me,
you could swear, you could say stuff that sounds
like, I don't know, Lex, sometimes I think you're
the dumbest human on the face of the earth or something.
I don't know.
This sounds very personal, right?
But I'm not going to take that personally.
I understand what's being said.
And then I also noticed that there's other people
that take stuff more personally.
This has to do with teams and figuring out like,
okay, who's going to take certain words personally and not.
And you have to know, that's what makes a great coach,
a great leader, a mentor.
You have to, you have to like, factor all that in.
But it just, there's something about just being an asshole
and being passionate and really driven
that sometimes you do cross lines.
And that's, I don't know what to do with that
because it feels like it comes with the territory.
Like you have, it seems like you can't just have
a perfectly optimized-
No.
No, absolutely not.
We're humans.
Yeah.
Humans, we don't have a program, everyone's programmed
the same way to react the same way to given stimulus, right?
Yeah.
So, you know, you said,
I don't know if this was a real example,
but you said, oh, you're the dumbest human on earth
or whatever, I would never say that.
Absolutely never.
And if someone said that to me
or I saw someone else say that to another person
on the team, absolutely not.
That is not allowed because that's judging someone.
You may be heated and you can get heated
and you can say it in your intonation,
but to then try to put a label on it
and put a label on a person, that is not allowed.
So, if you let that kind of culture happen
and it becomes somewhat, you know, sometimes it's ingest,
you know, it has to be very much ingest
and those two people have to have a really good
working relationship, but other than that,
I'm sorry, it's gonna be a lot more,
you could say, aseptic in that way
that you're not gonna add that stuff in,
but you can do it with all other types of ways
without saying that because then people
who do react to that kind of language
and don't have those shields
because they might not have that same confidence level
that you do and you can just brush it off,
you can, that can be very cancerous in a team
because people then mean that and then they see,
oh, that's the right way to be.
You gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that,
you gotta be that change or that model
that you wanna show the team.
Yes, it's true, even if it doesn't affect me,
it's going to affect a significant enough fraction
of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part
of the culture.
Exactly, and other people see that happen
and then, oh, I guess that's acceptable, right?
Just like politics in the workplace,
is that acceptable or not?
I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone,
right, because it's just another ego-driven thing.
You have to set the tone as a leader
for what you want your organization to be
and how it gets reflected in the world
and you have to uphold that.
And you can't, sure you can have an excursion outside
of that, but you have to go back and say, I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
You have to go and apologize, heal,
and said, I was not the person I wanted to be that day,
I'm really sorry.
Yeah.
This is, and even in front of the team
and have that humility and say, we're all human here
and just cause I'm the leader doesn't mean
I don't make mistakes.
So have the self-awareness, apologize.
Exactly.
And that's also part of the culture.
Oh yeah.
How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer?
So you've spoken about sort of what made you stronger,
which is he was able to challenge,
he was able to push you to bring out the best.
Well, I come from the technical angle, right?
Deep technology, software, hardware, systems,
thinking, implementation, all that stuff.
So I have a different bent.
He wanted to be an engineer, started,
but really he was much better at all the other things,
the storytelling, the interfacing
and being the voice of the customer
and being that product marketer in a way, right?
That we talked about.
I grew into being the product marketing, the marketing.
He came really out the other way, right?
And never got really deep technically.
So that's two different mindsets.
One's not better or worse, it's just, that's how it is.
And it takes all kinds and all kinds can do great designs.
Did it manifest itself differently?
Just the fact that you came from those different places.
Absolutely.
Like what, so like the discussion about glass
on the iPhone was probably had a different flavor to it.
Sure, when you started getting into the technical details,
enough so that you're getting the third order
technical details and he can't argue with that anymore.
Then it was somebody who's like, okay, you know,
at some point he's like, I can't win this war.
Like, and he learned that very early on
because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh board,
the PCB was laid out.
He wanted to be beautiful on the outside and on the inside.
He's like, why are all these wires running this way?
Why doesn't it have all this symmetry?
And we have to make it beautiful on the inside.
And even the traces on the boards have to look a certain way.
So the teams made the board, they knew that would work.
And then they made the board that's the way Steve wanted it.
And that didn't work.
And then Steve instantly figured out, like at some point,
don't micromanage every single detail.
There's some things he doesn't know enough about.
And so he would get out of that.
But that was one of those instances
where he pushed really hard and that's his opinion.
So they said, okay, we're gonna make it
a data-driven decision and we're gonna make both.
I'm gonna show you the results, right?
And then from there, he didn't get into those details.
So from that, you could have a great challenge, right?
Cause then you could get those data and say,
we can't do that and let me show you why.
Or we can do that.
And then Steve would go, you can't do that.
And you're like, oh, we can do that, let me show you.
So there's certain times when you were like,
bringing something to reality
that he didn't think could exist, right?
So it was always that creative tension,
that interaction that was so successful, right?
I think, but there was one other fundamental thing
that was different and that it graded on the team
and that I made sure and I learned from to not do.
And I over, maybe overdo now in the opposite direction,
which is when there's a great idea
that comes from the team, acknowledge that person
and go, that is a great idea.
As the leader, you know, the opinion-driven,
that's a great idea.
Let's build on that.
Let's see if that can do that.
Or it's a great idea, but not for now, put it aside.
But call out when people have great ideas
because it's infectious.
And that means, not ideas that come bubble up
to the customer level, but inside the organization.
People like, they get rewarded for their ideas
and say, that's a great one.
Steve was always like, you give an idea,
and he would go, okay, I don't know.
The next day, 24 hours later,
it would come back with slight modifications.
I've had this genius idea, right?
And sooner or later, we'd look around the table
and we'd like roll our eyes and go, here we go again.
So it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit?
Well, you know, we got used to it,
but later on in the team, it was just not,
it doesn't want to bring the best, right?
Cause if you're always like, the reaction is never,
that's a genius idea.
It was always like, it was either negative
or neutral, right?
Then it doesn't have that same emotional effect
that you want you to bring your best.
Yeah, sometimes it's fun when people get excited about it.
It's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You kind of build on top, excitement could be.
But coupled with sort of harshness when the idea is bad
and you call out the bad ideas too.
So it's the good and the bad.
Oh, you could say, you don't have,
you don't have to say bad ideas.
Like maybe not now, let's table that for later.
Let's discuss it or say that that's a decent idea.
But did you think about that idea this way?
Not just no or yes,
but let's talk about why that might not be applicable
in this case so that they can learn.
So the next time they bring the next idea,
they can modulate and understand
and start seeing through the opinion-based decision makers
or the databases to bring it
and bring better formatted arguments or ideas
so that you have better chance of success the next time, right?
You got to train through those moments.
You got to teach those are teaching moments.
Yeah, teachful moments.
I aspire to be that kind of person.
I'll usually say that that idea is shit.
That is the, like, and then you,
that I remember that this brilliant person
just gave that really shitty idea.
So I remember to make sure the next time they give a good idea,
I really compliment that good idea.
But I personally, I mean, it's emotion,
but I call out the really shitty ideas.
But you should call out the really great ones.
If you let the pendulum swing both ways,
then everybody goes, he's balanced.
It's always one way, why bring any idea?
I'm all about the pendulum.
Right, you got to have both the joy and the pain.
Don't just give me pain all the time.
The yang and the yang.
So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone.
So you wanted to, not just the iPod, not just Nest,
you wanted to keep figures in the creation of the iPhone.
What's the interesting aspects?
What's the good, the bad, and the ugly
of the origin story of the iPhone?
Again, this is a Netflix series
that spans multiple seasons.
But what?
Change my flight, please.
Yeah, what was the, what interesting memories
you have from the finding?
So the pain and the joy that was foundational to the iPod,
all the CDs, you had to lug around.
What was the pain and the joy and the vision of the iPhone
in your mind and the mind of the team, Steve's mind,
and so on?
Well, you know, there's multiple pains.
You have to also look, there's not just customer pain,
but there's business pain, OK?
And it's about the, so Apple now is getting out of that place
where it was in 2001.
Now people are starting to pay attention.
Apple's starting to get in the culture again.
It's becoming relevant.
Cash is starting to flow.
iPod is 60% of that, of the revenue, total revenue of Apple
doing on 85% market share.
You're starting to get a win at your back.
You got confidence.
Like Apple had been beaten down since probably the first time
the Mac was, since the Mac, it was a beaten company
ever since the Mac.
So we're talking 15 years at that point, right?
This is the first time you're seeing like,
and Steve would proudly came in front of us and said,
today I can tell you all of the employees,
we are now out of debt.
We paid off our debt.
It was a joyous moment for him, right?
And then ultimately for our team,
because no more debt, wonderful, right?
So now what you have is you have this successful thing
changing the face of Apple, and you
hear these heavy stomping footsteps
of the mobile phone industry.
Boom.
And it's the feature phones at that time.
They're adding cameras.
They're adding color displays.
They're seeing the success of the iPod and going,
that's just music.
We have some storage, we can load music on our phones,
and we can do what the iPod does plus more.
Boom, boom, boom, right?
And you're like, and how many hundreds of millions of them
are being sold at that point?
It wasn't billions yet, but it was still 100 million,
200 million a year.
iPod hadn't gotten there.
It was for 20, 40, 50 million, something like that.
So now you're like, OK, what are we
going to do about this Goliath who
wants to take our lunch, right?
The school yard bully.
And so there was one, let's partner with them.
So iTunes Music Store was there.
All of these phones are going to need music,
so they can come to the iTunes Music Store
and get that music for those phones.
Because it wasn't just about the hardware player
at that point.
It was about the software that you need on the desktop
and the content that you needed to download.
So now Apple had multiple legs of the stool,
as Steve would always refer to it.
So now the mobile phone industry, OK,
we're going to work with them.
They are going to make an iPod shuffle, basically.
Inside of a phone, can have 99 songs total,
and they're going to come to our store, and you're going to.
And it was like, OK, great.
It's all going to be well and good.
And that became the Motorola Rocker Project.
It was Apple and Motorola getting together.
There's going to be software on this smartphone, or not
smartphone, but feature phone, to cook to iTunes
to get your music.
It wasn't even downloadable over a cloud or anything,
because that wasn't available yet.
There wasn't have duty data networks yet.
It was a disaster from the beginning.
Two different cultures, two different types
of leadership styles, not necessarily
the most competent engineers on the other side.
And it turned out to be an absolutely horrible disaster.
I watched the pains, because luckily I
didn't have to be a part of it.
I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins face each time we would
meet, and he would be like, these guys are just like,
really?
Do we have to do this, Steve?
And he's like, we're contractually ovulated.
And when it came out on stage, and Steve showed it,
it was maybe a one minute.
Steve loves those extended, like, drawn up.
It might have been a one minute, two minute kind of thing.
And he literally threw that phone out of his hand
as fast as he could, because it was horrible.
So there was the pain of, we're not going to partner.
So if we can't partner with these guys,
we have to become one of them to actually compete,
to save the thing that is bringing
Apple from that 15 years of malaise, right?
So then from that, we were made a prototype of an iPod plus phone,
a classic with, it was an iPod, but it had a phone inside
with all the music and all the other stuff.
And you use your headset, wired headset to do the audio, right?
There was another project at the same time,
because we were doing videos in the iTunes music store,
iTunes video store.
And for music videos and movies, and it would be a full screen iPod.
So instead of the classic, the way you know it,
it would be full screen and it would have a virtual click wheel.
It'd have a virtual, like, single touch touchscreen
that you could scroll, right?
Think of maybe an iPhone like you knew it, right?
And then there was a third project going on,
not in, those two were going on in my team,
but the third project going on was the multi-touch screen
technology to drive a Mac tablet.
And so that Mac tablet, that touch screen technology,
there was just way too much you had to change on the software
and everything to be able to use a tablet, right?
We see this all the time, like people are like,
there's not enough tablet apps today
that are modified for tablet.
They're just phone apps that are grown up, right?
So then they would just be Mac touch stuff.
So you'd have to have a whole developer community.
That probably wasn't the best place
to take that technology first.
So you take that technology,
marry it with the full screen iPod,
and the phone stuff we were working on,
so the iPod phone with the rotary dial
was just like a rotary phone.
We couldn't make that interface work well for data input.
You put those three together,
and now those were those three things
that then created the form,
or the technology and the form inside,
what would become the iPhone,
married with a bunch of low level software
from the iPod and manufacturer software
and drivers and communication stuff,
combined with a very reduced Frankenstein Mac OS.
And I mean that in the best way.
It means it wasn't Mac OS just changed a little.
It was totally, things were hacked out and changed,
and I think new code was inserted,
and it really was a whole set of things
from all different places.
To make that first iPhone OS.
And then there was another team working on the apps,
and then another team working on the design
of how it looked overall between all that stuff.
So all of those things came together
to create what we know as the first generation iPhone.
And those are all probably fascinating.
Engineering challenges.
Correct.
And great teams, like the creating the Frankenstein OS.
That's fascinating,
because you're simplifying, simplifying,
but then you're just pulling different stuff from,
and you're basically inventing,
I mean they're probably not thinking of it that way,
but a new era of computing, a new kind of computer.
It really is Frankenstein.
Right, and you didn't have to run Mac software.
If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time,
like Windows and stuff,
they were like, we need to make sure it runs Excel,
and it runs Word or something like that,
and some reduced thing.
This was like, no, no, no, no, no.
This was born out of entertainment.
So we didn't have to go and take all the same application,
you know, all those other ones, it was about compatibility.
This was about a whole new way of being.
What did you think about
the Steve Jobs presentation of the iPhone?
The sort of, the first iPhone, you know,
phone, internet communicator,
and the iPod in your part.
Yeah, you're going to sort of present,
announcing three new products kind of thing,
and then saying that it's all in one.
Just, this is a good example,
one of the sort of historic presentations of a product.
Clearly, there's like some showmanship that works.
Some reason it works.
It doesn't always work, it often doesn't work,
but it did, in this case, it often did for Steve.
Like, how did that feel?
What part of the actually,
the design process was that presentation?
You know what I mean?
And the early, because you said,
so consider the why, the press release
at the very beginning. Exactly.
Steve was doing that the entire time.
He was working on that story from day one.
He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this,
and then he would look at our faces,
because you wouldn't, most people wouldn't,
at least if you were working for him,
wouldn't tell him what you really thought
of what he was saying, but he would look at your faces.
And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidence
outside of the organization and see what they thought.
And they could give him feedback on it,
and they could really challenge him,
but he would also look at their faces and go,
and so when you see that,
then he would modulate it and change it slightly,
and change it.
So he was working during all of that time
on the story and the storytelling, and the why's,
while we're working on that and helping us refine it,
just like the switch from plastic to glass, right?
All the time working on that.
So when he comes out on stage,
he does something that every marketer is told not to do.
Say, these three things are now combined in one.
That is like, they say that that is the laziest form
of storytelling possible for marketing, right?
Yeah.
But it was the best one because it was all those pains.
It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications,
and I want my internet browsing,
because I want it on the go so I can look up things,
because it was in information.
And when you were on the road, you had a laptop,
you had an iPod, and you had a phone that,
and you had to carry all of these things with you at once.
Now we're gonna solve that pain for you
and put it all together.
So he was just showing you the pain
and beating that virus of doubt and going,
it's now in this one magical thing.
And he could come up and masterfully tell that story
because he told it almost every day
to all of these people inside very quietly.
And then it was just, right?
It was like a, you know, a Tony Award winning play
that had been worked on for 10 years.
But also the human came through of timing.
It was all that.
It was all that.
And of course he was dramatic at certain points
and he would raise his voice and a wry smile
or whatever it was.
It was all those touches.
He was an actor as well as a storyteller.
Yeah.
But it was the truth, right?
The truth came through.
It was a non-fiction story.
And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it
to for dramatic effect.
It's amazing.
So there's a designer you mentioned, Johnny Yav.
You both are brilliant designers, great human beings.
There were some battles fought in the distant past
between the two of you.
Looking back, what is the positive characteristics
of Johnny that made you a better person and designer?
Having worked with him.
Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led.
I don't know where, because that was over years.
I didn't see all of those things.
But watching the design process of really,
because it was really a team that was about materials.
It was about form.
It was about colors.
It was about these physical characteristics.
When we talked about this earlier was design.
What is design?
Design's everywhere, okay?
So what they were really focused on was form,
how the feel was, how it looked, the aesthetics,
the physical aesthetics.
And watching, going through that process,
I learned so much in that process about how to do colors,
how to do materials, how to think deeply
about curves and shadows.
And how it would look, not just in your hand,
but how it would look in the photograph
you were gonna take for marketing.
So how it would look, how it would feel, all of it.
It was all of those physical things around that
and watching the process to get there.
That was enlightening for me, right?
It opened my mind to go, oh, okay.
Just like there's a process for all these other things.
It wasn't just magic and you say,
there it is.
It was really a process of refinement,
of opening the funnel at the beginning
and refining down over time to get to that final,
the final, and selecting and doing the selection
and certain types you could,
certain times there were opinion-based design details.
But a lot of data-driven designs
of what can we deliver in volume,
what can we do different things.
So you always had these constraints
that you had to work with under.
And sometimes they and the team,
not just I would say, we need this.
And we're like, we can't deliver that.
But maybe we were able to work together
to find different design characteristics
and different implementations.
And we were able to work together
to find characteristics and different implementation
characteristics that could get to that point
without what they were describing.
And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no,
let's find some other way to solve the problem together.
Yeah, and I've seen this in several companies
of more closer interact with like Tesla's an example.
Sometimes, talking about curves,
sometimes it's very painful on the engineering side
to deliver a very specific kind of thing.
And one question that comes up in my mind is like,
well, how far should we go to try to deliver
a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature,
or in like whatever the form factor is,
they're in a color of the material.
When the cost is like 10X to deliver, not financially,
but just like in effort, like how many problems
to have to solve.
I don't know if you can say any wisdom to that
because when you're thinking about curves,
you're designing in the space of ideas,
you're like platonic forms kind of thing,
not always grounded to like how much this is,
how much pain is gonna be involved in delivering this.
But that's as you should perhaps,
because then if you're always thinking about the pain
required to deliver this thing, you'll be too conservative.
You wouldn't do the wild ideas.
Oh, right, exactly.
But you have to understand again the why behind it.
And at Nest, when we had limited resources,
you know, putting a screwdriver in the box,
a custom designed screwdriver in the box
was born out of those experiences I had at Apple
and seeing how you can create something that's emotional.
It's part of marketing and it's part
of the product experience overall,
even though it seems extraneous.
I went back and made the design team
and the mechanical team changed some curves
on the Nest Protect, the smoke and CEO detector
we did at Nest after they had already tooled it.
And I said, there's Cosmo, I said, it doesn't look right.
There is a, but they're like, oh, well, we had,
I said, no, you're gonna go back
and you're gonna make that change.
I told you, you want, we needed to do it.
We had a better looking model, that is gonna get done.
I know it's gonna be a terrible cost to you,
but we already had this discussion
and that's the way it's gonna have to be.
And I'm sorry, but it is what it is.
You know, because it's better for the customer
and it looks better in the pictures
and all the other stuff.
And then we did it and it was great.
And everyone agreed it was great at the end,
but it was pain to get there.
Those are where those little details
are where the magic comes out, right?
And, you know, if you don't do,
if you don't take those pains and put in the love
the customer's gonna feel, it's gonna,
they're either gonna feel the pain
or they're gonna feel the love if you put it in, right?
So it depends on, you know, how much time and effort
you wanna put into something and what really matters to you.
And so how you communicate what you do.
We're human beings after all, is there something you've learned
from sort of the tensions that are natural
or that happen in teams when they're passionate
and they're trying to solve these problems?
Is that the way of life?
And there's the human drama.
Is that just, is that always gonna,
is that, it is what it is?
Is that make you better?
Actually the drama of the tension between personalities
and all that kind of stuff.
Look, a roller coaster ride without ups and downs is no fun.
It's the journey.
It's the journey that brings,
it brings out the best in everyone.
We're forged, we're tempered by those experiences.
Not all the ups, but also the downs.
And that's when you get the humanity and the connection.
And we can tell these stories till we're blue in the face
and smile every time because we did something together
that we each of us couldn't do apart,
but when it comes together,
that's where all the emotions happen.
And that's where, if it's born out of the right reasons
and the right story and the right way,
that's where the magic happens.
Not just for the customer,
but for how it transforms each person who is working on it.
And they will never forget those experiences in their life,
positively and negatively, that happened at the time,
but they look back and it's only positive
because they did something that mattered.
Yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life is Nest.
Nest thermostats and the big umbrella of Nest.
Again, as part of this Netflix series, season three,
what was the most memorable, the most painful,
the most insight-laden challenge you had to overcome
to bring Nest to life?
Well, the first thing for me
was making someone care about their thermostat.
No one considers it.
They never had any customer choice.
They didn't install it.
They usually don't even use it
because it's so complicated or what have you.
They just like, they bitch at it,
they hide it in the corner and then they just pay the bill,
of whatever it is, it's totally unloved, unconsidered.
So how do you wake up?
Like I said, the virus of doubt.
How do you wake that up and get people going?
Remember every day when you go in
and it's like you're just frustrated
and then you get the bill and you pay the bill.
So you have to do that.
So that was one thing.
I think the other big one was not delivering.
It was, all of it was hard.
It was constrained.
We had only so much stuff.
We were bootstrapped.
We didn't have massive funding.
We didn't get hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was, but we did it for the right reasons.
But I think the other big part of it was
not just building a disruptive product
because a lot of the people on the team had done that.
We knew what we were doing and that was,
if we got the design right, we could deliver it
with enough time.
It was getting the disruptive go to market.
In other words, how to take that product
from the end of the production line
and get it into the customer's hands
because there was no retail or customer choice
in thermostats.
No one even, it was never considered purchase.
They never thought they had choice.
Some guy, usually in suspenders and a butt crack,
told them, looked around, looked at their house and said,
this looks like somebody who's got as well to do.
This thermostat is now gonna cost you $350.
Thank you very much.
And you're like, I'll take whatever you give me, right?
And then it goes into another house.
It's worth $100.
It was the same damn thing, right?
So there was no price transparency.
There was no choice.
You just got what you were given.
So how do you go, and this was an entrenched industry.
That's why there was no innovation in it
because it was doing just fine
because every house needed them.
All the installers were programmed
by the product deliverers, by bonuses
and bonuses to say, you're gonna only carry our product
and if you sell this many,
you're gonna get a free trip to Hawaii, right?
And for these guys who install,
I get a free trip to Hawaii, that's dream for them, right?
So this whole channel was fully controlled
by the product guys
and it was almost monopolistic in a way.
So how do you go around that?
So creating a disruptive go to market channel,
one was direct to consumer, right?
And all the marketing that was necessary
to get that message across.
Another one was getting the installation right.
No one was self-installing thermostats.
So how do we get enough people who are early adopters
to be able to self-install them confidently?
So they didn't still have to call the guy
to come and install it
because then he would say, this is a crap product.
No, I got the most better product, right?
So you had to get rid of that friction.
And then ultimately, how do you get the people
who were not just early adopters,
but people who needed to see it
and touch it before they bought it?
How do you get that into retail
when the large brands of the time of thermostats
and Home Depot and Lowe's had contracts
that they couldn't bring in any other brands?
They were owning the channel all the way to where
there was any sort of slight customer choice.
And it was really contractor choice,
more than it was and consumer choice.
So all of that had to be innovated
along with the product.
And so to me, that was a huge challenge
and something I had never done,
most of us had never done and we had to create,
that was as much as a project
as actually delivering the product itself.
So it turned out to be a giant hit.
And it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion
as a founder and leader just out of curiosity
in these cases of acquisition.
Is it always a good thing?
Is there any part of you and the team
that considered saying no?
We considered saying no all the way along the process, right?
We had all been in big companies before.
We knew what it was like and the politics
and all the other stuff.
And what I came to learn, especially from Phillips,
because Phillips was a very, it was 375,000 people,
it was a big, it was massive company, right?
And tons of politics.
And I was like, do we wanna go back into that work?
Cause I had so many negative experiences from that.
But then going to Apple, which was not big,
but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics.
But then when you saw a leader rise up
and get rid of those dynamics
or not allow many of them to flourish,
then you're like, oh, with the right leadership,
this can be a beautiful marriage, right?
And so for four months,
we were working together with them with Google
to make sure that we had the right leadership
and we were gonna be in the right environment
that it felt right.
So that happened.
It absolutely happened.
We worked on all the details.
We didn't even talk about price.
We were talking about how's the brand gonna work?
Who's the team gonna work with?
How are we gonna get IP?
How are we gonna do exchanges?
How are we gonna get budgets and all that stuff done?
So we worked through all of that
before we actually sealed any kind of deal.
Cause they were already investor in the company.
So we already knew,
they knew relatively where the endpoint was for the price.
So working through all those prerequisites,
I knew that as a individual product company
that was trying to create a platform,
no investors were gonna invest in a platform
that could take three, four years
and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars to build
without all kinds of new products at the same time.
And products that we were having, which were successes,
but they weren't even break even yet, right?
We were still developing them.
So how are we gonna get more people to fund
all of these things and this platform
that I really wanna create?
Because my worry, and I had seen this many times
in Silicon Valley, is these small startups have bravado
and they said, I'm gonna take on the big guys, right?
With a platform.
But when those platform guys show up
and Apple says they're gonna get in the home,
at the time, nobody cared.
They were curiously, yeah, it's curious, what's next?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But Apple wasn't in the market,
Google wasn't in the market yet,
Amazon wasn't there, Microsoft, Samsung,
they were all just, that's curious, right?
And I had watched, if you said, I'm gonna go challenge them
and I'm gonna build a platform
and then they all of a sudden one by one go,
oh, well, we're building a platform now,
we're building a platform.
They fighted you to death, fear, uncertainty, doubt
and the developers run away
and you can't make that platform.
So I'm like, before the landscape gets changed on us
because we've tracked so much attention,
they announced something,
we need to change the landscape on them.
Let's go to the best place
where we can build out the platform,
have the right leadership behind us
to help us grow this thing
into what the vision it should be.
And that's what we believe we were doing
with the Google acquisition.
Is it possible to take on the platforms?
So you said there's a lot of startups with bravado
and all that kind of stuff, right?
Doesn't mean, James Joyce, when he was 20,
he said, I'm gonna be the greatest writer
of the 20th century before he wrote anything of value.
One of them might be actually right.
Yeah, in this modern world,
when you, so first of all,
people should definitely get your book build
as just this giant number of advice
on this exact question of how to build cool things
and how to build a startup,
how to all the different stages of that team
and hiring.
It's mostly human nature.
It's not technical.
It's mostly human nature behind it.
And it turns out it's,
turtles all the way down this human at the bottom.
Yes, so is it possible to build startups
that take on the big guys?
Whatever that is of the modern era.
So for now, it's these platforms of Apple, Google, Twitter.
I don't even know, Meta, I guess, called now.
Sure.
Is it possible to take them on?
Absolutely.
But you don't take them on on their same turf.
You take them on on the turf
they're gonna want to have in the future, right?
Spotify is a platform.
It started as an application, is now a platform, right?
Think of WeChat, think of all the super apps out there
that are now wallets and delivery services
and travel services and transportation services
all within an app.
They've innovated in a different level,
in a different space that the platform companies weren't,
right?
Or they, you know, Google was an app,
it was an app company.
It was solving search.
And then it became a platform company.
Apple was solving personal computing
and then it became, or iPhone was doing, you know,
solving internet browsing, all that stuff.
And then it became a platform company
when the app store was added.
If you look at it, there's no such thing
as building a platform company.
You build a great app first
and then you can expand it
and have the right to become a platform.
Your whole book is just a bunch of advice for young people.
But let me ask about-
And older people?
And older, well, everyone is young at heart.
If you're not, you should be.
So what, in terms of picking a career,
you have advice on this point,
what advice would you give to a person
on how to pick a career?
What is it you want to learn?
And who is it you want to learn from?
Just like you pick a university.
You're like, I wanna go here for this expertise.
I've heard about these programs, especially graduate,
graduate studies.
You go for a certain program with a certain set of people.
Why don't you do that when it comes to a job?
You just don't go or in a career.
You just don't go and say,
I just wanna go work at Google
or I just wanna work at Apple.
You wanna go to a certain team
with a certain set of people
and work with them on something
that you're really curious about
and you wanna learn about.
That's such, I just wanna sort of comment that
that's such a subtle but a brilliant framing
of just ask the question, what do I want to learn?
And then see what career path is going to maximize that.
That's so interesting.
It's the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me.
When I say I'm gonna bring somebody on the team,
first question is, what do you wanna learn?
I don't want the expert, like we talked about earlier,
says, I'm the expert in this.
You're gonna hire me as the expert.
We're doing something new.
You're not an expert, cause we're not an expert either.
What is it you wanna learn?
What do you wanna learn?
And on the topic of learning,
what is the best way to learn?
What starting, you go into this new place,
into this new world, into maybe V1,
you said you're building V1.
I mean, the whole world is full of V1s
or V0s waiting for the V1 to come along.
Zero to one.
Zero to one, what's the process of that look like?
What's the process of learning?
How do you learn?
Well, let me put a framing
and then we'll talk about that last piece.
I have now looking back, especially writing this book,
I have a version one of myself, a version two,
a version three, a version four.
I had a lot of opinions about myself
and what I wanted to do.
Sometimes those opinions for certain people,
those opinions are formed
and they get the data from their parents
and they go do what their parents told them to do
or their surroundings.
My opinions was like, I wanna go and learn this,
I'm curious about that.
I made the zero to one move
and then over time, by doing,
I was refining those things
and learning what I was really curious about
and what I was really good about
because I was getting data
and then I was like,
then I had another set of opinions
to create version two of me
and then I would go and do it.
So I was learning by doing,
starting with the opinion,
you're not gonna get any facts.
Most people are like,
where do I make the most money from my position?
They're trying to start with data.
Start with the why.
What's your curiosity?
What do you wanna learn?
And then follow that.
I took the lowest job on the totem pole
at General Magic
because I wanted to get in there to work with the right team.
I didn't even know what they were doing.
Right?
And then I thought that it felt right, right?
I was barely living above the power line working there,
working 80 hours a week
because it was so amazing to learn,
just like a college student, right?
That's what I was doing.
And then that set,
and then I learned more from that
and then changed those opinions into data
and then I found other opinions.
And so it's the same thing,
but it was by doing, right?
The way you find out what you wanna do in life
is by figuring out what you don't wanna do.
And the only way you find that out
is by doing a bunch of stuff.
Doing a bunch of stuff and refining it.
That's hilarious, yeah, that's brilliant.
So in terms of the career path
of leaping into the startup world
and launching a startup,
what does it take to successfully found a startup,
to have a chance to succeed?
And maybe how do you decide to take that leap?
Is there sort of having found it,
having been part of many V1s,
many of some of the most successful V1s ever,
what's it take to take that leap?
Maybe leave your job at a cushy job at a company
and do the startup.
What does it take?
It takes belief in yourself.
That's the first thing, belief that you can do it.
Not, but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around you
or coaches around you to make sure you know you're not crazy.
It's a crazy smart idea, but you're not crazy
and you're just working on something
as a lone mad man or woman.
You have a great idea.
And like I said, great ideas chase you.
In this world, there are so many people
who have more ideas than they have time to implement.
I used to be like that.
I would like, oh my God, I have this idea, this idea.
And you try to do all of them.
But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on
and you shut out all those other things
and you bring them other ideas into the thing
you're trying to do.
So I try to run away from a great idea.
And then it stalks me.
It hunts you down because you're like,
ah, that's gonna have this problem.
I'm gonna put it aside.
And then all of a sudden, you know, a few days later,
oh, I think I know how to solve that problem.
Or I talk to somebody and you're just always
kind of niggling around the edges of it.
And then at some point it's like,
it just becomes, it becomes like this black hole
that just sucks you and you're like,
I can't think about anything else but this.
It's almost like a relationship in the world, right?
You know, when you have it with a person,
you find your partner.
You know, you're like, hmm, wait, hmm, something.
And then you're trying to, and then all of a sudden it just,
it comes together, right?
It's kind of like that.
Ultimately achieve focus.
See, I'm different.
I just dive right in.
I used to do that too.
I used to dive right in.
Yeah.
But I learned that you need time.
It's more effective to run away from it.
Run away from it.
And so it chases you because it makes you think harder
about that story.
This is not dating advice.
We're talking about start-up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But ultimately you have achieved focus on it.
But you also said to believe in yourself.
So it's not necessarily even the idea.
It's the human that believe in the human being.
You have to believe in yourself and the idea that you have.
Cause if you don't have that belief,
then you can't project that to other people
to say join the team.
Let me ask you on, cause you mentioned mentors
and you've talked about having had incredible mentors
in your life.
You were also a mentor to a very large number of people.
What does it take to find a mentor?
How do you, how do you find a great mentor?
Usually they also find you.
Is it like with the ideas?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, what happens is, is you're in the right,
you have a community around you.
Okay. And because you've been building a network,
you, cause you can't do it alone.
So you have to create this network around you
and of relationships that don't, it's not transactions,
but relationships over time that you really cherish
and people you talk to, okay?
And you share vulnerable or nascent ideas with
or crazy opinions with and then you argue them through,
but you start to see resonate and it's not about age.
It's just about this connection, right?
I have mentors, obviously when I was young,
all my mentors were older and as I get older,
I have mentors who are younger than me or the same age, right?
They're not all just older, right?
And so it's about that connection.
It's about being on that same wavelength,
but they also, they can counterbalance you.
They compliment you in some way.
Like my best mentors had nothing to do with technology.
They didn't know anything about technology, right?
The way we know it.
They were all about human nature and they could reflect that
and help me get more human focused and more empathetic
because I was so detailed in the technology,
I needed to see from other perspectives,
but then they wanted to learn more about the technology, right?
Or they thought that this idea was so great
that it should exist.
Now let's work together on that.
So it's really, they have to find you
and you have to find them and that's by sharing.
You just don't go and look it up on, you know,
on the internet and say who are the best mentors
in the world, it just doesn't work that way.
So form and network of people and see where,
I mean, it's like finding relationships,
finding love and all that kind of.
Human nature, venture capitalists, money.
Do VCs help or hurt a business in general?
So like in those early stages
in the chase of developing a V1,
just what's the constructive and destructive power of money
in the development of a brilliant idea
and the deployment of a brilliant idea?
I have seen brilliant venture capitalists.
I have seen horrible ones.
Ones that care about their LPs more
than they care about the entrepreneurs.
Of course, everyone's in it, you know,
at the end of the day, especially venture capital,
they have to give a return to their limited partners,
the people who invest in money that they, you know,
that they have to shepherd that money
and make sure it's watched over properly.
But when there's not a balance, a pushback
in a venture capitalist between what the LP needs
and what the entrepreneur needs
and that the entrepreneur might be trying really hard,
but if they don't see, the VC doesn't see,
the exit's gonna happen in two years
and they just leave them hanging.
When it's, there's no, the value exchange is only money
and not mentorship or ideas or other things
when there's not a relationship, but really a transaction.
That's when money is toxic
because you can get money everywhere.
Maybe it's a little harder today, you know,
over the last month, but you can still find people
with money who are on that, who wanna enable your mission
and can be mentors, not always, not all of them,
but some of them can be mentors, but they're on your side,
then it's incredibly powerful
because it's not just one plus one equals two, right?
It's something bigger than that
because then they can bring their networks of people
and their networks of companies
and other people they worked with
that might wanna join your mission, right?
That's the kind of venture capitalist and smart money
that's out there, right?
But you have to build a relationship.
People go, oh, look at that valuation.
Oh, it's the brand name of the VC that's investing me.
No, it boils down to who's that partner
and how experienced are they?
Don't just give me the brand, give me the person
because that's the person I'm gonna be interacting with.
I have to, man, this is a million questions.
I wanna ask you, boy, we're on season five already,
but let me ask you, it seems like
out of all the brilliant things you write about,
it seems like not an important question,
but it's a fascinating one to me as lawyers.
You write about this, so does a company need lawyers?
And why?
And what kind?
So you write about sort of the value of this game, I guess.
Right, the legal game.
Why do we need lawyer?
You sound exasperated by lawyers.
I don't have a good question, I guess, I...
Well, because...
The why of lawyers.
The why of lawyers, yes, exactly.
Okay, the why of lawyers.
Thank you.
You even do the question.
I'm just...
We just have to put why in front of everything you ask
and then we'll be there, okay?
Lawyers, why?
Why?
Even mafiosos had lawyers.
Okay, you know, Tony Soprano, you know, Scarfe,
all of them had lawyers, right?
Why?
Because there are things in this world
that you don't always consider in the government,
in laws, in competitors,
because you're so focused on what you're doing,
they have to watch out for you, right?
Now, the best kind of lawyers are the ones
who try to work with you to enable what you're doing
and see gray areas.
Law is not black or white, it's how it's interpreted, right?
And so they can help interpret things a certain way
or help push on things a certain way
to get changed happen or allow change to happen,
because if you have lawyers who are always,
just like you were talking about PR people,
if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything,
because their job is to really say no or maybe,
they'll never say yes.
And you also say their job is to say no
and bill you by the hour.
Exactly, exactly.
The present.
Right?
Yeah.
If you don't want to know, don't ask them,
because you're gonna get a no, maybe a maybe.
You'll get charged for it.
And you'll get charged for it anyways, right?
So to have a partner, to have them on your team,
to help you see maybe some of the things
you don't see, some consequences,
they help to rein that in or change your language.
Like, are you gonna get sued for this ad?
Just change this one word and it helps, right?
So you need to have a partner.
Most of the times, especially engineers or designers,
they see lawyers as only stifling.
Lawyers can actually, if you do it right
and you have the right type,
they can actually open up a whole new world for you
because of the interpretation
and how we go about doing things.
So, and they help you not get bogged down
in the pain of little mistakes that didn't mean anything.
Exactly, you shot yourself in the foot
and you didn't even know it.
You didn't even know you were carrying the gun.
Just to jump around, Charles Bukowski once wrote,
find what you love and let it kill you. So,
the question is about work-life balance.
That's like finding an idea and let it chase you.
Yes, but a little more aggressive.
So, what does work-life balance look like
that maximizes success and or happiness?
Is there such a thing as work-life balance?
Is, can you speak to this?
Your work is your life.
And I mean that in the positive sense.
When you're on a mission that really matters
and you know that you can really affect
not just yourself but other people's lives
and then that is very rewarding, right?
That's not work.
That's like I said, a mission, right?
You adopt that.
But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself.
At General Magic, wonderful documentary.
If no one's seen it, you gotta see that.
It's amazing.
I was physically and mentally unhealthy,
socially unhealthy as well
because I put every waking minute into this thing.
Every ounce of me into it.
And when it was a spectacular disaster,
we were making the iPhone 15 years too early.
The bottom fell out.
I had nothing left.
I had to get healthy socially, emotionally, physically
after that, that trauma.
I let everything go.
I learned from that that you have to,
even though you might put everything into your work,
you need to find balance outside of it.
Now that doesn't mean you're always,
you know, it's three days a week working
and four days a week or whatever it was.
You're still working as hard as ever.
But what you're doing is you're making sure
when you're thinking time is during work
that you're not ruminating at three in the morning.
You use the tools that you have
to put those ideas into databases or on pages
or somewhere else.
So you can go back and look at them.
So you're not always having to remember,
because what happens is most people
don't write this stuff down.
So they just sit there and I gotta remember this.
I gotta remember this.
I gotta remember this.
If you just put it into the tools
and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh.
A lot of the time is about ruminating
about what I need to get done and remembering everything
instead of doing the work.
That's fascinating.
So if you just put it down on paper,
you can actually escape it.
Right.
Escape it for a time, to have peace for a time.
You mentioned General Magic.
Let me ask you the Russian question.
The Russian question.
What's been the darkest moments of your life?
Where are some of the darkest places
you've gone in your mind?
You've talked about, if you're doing
these kinds of things with startups,
you're gonna have to face a crisis.
Right, absolutely.
If you're doing it right, you're gonna face it.
So for you personally,
where were some of the tougher moments in your life?
Growing up, I went to 12 schools in 15 years.
I was always the new kid.
Put yourself in those shoes, right?
You picked on?
Well, you picked on?
Well, absolutely, but even more so,
I was the geek with the computer.
Remember the nerds in the 80s?
You probably don't know this, but believe me,
we were made fun of.
What were these computers?
What were these things?
You're off in a cold.
They're all partying or going, whatever it was,
and I'm sitting there like,
they're like, this guy is just this alien, right?
Who's this new guy who just showed up
and then you would ask the smart questions
and you couldn't be the smartest
in the, because then you get picked on too.
And you're the new kid.
So you're in this environment that's ever changing.
You don't fit in and you are just asking questions
because you think they're the right ad questions to answer.
But then they're like, you're making us look bad.
Don't ask these smart questions
because you're gonna make us do more work.
So right there, it's pretty tough.
And I'm moving cities, right?
And I didn't have the internet
to stay connected to people.
There was no internet.
Phone calls were $2 a minute.
So it was lonely too.
It was lonely, right?
Right?
I was a latchkey kid, right?
I had my brother, but he was a skateboarder
and he had a different social way of working.
He loved to do that stuff and be outside.
I loved the computer.
So even in the computer, you were alone in the family.
Were the computer in the family you were alone?
I was absolutely alone.
That was just me.
But then you could find the other geeks, right?
But there were just a few of us
and we made this little thing.
But then when you moved away,
then I had to use a BBS, a bulletin board system
and a dial up modem.
And then I started hacking the phone system
to get free codes out, MCI and Sprint back in the day
to get long distance, to get free codes to call my friends,
the geeks on the other side, right?
Or to dial into a BBS cheaply
that was in another part of the world.
So this was this subculture
and that was not accepted in any way
and not the heroes that you see today
that are on the richest people in the world and everything.
So that was the first set of trauma.
And then the next one really was general magic.
You know, the end of that, like I described before
and pulling yourself out and going just
cause I got so insular in that world of geeking out
and building stuff that I just tore all the social ties,
right?
Because it was just, it was a drug.
I was hooked on that.
I was a junkie.
I had to get clean.
Yeah.
And that made you who you are.
Tempered, tempered.
So Steve Jobs is no longer with us.
One day you also will no longer be with us.
That's the thing about this life it ends.
Yeah.
So no matter how many incredible things
you brought to this world,
no matter how many inventions you built,
you too shall perish.
Do you think about this?
Are you afraid of your death?
I am not afraid of my death.
I am an atheist.
And I think about the soul.
Because I do, even though I'm an atheist,
I think about the soul.
And the soul is the thing that you instill in others
when you go that lives on.
It's not this thing that's magically in space.
It's the thing that you've imparted onto people
that you've worked with
and those relationships you've had.
And that soul lives on in the stories that they tell, right?
And through build, I'm hopeful that those stories
stay relevant because they're human nature.
They're not about who knows what the next iPhone thing is
or the next iPod thing is.
The stuff that I have been able,
the privilege to make and work with people,
those are all ephemeral.
The iPod's gone now, right?
This week, it was announced iPod's dead after 21 years.
It is that those human connections,
it's that growth that you've helped someone
just like they helped me.
Just like Bill Campbell or Steve Jobs has gone,
but they made me be better.
That's the soul that I believe in.
That's fascinating that you say that, yeah,
so many of these products, I mean, to push back a little bit.
So even though the iPod is an end of an era, using it every day.
I think that, I mean, the number of people that impacted
is just, so I suppose the soul is carried by the people.
Exactly.
Sometimes the products you create
is the sort of the transport mechanism.
It's the vessel.
And they felt the love and they felt that love
and it transformed them,
even if they don't have the vessel anymore.
Yeah, and in that way, the soul lives on.
Just like the body is the vessel.
That's beautifully put.
Why do you think we're here?
What's the meaning of life, Tony?
Jesus, man, death, man, we're going all around.
Meaning of life?
Why, why?
Because you said it's important to have a press release.
I didn't.
If humanity, if life on earth, if this thing,
the consciousness, the falling in love and building bridges
and iPods and rockets and trying to extend out
into the cosmos, why?
Why do you think we're doing it?
Is there any meaning to it?
We are naturally curious.
We're, we are naturally curious individuals.
And we are always looking for meaning.
We're always trying to ascribe meaning to something
or understanding of something, right?
And through that, it's just like evolution, right?
Darwinism, it's just that thing that's baked into our being
at the most fundamental level.
Driven by curiosity.
Driven by curiosity.
And creating some pretty cool things along the way.
Tony, you, and speaking of cool things,
you've created some of the coolest things ever.
And on top of that,
you're just an amazing human being.
It's a huge honor that you sit and talk to me today.
This is fun.
Lex, this is great.
I didn't know where I was going, and I'm, let's talk.
I'm looking for seeds.
I would love to.
Seven, eight, nine.
Six, seven, yes.
Let's go hang out and have dinner
and just rap about all kinds of great.
I'd love to continue this.
I would too.
Thank you so much, Tony.
Thanks, Matt.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tony Fadal.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Tony Fadal himself.
The most wonderful part of building something together with a team
is that you're walking side by side with other people.
You're all looking at your feet
and scanning the horizon at the same time.
Some people will see things you can't,
and you will see things that are invisible to everyone else.
So don't think doing the work just means locking yourself into a room.
A huge part of it is walking with your team.
The work is reaching your destination together
or finding a new destination and bringing the team with you.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.