Transcript
00:00:00 It wasn’t just a one on one.
00:00:01 It could be Steve against the team going,
00:00:03 we need glass instead of plastic
00:00:05 on the front face of the iPhone.
00:00:07 And we’re going to do this.
00:00:10 And we’re like, God, you know, and so we did it.
00:00:14 And he pushed us because he didn’t know all the details,
00:00:17 but he could see in our minds that we’re like,
00:00:19 yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably,
00:00:22 but man, it’s really putting us in risk.
00:00:24 And we laid out the risks for him.
00:00:26 And he’s like, I’m willing to take those risks.
00:00:28 The following is a conversation with Tony Fadell,
00:00:31 engineer and designer, co creator of the iPod,
00:00:34 the iPhone and the Nest Thermostat.
00:00:38 And he’s the author of the new book, Build,
00:00:41 an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.
00:00:45 More than almost any human ever,
00:00:48 he knows what it takes to create technology ideas,
00:00:50 designs, products and companies that revolutionize life
00:00:55 for huge numbers of people in the world.
00:00:58 So it truly is an honor and pleasure
00:01:01 to sit down with Tony for a time
00:01:02 and look back at one heck of an amazing life.
00:01:06 This is the Lex Readman podcast.
00:01:08 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:01:10 in the description.
00:01:12 And now, dear friends, here’s Tony Fadell.
00:01:17 When did you first fall in love with computers?
00:01:20 Or let’s say computer engineering and design?
00:01:22 I first fell in love with computers and programming.
00:01:28 Was it a summer school class in fifth grade
00:01:33 in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan?
00:01:37 It was a simple basic programming class,
00:01:39 but the basic programming class
00:01:41 was not like you might think it was.
00:01:44 It was bubble cards.
00:01:45 So literally it was the cards, the stack of cards,
00:01:50 and you would use a number two pencil and you would put in
00:01:53 your program line by line,
00:01:55 and you’d have to make sure it was perfectly stacked
00:01:57 and no errors and what have you.
00:01:58 And you would take that set of cards
00:02:00 and you’d put it on this reader and it would zzzt, zzzt, zzzt.
00:02:03 And it would go off to an IBM microcomputer
00:02:06 somewhere in the, back then the cloud.
00:02:09 And then you would sit on a Texas Instruments paper terminal.
00:02:16 And it would just, literally I was just,
00:02:19 I could write things and it would,
00:02:21 I could program this machine to do stuff.
00:02:23 And it was, you know, it was nowhere near sexy.
00:02:25 There was no graphics, right?
00:02:26 Oregon Trail was all in text, right?
00:02:30 The cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong
00:02:33 or out of order, or a disaster, or you dropped one card,
00:02:37 it would all fall apart.
00:02:38 So just doing that, you know, print f,
00:02:42 or what was it?
00:02:43 I can only remember what it was.
00:02:44 It was, you know, what the basic commands were, but.
00:02:48 Oh, so when you say basic, you mean basic programming?
00:02:50 Programming language.
00:02:51 Okay.
00:02:52 Basic programming.
00:02:53 So you’re writing basic programming language on paper.
00:02:57 On paper.
00:02:58 And you’re calling it programming though.
00:03:00 It’s called programming.
00:03:01 Yeah, you’re programming this computer in, you know,
00:03:03 in a remote location and it came back.
00:03:06 So it was truly cloud computing in a way.
00:03:08 So it was really terminal based computing.
00:03:11 And the input and the program are separate.
00:03:14 So the input to the program, or they could go together.
00:03:17 Like, or there’s no input to the program.
00:03:20 It just runs and it gives you output.
00:03:22 Yeah, it goes in and it says ready,
00:03:24 and then you can say run, and then it would run.
00:03:27 But to program it, you didn’t type it
00:03:30 because it was a printer terminal.
00:03:31 You would make the stack of cards
00:03:32 and that would get it into the computer’s memory.
00:03:35 Okay, so where was the magic?
00:03:37 The magic was that you could create, you had a language
00:03:41 and you could create what you wanted to create, right?
00:03:43 You could create a world or what have you
00:03:46 and have this interaction.
00:03:47 And you could compute things, you could, you know,
00:03:50 do numbers, you could, I was playing Oregon Trail, right?
00:03:53 So you were less like.
00:03:54 So you can play video games.
00:03:56 Well, video.
00:03:58 Right, without the video.
00:03:59 You could play text games
00:04:01 and then imagine them in your brain, right?
00:04:04 Oregon Trail, there’s this meme I saw recently.
00:04:08 If you wanna feel bad about yourself as a programmer,
00:04:11 realize that one person wrote Railroad Tycoon.
00:04:16 I think that’s the name of the game.
00:04:17 It’s this cool little builder game.
00:04:20 One person wrote it in assembly.
00:04:22 So like from scratch and for people who don’t know,
00:04:29 it kind of looks like a Sim City type game.
00:04:31 It’s a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads.
00:04:35 And there’s a nice graphics, it’s three dimensional,
00:04:36 all that kind of stuff.
00:04:38 All the things, all the rich colorful things
00:04:40 you would imagine for a three dimensional video game,
00:04:43 all written in assembly,
00:04:45 meaning the lowest level code next to binary,
00:04:48 which is fascinating.
00:04:50 And that’s the, you had to notice the magic
00:04:53 at that low level at that time.
00:04:55 You didn’t have all the graphics.
00:04:57 You didn’t have all the like APIs and all the sample codes,
00:05:02 no stack overflow, no internet, none of that.
00:05:04 You just had, you had to know registers.
00:05:06 You know, had to know the op codes
00:05:08 and you had to imagine the world in your brain
00:05:10 and the memory structures and everything else.
00:05:12 There’s no visualization.
00:05:13 You visualized it all yourself, right?
00:05:15 And so that was magic.
00:05:16 But then the next part of the magic
00:05:18 of where I got hooked even further
00:05:20 was like I’m doing these little things.
00:05:22 And then Electronic Arts came out for the Apple II.
00:05:25 So I got an Apple II and Electronic Arts came out
00:05:28 and I was programming and doing basic
00:05:29 and making my own games.
00:05:31 But then there were two games that really blew my mind.
00:05:34 One was pinball construction set.
00:05:37 And the other one was music construction set.
00:05:39 And these were both places where I could create pinball games
00:05:42 and I could create musical scores
00:05:45 because I love music and I could then play them, right?
00:05:48 And so when you had that, you were like,
00:05:50 oh, this is something very different.
00:05:53 So I could create myself,
00:05:54 but then there was others that create tools
00:05:57 so you could create at a visual level.
00:06:00 And then you would read the backstories
00:06:01 because Electronics Arts back in the day,
00:06:03 it was one programmer who would program those games
00:06:06 program those things, each of those things.
00:06:08 And you could read their backstories.
00:06:10 It was literally like a musician or someone else.
00:06:13 Like you could read Rick Rubens, like here’s the thing.
00:06:15 They tell you all of that stuff.
00:06:16 And there was one guy who wrote music construction set.
00:06:20 He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old.
00:06:24 Wow.
00:06:25 And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time.
00:06:28 And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this
00:06:33 and had published, right, and this amazing tool was created,
00:06:37 I’m like, what could I do?
00:06:38 And so then it just kept building off of that.
00:06:41 But really it was those seminal things.
00:06:43 First, the introduction and then the power
00:06:46 through programming and turning these things
00:06:48 into what you wanted to turn it into.
00:06:50 And you didn’t have to be 40, 50 years old
00:06:53 and have PhDs.
00:06:55 And then I was like, okay, this is really cool.
00:06:58 I wish we did that with programmers
00:07:01 where we treated them like artists.
00:07:02 We would know the backstory these days today.
00:07:05 Or not just programmers, engineers.
00:07:07 Engineers, designers.
00:07:09 Yeah, like all the things about a product
00:07:11 that I think we love are the little details.
00:07:14 And there’s probably a human being
00:07:16 behind each of those details
00:07:18 that had their little inkling of genius that they put in.
00:07:22 I wish we knew those stories.
00:07:24 That’s always sad to me when I,
00:07:25 because obviously I love engineering
00:07:28 and I interact with companies
00:07:29 and they, you know, autonomous vehicles,
00:07:31 something I’m really interested about.
00:07:33 And I see that companies generally,
00:07:35 and we’ll probably talk about this,
00:07:37 but they seem to want to hide their engineers.
00:07:39 Like engineers hold the secrets.
00:07:42 Like the great secret,
00:07:44 we did not speak of the great secret.
00:07:47 But then the result of that is you don’t get
00:07:50 to hear their stories.
00:07:52 The passion that is there behind the engineers.
00:07:56 Like, and also the genius, the little,
00:07:59 there’s a difference between the stuff that’s patented,
00:08:01 like the kernel of the idea
00:08:03 and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea.
00:08:06 And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects
00:08:09 a little bit more, but sorry for the distraction.
00:08:13 So what, you mentioned Apple II.
00:08:15 What was the first computer you fell in love with?
00:08:18 Like the product, the thing before you
00:08:21 that was a personal computer?
00:08:23 It was the Apple II.
00:08:25 So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over.
00:08:28 You know, it was, I think it was at the time,
00:08:31 it was the, you know, the person of the year.
00:08:34 Maybe it was that year.
00:08:35 I don’t remember what, but.
00:08:36 Well, Apple II was the person of the year?
00:08:38 Yeah, for my magazine back in, I don’t remember when,
00:08:41 but it was around that same time.
00:08:43 I was so young, but I had, there was the Apple II
00:08:46 and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew about tools
00:08:49 because my grandfather taught me about tools
00:08:50 and creating things, right?
00:08:53 And I saw this thing and I had the, you know,
00:08:56 that IBM experience, that terminal experience.
00:08:59 And I’m like, oh, I could have that at home, right?
00:09:01 And so I need to have that at home.
00:09:03 And the only thing that was really talked about
00:09:04 in our circles was the Apple II.
00:09:06 And I was just like, that’s it.
00:09:08 So I went, jumped up and down.
00:09:11 It was very expensive.
00:09:12 I have to have this.
00:09:13 My parents were like, what?
00:09:14 You know, it was $2,500 back then in the 1981.
00:09:19 It was like crazy, right?
00:09:20 So I was like, I’m gonna make as much money
00:09:23 as I can this summer.
00:09:23 And my grandfather said,
00:09:25 cause he helped me learn all about tools
00:09:27 and build things together.
00:09:29 I will match whatever you make
00:09:30 so you can get this computer.
00:09:32 So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy.
00:09:36 Caddying actually for the, you know,
00:09:38 the families in, you know, at the country clubs
00:09:41 in the town where we lived.
00:09:43 And did whatever I could.
00:09:45 And that end of that summer, we got my Apple II.
00:09:48 And you couldn’t tear it away from me.
00:09:50 It was my friend.
00:09:51 It was everything.
00:09:52 From a product perspective,
00:09:54 what do you remember that was brilliant?
00:09:56 The design choices, the ideas behind it,
00:10:01 or is it just that it exists?
00:10:02 Or the very idea of a personal computer
00:10:05 is the brilliant design choice.
00:10:07 Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool
00:10:10 in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted.
00:10:12 I could program it anyways.
00:10:14 There was no, you know, there was no internet connection.
00:10:16 There was no, it was all just you.
00:10:18 You either loaded software that you got from someone, right?
00:10:22 Or you created it yourself.
00:10:24 And then there was the whole other thing
00:10:25 which was started happening, which we were doing.
00:10:28 And this was kind of like MP3 and stuff.
00:10:30 We were sharing software, right?
00:10:32 So you built this community of sharing software.
00:10:34 You would go and pirate.
00:10:35 That was what it called, pirate all this software.
00:10:37 You’d never use it all, but it was just that fun thing
00:10:39 of like, I’m gonna get all this other stuff
00:10:41 and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it
00:10:44 and see behind the scenes.
00:10:45 So you really had a sense this was your world
00:10:48 and you owned it, right?
00:10:50 And you could like literally go into every register.
00:10:52 We didn’t have all those security layers.
00:10:53 Like we do not like,
00:10:55 you could really touch bits and you could poke bits
00:10:57 and you can make this light turn on.
00:10:59 And the geek assignment just lit up.
00:11:01 Now there’s, it’s so abstract.
00:11:05 People don’t even understand.
00:11:06 Like usually some programs don’t even understand memory.
00:11:09 They just think it’s unlimited, right?
00:11:11 And security, it’s like,
00:11:13 now there’s all this security you should have,
00:11:16 but it’s like the adults all showed up to the party
00:11:19 and now you can’t have all the fun, right?
00:11:21 It’s like, no, no.
00:11:23 This was the thing where if you, if the power went out,
00:11:26 you lost your whole program,
00:11:27 you might’ve worked a whole day on it.
00:11:28 And if you didn’t press save at every other line
00:11:31 and you were to save, save, save,
00:11:33 and it would like, the disk drive or the tape drive.
00:11:38 Like every single step was contemplated
00:11:41 because if you didn’t, you lost maybe a ton of work.
00:11:45 So a lot of the magic was in the software.
00:11:47 The fact that you could have software,
00:11:48 the fact that you could share software,
00:11:51 the community around the software,
00:11:53 it wasn’t necessarily the hardware.
00:11:55 Well, that was the first step.
00:11:56 The second step around the hardware
00:11:58 was I got things like the mocking board,
00:12:01 which the mocking board
00:12:02 paired with the music construction set,
00:12:04 you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes
00:12:06 and it was a synthesizer in the Apple II.
00:12:09 So you would plug in this card and you go,
00:12:11 oh my God, look at this.
00:12:12 And it would, you know,
00:12:13 you could start generating cool sounds.
00:12:15 You know, like it was a Moog, you know,
00:12:17 like a Moog in a way, early Moog.
00:12:20 What year are we talking about?
00:12:21 This is 82, I think, 81, 82.
00:12:25 And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds
00:12:28 that are very cool in the 80s.
00:12:30 Yeah, the 8 bit, you know, chip tunes, right?
00:12:32 Chip tune, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
00:12:34 And then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick,
00:12:38 you had to pull a chip out
00:12:39 and you had to like plug in a dip socket
00:12:41 to put in a joystick.
00:12:42 And then I was like, oh,
00:12:43 and then I had to get more memory.
00:12:44 How do we do that?
00:12:45 And now I wanted to speed up progress.
00:12:47 So then that turned into a company actually from that,
00:12:51 but it was, and a hardware software went at that.
00:12:54 But it was all about, you know,
00:12:55 modifying this thing in every way, first with software.
00:12:58 And then you started gaining confidence.
00:13:00 And then I got a little bit more money and stuff.
00:13:01 And then you could get into the hardware
00:13:03 and, you know, wire things.
00:13:05 And then the Apple II came with all the schematics, right?
00:13:09 So in the back, in the early Apple IIs,
00:13:12 you could open up and all the schematics were there.
00:13:14 So you purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it.
00:13:18 Yeah, it came with it.
00:13:19 That’s an interesting choice.
00:13:21 That’s an interesting choice from a company perspective.
00:13:25 Right, it was like a real maker kind of thing.
00:13:27 Right.
00:13:29 Ah, I wonder what they, so that was intentional.
00:13:32 Like this is. Absolutely intentional.
00:13:34 This is for the cutting edge folks too,
00:13:37 or especially for the cutting edge.
00:13:38 It was only the cutting edge.
00:13:39 It was geeks for geeks.
00:13:41 Yeah.
00:13:41 So we were like, oh, how did they make it?
00:13:43 And then we got to learn through that.
00:13:44 Apple I did the same thing, right?
00:13:46 It just Apple II became more packaged up
00:13:48 and had, you know, a little bit better software, right?
00:13:52 Came with basic and then, you know,
00:13:53 so it was really, it was what we might think of
00:13:57 as a raspberry pie today or something like that,
00:14:00 but not with so much software.
00:14:01 It was literally, and all the chips were out there
00:14:03 so you could inspect the buses and the, right?
00:14:06 Cause everything was just broken out.
00:14:08 So I guess that’s the idea behind stable big projects
00:14:13 and open source, like on GitHub,
00:14:15 that you have the schematics there
00:14:18 and it’s kind of a product,
00:14:20 but I wonder why more companies don’t do that kind of thing.
00:14:23 Like we’re going to release this to a small set of people,
00:14:29 self selected, perhaps that are kind of the makers,
00:14:33 the cutting edge folks, the builders,
00:14:36 the at home engineers, like in some way,
00:14:40 what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self driving
00:14:45 is kind of like that.
00:14:47 It’s like selecting a group of people,
00:14:48 but that has to do more with you,
00:14:51 how safe of a driver you are
00:14:53 versus how much of a tinkerer you are
00:14:55 because you don’t get to tinker.
00:14:56 I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do
00:14:59 for really cutting edge technologies,
00:15:01 especially you’re interested in like hardware stuff.
00:15:05 Is that crazy?
00:15:06 Why don’t more companies do that kind of thing, you think?
00:15:10 I think back then it was about a community
00:15:13 and serving that community of builders.
00:15:15 Now this is about people who want to take,
00:15:18 get the experience and want it really simple and easy.
00:15:20 And they’re like, and so there’s the audience
00:15:24 or they believe the audience is small
00:15:26 who would value those other things
00:15:27 that we’re just talking about.
00:15:29 But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi
00:15:30 and all of these other little boards, right?
00:15:33 There’s a whole world more than I’ve seen.
00:15:36 Like it’s amazing what you can do now
00:15:38 with these little kits and the software that’s created.
00:15:43 And so there’s a whole nother,
00:15:45 I think another batch of makers and builders
00:15:47 that are coming up through the ranks.
00:15:49 And if you, we look at YouTube channels and stuff, right?
00:15:51 They take these little boards, they hack them,
00:15:53 then they print out parts on their 3D printer,
00:15:56 assemble them and they create robots and what have you.
00:15:59 So I think it’s happening.
00:16:01 It’s just not as, you know, as,
00:16:03 it’s just not as, I guess, raw as it used to be,
00:16:09 but it’s there and it’s really expanding around the world.
00:16:11 And that’s really nice to see
00:16:13 cause you know, it’s a whole new generation
00:16:15 who can, who are empowered.
00:16:17 I think there’s a semi dormant genius amongst millions.
00:16:21 So like Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit.
00:16:23 It’s probably, I wouldn’t be surprised
00:16:26 if it’s several million Raspberry Pis
00:16:28 that have been sold.
00:16:30 I think more than that.
00:16:31 And it’s kind of this quiet storm of genius,
00:16:36 brewing of engineers who don’t get to hear
00:16:38 because they’re not organized.
00:16:40 I mean, we get to hear their inklings here and there.
00:16:42 Like I said, YouTube, there’s little communities
00:16:44 that are local and so on.
00:16:45 But if they were organized,
00:16:49 if a leader would emerge, no.
00:16:51 Okay, so when did you first start to dream
00:16:55 about building your own things,
00:16:58 designing your own products,
00:17:01 designing your own systems and software and hardware?
00:17:05 Well, in high school, there was a company
00:17:09 that a friend of mine founded
00:17:12 and I was the second employee,
00:17:13 it was called Quality Computers.
00:17:15 And it was a mail order,
00:17:18 mail order cause there’s no eCommerce then,
00:17:20 there was no internet again.
00:17:21 You either mailed in your little coupon
00:17:23 and you said, this is what I wanted to order
00:17:25 or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you.
00:17:28 Turn around time and this stuff was like,
00:17:30 from the time you wanted, the time you bought it
00:17:32 was maybe eight to 12 weeks.
00:17:34 That was just the normal way of getting things.
00:17:37 So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple too
00:17:42 and it was software and all kinds of accessories.
00:17:46 So hardware accessories, so hardware,
00:17:48 plug in cards, joysticks, all this stuff.
00:17:50 And what we noticed was there were accelerators
00:17:55 or memory cards.
00:17:57 And to be able to use those cards,
00:18:00 you had to actually go and change the software you use
00:18:03 to access this new memory.
00:18:05 So you literally had to go and you took the program
00:18:07 that you had, let’s say it was Apple works,
00:18:09 which was like an early Microsoft office
00:18:11 or something like that.
00:18:12 And you had to literally change the code
00:18:15 and you would install all these patches
00:18:18 to then take advantage of the hardware.
00:18:20 So what we started creating was software on top of it
00:18:23 to do the automatic installation of all of these patches.
00:18:27 So we made it much easier to take new hardware
00:18:30 and the existing software you have
00:18:33 and expand it into this new world.
00:18:35 So it was creating tools
00:18:36 and the really great customer support.
00:18:38 And we started getting a lot of orders
00:18:40 because we had the software make it easier to install,
00:18:43 to give them the superpower.
00:18:45 And at the same time, they would be able
00:18:49 to change their software and have a new world
00:18:52 that wasn’t existing from the companies
00:18:53 that were creating the initial products.
00:18:56 And so it was more of that.
00:18:58 And then that happened with hard drives.
00:19:00 So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II
00:19:04 to like read, because you could get really fragmented.
00:19:07 So I wrote that piece of software
00:19:08 and we sold that through the company
00:19:10 along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties.
00:19:12 So that all happened in 12th grade,
00:19:17 freshman year of college.
00:19:20 You wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade
00:19:23 for the Apple II.
00:19:24 Between 12th and freshman year.
00:19:26 What programming language do you remember?
00:19:28 Is it assemblies?
00:19:29 There were certain inner loops were assembly
00:19:32 and other loops actually there were really early Pascal,
00:19:35 no C compilers.
00:19:39 What was the motivation behind these?
00:19:41 Is it to make people’s lives easier?
00:19:43 Is it to create a thing experience
00:19:45 that is simpler and simpler and simpler,
00:19:47 thereby more accessible to a larger number of people?
00:19:51 Or did you just like to tinker?
00:19:52 No, no, no, it was two things really.
00:19:54 Cause one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software.
00:19:57 So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user.
00:19:59 And then the other thing was,
00:20:01 because I was also manning the customer support line,
00:20:04 people would call in and go, this doesn’t work.
00:20:06 And I’m like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware and software.
00:20:09 Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware
00:20:10 and the installation process better.
00:20:12 So my whole world was out of box experience
00:20:16 from when I was in high school.
00:20:18 Cause I had to man the customer support line,
00:20:20 pack the boxes and write some of the code
00:20:23 while we were doing, while Joe, Joe Gleason,
00:20:25 who was the founder of Quality Computers,
00:20:27 he was off doing the mark, the ads,
00:20:30 placing the ads for the mail order,
00:20:32 making sure we were running the credit cards, right?
00:20:35 It was two of us.
00:20:36 And then it turned into a third,
00:20:38 and then we hired another person from high school
00:20:40 to like pack boxes so I could stay
00:20:41 on the customer support line or doing the software, right?
00:20:44 And it was all in his parents basement, right?
00:20:47 As you were scaling exponentially.
00:20:50 Scaling, right, exactly, bootstrapping.
00:20:52 So we’ll jump around a little bit,
00:20:54 but what were the, you said you love music.
00:20:56 What were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod
00:20:59 if we jump forward and how far back do those ideas stretch?
00:21:07 If you look at the history of technology,
00:21:11 there’s, I mean, not just the product,
00:21:14 but the idea is truly revolutionary.
00:21:17 Maybe it’s time has come,
00:21:21 but just if you look at the arc of history,
00:21:25 sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity.
00:21:30 And to be able to put that in your pocket,
00:21:34 make it truly portable is fascinating
00:21:36 in a way that’s truly portable.
00:21:40 So it’s digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman
00:21:44 or something like that.
00:21:45 So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod?
00:21:49 You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid.
00:21:53 Just loved music from, I think, second grade
00:21:55 when I got my first albums and stuff like that.
00:21:58 What kind of music are we talking about?
00:21:59 So this was Led Zeppelin.
00:22:04 This was the Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith,
00:22:10 Cheap Trick, Stix, Ted Nugent,
00:22:14 just the real American and British rock and roll, right?
00:22:19 There’s a bunch of people listening right now.
00:22:20 Who’s that?
00:22:22 Who’s that?
00:22:22 Led Zeppelin?
00:22:23 What is that?
00:22:24 Is that some kind?
00:22:25 Oh, yeah.
00:22:26 It drove my parents crazy.
00:22:29 Yeah.
00:22:30 You just blasted loud.
00:22:31 Loud, just brr.
00:22:32 And this was second, third grade, fourth grade.
00:22:35 I just fell in love.
00:22:36 And then we moved back to Detroit
00:22:40 and I loved listening to the radio station
00:22:43 because there was all kinds of crazy music
00:22:44 because you’d have an amalgam of rock and then funk
00:22:48 and R&B and I loved to listen at night.
00:22:50 So I had a clock radio.
00:22:52 But if I had the clock radio on,
00:22:54 everyone, parents would go, go to sleep.
00:22:57 Stop that.
00:22:58 Turn that stuff off.
00:22:58 So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it.
00:23:02 Nice.
00:23:03 Right?
00:23:04 So I said, oh, they’re like, okay.
00:23:07 And then I could listen to it all night
00:23:09 and no one could hear me, right?
00:23:10 And I could just sit there and, you know.
00:23:12 Just huddling around the radio.
00:23:13 Groove out.
00:23:14 Just listening to Zeppelin.
00:23:15 Stairway to Heaven, what would you say
00:23:19 is the greatest classic rock song of all time?
00:23:23 Greatest classic rock song of all time?
00:23:25 What pops into mind?
00:23:26 Well, no, you know what?
00:23:27 I mean, this has to be objectively number one.
00:23:29 That’s really hard, dude.
00:23:30 This is so hard.
00:23:31 No, you have to.
00:23:32 This is a serious journalistic interview.
00:23:34 You’re not going to back down from these kinds of questions.
00:23:37 Oh my God.
00:23:37 No, I don’t know.
00:23:38 What a challenge.
00:23:39 Yeah, it’s hard to pick.
00:23:40 But to me, Stairway to Heaven is a safe fall.
00:23:45 It’s like, it’s so often considered
00:23:47 to be one of the greatest songs of all time
00:23:49 that you almost don’t want to pick it.
00:23:51 Right, exactly.
00:23:52 But you’ve returned to it time and time again.
00:23:54 It’s like, yeah, this is something pretty special.
00:23:58 This is a rock opera of sorts.
00:24:00 Well, the rock opera that really blew me away
00:24:03 and still continues to blow me away
00:24:04 is all of Dark Side of the Moon.
00:24:07 Like that, I love Zeppelin.
00:24:10 I can’t say which one’s better.
00:24:12 But Dark Side of the Moon for me was,
00:24:13 it was a, you know, audio experience, right?
00:24:16 The whole thing from soup to nuts,
00:24:18 plus all the synthesizers, all of those things.
00:24:21 Okay, so back to the iPod.
00:24:23 So that’s, from the early age, you loved music.
00:24:26 Loved it.
00:24:27 Absolutely loved it.
00:24:28 And, you know, always was just around it
00:24:30 and always, I just, it was always playing, you know.
00:24:34 I played it so loud that I actually hurt the earring
00:24:37 in my right ear.
00:24:39 And I still suffer from that today.
00:24:41 And then.
00:24:42 No regrets.
00:24:43 No regrets whatsoever.
00:24:44 Going to concerts in downtown Detroit
00:24:47 and all the crazy stuff.
00:24:48 So moving forward.
00:24:50 So in college, I was a DJ.
00:24:54 So I would DJ and hang out and play all the tunes I love
00:24:58 and whatever for the crowd.
00:25:01 And then I continued to do that in Silicon Valley
00:25:03 when I moved right after school.
00:25:06 And so I was be lugging all of these CDs around with me.
00:25:10 A thousand CDs to, right?
00:25:12 And at the same time, and so those were heavy.
00:25:16 And at the same time I was doing the Philips Nino and Velo.
00:25:20 Those were Windows CE based mobile computing products.
00:25:25 Nino was the first device
00:25:28 to actually put Audible books on tape.
00:25:30 So I worked with Audible.
00:25:32 We met in a conference and they were like,
00:25:34 we don’t want to do hardware.
00:25:35 We just want to do content.
00:25:36 I was like, well, we have this device.
00:25:37 Let’s get it together.
00:25:39 And we got Audible on that.
00:25:41 And this was in 96 or seven, first Audible books.
00:25:46 And it, you know, I was like, oh my God, that’s audio.
00:25:49 Well, what if we put music on it, right?
00:25:52 And so I, and the memory was very small at the time, right?
00:25:56 There was almost no flash.
00:25:57 It was all DRAM.
00:25:58 When you did Audible, you stored it in DRAM, right?
00:26:03 Which was okay probably
00:26:04 because how much books do you need is the idea.
00:26:09 By the way, brilliant, I mean, just putting books.
00:26:12 I know it’s probably not the sexiest of things,
00:26:15 but putting books on a mobile device is a brilliant step.
00:26:21 I don’t know.
00:26:23 Sometimes can’t measure how much human progress occurred
00:26:27 because of an invention.
00:26:29 Like there’s the sexy big products, but you never know.
00:26:32 Like, like Wikipedia is one of those things
00:26:34 that doesn’t get enough, I think, credit
00:26:37 for the transformational effects it has.
00:26:39 It’s not seen as the sexiest of products, but maybe it is.
00:26:43 When you look at human history, Wikipedia arguably
00:26:47 is one of the big things
00:26:48 that basically unlocked human knowledge.
00:26:52 Human knowledge and human editing and human, you know,
00:26:55 just the human nature of building something together.
00:26:59 Yeah.
00:27:00 So it’s fascinating.
00:27:01 Sometimes you can’t measure those things,
00:27:02 maybe until many, many decades later.
00:27:04 Anyway, sorry.
00:27:05 So that was, that was, you know, that was, so that was there.
00:27:09 And then there was Audible,
00:27:10 that you put books, why not put music?
00:27:13 Music, and I’m carrying around the music for the DJ gigs.
00:27:16 And you’re like, wait a second, two and two together, right?
00:27:19 Like, let’s get rid of this.
00:27:20 And so, and then MP3 show up.
00:27:23 The actual, like in COVID?
00:27:24 The format, the format, MP3 showed up around 97, 98.
00:27:29 So MP3 is compressed so you can have,
00:27:34 like the storage is reduced significantly.
00:27:35 Right, so you could go from a, you know,
00:27:37 a large full lossless, you know,
00:27:42 digital track into something that can be stored
00:27:45 in four to eight megabytes,
00:27:47 something like that for the audio.
00:27:49 Now, you know, that’s a reduced quality,
00:27:51 but you could get it down there and you’re like, oh, okay.
00:27:54 And now if we have enough flash or DRAM,
00:27:56 we can put 10, 15, what have you all in that same memory.
00:28:00 And it starts to replicate a CD.
00:28:02 And then ultimately, if you put it on a hard drive,
00:28:05 you could start to put, you know, thousands of songs.
00:28:07 Yeah, that’s also another brilliant invention.
00:28:10 But like, people don’t realize,
00:28:11 I think people would be surprised how big
00:28:14 in terms of storage raw audio is.
00:28:17 And the fact that you can compress it,
00:28:19 like, I don’t know what the compression is,
00:28:24 but it’s like 10X, it’s very significant compression.
00:28:26 And still it sounds almost lossless.
00:28:29 Much to the chagrin of Neil Young,
00:28:31 who does not like that.
00:28:33 But even Neil Young, even the stuff he talks about
00:28:37 is still tiny files relative to the raw.
00:28:40 So he wants us to increase it just a little bit more,
00:28:43 a little bit more.
00:28:44 But it’s still, that’s an invention.
00:28:46 That’s a thing that unlocks your ability
00:28:49 to carry around a device like a Nino and listen to music.
00:28:52 Because without that, there’s no way
00:28:53 you can carry on a gigantic hard drive.
00:28:56 Right, exactly.
00:28:57 And so then that, so it was MP3s, the Nino,
00:29:01 and my, you know, my hatred of carrying around
00:29:04 all this heavy stuff that then spawned, you know,
00:29:08 fuse and then ultimately, you know,
00:29:11 became a lot of that, the ideas and things of that nature
00:29:15 were, and my passions were born into then the iPod.
00:29:19 You know, it was too, Apple needed something
00:29:21 and I wanted to fix something and it all kind of,
00:29:24 you know, came together at the right place, right time,
00:29:27 plus the right technology came at this.
00:29:29 It was just like the stars aligned.
00:29:31 So how did it come to life?
00:29:33 The details of the stars aligning, but the actual design,
00:29:39 the actual engineering of getting a device to be small,
00:29:42 the storage of the, you know, the interface, how it looks,
00:29:49 the storage, the details of the software,
00:29:51 all that kind of stuff.
00:29:52 What are some interesting memories from that design process?
00:29:57 What are some wisdoms you can impart from that process?
00:30:02 Okay, well, you know, how long do you want to go?
00:30:05 Cause I have, I can go deep.
00:30:07 So, let’s go at least 20 hours.
00:30:11 Let’s go, this is one of the lengthy documentaries.
00:30:14 Are you going to turn it into episodic binge listening?
00:30:18 Yeah, it’s Game of Thrones.
00:30:20 So let’s just start with, you know,
00:30:23 after I was asked to be a consultant
00:30:24 to put this thing together.
00:30:26 So I already had knowledge of, you know,
00:30:28 the space and the technology and all that stuff,
00:30:31 but I had to very quickly, and a lot of the suppliers,
00:30:34 because of what I was doing at Fuse,
00:30:36 trying to create that thing.
00:30:37 So as a contractor, I was like, okay,
00:30:42 what is the first thing they need to do?
00:30:43 So after I showed a, you know, different architectures
00:30:48 and what three different products could be to Steve
00:30:51 about options for storage options, battery options,
00:30:54 form factor options, there was three options.
00:30:57 And as I was told, given very good advice,
00:31:02 give the two options you really do not like,
00:31:04 but they’re options, and give the best option last,
00:31:06 because Steve will shoot all those down
00:31:08 and give the best option last,
00:31:10 and then you could talk about that.
00:31:11 And so that was the one that had a 1.8 inch hard drive
00:31:18 and a small screen, like the screen, you know it,
00:31:23 and the original iPod, classic iPod.
00:31:26 And then I had enough of the idea of the three
00:31:30 or three or four different CPUs and processor suppliers
00:31:35 and kind of systems that were out there
00:31:37 that I had gone and found and put together on power supplies,
00:31:41 you know, disk drive interfaces,
00:31:43 firewire interface, all that stuff.
00:31:45 So I put together all of those schematics
00:31:48 or, you know, block diagrams.
00:31:49 They weren’t schematics yet, because it was just me.
00:31:52 And coming up with a bill of materials,
00:31:54 coming up with what it could look like,
00:31:56 what would be the input, output,
00:31:58 how we could make a better headphone jack.
00:32:02 That was also on there.
00:32:03 Screen suppliers, tearing apart calculators.
00:32:07 So got all calculators and all kinds of electronics
00:32:09 to get the right size, different sizes of small LCDs.
00:32:14 So I got all kinds of different battery types.
00:32:17 I got different types of, you know,
00:32:19 in different battery sizes, double A’s, triple A’s,
00:32:22 working through all the different,
00:32:24 and there was lithium ion, nickel metal hydride.
00:32:26 So I took all the battery types.
00:32:27 I took all of the memory types, processing types,
00:32:31 LCD types, and connectivity and all that stuff,
00:32:38 not wireless, but wired,
00:32:40 and laid out these things as Lego blocks.
00:32:44 So literally had all of these things as just,
00:32:46 and so it made them so I could like, you know,
00:32:48 put them together and figure out
00:32:50 what the compact form factor would be.
00:32:52 Oh, like how do we shove them together?
00:32:55 What’s the smallest possible box you can get?
00:32:57 So the questions was on storage, so the hard drive,
00:33:01 batteries, double A, triple A, screens.
00:33:06 So screen size, and then for that,
00:33:07 you’re tearing apart calculators.
00:33:09 Calculators, digital cameras, whatever,
00:33:11 and getting little things, right?
00:33:12 So you can make it physical, right?
00:33:14 If you can make the intangible tangible,
00:33:17 like, and so I can say, look, we can make this,
00:33:19 and I brought this whole bag of goods,
00:33:21 and it was like, right?
00:33:23 And like, here’s this, here’s this,
00:33:25 this is why double A’s won’t work,
00:33:26 and because it makes it too fat and everything.
00:33:28 So just educate everybody through,
00:33:30 here’s the parts that we can use.
00:33:32 You should not sheet of paper, it’s physical.
00:33:34 You’re playing in the physical space.
00:33:35 Oh, I would go back and forth.
00:33:36 So truth be told,
00:33:38 because there weren’t a good enough graphical tools
00:33:40 on the Mac, I was using a PC with Visio and some 3D tools,
00:33:46 and I was doing 3D design at the same time
00:33:49 I was taking all these physical parts and going,
00:33:51 okay, what feels right?
00:33:52 Because you have to go from, you know,
00:33:54 the details and then the rough,
00:33:56 and you go back and forth and you iterate, right?
00:33:58 And so it was just a lot of fun.
00:34:00 And then it ultimately ended up with a styrofoam model
00:34:03 and printouts that came from Visio
00:34:05 that I glued together and put my grandfather’s
00:34:08 fishing weights in,
00:34:09 because I also modeled the weights, right?
00:34:11 So I said, oh, this is this many ounces,
00:34:13 this is this many ounces and grams.
00:34:15 And then I went and got all that
00:34:17 and made the, weighted these styrofoam models
00:34:21 to then match that.
00:34:22 So when you picked it up,
00:34:23 it felt more or less form factor, right?
00:34:25 And it also, you felt how much, you know,
00:34:27 was it gonna be dense enough?
00:34:29 Is it gonna feel solid and rigid in your hand, right?
00:34:34 Why does it need to feel rigid?
00:34:36 Because it has to feel substantial.
00:34:37 It has to feel like I have like a,
00:34:39 like a bar of gold in my hand, right?
00:34:41 You know, maybe you know this,
00:34:43 when you open and close a car door,
00:34:45 you know that thunk and you go, bam,
00:34:47 and you go, that feels solid, that feels real.
00:34:49 And then you get this tinny car that’s like ding,
00:34:52 and you’re like, does this feel safe?
00:34:54 Does this feel like a value?
00:34:55 And so you, when you have a device like that,
00:34:58 and you wanna make sure that there’s not too much air in it,
00:35:00 that you distributed the density of the masses
00:35:04 in the right way.
00:35:05 So it feels like it’s the right thing.
00:35:07 So you have to model battery life, costs,
00:35:12 you know, mass, sizes of different things.
00:35:16 And then you have to also think about
00:35:17 what the UI is gonna look like, right?
00:35:19 You have all of these constraints you’re working,
00:35:21 variables you’re working with,
00:35:22 and you have to kind of, you know,
00:35:24 you can’t get the perfect of everything.
00:35:26 What’s the best, you know, local maximum
00:35:29 of all of these components that come together
00:35:31 to provide an experience?
00:35:32 Local maximum, it’s always trade offs.
00:35:34 What about buttons?
00:35:35 Buttons, well, there was also the buttons too, right?
00:35:37 Oh, by the way, a lot of these battles
00:35:39 fought inside your mind, or is it with other people?
00:35:41 Is it with Steve, is it lower, like what?
00:35:44 This was all independent.
00:35:46 This was me before being able to present to Steve,
00:35:48 because I had to feel really confident
00:35:51 that if I was gonna put this in front of him,
00:35:53 that it could be made, right?
00:35:55 So I had to convince myself
00:35:56 and go work through all the details,
00:35:58 through like the very, very rough mechanical design,
00:36:01 electrical design, software things,
00:36:03 because I didn’t wanna present something
00:36:05 that was gonna be fictional, right?
00:36:07 My credibility would be like trashed, right?
00:36:10 So you mentioned convince yourself.
00:36:13 You’re painting this beautiful picture
00:36:15 of a driven engineer, designer, futurist.
00:36:21 How much doubt were you plagued by through that?
00:36:24 Like this is even doable,
00:36:26 because it’s not obvious that this is even doable.
00:36:29 Like to do this at scale, to do this kind of thing,
00:36:33 to make it sexy, to shovel the screen,
00:36:39 the batteries, the storage, to make the interface,
00:36:42 the hardware and the software interface work, all of that.
00:36:45 I mean, I don’t know.
00:36:46 I would be overwhelmed by the doubt of that,
00:36:48 because so many things have to work, plus the supply chain.
00:36:51 Like at that point,
00:36:52 I wasn’t getting into any of those details or anything.
00:36:55 There’s the basic stuff that you have to put together.
00:36:58 And then you have to,
00:37:00 through my learnings at General Magic
00:37:01 and my learnings at Phillips
00:37:02 and delivering multiple large scale programs
00:37:06 and manufacturing, you kind of get a rule of thumb
00:37:09 and you know what to focus on at the beginning
00:37:11 and what not to worry about over time.
00:37:13 Like when I was early in my career,
00:37:14 I worried about everything on the engineering details
00:37:16 so much so that I would be a nervous wreck.
00:37:19 Sooner or later, you learn how to filter out
00:37:21 and figure out what to prioritize.
00:37:23 And so 10 years later,
00:37:25 I was able to do a much better job
00:37:27 of filtering out the things of like,
00:37:29 we’ll get to that in weeks to come.
00:37:31 But right now we gotta solve the very important things,
00:37:36 which is could this actually be something real
00:37:39 and that you could deliver enough battery life, right?
00:37:42 Enough of an interface of the right cost, right?
00:37:46 And the right price point.
00:37:49 So you were sitting on a track record
00:37:51 of successes and failures in your own mind
00:37:54 where you had sort of already a confidence,
00:37:57 a calmness, but still,
00:38:01 was there a doubt that you can get this done?
00:38:03 Always, always.
00:38:05 How hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence
00:38:08 to a level where you could present it to Steve
00:38:10 and actually believe that this is doable?
00:38:13 Like what, do you remember when you felt?
00:38:15 Yeah, that moment?
00:38:16 Yeah.
00:38:16 I think it was after I triple checked my,
00:38:19 I couldn’t bring anyone in, right?
00:38:22 I couldn’t let anyone in on this.
00:38:24 So it was just me.
00:38:25 Are they gonna trample on it, that kind of thing?
00:38:27 Why? No, no, no, no,
00:38:28 because I couldn’t bring any,
00:38:29 when I mean bring anyone in on this,
00:38:31 one, it was a highly confidential program inside Apple.
00:38:33 There was like four people who knew about it, right?
00:38:36 And so I couldn’t bring anyone from Apple
00:38:38 because I was a contractor.
00:38:40 I couldn’t bring anyone else from the outside world.
00:38:42 I’m working for Apple and I’m under this crazy NDA, right?
00:38:45 In this contract.
00:38:46 So it was just, so I’m doing this.
00:38:50 Oh, and at the same time,
00:38:51 I’m also buying every competitive product, MP3 player
00:38:54 and tearing them all apart, right?
00:38:55 Tore them all apart and looking at them
00:38:58 and trying to learn from those as well.
00:39:00 So it was all of this stuff in six weeks.
00:39:02 So I didn’t sleep, right?
00:39:05 Yeah, yeah.
00:39:06 But I was like, because I was trying to make this,
00:39:09 I was envisioning this since the Nino, right?
00:39:12 And I was like, oh my God, right?
00:39:15 But there was another doubt that I had
00:39:17 and it wasn’t just, could you make the product?
00:39:19 But could Apple actually have the balls to make it?
00:39:25 Because Apple was not the same company
00:39:28 that you know it today in 2001.
00:39:31 Really, it was cautious, conservative, careful?
00:39:34 No, no, it was barely break even.
00:39:36 It was a four or $5 billion company.
00:39:39 So the guts required there is not necessarily
00:39:42 in the innovation.
00:39:43 It’s like, this is gonna cost a lot of money
00:39:45 and we’re gonna potentially lose all of it
00:39:47 because it’ll be a flop.
00:39:49 Well, there’s not just that, but there was only the Mac.
00:39:52 And the Mac wasn’t doing very well.
00:39:55 There was less, it was about a 1%
00:39:57 only in the US market share for the Mac, right?
00:40:01 The company was in debt.
00:40:02 Bill Gates had to give him a loan, right?
00:40:07 Michael Dell at the time was saying,
00:40:09 shut down the company and give the money back
00:40:11 to the shareholders.
00:40:13 So this is not the company that people,
00:40:17 oh my God, the iPhone came out.
00:40:18 It’s a very different level of confidence
00:40:20 and financial situation that the company was in
00:40:24 versus the iPod.
00:40:25 So given that, what was the conversation
00:40:27 when you finally presented to Steve?
00:40:29 Steve, what was that conversation like?
00:40:34 The conversation was, well, we went through it,
00:40:37 the presentation and all that stuff happened.
00:40:40 And he was just like, and he never,
00:40:43 he would flip through it real quick,
00:40:45 throw the presentation aside and said,
00:40:47 okay, let’s talk about this, right?
00:40:49 And so we went through it all.
00:40:51 And one was a big conversation about Sony.
00:40:55 And Sony was the number one in all audio categories,
00:40:59 home, portable, whatever, in the world, okay?
00:41:03 I had been already gone through 10 years of failure.
00:41:06 And I was like, wait a second,
00:41:07 how are we gonna compete with Sony?
00:41:10 And I was always worried that Sony
00:41:12 was gonna come out with whatever it was
00:41:14 that they were gonna come out with, their MP3 player.
00:41:16 And that was it, game over, right?
00:41:19 And so I was like, Steve,
00:41:22 Steve, and this is why it took me four weeks
00:41:26 to finally sign on to join Apple
00:41:27 after he green lighted the iPod program in that meeting,
00:41:32 was because I had built other things in the past
00:41:35 at Phillips, the Nino and Velo,
00:41:36 but they didn’t know how to sell it or market it.
00:41:38 They didn’t know how to retail it, right?
00:41:41 So I was like, we could build this.
00:41:42 And I was like, Steve, I’m pretty sure I can build this.
00:41:45 I’ve done this before, but how are we gonna sell it?
00:41:48 You have all your marketing dollars on the Mac.
00:41:52 And he looked at me and he goes, you build this
00:41:55 with, you know, a team and our team and Apple
00:41:57 and this and this and the me, right?
00:41:59 And I dedicate that we will make sure
00:42:02 that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars
00:42:05 will only go to this product and nothing else.
00:42:08 Wow.
00:42:10 Right, Mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company.
00:42:14 So Steve saw something special here.
00:42:16 Exactly, and he said, I’m going to commit
00:42:19 all the marketing dollars if you can deliver
00:42:21 the experience that we’re all talking about,
00:42:24 if we can do that, and that was Jeff Robin as well,
00:42:26 because iPod would have never happened without iTunes.
00:42:29 You know, people don’t understand that was a bundle.
00:42:31 You couldn’t do one without the other and vice versa.
00:42:33 So Jeff and I were, you know, if Jeff and you can present
00:42:36 and bring that experience to life,
00:42:40 I will put all the marketing dollars behind it.
00:42:42 When did the marriage of iPod and iTunes sort of,
00:42:48 what was that birth of ideas that made up iTunes?
00:42:53 iTunes existed before the iPod, okay?
00:42:56 And so Jeff Robin had his company,
00:42:58 oh man, I can’t remember the name, but it was bought.
00:43:00 He was making a MP3 player app for the Mac.
00:43:05 Steve saw it because there was MP3 player apps
00:43:08 like Winamp and other things that were on the PC,
00:43:10 real player, and Steve saw that going on
00:43:13 and saw that Jeff and his small team had this,
00:43:17 I can’t remember, sound something.
00:43:19 Anyways, he bought that and that became the basis of iTunes
00:43:22 and then Jeff ran all of iTunes.
00:43:24 And so what happened specifically there was
00:43:27 they were starting to hook up
00:43:28 to all these third party MP3 players
00:43:31 because there’s a lot of Korean, the MP man,
00:43:34 like Walkman, but MP man, all these,
00:43:36 and they were trying to hook them up
00:43:38 and they were like, these are horrible experiences.
00:43:41 And through that, and they said,
00:43:43 iTunes was something that was gonna help grow the Mac base
00:43:46 because we were trying to get more on the Mac.
00:43:49 So this program would be a great new thing
00:43:51 you could add to the Mac.
00:43:53 And there was also internet connectivity at the time
00:43:55 for the iMac.
00:43:56 And so they did that
00:43:57 and then they’re trying to do these hookups.
00:44:00 They weren’t going well.
00:44:01 And that’s when they said, we need to build our own.
00:44:04 Or Steve said, we need to build our own
00:44:06 since these are such horrible experiences.
00:44:08 People don’t wanna just burn CDs from iTunes.
00:44:10 We need to get that music on the go,
00:44:12 but in an Apple fashion.
00:44:14 That’s when I was called to come in to do that,
00:44:18 the iPod thing after the six weeks.
00:44:20 Then he already envisioned, I’m sure he had it envisioned
00:44:24 because they were trying to do this thing.
00:44:26 Okay, now that’s it.
00:44:28 iTunes, it wasn’t called iPod yet.
00:44:32 What would become the iPod?
00:44:33 That is gonna be the thing that then propels Apple
00:44:36 into this new thing
00:44:37 because you’re gonna bring all these music lovers in
00:44:39 that are gonna need their next generation
00:44:43 or Sony Walkman version 2.0.
00:44:46 So when you look at, again, apologies to linger on iPod,
00:44:51 but it’s one of the great inventions in tech history.
00:44:58 What wisdom do you draw from that whole process
00:45:00 about spotting an idea?
00:45:03 This is something you talk about in your book, Build.
00:45:09 How do you know that an idea is brilliant?
00:45:11 At which stage?
00:45:12 When did you know it was a good idea?
00:45:16 And maybe is there like some phase shifts?
00:45:22 First you complete out, then maybe,
00:45:25 and then maybe it becomes more than a hmm
00:45:27 and becomes like a little more confidence,
00:45:29 that kind of stuff.
00:45:29 And also wisdom about who to talk to
00:45:35 so they don’t trample the idea in their early stages,
00:45:37 that kind of stuff.
00:45:39 Any thoughts about this?
00:45:40 We could go on again.
00:45:41 How long do you wanna go?
00:45:42 20, this is a Netflix series, I told you.
00:45:45 Multi season.
00:45:47 So a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure
00:45:51 and success, but the first thing it starts with,
00:45:55 there’s a whole chapter called Great Ideas Chase You.
00:45:58 And so it kind of goes into in Build
00:46:00 and it goes through kind of chapter and verse
00:46:03 about all of those, how Nest became into being.
00:46:07 But let’s talk about it specifically for iPod, right?
00:46:10 So for me, I always had pain,
00:46:13 the pain of carrying these CDs everywhere, right?
00:46:16 And I had the joy of music, right?
00:46:19 If you could say, all of a sudden I could get
00:46:21 the music I love all the time in a portable package
00:46:25 and I can have all the music I love all the time,
00:46:28 I was solving a pain, which was,
00:46:30 for me it was thousands of CDs,
00:46:31 other people might be 10 or 15 CDs, right?
00:46:34 And then I can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted.
00:46:38 That was taking the pain, making a painkiller for it.
00:46:43 And then at the end was a superpower,
00:46:45 an emotional superpower that said,
00:46:47 oh my, this is something different.
00:46:50 So when you can actually focus on a pain,
00:46:53 not and get a painkiller for it, not a vitamin.
00:46:57 So the difference between a painkiller
00:46:58 and a vitamin is very clear.
00:46:59 One, you need, I gotta get rid of this pain.
00:47:02 A vitamin, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t,
00:47:05 maybe somebody needs it, maybe not,
00:47:06 it’s all marketing story, right?
00:47:08 So you start with the pain, give them a painkiller,
00:47:11 and hopefully if you can do it in the right way,
00:47:13 you give them a superpower, an emotional superpower.
00:47:17 That is always, and that’s the way to know
00:47:21 that you’re hitting on something that’s really powerful.
00:47:23 The pain and the joy, are you always aware of the pain?
00:47:31 So it seems like a lot of great products,
00:47:34 it’s like we do a lot of painful things
00:47:36 and we just kind of assume that’s the way it’s supposed
00:47:40 to be, like with autonomous vehicles,
00:47:42 we’ll all assume we’re supposed to be driving.
00:47:46 And it doesn’t, you don’t think of it as a pain.
00:47:50 Right, well, you’ve habituated it away.
00:47:54 You’ve habituated it away.
00:47:55 For me, when I go to other places,
00:47:58 living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever,
00:48:01 and I’m not driving, I’m walking or I’m using a scooter
00:48:05 or what have you, different thing,
00:48:06 and you go, oh my God, when you left that environment,
00:48:10 because everyone else is driving all the time,
00:48:12 you’re like, that’s what you do.
00:48:13 And you find out there’s other ways of living
00:48:15 and there’s freedom when you get rid of that,
00:48:17 you’re like, oh my God, I didn’t know
00:48:20 that this was so much better.
00:48:21 So there’s something in the book that’s called out
00:48:24 and I deemed it the virus of doubt.
00:48:27 And what the virus of doubt is, is when there’s pain
00:48:30 and it’s been habituated away,
00:48:33 you use the right marketing messages
00:48:35 to bring people back to that initial experience they had
00:48:39 or the initial experience that they had of that pain.
00:48:42 Do you remember when the first time you did blah
00:48:45 and it felt like this, right?
00:48:48 And then you reawaken that habituated pain
00:48:54 and people, and it becomes visceral
00:48:56 and then they’re like, oh, yes, I hate that.
00:49:01 And then you go, now I have the painkiller
00:49:04 and the joy for you.
00:49:05 That’s when it all comes together and it goes.
00:49:10 Let me, on this, on the pain and the joy
00:49:12 that’s brilliantly put, you mentioned selling
00:49:17 and marketing, right?
00:49:19 Marketing dollars.
00:49:22 I have a love, hate relationship with marketing,
00:49:26 like with a lot of things that require artistic genius.
00:49:30 To me, the best marketing, I suppose,
00:49:34 is the product itself and then word of mouth.
00:49:37 So like create a thing that people love.
00:49:40 Oh, absolutely, that’s fundamental.
00:49:41 Yeah, so any other marketing requires genius
00:49:46 to be any extra thing.
00:49:48 Because to me, I don’t, yeah, maybe you can,
00:49:54 by way of question, I’m just speaking off the top
00:49:59 of my head as a consumer, what is great marketing?
00:50:03 What does it take to reveal the pain
00:50:07 and the joy of a thing?
00:50:08 Okay.
00:50:09 It all starts at the beginning.
00:50:11 And let me give you, I’m gonna give you a couple
00:50:13 of different ways of looking at it, okay?
00:50:15 And again, we might go a little long here.
00:50:18 So just stay tuned in.
00:50:22 So the first thing is.
00:50:23 Start at the beginning.
00:50:23 Let’s start at the beginning.
00:50:26 In the early part of my career, like General Magic
00:50:29 and Philips and what have you,
00:50:33 and especially when I was a teenager,
00:50:36 when I was making my own chips and stuff like that,
00:50:39 I really worried about just putting cool things together.
00:50:44 I’m like that, when I put those two cool things together
00:50:46 as an engineer, you go, that’s cool.
00:50:48 And then I would talk to the other friends
00:50:50 who might be geeks too, and they go, yeah, that’s cool.
00:50:54 Because we knew the bits, so we put them together
00:50:57 and that’s a new way of doing it.
00:50:58 And you’re like, wow, that’s all what?
00:51:02 It’s not why?
00:51:04 Why are you doing this?
00:51:06 We know what we’re doing, but we don’t know
00:51:08 why we’re doing it, because we’re not articulating it
00:51:10 for ourselves, because it’s just something
00:51:12 we’re like putting it together and like, yeah, that’s cool
00:51:14 because we think we’re solving some problem we have,
00:51:17 but we’re not really articulating it.
00:51:19 So what normally happens, and this happens
00:51:21 because we invest in so many companies around the world,
00:51:24 you have these brilliant engineers, designers,
00:51:26 scientists, researchers, they put together these what’s.
00:51:32 And then they develop it, develop it, develop it.
00:51:35 And then at the end, they call in marketing
00:51:38 and say, now tell a story about this
00:51:40 and let’s get it out to the world, okay?
00:51:43 What happens then is marketing is like,
00:51:46 well, why do people need this?
00:51:48 Tell us why people need it.
00:51:50 And so they create a story around this product,
00:51:54 but the product was born out of what’s, not why’s.
00:51:57 And so they start telling, marketing starts telling a story
00:52:00 and it turns out to be a fictional story usually.
00:52:03 They say, oh, this is going to do these things.
00:52:06 The product comes in as delivered.
00:52:07 And it falls flat on its face
00:52:10 because the marketing doesn’t match the product
00:52:12 because they weren’t both created
00:52:14 at the beginning together, right?
00:52:17 There are what’s when you create a product,
00:52:19 but there’s a lot more why’s
00:52:21 and the why’s help inform the what’s.
00:52:23 And the why’s also inform the marketing.
00:52:27 So that’s what you mean deeply
00:52:31 at we should start at the beginning.
00:52:32 So the designer should be also the marketer.
00:52:35 The engineer should be the marketer.
00:52:37 Exactly.
00:52:38 Stop impressing the geek next to you.
00:52:40 What is the superpower you’re bringing
00:52:42 or the pain you’re killing for the end customer, right?
00:52:48 Now let’s contrast that.
00:52:51 Think about a movie.
00:52:53 A movie starts with a treatment.
00:52:54 It has an audience.
00:52:55 This has the audience.
00:52:56 Here’s the characters.
00:52:57 Here’s the storyline, the plot.
00:52:59 Here’s the arc of the story, right?
00:53:02 It pulls that all out.
00:53:04 Then there’s a script that’s written.
00:53:07 And that script is then produced.
00:53:09 And then you add all the flourishes
00:53:11 and what have you music and graphics
00:53:13 and what have you, right?
00:53:14 And then it comes out
00:53:15 and then there’s the marketing of the movie.
00:53:17 And that story was created at the beginning.
00:53:19 What you need to do if you’re gonna do a great product
00:53:22 is create that treatment for your product.
00:53:24 And I call that the press release.
00:53:26 Do the press release like the treatment.
00:53:30 Who’s the audience?
00:53:31 What features do you have?
00:53:33 What pains are you solving for people?
00:53:35 Have the virus of doubt there to remind them
00:53:37 what pains they have and why you’re solving them.
00:53:40 The price, all of those things.
00:53:41 And you use that as the bar, the measuring stick
00:53:46 for what you do during development.
00:53:48 Because what happens that along the route, you know this.
00:53:52 Oh, we’re not gonna be able
00:53:53 to get that feature done on time.
00:53:55 Throw that one overboard.
00:53:56 We gotta hit the, we have to hit the date.
00:53:58 Oh, we’re not sure this product’s right yet.
00:54:01 Add another feature.
00:54:02 Add another feature creep, right?
00:54:05 If you don’t have that story
00:54:06 you know you’re gonna tell at the beginning,
00:54:08 you don’t have that bar, right?
00:54:11 And then at the end, you don’t know when you’re done
00:54:13 if you don’t have that story.
00:54:14 So you can actually look at that press release.
00:54:16 You know, you change it over time, that draft.
00:54:21 But then when you’re done, you know the what’s and the whys.
00:54:24 You have all the things, the audience and everything.
00:54:26 And then you can give that to marketing and say,
00:54:29 well, and marketing has been along the way, let’s be clear.
00:54:32 But then everybody’s in sync.
00:54:33 And that’s when you can tell a cohesive,
00:54:35 non fictional story about,
00:54:37 and the product delivers on that story
00:54:39 or hopefully over delivers on that story.
00:54:41 So in the drafting from the beginning
00:54:45 to the end of the press release,
00:54:47 what does a successful team look like?
00:54:49 Who’s part of the draft?
00:54:51 Is it engineers, designers?
00:54:53 What’s the purpose of a marketing department
00:54:56 in a company, small, let’s say small company,
00:54:59 but more than two people?
00:55:02 So from where does the why come from?
00:55:06 Should it always come from the designer
00:55:08 or should there be a marketing person
00:55:10 that yeah, steps in and ask the question.
00:55:13 So I’ll just keep asking random questions.
00:55:16 No, these are great questions.
00:55:18 So, cause you’re just like, I’m like,
00:55:20 I can’t wait to tell you the answer.
00:55:22 So it’s in the book as well,
00:55:23 but you have to separate out
00:55:25 the various functions of marketing.
00:55:27 That’s what I thought, I was like,
00:55:30 marketing’s marketing, and it’s really not.
00:55:34 There’s so many disciplines,
00:55:35 just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical, software,
00:55:38 and even software, it’s cloud services,
00:55:41 firmware applications,
00:55:43 marketing has that much diversity as well.
00:55:46 Okay, and you have to honor that.
00:55:48 And so there is marketing communications like PR, press,
00:55:53 there is social marketing,
00:55:57 there is a marketing creative, right?
00:56:00 There’s marketing activation,
00:56:03 but there’s another thing that also comes out
00:56:05 and people confuse it with marketing,
00:56:09 which is called product marketing or product management.
00:56:13 And product management or product marketing
00:56:15 is the voice of the customer.
00:56:18 They’re the person who sits there and listens
00:56:21 to what’s going on in the competition, in the marketplace,
00:56:25 understanding the needs and those pains of the customer,
00:56:28 and they’re representing them in every single meeting
00:56:31 so things don’t get off track, right?
00:56:34 So that, and they’re creating the messages,
00:56:38 not the marketing.
00:56:39 What happens is there’s messages
00:56:40 that product marketing creates,
00:56:41 like those are the deep messages,
00:56:43 like we need to save 20% of energy, let’s say, right?
00:56:48 And then marketing turns that into something
00:56:50 that’s with creative and everything
00:56:52 and brings that message across.
00:56:53 Maybe it doesn’t say that,
00:56:54 but it comes maybe visually or some other way.
00:56:57 So product management does that
00:56:59 and holds that press release along the route
00:57:04 and making sure that we’re tracking.
00:57:07 And then also marketing is tracking with that press release
00:57:09 to make sure they’re not telling a fictional story, right?
00:57:12 Because they can also add extra adjectives or something,
00:57:15 and then the product can’t deliver that.
00:57:16 It’s like, no, no, no, no, no.
00:57:18 Keeps everybody in check.
00:57:19 It has to be grounded to the press release, to the raws.
00:57:22 Right, to the customer needs, right?
00:57:24 Cause they’re always representing the customer.
00:57:25 So you have to have a product manager.
00:57:28 Typically that’s the founder, right?
00:57:30 In the beginning.
00:57:32 And then over time you hire a product management team
00:57:36 to then really watch over this the whole way.
00:57:40 And they are talking to customer support.
00:57:42 They’re talking to engineering, they’re talking to design,
00:57:45 they’re talking to sales and marketing.
00:57:47 And they are always in the mix.
00:57:50 And it’s the hardest thing to hire for.
00:57:52 Ooh, yeah.
00:57:53 So they have this very important job
00:57:55 of developing and maintaining the why.
00:57:58 Exactly.
00:57:59 Why is it the hardest to hire for?
00:58:01 Because you have to understand,
00:58:03 first, nobody reports to you.
00:58:06 You’re alone.
00:58:07 So you’re alone and you have to build great ties
00:58:10 with all of these different functions.
00:58:13 You have to understand what they do,
00:58:15 be empathetic with what they do.
00:58:17 And you have to project the customer’s empathy
00:58:21 or empathy for the customer to them and tell them why
00:58:25 and why this customer needs this, why this doesn’t work.
00:58:28 And so that they learn more.
00:58:30 They’re not just doing,
00:58:31 but they learn about the customer’s point of view
00:58:33 and sit in there and stand in their shoes
00:58:36 to be able to then make better decisions
00:58:38 on the engineering details or the operational details,
00:58:41 customer support details.
00:58:42 So they understand that if they’re not the customer
00:58:47 that it’s intended for,
00:58:48 they start to live through their eyes
00:58:51 and see through their eyes of that customer
00:58:53 so they make better decisions.
00:58:55 And there’s probably fascinating, beautiful tensions
00:58:59 between that and sort of the engineers.
00:59:03 Oh, that’s cool.
00:59:04 Sort of the developing the what.
00:59:08 Exactly.
00:59:09 Which makes it an extra hard job, I’m sure.
00:59:11 Exactly.
00:59:12 Can I ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question
00:59:15 on the one subfield of marketing you mentioned,
00:59:17 comms and PR.
00:59:22 How do I ask this?
00:59:23 I can hear your struggle in your sigh.
00:59:27 Why or do the comms and PR folks sometimes
00:59:36 kill the heart and soul of the magic
00:59:40 that makes a company or is that wrong to say?
00:59:45 Give me an example.
00:59:46 I will say the spirit of the example,
00:59:48 which is it feels like often the jobs of communications
00:59:55 is to provide caution.
00:59:58 It almost works together with legal to say.
01:00:01 A shield.
01:00:02 Yeah, we probably should not say this.
01:00:06 Let’s be careful, let’s be careful.
01:00:09 Now, that makes sense except in this modern world,
01:00:15 authenticity is extremely valuable
01:00:20 and revealing the beauty that is in the engineering,
01:00:24 the beauty of the ideas, the chaos of the ideas,
01:00:29 I think requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree.
01:00:34 I agree.
01:00:35 And I just find that, boy, to push back on myself,
01:00:43 I think it’s an extremely difficult job
01:00:45 because people hold you responsible
01:00:47 if you’re doing communications when you take risks.
01:00:53 And especially when they fail.
01:00:54 So it’s a difficult job,
01:00:57 so I understand why people become cautious,
01:00:59 but to me, communications is about taking big risks
01:01:03 and throwing caution to the wind at its best
01:01:06 because your job is to communicate in the long term,
01:01:12 communicate the genius, the joy,
01:01:17 the genius of the product.
01:01:19 And that sometimes is a tension with caution.
01:01:23 Sorry, so because I’ve gotten the chance
01:01:26 to meet a lot of very interesting people
01:01:28 and interesting engineering teams and so on,
01:01:31 I look at what they’re doing
01:01:33 and I look at what’s being communicated
01:01:35 and it’s just, there’s a mismatch
01:01:37 because the communication is a lot more boring.
01:01:40 It’s like, there’s something very like,
01:01:44 just straight up boring
01:01:45 about the way they’re communicating because of caution.
01:01:49 Okay, you have just teed me up for another diatribe, okay?
01:01:54 I’m gonna get on my podium here.
01:01:58 Yes, please.
01:01:58 Yeah, it all comes out of the leader.
01:02:04 If the leader doesn’t know how to storytell
01:02:06 or the leader doesn’t know how to do bold storytelling,
01:02:09 then you get even more conservatism
01:02:14 from the PR and communications folks
01:02:17 because they’re always,
01:02:18 so if you have a, not a bold leader,
01:02:21 they’re always going to be a filter, right?
01:02:23 They’re always gonna try to smooth things out
01:02:25 and take off the rough edges and try,
01:02:27 so they’re gonna be even more,
01:02:28 if you have a conservative messaging leader,
01:02:31 you’re gonna have an even more
01:02:32 conservative communications department.
01:02:35 Why?
01:02:36 Because they wanna keep their jobs.
01:02:37 Okay, it’s really simple.
01:02:40 They gotta keep their jobs.
01:02:41 If they say one wrong thing, it could be the end of it.
01:02:44 So if you have very conservative leader,
01:02:46 they’re going to be even more conservative.
01:02:48 If you have a bold leader,
01:02:50 they’ll always take a little more conservative bent,
01:02:54 but you’re still gonna have bold communications.
01:02:56 Yeah, that’s brilliant.
01:02:57 Okay, so it starts with the leader.
01:03:00 Now, that said,
01:03:03 when you think about the messages
01:03:08 and the joy and revealing things, right?
01:03:13 Many of these leaders don’t tell great stories.
01:03:18 So what we do at FutureShape, our investment firm,
01:03:22 is we take those scientists all of,
01:03:24 and the great minds and everything,
01:03:25 and what do we surround them with?
01:03:28 Marketing and communication people
01:03:30 and storytellers to give them the confidence
01:03:33 to tell a much broader story
01:03:36 about the impacts of what they’re creating
01:03:39 and how big the global change can be
01:03:42 with those technologies.
01:03:43 Because usually they don’t,
01:03:45 those leaders who created those technologies,
01:03:47 they don’t really know how to communicate really well
01:03:49 and they don’t feel very comfortable in how they speak.
01:03:52 Yeah, so it’s interesting
01:03:54 because stories, I’m a huge fan of stories.
01:03:57 Have you ever read the book, Story?
01:03:59 No.
01:04:00 By Robert McKee?
01:04:01 Mm hmm.
01:04:02 You should read this.
01:04:02 And this is what I read when I was 26.
01:04:05 Story by Robert McKee,
01:04:07 and it’s a book all about the ways to do script writing,
01:04:12 the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy,
01:04:16 and how it’s been shown over millennia,
01:04:20 how these stories are done.
01:04:21 It’s a fascinating thing
01:04:23 and it gives you an insight to,
01:04:26 and it’s written for obviously Hollywood
01:04:28 and movies and things like that,
01:04:30 but it’s incredibly useful for what we do
01:04:33 as designers and engineers and technology leaders.
01:04:37 There’s some aspect in this modern day
01:04:40 where this podcast and so on,
01:04:44 what I love is the humans behind the story too.
01:04:47 So some part of the story is the human beings.
01:04:49 So humor, drama,
01:04:55 heartbreak, hope.
01:04:57 Emotions.
01:04:58 Emotions.
01:04:59 That’s not just about painting a beautiful story
01:05:03 that’s flawless, it’s…
01:05:05 Vulnerability.
01:05:06 Yep.
01:05:07 It’s being a dreamer, like overpromising,
01:05:11 and then failing, so changing your mind,
01:05:16 realizing sort of just the whole of it.
01:05:18 And then also being like,
01:05:20 depending of course where your personality is,
01:05:23 embracing the full richness and the complexity
01:05:26 of the personality of the leader
01:05:28 or the different people involved.
01:05:30 I mean, that’s all part of it.
01:05:31 Like you can’t just present this beautiful,
01:05:34 always pleasant view of a product.
01:05:37 There has to be this humanity that’s part of it,
01:05:43 the full roller coaster of the humanity,
01:05:45 which I think has been very difficult for companies
01:05:49 to embrace, I’m not sure why.
01:05:52 Maybe it’s just an old school way of doing things
01:05:54 that people think that we present a facade
01:05:59 and we generate the story and we tell the story
01:06:02 as opposed to sort of…
01:06:04 Well, we learn, especially in the technical world,
01:06:07 we present the story as it’s faster, it’s smaller,
01:06:11 it’s longer battery life, it’s bits and numbers
01:06:14 and metrics, that resonates sure with other geeks.
01:06:22 What resonates with the planet?
01:06:26 It’s all emotions, right?
01:06:28 And if you can bring a great emotional story,
01:06:31 but with a great rational story at the same time,
01:06:33 why you should do this, and it’s like,
01:06:36 oh my God, you bring that superpower, that joy,
01:06:39 then it all hangs.
01:06:41 And there’s personal drama too, like the human.
01:06:45 Right, here’s the pain I had, remember that thing.
01:06:48 And I mean, you’re obviously this extremely well known
01:06:58 human being that’s behind a lot of these great inventions
01:07:02 of the technology world, but you’re also just
01:07:04 a human being, you have clearly a distinct personality
01:07:09 that comes through, like your eyes light up,
01:07:11 just the way you communicate, it’s you.
01:07:15 Some people are more stoic, some people are,
01:07:18 like Elon is all over the place, the chaos.
01:07:24 Steve Jobs, I mean, it’s hard to put into words,
01:07:28 I can be poetic and so on, but there’s a very distinct,
01:07:31 comes on stage, you know, that personality is right there.
01:07:34 That’s not just the product, that’s something else too.
01:07:37 And like, you have to reveal that a little bit,
01:07:40 and allow people to reveal that a little bit,
01:07:43 and just let them be themselves.
01:07:45 Well, look, why do I think your podcast is so amazing?
01:07:51 Because you are yourself.
01:07:53 You talk about yourself, you bring your emotions into it,
01:07:55 and you don’t modulate it, you’re you, right?
01:08:00 It comes through, it’s true, it feels right.
01:08:03 You are you, you dress the way you wanna dress,
01:08:07 you say this is me, and this is all of me,
01:08:09 and you become vulnerable, right?
01:08:11 It’s much easier to do a podcast like that
01:08:14 than run a very large company,
01:08:16 where a lot of people would feel the pain if you make,
01:08:18 if you say something stupid.
01:08:20 So it’s much more easy to be afraid and be careful.
01:08:27 But nevertheless, the same applies.
01:08:31 Authenticity and risk taking is the only way, unfortunately,
01:08:36 to be successful in the long term.
01:08:39 Let me, just because we’re jumping all over the place,
01:08:42 just link on the iPod.
01:08:44 One of the great designs, broadly speaking,
01:08:49 in the word design of all time,
01:08:50 what does it take to design a great product?
01:08:53 If you look, we can jump around, we can look at Nest,
01:08:56 we can look at iPod, we can look at iPhone,
01:08:59 and many of the great things you design,
01:09:02 but just looking at that one transformational thing,
01:09:08 what can you say about what it takes to do a great design?
01:09:13 Or maybe what makes a great design?
01:09:20 Well, we talked about a painkiller,
01:09:22 and we talked about the,
01:09:24 we talked about that joy that comes from it.
01:09:28 But then there’s the behind the scenes,
01:09:31 there’s the team, there’s everyone who brings it to life,
01:09:35 brings that story to life.
01:09:38 If you have a great story, and you know the why,
01:09:41 then you can communicate it
01:09:43 to those people who are working on it.
01:09:45 And then they bring their own thing into it, right?
01:09:49 It becomes emotional for them too.
01:09:51 It’s not just a job, it’s a mission.
01:09:54 And so many of the details that are born
01:09:58 out of these early prototypes,
01:10:02 these things that you still haven’t given full form to,
01:10:04 there may be 80% done, or maybe even 60% done,
01:10:08 but you can see enough in there.
01:10:10 Then you take those great ideas,
01:10:12 and you give the whys to the team.
01:10:14 And so that they feel it, they can understand it,
01:10:18 then they bring their best and their ideas to the table,
01:10:22 and then you can select from those,
01:10:24 and you can then start to, you know,
01:10:27 it could be just a pixel change.
01:10:29 It could be a slight change on how you do the audio
01:10:32 for the feedback, or maybe a curve on the mechanics,
01:10:35 or something like that, of how it feels.
01:10:38 Because everybody brings themselves
01:10:39 trying to feel this thing.
01:10:41 They’re not just doing something
01:10:42 that someone told them to do.
01:10:44 If you can instill that mission and that why into that team,
01:10:48 it doesn’t have to be big, you get, I feel, a 10X.
01:10:52 Everyone comes together in a special way,
01:10:54 and the magic is created.
01:10:58 You put the love into it,
01:11:00 the customer feels the love on the other side.
01:11:02 So the, making the team,
01:11:08 like taking them in onto the vision, onto the why,
01:11:12 now they feel, all the little details we think of,
01:11:16 the original iPod, and all the many generations after,
01:11:21 all those little details are,
01:11:24 in them is the emotion of the engineers and the designers,
01:11:27 that working nights, struggling, this isn’t right.
01:11:33 Like you said, changing little pixels here and there,
01:11:36 changing the shape of things, changing the feel of things,
01:11:41 like the materials, the, I don’t know,
01:11:46 just everything on the software part of the packaging.
01:11:48 Then the words on the packaging.
01:11:51 Just everything.
01:11:52 The words on the website.
01:11:53 And always jumping from the very specific detail problem
01:11:57 to the big picture, how the thing feels, the overall.
01:12:00 Always jumping back and forth.
01:12:01 What does it look like to the customer?
01:12:02 How are we gonna implement it in the most efficient way?
01:12:07 Because a lot of the stuff you don’t know is,
01:12:10 some of that stuff is hacked in, maybe hacked in at the end.
01:12:13 It may not be the most beautiful architecture
01:12:17 that a geek would look at and go, oh my God,
01:12:18 that’s so beautiful, because we can look at it
01:12:20 and visualize this incredible software stack
01:12:23 or hardware stack.
01:12:24 Some of it could just be hacked in.
01:12:26 You make it better over time,
01:12:28 but it was that brilliant thing and we gotta get that in,
01:12:30 because that’s the way you do it now,
01:12:32 and we’ll make it more efficient later.
01:12:35 Maybe this is a good moment to draw a distinction
01:12:38 between design and engineering,
01:12:40 and does such a distinction even exist?
01:12:43 Are these distinct disciplines or no?
01:12:46 I don’t think they’re distinct.
01:12:47 I think they’re different types of design.
01:12:49 I think there’s always this idea of this,
01:12:54 oh, on the mount, designer, and it all comes down
01:12:58 and it all flows down like some magic.
01:13:02 There are electrical designers, there’s AI designers,
01:13:05 there is data scientist designers.
01:13:07 Everybody has design, and there’s a chapter in the book
01:13:10 all about that, actually.
01:13:12 That it’s not just you go to the mount
01:13:15 and it comes down and you’re enlightened.
01:13:17 It’s each person brings their form of design
01:13:20 and their craft, because if they’re really good,
01:13:24 they’re artists in their own right.
01:13:25 They’re not just engineers, they’re not just designers,
01:13:27 they’re artists, they’re empathetic,
01:13:29 they really wanna bring their best.
01:13:30 A lot of the best engineers I have
01:13:32 are not the technical, or that I’ve worked with,
01:13:34 are not the technical gotta get it exactly right.
01:13:38 They’re the artists, they came from music
01:13:39 or they came from other things, and they see that.
01:13:43 When you work with very rigid engineers,
01:13:46 this is the way, the only way, la la la,
01:13:49 those are not the engineers I wanna work with.
01:13:52 They’re all like a bit artists at heart.
01:13:54 Right, they understand the practicalness.
01:13:59 They don’t have to have the rigidity of,
01:14:01 this is the way it’s done.
01:14:03 Like, mm mm.
01:14:05 If you’re building something new,
01:14:07 all new and revolutionary, none of us are experts at it.
01:14:11 And if you come with that expert mindset, just tell me,
01:14:14 and I can give you a story,
01:14:15 I should probably give you that story,
01:14:18 about that if you come with the expert and I’m the expert,
01:14:21 when you’re doing something no one’s ever done before,
01:14:23 I don’t want you on the team.
01:14:25 Because we all are learning about something
01:14:27 that has never been in existence before.
01:14:30 And we have to bring that level of vulnerability
01:14:33 and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things
01:14:37 throughout the team.
01:14:39 So you want people that are able to have like
01:14:42 beginner’s mind or whatever, like don’t come in as an expert.
01:14:46 What’s the story?
01:14:47 Okay, here’s the story.
01:14:48 No, I can tell it for sure.
01:14:50 So, you know, you asked what were these risks,
01:14:54 you know, like on the early iPod,
01:14:56 and there was a few big risks.
01:14:58 Like one, and this doesn’t go in the story,
01:15:00 but like putting rotating media in your pocket
01:15:03 and it could drop at any time,
01:15:06 what happens there?
01:15:07 And like you can damage,
01:15:08 because the heads and the hard drive media are so close,
01:15:11 it smacks, it’s dead, right?
01:15:13 So that was one big one, like, holy shit, right?
01:15:16 So that was something we,
01:15:17 and we had to design special tests and everything
01:15:19 and special software on that.
01:15:21 But then there was another one,
01:15:22 which was at the early days,
01:15:24 the way the first generations of iPods,
01:15:26 I had to hack the IDE interface to the hard drives.
01:15:32 So I was like, okay, what we’re gonna use
01:15:34 is we’re gonna use this chip for hard drive,
01:15:38 hard drive, to make a hard drive,
01:15:40 you had to have a chip that did FireWire to a hard drive.
01:15:43 Okay, and then that would become a portable hard drive.
01:15:46 Well, then we had the MP3 player
01:15:50 and the user interface and everything.
01:15:52 So there was times when it was just this hard drive
01:15:54 and there was times when it was a MP3 player
01:15:57 and I had to hot switch between
01:16:00 what the hard drive thinks it was talking to, right?
01:16:03 So designed this thing, tore it apart,
01:16:05 did all this stuff.
01:16:06 And I was like, you know,
01:16:08 maybe I’m gonna screw up IDE and there’s something,
01:16:10 there’s some holes I’m gonna see.
01:16:13 So I go, who’s the expert at Apple
01:16:15 who understands IDE and everything?
01:16:18 So this person comes over,
01:16:21 the mass storage specialist comes over
01:16:23 and I put on the whiteboard and say,
01:16:24 here’s how we’re gonna do this thing
01:16:25 and here’s the commands and da da,
01:16:27 and this is how it hot switches and everything.
01:16:28 He’s like, that’s never gonna work.
01:16:30 Yeah.
01:16:31 And I was like, what?
01:16:32 It was never gonna work.
01:16:33 I said, well, let me go over here
01:16:35 and show you this right here.
01:16:36 I have it prototyped and it’s been working for days.
01:16:38 I just wanna see if you’re gonna have it,
01:16:40 find any holes in the thing.
01:16:41 Didn’t even, and he just stormed out of the room
01:16:44 and never even, right?
01:16:46 That’s hilarious.
01:16:47 I’ve had a lot of experience like this with experts.
01:16:50 Like for example, this ridiculous room.
01:16:54 I had a person and there’s many people like this
01:16:59 that I showed them, here’s the situation, you know.
01:17:03 For acoustics or something?
01:17:04 For acoustics, yeah.
01:17:04 They’re like, no, no, no, no, this is horrible.
01:17:07 This is not, this is not gonna work.
01:17:11 The reflection, the curtains are not gonna stop.
01:17:15 There’s a bunch of terminology they’re telling me.
01:17:19 It’s a similar kind of situation as the ID,
01:17:22 which I was like, no, listen,
01:17:25 I just need to see is there major issues
01:17:27 and they’re like a low hanging fruit that are fixable
01:17:30 and major holes I should be aware of.
01:17:32 Not like, let’s.
01:17:33 $100,000 to upgrade.
01:17:35 To upgrade for what exact purpose?
01:17:38 What, not why?
01:17:39 Yeah, exactly, exactly.
01:17:40 The why, the focusing on the story, on the content,
01:17:44 on the, the why, the why, the why.
01:17:46 And that actually I’ve experienced that unfortunately
01:17:49 in the artistic realms too, which is like photography
01:17:53 and videography, cinematography.
01:17:56 It’s interesting, I talk to photographers
01:17:58 that are quote unquote experts.
01:18:01 And it’s always about so much of the focus
01:18:04 is on the equipment.
01:18:08 The equipment behind the sensors and the lighting.
01:18:12 And it’s like, all right, all right.
01:18:16 But what about, what about the feeling
01:18:22 of the story you create visually?
01:18:26 The difference between a movie that’s really well told
01:18:30 and it doesn’t have all the effects and everything
01:18:33 versus maybe some of the superhero movies
01:18:35 we see all the time, which is good luck if there’s a story
01:18:38 but man, there’s a lot of action and CGI, right?
01:18:41 That’s right.
01:18:42 And there’s also value to those, right?
01:18:46 CGI, superhero.
01:18:48 Can tell a better story
01:18:49 but you have to have a good story to begin with.
01:18:51 Sure, exactly.
01:18:53 But if you’re focused on the story,
01:18:55 I guess you need to start with a story.
01:18:57 You need to start with a story.
01:18:58 And if you bring in experts,
01:19:01 they can often be detrimental, I guess, to the why.
01:19:07 They’re too good at doing the what.
01:19:09 Well, you can bring in experts for why.
01:19:11 There’s lots of experts for why.
01:19:13 Too many times we get experts for what.
01:19:16 Yes.
01:19:17 And then they only focus on the what.
01:19:19 And so they come with the specs and feeds
01:19:21 and the numbers and all the other stuff.
01:19:24 But what you’re really asking for is I need somebody
01:19:25 about the why and understanding
01:19:27 what we’re trying to get done here
01:19:29 and fitting the what’s into that why, right?
01:19:32 That’s why I do think that one of the qualities
01:19:37 that I really enjoy for people to work with
01:19:39 is like humility for a particular problem
01:19:41 when you approach it.
01:19:43 Basically, I don’t know how to solve this
01:19:45 but we’re going to figure it out.
01:19:47 As opposed to, oh, I’ve solved this thing many, many times
01:19:51 before I know exactly what to do.
01:19:53 Humility before the chaos.
01:19:55 So having an open mind that this is going to require
01:19:59 a totally new way of doing things.
01:20:01 It’s a really nice quality to see.
01:20:05 You’re one of the fascinating humans
01:20:07 in the history of Silicon Valley.
01:20:09 Steve is another one of those.
01:20:11 So those two humans came together for a time
01:20:13 to work together.
01:20:15 What was it like working with Steve Jobs?
01:20:18 What aspect of his behavior and personality,
01:20:22 let’s say, brought out the best in you?
01:20:25 Pushing you, really pushing you,
01:20:28 relentless on the details,
01:20:30 challenging you for the right reasons.
01:20:33 It wasn’t bullying, it wasn’t demeaning.
01:20:36 He would critique the work, not judge the person,
01:20:39 at least not in front of them.
01:20:41 Or inside of a, you know, in front of a group
01:20:43 or anything like that.
01:20:44 I know it was really that attention to detail.
01:20:46 And he, when he would make a decision, you know,
01:20:50 there are, when you make the first version of anything,
01:20:52 something revolutionary,
01:20:53 there are a lot of opinion based decisions.
01:20:56 And there’s only one or two people, three people
01:20:59 who hold those opinion based decisions
01:21:01 and what they should be.
01:21:03 And when you have those opinions
01:21:07 and you’re trying to work with the team
01:21:09 to implement those decisions,
01:21:13 you have to really tell the why of those decisions.
01:21:16 Just don’t go do it, but why it’s there.
01:21:19 So you can feel part of that decision.
01:21:23 You can understand what were the trade offs
01:21:27 of the different other answers to that opinion, right?
01:21:31 And say, this is the reason why we picked the route we picked
01:21:35 because it’s this for the customer
01:21:36 or this for the whole world story, what have you.
01:21:38 So that you felt really good
01:21:40 because a lot of times most people
01:21:42 want a data driven decision,
01:21:45 but with the ones you don’t get data, right?
01:21:48 Maybe in a B2B, you could a little bit
01:21:50 cause you can talk to customers,
01:21:51 but you can’t do that with a consumer product.
01:21:52 V1, version one, B2B, business to business
01:21:57 versus what’s the alternative?
01:21:59 Business to consumer, V1.
01:22:01 Okay, we’re just defining some terms.
01:22:05 Yes, you’re absolutely.
01:22:06 And when you say data driven decisions versus what?
01:22:09 Opinion based decisions.
01:22:11 So like gut, you have to use, you don’t have any.
01:22:14 You can’t fall back on any data or any previous history
01:22:19 to kind of inform you of what’s going on, right?
01:22:23 And so if you look at most companies who are paralyzed
01:22:27 and cannot make new innovations and new products,
01:22:31 it’s because they’re trying to turn,
01:22:33 and this is what I saw at Phillips,
01:22:35 they’re trying to turn opinion based decisions
01:22:37 into data driven decisions so they don’t lose their jobs.
01:22:41 So if you look at management consulting,
01:22:43 management consulting is all about
01:22:46 taking those opinion based decisions,
01:22:48 giving them to someone else to turn into data
01:22:50 that comes back to them and says,
01:22:52 they can blame the management consultants
01:22:55 when something goes wrong,
01:22:57 as opposed to it wasn’t me, right?
01:23:01 When you need to have to tell that story,
01:23:03 you have to understand that, especially V1,
01:23:06 you need to be able to articulate
01:23:09 those opinion based decisions and you need to own them.
01:23:14 And if you fail with some of them, you didn’t get it right,
01:23:17 you then own them and fix them and move on, right?
01:23:21 Version one of the iPod wasn’t perfect.
01:23:23 Version one of the iPhone wasn’t perfect.
01:23:25 We got a lot of opinion based decisions wrong.
01:23:29 But as you go through that, because you got more data,
01:23:31 because V2, you had data on those original opinions
01:23:34 and then you were able to then modulate off of that, right?
01:23:37 And you’ll still have new opinions
01:23:38 because those are differentiators
01:23:40 that we call differentiators,
01:23:42 the things that move the product forward in its evolution.
01:23:48 But at the revolution stage,
01:23:49 opinions, opinions, opinions, no data.
01:23:52 And so you have this discussion, you and Steve
01:23:55 in the stage and the whole team with opinions.
01:24:02 And there you have to be harsh.
01:24:04 And I wouldn’t say harsh,
01:24:08 but you have to be very determined, right?
01:24:10 You know, there are two real opinion based decisions
01:24:13 that happened on the iPhone.
01:24:15 One was the keyboard.
01:24:18 Should we have a hardboard keyboard
01:24:19 or should we have a virtual keyboard?
01:24:21 The Blackberry was the number one
01:24:23 productivity messaging device of its time.
01:24:26 It was called a Crackberry for a reason
01:24:29 because people loved it because it was easy to type
01:24:31 and they could get their work done.
01:24:34 But when you’re saying we’re gonna move from that,
01:24:36 everyone’s talking about that in the market
01:24:38 and you say we’re gonna move to a virtual keyboard
01:24:41 and it’s not gonna work as well as the hardware keyboard,
01:24:44 that’s an opinion based decision, right?
01:24:46 Because the data is telling you
01:24:49 all the best sales are over here.
01:24:51 God, that takes guts.
01:24:53 It takes guts, but you have to look at it
01:24:54 from a different point of view.
01:24:56 And this is how I learned to come to understand this
01:24:59 because I had been building virtual keyboards before
01:25:02 and I knew the goodness and the badness in them, right?
01:25:06 But he was like, look, those are productivity devices.
01:25:09 We’re making it, ours is born out of an entertainment device
01:25:12 and productivity, right?
01:25:14 We need to show full screen videos.
01:25:16 We are gonna have apps, not apps, but our apps,
01:25:19 the Apple apps, cause there were no app store yet,
01:25:22 are gonna take over the whole screen.
01:25:23 You want a full screen web browser.
01:25:25 You don’t want one that’s like half of the device
01:25:27 is just a keyboard.
01:25:28 Maybe you don’t need that keyboard in every instance.
01:25:30 So we want that part of the screen to change
01:25:32 based on the tool you may need at the time.
01:25:34 And maybe it’s just full view, right?
01:25:36 So you have to go and understand
01:25:38 it’s a different type of device,
01:25:39 just cause that’s that and it’s successful for that reason,
01:25:42 the crackberry for the keyboard.
01:25:43 That’s not the only thing you’re gonna do with this device
01:25:46 cause people only did messaging
01:25:47 and maybe a few phone calls, right?
01:25:49 This was gonna be so much more.
01:25:50 It was gonna be an entertainment web browsing device.
01:25:53 So you wanted those tools to go away,
01:25:55 but it wouldn’t be as good as the hardware keyboard.
01:25:58 So that’s an opinion.
01:25:59 But let me give you another opinion based decision
01:26:01 that got turned around before it shipped.
01:26:04 Steve said, no SIM slot.
01:26:07 I don’t want any slots.
01:26:08 We’re gonna make it very pure.
01:26:10 Johnny was like, of course, no slots.
01:26:13 Johnny, hi.
01:26:14 And we all looked around and go, that doesn’t work.
01:26:18 You can’t do that.
01:26:19 Well, why does Varite?
01:26:20 And then he would always, and this was the magic of Steve,
01:26:22 like when you said, no, that doesn’t work,
01:26:24 you’d go, well, why does Verizon not have any SIM slots?
01:26:27 They showed that you can do a mobile phone
01:26:29 with no SIM slots.
01:26:30 And you’re like, okay, here we go.
01:26:32 And so a few days later, we come back with,
01:26:36 so product marketing, voice of the customer, engineering,
01:26:40 we all come back with all the data
01:26:41 showing how many data networks and mobile networks
01:26:46 required SIM cards versus did not and what the trends were.
01:26:50 And so we showed the data and that killed the,
01:26:54 or excuse me, brought back the SIM slot
01:26:56 on the original iPhone.
01:26:58 Because we’re like, because he was just like,
01:27:01 we’re gonna tell AT&T to not use a SIM, right?
01:27:04 We’re gonna just tell them to do it differently, right?
01:27:06 But we were like,
01:27:07 if we want this thing to go anywhere around the world,
01:27:09 you wanna put that friction in.
01:27:11 People are gonna move from place to place.
01:27:13 They have different SIMs
01:27:14 because of the prices and all that stuff.
01:27:16 We had to show all of that data.
01:27:17 And then that opinion based decision got turned
01:27:20 into a data driven decision.
01:27:22 And the SIM slot obviously showed up.
01:27:25 So those are two very, at the very same time, right?
01:27:29 Opinion can hold and so can data overrule opinion
01:27:33 when data does exist for a V1.
01:27:36 But at the end of the day,
01:27:37 you don’t know what the right answer is.
01:27:40 So doing no SIM card slot
01:27:45 may have been the right decision.
01:27:47 We won’t know.
01:27:49 Because maybe if that was the decision,
01:27:53 then like many times throughout Apple’s history,
01:27:56 you basically changed the tide of how technology is done.
01:28:01 Absolutely, you never know.
01:28:03 Apple started WiFi.
01:28:05 People don’t understand WiFi came out of there.
01:28:06 There was no WiFi in 2001.
01:28:08 Apple started WiFi.
01:28:10 And then everyone else got on board.
01:28:13 If you look at now where we’re going,
01:28:15 we’re going to phones without SIM slots.
01:28:17 Cause we have eSIMs, right?
01:28:18 And now the SIM slots becoming legacy, legacy.
01:28:21 It’s a legacy port.
01:28:23 That legacy port will probably be gone
01:28:24 by six, maybe 10 years.
01:28:28 It’ll be gone.
01:28:29 I’m pretty sure of that.
01:28:31 Because it’s so much easier for carriers.
01:28:32 They don’t have to have physical things to go out and right.
01:28:35 So right now it’s just the early days,
01:28:38 but it will happen and it will go its way.
01:28:41 It’ll fall away, but it will take time.
01:28:43 You just couldn’t do it back then.
01:28:44 So timing is essential here, but at the end of the day,
01:28:47 it’s opinions and that’s where the genius is.
01:28:49 Sometimes the data tells you one thing,
01:28:52 but the data at the end of the day does represent the past.
01:28:55 Exactly.
01:28:56 And the future may be different than the past.
01:28:59 Right.
01:29:00 Sometimes there’s wisdom in the past
01:29:03 and sometimes it’s actually representative
01:29:06 of something that should be overcome
01:29:09 and progress looks like leaving that stuff behind.
01:29:12 Like the headphone jack.
01:29:15 Right.
01:29:16 I mean that when different folks were getting rid
01:29:20 of the headphone jack, boy, I would love to be a fly
01:29:25 in the wall of those discussions.
01:29:27 We had that, oh, that was a discussion
01:29:31 that happened almost every year.
01:29:34 That was an every year,
01:29:35 should we get rid of headphone jacks on the iPod, right?
01:29:38 When are wireless headsets gonna happen, right?
01:29:41 And it took years to build all the right protocols,
01:29:44 the chips, all those things to make the experience
01:29:47 that is the iPods today, right?
01:29:50 To say, have the confidence,
01:29:52 cause Bluetooth was good, but it wasn’t Apple like.
01:29:55 So that is like, we gotta make our own chips,
01:29:57 we gotta make our own software stacks.
01:29:59 Now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack
01:30:01 and actually make you pay $200 more for your iPhone
01:30:04 that you were just paying because of the headphone jack.
01:30:07 Now we’ve grown our revenue,
01:30:09 we’ve given a new experience to the user, right?
01:30:11 And ta da, you know, and it’s just, it’s magic.
01:30:15 And now the world’s transformed to everyone,
01:30:17 you know, moving to that, right?
01:30:19 But it took years to understand the problem,
01:30:22 develop the technology and not just rush it to market
01:30:26 to get a half experience, but to get it right
01:30:28 and refine it, then ship it.
01:30:31 And only then after it was probably four
01:30:33 or five years in development,
01:30:34 just like the M1 processor, right?
01:30:37 That was a work from 2008, right?
01:30:43 Grinding away, grinding away, grinding away,
01:30:45 then saying, okay, now we have the confidence
01:30:47 we’re doing our own silicon for all the iPhones
01:30:49 and iPads and such.
01:30:54 Now we’re gonna turn to the Mac
01:30:56 and make sure we have the best processor, right?
01:30:58 Not just that we have the best integrated design team.
01:31:01 And then saying we’re gonna, you know,
01:31:03 and then besting everyone, making sure the softwares
01:31:06 and the hardware is designed at the same time,
01:31:09 making sure the kernels, all those things
01:31:11 are gonna use the best efficiency and then popping it out.
01:31:16 And then it feels seamless.
01:31:18 It’s magic.
01:31:19 There were no, as far as I could tell,
01:31:21 unless you were in real esoteric drivers
01:31:23 or something like that, it just worked.
01:31:25 It was magic.
01:31:27 Like the transition, it was not even a speed bump.
01:31:29 It was not even a crack in the road.
01:31:32 So perhaps famously Steve had a bit of a temper.
01:31:36 Steve Jobs, would you say his particular personality
01:31:41 in this aspect was constructive or destructive
01:31:46 in the process of shaping these opinion based ideas?
01:31:55 So in Build, I write a chapter called Assholes.
01:32:00 Yes, and you lay out beautifully the types of assholes
01:32:05 and maybe you could speak to the constructive
01:32:09 and the destructive types of assholes.
01:32:13 So there’s really two delineations that I’ve found
01:32:18 of real fundamental ones.
01:32:20 And that is again, the why.
01:32:24 Why do I feel this person is an asshole?
01:32:27 They might not be.
01:32:30 I feel this is a person who’s an asshole.
01:32:32 Are they motivated by their ego
01:32:35 or are they motivated by their mission?
01:32:38 Something they’re trying to do
01:32:39 and doing in service of something else, right?
01:32:43 Sometimes those lines can be blurry,
01:32:44 but it’s usually pretty clear.
01:32:48 When it’s ego motivated, it’s clear they’re just trying
01:32:52 to get up in the ranks, push people down,
01:32:55 shove people aside.
01:32:57 I think we saw a president do that on a stage once.
01:33:00 I’m me and I’m the guy, right?
01:33:06 And I’m gonna prove it by pushing everyone away
01:33:09 and being nefarious or what have you.
01:33:11 Either passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive,
01:33:16 but they’re doing about themselves.
01:33:18 There’s another one, which is someone who’s so attentive
01:33:21 to detail and unrelenting that they’re trying to get
01:33:26 the right things for the country.
01:33:28 They’re trying to get the right things for the customer
01:33:31 or in service of their mission.
01:33:33 And they wanna make sure we fulfill those things, right?
01:33:37 And they really care.
01:33:39 They don’t micromanage all the details,
01:33:41 but they micromanage the details where the customer,
01:33:44 it touches the customer in some way.
01:33:48 People who work with those types of people
01:33:51 who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset.
01:33:55 A lot of times it’s a knee jerk reaction to go,
01:33:58 they are an asshole.
01:34:01 Get off my back, you’re an ass, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:34:05 Right, and you’re protecting your ego
01:34:09 because what’s happening is that person
01:34:11 is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries.
01:34:13 They see something that we can do or you can do
01:34:18 that you’re just either not wanting to do
01:34:20 for whatever reason, you’re not confident in that.
01:34:23 You’re like, I don’t wanna take the extra time
01:34:26 and saying, no, we need to get that done and pushing you.
01:34:28 Okay, and so when we came to those areas,
01:34:35 it wasn’t just a one on one,
01:34:36 it could be Steve against the team going,
01:34:39 we need glass instead of plastic
01:34:41 on the front face of the iPhone,
01:34:43 and we’re going to do this.
01:34:45 And we’re like, God, you know, and so we did it.
01:34:49 And he pushed us because he didn’t know all the details,
01:34:52 but he could see in our minds that we’re like,
01:34:55 yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably,
01:34:57 but man, it’s really putting us in risk.
01:34:59 And we laid out the risks for him.
01:35:01 And he’s like, I’m willing to take those risks.
01:35:03 We’ll do that.
01:35:04 We’re like, we might be three months late.
01:35:06 He’s like, this is so important.
01:35:08 We need to stay on time.
01:35:11 You know, but it would be all the time, push, push, push.
01:35:14 It reminds me of like kids growing up and me as growing up,
01:35:18 you know, when your parents push you
01:35:20 to make you grow beyond your boundaries,
01:35:22 your personal boundaries.
01:35:23 And you’re like, God damn it, I’m so, you know,
01:35:27 but they do it for the right reasons.
01:35:28 Now let’s see, it’s not bullying.
01:35:30 It’s not about bullying.
01:35:31 It’s not about demeaning.
01:35:33 It’s about either pushing you to another part of the mission
01:35:36 that needs to get done, or it’s about critiquing your work,
01:35:39 but not judging you.
01:35:40 Yes.
01:35:41 Well, there’s a lot to say there.
01:35:43 So one, it’s fascinating.
01:35:46 It really is fascinating.
01:35:48 And you laid out a very nice picture,
01:35:49 but it does feel like there’s sometimes gray areas,
01:35:55 which is why it makes all of this very complicated.
01:35:57 So one question I have for you
01:35:58 in terms of glass on the iPhone.
01:36:03 How important is it that like Steve in that case is right?
01:36:09 Because I could argue each side.
01:36:12 It seems like in one sense,
01:36:14 just having a strong vision and opinion
01:36:18 is already going to make everybody grow,
01:36:20 even if it turns out to be the wrong.
01:36:22 As long as you are sort of standing your ground,
01:36:28 you know, Napoleon invading Russia or something
01:36:30 in the winter, like it’s just not gonna be a good idea.
01:36:35 It’s not a good idea, but I’m gonna hold to that.
01:36:39 And then once you decide, you go all in.
01:36:41 And then from that, even if the whole team knows
01:36:44 it’s the wrong decision, just sticking by it,
01:36:46 powering through, you will learn through the pain of it.
01:36:50 Like everybody will learn.
01:36:51 So that’s one side.
01:36:53 The other is maybe the asshole, the vision driven asshole
01:36:59 gets to be more and more of an asshole
01:37:02 if they have a track record of through that process,
01:37:06 having built people up, having made the correct decisions.
01:37:10 They can’t, they’re not allowed to be an asshole.
01:37:13 They’re in rare air and no one can challenge them.
01:37:15 Right, right.
01:37:16 Steve was never that.
01:37:18 That’s the great thing.
01:37:19 He was never unchallengeable.
01:37:22 You could challenge him.
01:37:23 Now the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this.
01:37:31 So at the beginning of the project,
01:37:33 well before we were going,
01:37:35 we had always had these things about plastic front iPods,
01:37:38 these kinds of things, scratches and all that stuff.
01:37:41 So we said, oh, we’re gonna have a glass or a plastic,
01:37:46 a cover for the display.
01:37:47 Cause the display was glass underneath it.
01:37:51 We argued back and forth about glass versus plastic.
01:37:54 And then we all landed together on plastic.
01:38:00 Okay, the original decision was plastic.
01:38:03 And the reasons were, okay, we don’t wanna make a mistake.
01:38:06 Glass can break, you know,
01:38:08 people drop them all the time.
01:38:11 So we don’t wanna have a fragile device
01:38:14 because you’re gonna be using even more
01:38:17 than a music player, right?
01:38:20 And you’re gonna be holding your head
01:38:21 and putting it in your pocket and misses and all that stuff.
01:38:24 So we went down the road with plastic.
01:38:27 When it was shown, when the product was shown
01:38:30 at Mac World in 2007, the first time, that was plastic.
01:38:35 We had just enough of them in the field at the time.
01:38:39 We started to start seeing light scratches on the plastic.
01:38:45 Reviewers who didn’t have the device yet,
01:38:48 cause it was behind glass.
01:38:49 If you remember 2007, the Jesus phone comes up
01:38:52 and no one could even touch them.
01:38:54 You could just look at it
01:38:55 in this beautiful museum quality box.
01:38:57 Like it came from the future or whatever, the past.
01:39:00 And it was just plastic.
01:39:02 And it was like, oh, and you just looked
01:39:06 and that was all you got.
01:39:07 But then people said, well, what screen is,
01:39:10 what covers on that, you know, reviewers who knew better,
01:39:13 you know, it’s plastic.
01:39:15 And they were like, really?
01:39:17 And so there was enough of a doubt there.
01:39:20 And then when we started to do it,
01:39:21 and then Steve changed the frame of reference
01:39:24 of the question or of the result
01:39:26 of what the customer would think.
01:39:28 And he was like, if we designed it with plastic,
01:39:31 with plastic and it’s in their pocket all the time
01:39:34 and it gets scratched by coins, slightly scratched
01:39:36 or by keys or something like that.
01:39:39 That is a design problem.
01:39:41 We need to fix the problem.
01:39:42 That was our bad.
01:39:45 If they go off and drop it or even slightly drop it
01:39:51 and it cracks, it’s the customer’s fault.
01:39:54 And they have much lower,
01:39:56 they have less likelihood to complain.
01:39:58 Yes, they’ll complain,
01:40:00 but they’re part of that, of that failure.
01:40:04 Yes.
01:40:05 Oh, that’s fascinating.
01:40:06 And then.
01:40:07 There’s truth to that.
01:40:08 Right?
01:40:09 Because then they were part of why it failed.
01:40:11 Whereas the design, they didn’t do anything wrong.
01:40:13 It was just sitting in their pocket and it’s scratching
01:40:16 and that’s normal use.
01:40:18 Abnormal use has been dropped.
01:40:19 And we’re like, oh, now we get it.
01:40:23 And so we all moved to that mindset
01:40:25 when you framed the problem and the solution in that way
01:40:30 versus the original framing
01:40:32 where we all landed on plastic.
01:40:34 So, and then he was unrelenting on that,
01:40:37 but we all had moved and we had moved mindset
01:40:41 and we understood the why and we marshaled together.
01:40:45 And then by the end of June, and it was crazy,
01:40:48 the mechanical product design teams sourcing,
01:40:52 all of us, the partner Corning pulled together
01:40:56 to make that happen because it was the right reason.
01:40:59 Right?
01:41:00 So this, you look at these stories
01:41:03 and you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways,
01:41:06 but that’s not usually how it all happened
01:41:08 of like one leader was, that’s not how Steve was.
01:41:12 Now I’ve seen leaders who are just pounding
01:41:14 and just had no real empathy for the team
01:41:18 and understanding the why.
01:41:19 And it’s just, it is the way I want it, right?
01:41:21 I am the supreme leader.
01:41:23 That wasn’t like that when.
01:41:25 He just had a very strong opinion.
01:41:27 Very strong opinion.
01:41:29 But it was challengeable.
01:41:30 It was challengeable and if you came with the right thing,
01:41:33 you know, it was, you could modulate that,
01:41:35 but you had to come with a team.
01:41:37 It couldn’t just be you.
01:41:38 It had to become a team and data and to overcome
01:41:41 because it was a very strong opinion.
01:41:43 And there’s personal quirks of character, like you said.
01:41:46 Bad days and good days.
01:41:47 Bad days and good days.
01:41:48 So there’s also the three options you said.
01:41:51 You noticed that the third option is always going
01:41:53 to be the one that’s picked.
01:41:56 Those kinds of.
01:41:57 Idiosyncrasies.
01:41:58 Idiosyncrasies.
01:41:59 And that, so that brings up another thing.
01:42:04 You said challenge the idea, not the person.
01:42:10 I’m somebody who has a, you know, I have a temper.
01:42:13 I use colorful language and so on.
01:42:16 On teams I work.
01:42:17 In my private life I’m much calmer and so on.
01:42:19 But I get, when I get really passionate
01:42:21 with engineering teams.
01:42:23 I’ve been called an asshole.
01:42:24 And you get, I mean, I am distinctly aware
01:42:29 that you cross lines often.
01:42:34 There’s like levels, right?
01:42:35 Sure.
01:42:36 You know, you could, it has to do with language
01:42:39 and how language is heard.
01:42:41 So for example, you could say a lot of stuff to me.
01:42:43 You could swear.
01:42:44 You could say stuff that sounds, like, I don’t know.
01:42:49 Lex, sometimes I think you’re the dumbest human
01:42:53 on the face of the earth or something.
01:42:54 I don’t know.
01:42:55 That sounds very personal, right?
01:42:57 But I’m not gonna take that personally.
01:42:58 I understand what’s being said.
01:43:00 And then I also notice that there’s other people
01:43:02 that take stuff more personally.
01:43:04 This has to do with teams and figuring out like,
01:43:07 okay, who’s going to take certain words personally
01:43:09 and not, and you have to know.
01:43:10 That’s what makes a great coach, a great leader,
01:43:13 a mentor, you have to like factor all that in.
01:43:16 But it just, there’s something about just being an asshole
01:43:19 and being passionate and really driven
01:43:23 that sometimes you do cross lines.
01:43:26 And that’s, I don’t know what to do with that
01:43:30 because it feels like it comes with the territory.
01:43:32 Like you have, it seems like you can’t just have
01:43:36 a perfectly optimized.
01:43:38 No, no, absolutely not.
01:43:41 We’re humans.
01:43:41 Yeah.
01:43:42 We’re humans, we don’t have a program.
01:43:43 Everyone’s programmed the same way to react the same way
01:43:46 to given stimulus, right?
01:43:48 Yeah.
01:43:48 So, you know, you said, I don’t know
01:43:52 if this was a real example, but you said,
01:43:53 oh, you’re the dumbest human on earth or whatever.
01:43:56 I would never say that.
01:43:58 Absolutely never.
01:44:00 And if someone said that to me or I saw someone else say
01:44:02 that to another person on the team, absolutely not.
01:44:06 That is not allowed because that’s judging someone.
01:44:08 You may be heated and you can get heated
01:44:10 and you can say it in your intonation,
01:44:12 but to then try to put a label on it
01:44:15 and put a label on a person, that is not allowed.
01:44:17 So if you let that kind of culture happen
01:44:20 and it becomes somewhat, you know, sometimes it’s ingest,
01:44:26 you know, it has to be very much ingest
01:44:28 and those two people have to have
01:44:29 a really good working relationship.
01:44:31 But other than that, I’m sorry,
01:44:33 it’s gonna be a lot more, you could say a septic
01:44:37 in that way that you’re not gonna add that stuff in,
01:44:39 but you can do it with all other types of ways
01:44:42 without saying that because then people who do react
01:44:45 to that kind of language and don’t have those shields
01:44:48 because they might not have that stream confidence level
01:44:51 that you do and you can just brush it off,
01:44:54 that can be very cancerous in a team
01:44:56 because people then mean that and then they see,
01:44:59 oh, that’s the right way to be.
01:45:01 You gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that,
01:45:04 you gotta be that change or that model
01:45:06 that you wanna show the team.
01:45:08 Yes, it’s too, even if it doesn’t affect me,
01:45:10 it’s going to affect a significant enough fraction
01:45:14 of brilliant people where that shouldn’t be part
01:45:17 of the culture.
01:45:18 Exactly, and other people see that happen
01:45:20 and then, oh, I guess that’s acceptable, right?
01:45:22 Just like politics in the workplace,
01:45:24 is that acceptable or not?
01:45:26 I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone,
01:45:29 right, because it’s just another ego driven thing.
01:45:32 You have to set the tone as a leader
01:45:35 for what you want your organization to be
01:45:37 and how it gets reflected in the world
01:45:39 and you have to uphold that and you can’t,
01:45:42 sure, you can have an excursion outside of that,
01:45:44 but you have to go back and say, I’m sorry.
01:45:47 Yeah, yeah.
01:45:49 You have to go and apologize, heal and said,
01:45:51 I was not the person I wanted to be that day,
01:45:53 I’m really sorry.
01:45:55 Yeah.
01:45:56 This is, and even in front of the team
01:45:58 and have that humility and say, we’re all human here
01:46:00 and just cause I’m the leader
01:46:01 doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes.
01:46:03 So have the self awareness, apologize.
01:46:06 Exactly.
01:46:07 And that’s also part of the culture.
01:46:11 Oh yeah.
01:46:12 How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer?
01:46:16 So you’ve spoken about sort of what made you strong,
01:46:20 which is he was able to challenge,
01:46:22 he was able to push you to bring out the best.
01:46:26 Well, I come from the technical angle, right?
01:46:28 Deep technology, software, hardware, systems thinking,
01:46:33 implementation, all that stuff.
01:46:34 So I have a different bent.
01:46:36 He wanted to be an engineer, started,
01:46:38 but really he was much better at all the other things,
01:46:40 the storytelling, the interfacing
01:46:43 and being the voice of the customer
01:46:45 and being that product marketer in a way, right?
01:46:47 That we talked about.
01:46:49 I grew into being the product marketing, then marketing.
01:46:51 He came really out the other way, right?
01:46:53 And never got really deep technically.
01:46:55 So that’s two different mindsets.
01:46:57 One’s not better or worse.
01:46:58 It’s just, that’s how it is.
01:47:00 And it takes all kinds and all kinds can do great designs.
01:47:05 Did it manifest itself differently?
01:47:06 Just the fact that you came from those different places.
01:47:09 Absolutely.
01:47:10 Like what, so like the discussion about glass on the iPhone
01:47:15 was probably had a different flavor to it.
01:47:17 Sure.
01:47:18 When you started getting into the technical details,
01:47:20 enough so you’re getting the third order technical details
01:47:23 and he can’t argue with that anymore.
01:47:25 Then with somebody he’s like, okay.
01:47:27 At some point he’s like, I can’t win this war.
01:47:30 And he learned that very early on
01:47:32 because he didn’t like the way the look of the Macintosh
01:47:36 board, the PCB was laid out.
01:47:39 He wanted it to be beautiful on the outside
01:47:41 and on the inside.
01:47:42 He’s like, why are all these wires running this way?
01:47:44 Why doesn’t it have all this symmetry?
01:47:47 And we have to make it beautiful on the inside.
01:47:49 And even the traces on the boards
01:47:52 have to look a certain way.
01:47:53 So the teams made the board they knew that would work.
01:47:56 And then they made the board that the way Steve wanted it.
01:47:59 And that didn’t work.
01:48:01 And then Steve instantly figured out like at some point
01:48:03 don’t micromanage every single detail.
01:48:05 There’s some things he doesn’t know enough about.
01:48:07 And so he would get out of that.
01:48:09 But that was one of those instances
01:48:11 where he pushed really hard and that’s his opinion.
01:48:13 So they said, okay, we’re gonna make it
01:48:14 a data driven decision and we’re gonna make both.
01:48:16 I’m gonna show you the results, right?
01:48:18 And then from there, he didn’t get into those details.
01:48:21 So from that, you could have a great challenge, right?
01:48:25 Cause then you could get those data and say,
01:48:26 we can’t do that.
01:48:27 And let me show you why, or we can do that.
01:48:29 And then Steve would go, you can’t do that.
01:48:31 And you’re like, oh, we can do that.
01:48:32 Let me show you, right?
01:48:33 So there’s certain times when you were like
01:48:34 bringing something to reality
01:48:36 that he didn’t think could exist, right?
01:48:39 So it was always that creative tension,
01:48:42 that interaction that was so successful, right?
01:48:46 I think, but there was one other fundamental thing
01:48:48 that was different and that it graded on the team
01:48:52 and that I made sure and I learned from to not do.
01:48:56 And I maybe overdue now in the opposite direction,
01:49:00 which is when there’s a great idea that comes from the team,
01:49:04 acknowledge that person and go, that is a great idea.
01:49:07 As the leader, the opinion driven, that’s a great idea.
01:49:11 Let’s build on that.
01:49:11 Let’s see if that can do that.
01:49:13 Or it’s a great idea, but not for now, put it aside.
01:49:15 But call out when people have great ideas
01:49:17 because it’s infectious.
01:49:19 And that means maybe not ideas that come bubble up
01:49:21 to the customer level, but inside the organization.
01:49:24 People like they get rewarded for their ideas
01:49:26 and say, that’s a great one.
01:49:29 Steve was always like, you give an idea
01:49:32 and he would go, okay, I don’t know.
01:49:37 The next day, 24 hours later,
01:49:38 it would come back with slight modifications.
01:49:40 I’ve had this genius idea, right?
01:49:43 And it’s sooner or later we’d look around the table
01:49:46 and we’d like roll our eyes and go, here we go again.
01:49:49 So it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit.
01:49:53 Well, we got used to it,
01:49:55 but later on in the team, it was just not,
01:49:59 it doesn’t want to bring the best, right?
01:50:02 Cause if you’re always like, the reaction is never,
01:50:05 that’s a genius idea.
01:50:07 It was always like, it was either negative or neutral.
01:50:12 Right?
01:50:13 Then it doesn’t have that same emotional effect
01:50:15 that you want you to bring your best.
01:50:17 Yeah, sometimes it’s fun when people get excited
01:50:19 by just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:50:21 You kind of build on top excitement.
01:50:23 It could be, but coupled with sort of harshness
01:50:25 when the idea is bad and you call out the bad ideas too.
01:50:28 So it’s the good and the bad.
01:50:30 Oh, you could say, you don’t have to say bad idea.
01:50:33 You say, maybe not now.
01:50:35 Let’s table that for later.
01:50:37 Let’s discuss it or say, that’s a decent idea.
01:50:40 But did you think about that idea this way?
01:50:42 Not just no or yes,
01:50:43 but let’s talk about why that might not be applicable
01:50:46 in this case so that they can learn.
01:50:48 So the next time they bring the next idea,
01:50:50 they can modulate and understand
01:50:52 to start seeing through the opinion based decision makers
01:50:55 or the databases to bring it
01:50:56 and bring better formatted arguments or ideas
01:50:59 so that you have better chance of success the next time.
01:51:02 Yeah. Right?
01:51:03 You got to train through those moments.
01:51:04 You got to teach, those are teaching moments.
01:51:07 Teaching moments.
01:51:08 I aspire to be that kind of person.
01:51:10 I’ll usually just say that idea is shit.
01:51:14 That is the like, and then you,
01:51:18 I remember that this brilliant person
01:51:21 just gave that really shitty idea.
01:51:23 So I remember to make sure the next time
01:51:24 they give a good idea, I really compliment that good idea.
01:51:27 But I personally, I mean, it’s emotion,
01:51:32 but I call out the really shitty ideas.
01:51:34 But you should call it the really great ones.
01:51:36 If you let the pendulum swing both ways,
01:51:38 then everybody goes, he’s balanced.
01:51:40 It’s always one way.
01:51:42 Why bring any idea?
01:51:43 I’m all about the pendulum.
01:51:45 Right?
01:51:46 You got to have both, the joy and the pain.
01:51:51 Don’t you give me pain all the time.
01:51:53 So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone.
01:51:55 So you wanted to, not just the iPod, not just Nest.
01:51:59 You were one of the key figures
01:52:00 in the creation of the iPhone.
01:52:02 What’s the interesting aspects?
01:52:03 What’s the good, the bad, and the ugly
01:52:05 of the origin story of the iPhone?
01:52:08 Again, this is a Netflix series
01:52:10 that spans multiple seasons.
01:52:13 Change my flight, please.
01:52:14 Yeah, what was the, what interesting memories
01:52:18 you have from the finding?
01:52:19 So the pain and the joy that was foundational
01:52:25 to the iPod, all the CDs you had to lug around.
01:52:33 What was the pain and the joy and the vision
01:52:36 of the iPhone in your mind, in the mind of the team,
01:52:39 in Steve’s mind, and so on?
01:52:42 Well, you know, there’s multiple pains.
01:52:44 You have to also look, there’s not just customer pain,
01:52:46 but there’s business pain, okay?
01:52:48 And it’s about the, so Apple now is getting out
01:52:52 of that place where it was in 2001.
01:52:54 Now people are starting to pay attention.
01:52:56 Apple’s starting to get in the culture again.
01:52:58 It’s becoming relevant.
01:53:00 Cash is starting to flow.
01:53:01 iPod is 60% of that, of the revenue,
01:53:06 total revenue of Apple doing an 85% market share.
01:53:10 You’re starting to get a wind at your back.
01:53:11 You got confidence.
01:53:13 Like Apple had been beaten down since probably
01:53:15 the first time the Mac was, since the Mac,
01:53:18 it was a beaten company ever since the Mac.
01:53:21 So we’re talking 15 years at that point, right?
01:53:25 This is the first time you’re seeing like,
01:53:27 and Steve would proudly came in front of us and said,
01:53:31 today I can tell you all of the employees,
01:53:34 we are now out of debt.
01:53:36 We paid off our debt.
01:53:38 It was a joyous moment for him, right?
01:53:42 And then ultimately for our team
01:53:43 because no more debt, wonderful, right?
01:53:47 So now what you have is you have this successful thing
01:53:50 changing the face of Apple and you hear these
01:53:55 heavy stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry.
01:53:59 Boom.
01:54:01 And it’s the feature phones at that time.
01:54:03 They’re adding cameras.
01:54:04 They’re adding color displays.
01:54:06 They’re seeing the success of the iPod and going,
01:54:08 that’s just music, we have some storage.
01:54:12 We can load music on our phones
01:54:15 and we can do what the iPod does plus more.
01:54:19 Boom, boom, boom, right?
01:54:22 And you’re like, and how many hundreds of millions
01:54:25 of them are being sold at that point?
01:54:27 It wasn’t billions yet, but it was still,
01:54:29 a hundred million, 200 million a year.
01:54:31 iPod hadn’t gotten there.
01:54:32 It was for 20, 40, 50 million, something like that.
01:54:36 So now you’re like, okay,
01:54:37 what are we gonna do about this Goliath
01:54:41 who wants to take our lunch, right?
01:54:44 The schoolyard bully.
01:54:46 And so there was one, let’s partner with them.
01:54:51 So iTunes music store was there.
01:54:54 All of these phones are gonna need music
01:54:57 so they can come to the iTunes music store
01:55:00 and get that music for those phones
01:55:02 because it wasn’t just about the hardware player
01:55:04 at that point.
01:55:05 It was about the software that you need on the desktop
01:55:07 and the content that you needed to download.
01:55:10 So now Apple had multiple legs of the stool
01:55:12 as Steve would always refer to it.
01:55:14 So now the mobile phone industry,
01:55:16 okay, we’re gonna work with them.
01:55:18 They are going to make an iPod shuffle basically
01:55:24 inside of a phone, can have 99 songs total.
01:55:27 And they’re gonna come to our store and you’re gonna,
01:55:29 I was like, okay, great.
01:55:31 It’s all gonna be well and good.
01:55:32 And that became the Motorola rocker project.
01:55:35 It was Apple and Motorola getting together.
01:55:38 There’s gonna be software on this smartphone
01:55:41 or not smartphone, but feature phone
01:55:43 to hook to iTunes to get your music.
01:55:45 It wasn’t even downloadable over a cloud or anything
01:55:47 because that wasn’t available yet.
01:55:49 There wasn’t data networks yet.
01:55:54 It was a disaster from the beginning.
01:55:56 Two different cultures,
01:55:58 two different types of leadership styles,
01:56:01 not necessarily the most competent engineers
01:56:03 on the other side.
01:56:06 And it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster.
01:56:10 I watched the pains,
01:56:11 cause luckily I didn’t have to be part of it.
01:56:12 I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins face
01:56:14 each time we would meet.
01:56:15 And he would be like, these guys are just like, really?
01:56:20 Do we have to do this, Steve?
01:56:21 And he’s like, we’re contractually obligated.
01:56:24 And when it came out on stage and Steve showed it,
01:56:26 it was maybe a one minute,
01:56:28 Steve loves those extended, like drawn up.
01:56:31 It might’ve been a one minute, two minute kind of thing.
01:56:33 And he literally threw that phone out of his hand
01:56:35 as fast as he could, right?
01:56:37 Cause it was horrible.
01:56:38 So there was the pain of we’re not gonna partner.
01:56:41 So if we can’t partner with these guys,
01:56:43 we have to become one of them to actually compete,
01:56:47 to save the thing that is bringing Apple
01:56:49 from that 15 years of malaise, right?
01:56:54 So then from that, we were made a prototype
01:56:59 of an iPod plus phone, a classic with it was an iPod,
01:57:04 but it had a phone inside with all the music
01:57:06 and all the other stuff.
01:57:07 And you use your headset,
01:57:09 wired headset to do the audio, right?
01:57:12 There was another project at the same time
01:57:15 cause we were doing videos in the iTunes music store,
01:57:19 iTunes video store for music videos and movies.
01:57:24 And it would be a full screen iPod.
01:57:26 So instead of the classic, the way you know it,
01:57:29 but it would be full screen
01:57:31 and it would have a virtual click wheel.
01:57:34 You’d have a virtual, like single touch touchscreen
01:57:36 that you could scroll, right?
01:57:38 Think of maybe an iPhone, like you knew it, right?
01:57:41 And then there was a third project going on,
01:57:44 not in, those two were going on in my team,
01:57:46 but the third project going on
01:57:48 was the multi touchscreen technology
01:57:52 to drive a Mac tablet.
01:57:55 And so that Mac tablet, that touchscreen technology,
01:58:00 there was just way too much you had to change
01:58:02 on the software and everything
01:58:04 to be able to use a tablet, right?
01:58:06 We see this all the time.
01:58:07 Like people are like, there’s not enough tablet apps today
01:58:09 that are modified for tablet.
01:58:10 They’re just phone apps that are grown up, right?
01:58:12 So then they would just be Mac touch stuff.
01:58:15 So you’d have to have a whole developer community.
01:58:17 That probably wasn’t the best place
01:58:19 to take that technology first.
01:58:21 So you take that technology,
01:58:23 marry it with the full screen,
01:58:24 that technology, marry it with the full screen iPod
01:58:26 and the phone stuff we were working
01:58:28 because the iPod phone with a rotary dial
01:58:31 was just like a rotary phone.
01:58:32 We couldn’t make that interface work well for data input.
01:58:37 You put those three together.
01:58:38 And now is where those three things
01:58:41 that then created the form or the technology
01:58:44 and the form inside what would become the iPhone,
01:58:48 married with a bunch of low level software
01:58:51 from the iPod and manufacturing software
01:58:54 and drivers and communication stuff,
01:58:57 combined with a very reduced Frankenstein Mac OS.
01:59:03 And I mean that in the best way.
01:59:06 It means it wasn’t Mac OS just changed a little.
01:59:09 It was totally, things were hacked out and changed
01:59:11 and new code was inserted.
01:59:13 And it really was a whole set of things
01:59:16 from all different places to make that first iPhone OS.
01:59:20 And then there was another team working on the apps
01:59:23 and then another team working on the design
01:59:25 of how it looked overall between all that stuff.
01:59:27 So all of those things came together
01:59:29 to create what we know as the first generation iPhone.
01:59:32 And those are all probably fascinating
01:59:34 engineering challenges.
01:59:36 Correct.
01:59:37 And great teams like creating the Frankenstein OS.
01:59:42 That’s fascinating because you’re simplifying and simplifying
01:59:45 but then you’re just pulling different stuff from,
01:59:47 and you’re basically inventing,
01:59:49 I mean, they’re probably not thinking of it that way,
01:59:51 but a new era of computing, a new kind of computer.
01:59:56 It really is Frankenstein.
01:59:57 Right, and you didn’t have to run Mac software.
01:59:59 If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time,
02:00:02 like Windows and stuff, they were like,
02:00:04 we need to make sure it runs Excel
02:00:06 and it runs Word or something like that
02:00:08 in some reduced thing.
02:00:09 This was like, no, no, no, no.
02:00:11 This was born out of entertainment.
02:00:12 So we didn’t have to go and take all the same application,
02:00:15 you know, all those other ones was about compatibility.
02:00:19 This was about a whole new way of being.
02:00:21 What did you think about the Steve Jobs presentation
02:00:26 of the iPhone, the sort of, the first iPhone, you know.
02:00:31 Phone, internet communicator, and the iPod in your pocket.
02:00:34 Yeah, that you’re going to sort of present,
02:00:38 announcing three new products kind of thing
02:00:41 and then saying that it’s all in one.
02:00:43 Just, this is a good example,
02:00:44 one of the sort of historic presentations of a product.
02:00:52 Clearly there’s like some showmanship that works,
02:00:55 some reason it works.
02:00:56 It doesn’t always work, it often doesn’t work,
02:00:59 but it did in this case, it often did for Steve.
02:01:02 What, like, how did that feel?
02:01:06 What part of the actually the design process
02:01:11 was that presentation?
02:01:13 You know what I mean?
02:01:14 In the early, because you said,
02:01:15 should consider the why, the press release
02:01:17 at the very beginning.
02:01:19 Steve was doing that the entire time.
02:01:21 He was working on that story from day one.
02:01:24 He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this.
02:01:27 And then he would look at our faces
02:01:29 because you wouldn’t, most people wouldn’t,
02:01:31 at least if you’re working for him,
02:01:32 wouldn’t tell him what you really thought
02:01:34 of what he was saying, but he would look at your faces.
02:01:36 And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidence
02:01:39 outside of the organization.
02:01:44 And see what they thought, right?
02:01:45 And they could give him feedback on it
02:01:47 and they could really challenge him,
02:01:49 but he would also look at their faces and go, hmm.
02:01:51 And so when you see that, hmm,
02:01:53 then he would modulate it and change it slightly
02:01:56 and change it.
02:01:57 So he was working during all of that time
02:01:59 on the story and the storytelling, right?
02:02:01 And the whys, while we’re working on that
02:02:03 and helping us refine it,
02:02:04 just like the switch from plastic to glass, right?
02:02:08 All the time working on that.
02:02:10 So when he comes out on stage,
02:02:12 he does something that every marketer is told not to do.
02:02:15 Say these three things are now combined in one.
02:02:19 That is like the, they say that that is the laziest form
02:02:23 of storytelling possible for marketing, right?
02:02:26 Yeah. Right?
02:02:28 But it was the best one because it was all those pains.
02:02:31 It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications
02:02:35 and I want my internet browsing because I want it on the go
02:02:37 so I can look up things because it was information.
02:02:40 And when you were on the road, you had a laptop,
02:02:42 you had an iPod and you had a phone that,
02:02:45 and you had to carry all of these things with you at once.
02:02:49 Now we’re gonna solve that pain for you
02:02:51 and put it all together.
02:02:52 So he was just showing you the pain
02:02:54 and beating that virus of doubt and going,
02:02:55 it’s now in this one magical thing.
02:02:57 And he could come up and masterfully tell that story
02:03:00 because he told it almost every day
02:03:03 to all of these people inside very quietly.
02:03:06 And then it was just, right?
02:03:09 It was like a Tony award winning play
02:03:12 that had been worked on for 10 years.
02:03:14 But also the human came through, the timing.
02:03:17 It was all that, it was all of it.
02:03:18 And of course he was dramatic at certain points
02:03:20 and he would raise his voice and a wry smile
02:03:23 or whatever it was.
02:03:24 Right, that wry smile was magic.
02:03:25 It was all those touches.
02:03:26 He was an actor as well as a storyteller.
02:03:29 Yeah.
02:03:29 But it was the truth, right?
02:03:32 The truth came through.
02:03:33 It was a nonfiction story.
02:03:36 And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it
02:03:39 for dramatic effect.
02:03:42 It’s amazing.
02:03:45 So there’s a designer you mentioned, Johnny Ave.
02:03:51 You both are brilliant designers, great human beings.
02:03:55 There were some battles fought in the distant past
02:03:59 between the two of you.
02:04:01 Looking back, what is the positive characteristics
02:04:04 of Johnny that made you a better person and designer
02:04:07 having worked with him?
02:04:13 Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led.
02:04:20 I don’t know where, cause that was over years.
02:04:22 I didn’t see all of those things.
02:04:23 But watching the design process of really,
02:04:26 cause it was really a team that was about materials.
02:04:29 It was about form.
02:04:31 It was about colors.
02:04:32 It was about these physical characteristics.
02:04:36 When we talked about this earlier was design.
02:04:38 What is design?
02:04:39 Design’s everywhere, okay?
02:04:41 So what they were really focused on was form,
02:04:44 how the feel was, how it looked, the aesthetics,
02:04:47 the physical aesthetics.
02:04:50 And watching, going through that process,
02:04:53 I learned so much in that process about how to do colors,
02:04:58 how to do materials, how to think deeply about curves,
02:05:05 and shadows, and how it would look, not just in your hand,
02:05:10 but how it would look in the photograph
02:05:12 you were gonna take for marketing, right?
02:05:14 So how it would look, how you would feel, all of it.
02:05:19 It was all of those physical things around that
02:05:23 and watching the process to get there,
02:05:28 that was enlightening for me, right?
02:05:31 It opened my mind to go, oh, okay.
02:05:35 Just like there’s a process for all these other things,
02:05:37 it wasn’t just magic and you say,
02:05:41 ha, ha, ha, there it is.
02:05:42 It was really a process of refinement,
02:05:44 you know, of opening the funnel at the beginning
02:05:46 and refining down over time to get to that final,
02:05:51 the final and selecting and doing the selection.
02:05:53 And certain types you could,
02:05:55 certain times there were opinion based design details.
02:05:58 But a lot of data, a lot of data driven designs
02:06:02 of what can we deliver in volume?
02:06:05 What can we do different things?
02:06:06 So you always had these constraints
02:06:08 that you had to work with under.
02:06:09 And sometimes they, and the team,
02:06:13 not just I, would say, we need this.
02:06:14 And we’re like, we can’t deliver that.
02:06:16 But maybe we were able to work together
02:06:18 to find different design characteristics
02:06:20 and different implementation characteristics
02:06:23 that could get to that point
02:06:25 without what they were describing.
02:06:27 And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no,
02:06:30 let’s find some other way to solve the problem together.
02:06:34 Yeah, is, and I’ve seen this in several companies
02:06:40 I’ve more closely interacted with, like Tesla is an example.
02:06:43 Sometimes, you know, talking about curves,
02:06:46 sometimes it’s very painful on the engineering side
02:06:51 to deliver a very specific kind of thing.
02:06:55 And one question that comes up in my mind is like,
02:06:59 well, how far should we go to try to deliver
02:07:02 a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature,
02:07:06 or in like whatever the form factor is,
02:07:10 or the color of the material,
02:07:12 when the cost is like 10X to deliver,
02:07:15 not financially, but just like in effort,
02:07:17 like how many problems to have to solve.
02:07:22 I don’t know if you can say any wisdom to that,
02:07:26 because when you’re thinking about curves,
02:07:29 you’re designing in the space of ideas,
02:07:31 you’re like platonic forms kind of thing,
02:07:34 not always grounded to like how much this is,
02:07:38 how much pain is gonna be involved in delivering this,
02:07:40 but that’s as you should perhaps,
02:07:44 because then if you’re always thinking about the pain
02:07:47 required to deliver this thing, you’ll be too conservative,
02:07:51 you wouldn’t do the wild ideas.
02:07:54 Right, exactly, but you have to understand again
02:07:57 the why behind it.
02:07:58 And at Nest, when we had limited resources,
02:08:02 you know, putting a screwdriver in the box,
02:08:04 a custom designed screwdriver in the box,
02:08:07 was born out of those experiences I had at Apple,
02:08:10 and seeing how you can create something
02:08:12 that’s emotional, it’s part of marketing,
02:08:15 and it’s part of the product experience overall,
02:08:17 even though it seems extraneous.
02:08:20 I went back and made the design team,
02:08:23 and the mechanical team change some curves
02:08:25 on the Nest Protect, the smoke and CO detector
02:08:28 we did at Nest, after they had already tooled it.
02:08:32 And I said, they’re saying these cost more,
02:08:33 I said, it doesn’t look right.
02:08:35 There is a, but they’re like, oh, well we had,
02:08:37 I said, no, you’re gonna go back,
02:08:39 and you’re gonna make that change,
02:08:40 I told you we needed to do it,
02:08:43 we had a better looking model, that is gonna get done,
02:08:45 I know it’s gonna be a terrible cost to you,
02:08:48 but we already had this discussion,
02:08:50 and that’s the way it’s gonna have to be,
02:08:52 and I’m sorry, but it is what it is.
02:08:56 And you know, because it’s better for the customer,
02:08:58 and it looks better in the pictures,
02:09:00 and all the other stuff.
02:09:00 And then we did it, and it was great,
02:09:02 and everyone agreed it was great at the end,
02:09:04 but it was pain to get there.
02:09:07 Those are where, those little details
02:09:09 are where the magic comes out, right?
02:09:11 And if you don’t do, if you don’t take those pains
02:09:15 and put in the love, the customer’s gonna feel,
02:09:18 it’s gonna, they’re either gonna feel the pain,
02:09:20 or they’re gonna feel the love,
02:09:22 if you put it in, right?
02:09:23 So it depends on how much time and effort
02:09:26 you wanna put into something,
02:09:28 and what really matters to you,
02:09:30 and so how you communicate what you do.
02:09:32 We’re human beings after all,
02:09:34 is there something you’ve learned
02:09:36 from sort of the tensions that are natural,
02:09:40 or that happen in teams when they’re passionate,
02:09:43 and they’re trying to solve these problems?
02:09:45 Is that the way of life?
02:09:47 And there’s the human drama.
02:09:49 Is that just, is that always going,
02:09:51 is that, it is what it is?
02:09:54 Is that make you better?
02:09:55 Actually, the drama, the tension between personalities,
02:09:58 and all that kind of stuff.
02:10:01 Look, a rollercoaster ride without ups and downs
02:10:04 is no fun.
02:10:05 It’s the journey, it’s the journey that brings,
02:10:10 it brings out the best in everyone.
02:10:12 We’re forged, we’re tempered by those experiences,
02:10:17 not all the ups, but also the downs,
02:10:19 and that’s when you get the humanity and the connection,
02:10:22 and we can tell these stories till we’re blue in the face,
02:10:25 and smile every time, because we did something together
02:10:28 that each of us couldn’t do apart,
02:10:30 but when it comes together,
02:10:32 that’s where all the emotions happen,
02:10:34 and that’s where, if it’s born out of the right reasons,
02:10:36 and the right story, and the right way,
02:10:38 that’s where the magic happens,
02:10:40 not just for the customer,
02:10:41 but for how it transforms each person
02:10:43 who is working on it,
02:10:45 and they will never forget those experiences in their life,
02:10:48 positively and negatively, that happened at the time,
02:10:51 but they look back, and it’s only positive,
02:10:53 because they did something that mattered.
02:10:56 Yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life
02:11:00 is Nest, Nest thermostats, and the big umbrella of Nest.
02:11:08 Again, as part of this Netflix series, season three,
02:11:14 what was the most memorable, the most painful,
02:11:17 the most insight leading challenge
02:11:22 you had to overcome to bring Nest to life?
02:11:24 Well, the first thing for me was making someone care
02:11:33 about their thermostat.
02:11:37 No one considers it.
02:11:39 They never had any customer choice.
02:11:41 They didn’t install it.
02:11:43 They usually don’t even use it,
02:11:44 because it’s so complicated, or what have you,
02:11:46 they just, they bitch at it, they hide it in the corner,
02:11:50 and then they just pay the bill, right,
02:11:52 of whatever it is, right?
02:11:54 It’s totally unloved, unconsidered, right?
02:11:58 So how do you wake up, like I said, the virus of doubt,
02:12:00 how do you wake that up and get people going,
02:12:03 remember every day when you go in and it’s like,
02:12:05 you’re just frustrated, and then you get the bill
02:12:07 and you pay the bill, so you have to do that.
02:12:08 So that was one thing.
02:12:10 I think the other big one was not delivering,
02:12:12 all of it was hard, right?
02:12:14 It was constrained, we had only so much stuff,
02:12:16 we were bootstrapped, we didn’t have massive funding,
02:12:19 we didn’t get hundreds of millions of dollars,
02:12:21 but we did it for the right reasons.
02:12:22 But I think the other big part of it was
02:12:25 not just building a disruptive product,
02:12:27 because a lot of the people on the team had done that,
02:12:29 we knew what we were doing, and that was,
02:12:32 if we got the design right, we could deliver it
02:12:36 with enough time.
02:12:40 It was getting the disruptive go to market,
02:12:42 in other words, how to take that product
02:12:44 from the end of the production line
02:12:46 and get it into the customer’s hands,
02:12:49 because there was no retail or customer choice
02:12:53 in thermostats.
02:12:54 No one even, it was never considered purchase.
02:12:57 They never thought they had choice.
02:13:00 Some guy, usually in suspenders and a butt crack,
02:13:03 told them, looked around, looked at their house
02:13:05 and said, this looks like somebody who’s got,
02:13:08 is well to do.
02:13:09 This thermostat is now gonna cost you $350,
02:13:13 thank you very much.
02:13:14 And you’re like, I’ll take whatever you give me, right?
02:13:17 And then it goes into another house,
02:13:18 it’s worth $100, it was the same damn thing, right?
02:13:21 So there was no price transparency,
02:13:23 there was no choice, you just got what you were given.
02:13:26 So how do you go, and this was an entrenched industry,
02:13:30 that’s why there was no innovation in it,
02:13:34 because it was doing just fine
02:13:35 because every house needed them.
02:13:37 All the installers were programmed by the product deliverers,
02:13:42 by bonuses to say, you’re gonna only carry our product,
02:13:49 and if you sell this many,
02:13:50 you’re gonna get a free trip to Hawaii, right?
02:13:53 And for these guys who install,
02:13:54 I get a free trip to Hawaii, that’s dream for them, right?
02:13:57 So this whole channel was fully controlled
02:14:00 by the product guys,
02:14:01 and it was almost monopolistic in a way.
02:14:04 So how do you go around that?
02:14:06 So creating a disruptive go to market channel,
02:14:10 one was direct to consumer, right?
02:14:13 And all the marketing that was necessary
02:14:15 to get that message across.
02:14:17 Another one was getting the installation right.
02:14:21 No one was self installing thermostats.
02:14:24 So how do we get enough people who are early adopters
02:14:27 to be able to self install them confidently?
02:14:30 So they didn’t still have to call the guy
02:14:32 to come and install it,
02:14:34 because then he would say, this is a crap product.
02:14:36 No, I got the most better product, right?
02:14:38 So you had to get rid of that friction.
02:14:40 And then ultimately, how do you get the people
02:14:42 who were not just early adopters,
02:14:44 but people who needed to see it
02:14:45 and touch it before they bought it?
02:14:47 How do you get that into retail
02:14:49 when the large brands of the time of thermostats
02:14:53 and Home Depot and Lowe’s had contracts
02:14:55 that they couldn’t bring in any other brands?
02:14:58 They were owning the channel all the way
02:15:00 to where there was any sort of slight customer choice.
02:15:04 And it was really contractor choice
02:15:06 more than it was in consumer choice.
02:15:09 So all of that had to be innovated along with the product.
02:15:13 And so to me, that was a huge challenge
02:15:15 and something I had never done,
02:15:17 most of us had never done.
02:15:18 And we had to create, that was as much as a project
02:15:21 as actually delivering the product itself.
02:15:25 So it turned out to be a giant hit.
02:15:28 And it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion.
02:15:33 $3.2 billion.
02:15:36 As a founder and leader, just out of curiosity,
02:15:39 in these cases of acquisition, is it always a good thing?
02:15:44 Is there any part of you and the team
02:15:47 that considered saying no?
02:15:49 Oh, we considered saying no
02:15:51 all the way along the process, right?
02:15:54 We’d all been in big companies before.
02:15:58 We knew what it was like and the politics
02:16:01 and all the other stuff and what I came to learn,
02:16:04 especially from Phillips,
02:16:06 because Phillips was a very, it was 375,000 people.
02:16:08 It was a big, it was massive company, right?
02:16:11 And tons of politics.
02:16:13 And I was like, do we wanna go back into that world?
02:16:15 Because I had so many negative experiences from that.
02:16:19 But then going to Apple, which was not big,
02:16:22 but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics.
02:16:24 But then when you saw a leader rise up
02:16:26 and get rid of those dynamics or not,
02:16:28 allow many of them to flourish,
02:16:32 then you’re like, oh, with the right leadership,
02:16:35 this can be a beautiful marriage, right?
02:16:37 And so for four months, we were working together with them,
02:16:41 with Google, to make sure that we had the right leadership
02:16:43 and we were gonna be in the right environment
02:16:45 that it felt right.
02:16:47 So that happened.
02:16:49 It absolutely happened.
02:16:50 We worked on all the details.
02:16:51 We didn’t even talk about price.
02:16:53 We were talking about how’s the brand gonna work?
02:16:55 Who’s the team gonna work with?
02:16:56 How are we gonna get IP?
02:16:58 How are we gonna do exchanges?
02:16:59 How are we gonna get budgets and all that stuff done?
02:17:01 So we worked through all of that
02:17:02 before we actually sealed any kind of deal
02:17:04 because they were already an investor in the company.
02:17:05 So we already knew,
02:17:07 they knew relatively where the end point was for the price.
02:17:12 So working through all of those prerequisites,
02:17:15 I knew that as a individual product company
02:17:20 that was trying to create a platform,
02:17:22 no investors were gonna invest in a platform
02:17:25 that could take three, four years
02:17:27 and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars to build
02:17:30 without all kinds of new products at the same time.
02:17:33 And products that we were having, which were successes,
02:17:35 but they weren’t even break even yet, right?
02:17:37 We were still developing them.
02:17:39 So how are we gonna get more people to fund
02:17:42 all of these things and this platform
02:17:44 that I really wanna create?
02:17:46 Because my worry, and I had seen this many times
02:17:48 in Silicon Valley, is these small startups have bravado
02:17:51 and they said, I’m gonna take on the big guys, right?
02:17:54 With a platform.
02:17:55 But when those platform guys show up
02:17:57 and Apple says they’re gonna get in the,
02:17:59 at the time, nobody cared.
02:18:01 They were curious, what’s next?
02:18:04 But Apple wasn’t in the market,
02:18:07 Google wasn’t in the market yet,
02:18:09 Amazon wasn’t there, Microsoft, Samsung,
02:18:12 they were all just, that’s curious, right?
02:18:16 And I had watched, if you said,
02:18:19 I’m gonna go challenge them
02:18:20 and I’m gonna build a platform,
02:18:22 and then they all of a sudden one by one go,
02:18:24 oh, well, we’re building a platform now,
02:18:26 we’re building a platform.
02:18:27 They flooded you to death, fear, uncertainty, doubt,
02:18:29 and the developers run away
02:18:31 and you can’t make that platform.
02:18:32 So I’m like, before the landscape gets changed on us,
02:18:35 because we’ve tracked so much attention,
02:18:37 they announced something,
02:18:38 we need to change the landscape on them.
02:18:42 Let’s go to the best place
02:18:44 where we can build out the platform,
02:18:46 have the right leadership behind us
02:18:48 to help us grow this thing into what the vision it should be.
02:18:51 And that’s what we believed we were doing
02:18:53 with the Google acquisition.
02:18:55 Is it possible to take on the platforms?
02:19:00 So you said there’s a lot of startups
02:19:01 with bravado and all that kind of stuff.
02:19:04 It doesn’t mean, James Joyce, when he was 20,
02:19:07 he said, I’m gonna be the greatest writer
02:19:09 of the 20th century before he wrote anything of value.
02:19:15 One of them might be actually right.
02:19:17 Yeah, in this modern world,
02:19:21 when you, so first of all, people should definitely
02:19:25 get your book built as just this giant number of advice
02:19:31 on this exact question of how to build cool things,
02:19:36 how to build a startup,
02:19:37 how to all the different stages of that team and hiring.
02:19:41 It’s mostly human nature.
02:19:43 It’s not technical.
02:19:44 It’s mostly human nature behind it.
02:19:46 And it turns out it’s,
02:19:48 turtles all the way down this human at the bottom.
02:19:51 Yes, so is it possible to build startups
02:19:56 that take on the big guys,
02:19:58 whatever that is of the modern era?
02:20:01 So for now, it’s these platforms of Apple, Google, Twitter,
02:20:05 I don’t even know, Meta I guess called now.
02:20:09 Is it possible to take them on?
02:20:11 Absolutely, but you don’t take them on on their same turf.
02:20:15 You take them on on the turf
02:20:16 they’re gonna want to have in the future, right?
02:20:20 Spotify is a platform.
02:20:21 It started as an application, is now a platform, right?
02:20:26 Think of WeChat.
02:20:28 Think of all the super apps out there
02:20:30 that are now wallets and delivery services
02:20:33 and travel services and transportation services
02:20:37 all within an app.
02:20:39 They’ve innovated in a different level,
02:20:40 in a different space that the platform companies weren’t.
02:20:46 Google was an app company.
02:20:49 It was solving search.
02:20:51 And then it became a platform company.
02:20:52 Apple was solving personal computing.
02:20:55 And then iPhone was solving internet browsing,
02:21:00 all that stuff.
02:21:01 And then it became a platform company
02:21:03 when the app store was at it.
02:21:04 If you look at it,
02:21:05 there’s no such thing as building a platform company.
02:21:07 You build a great app first,
02:21:09 and then you can expand it
02:21:11 and have the right to become a platform.
02:21:14 Your whole book is just a bunch of advice for young people.
02:21:19 But let me ask.
02:21:20 And older people.
02:21:20 And old, well, everyone is young at heart.
02:21:23 And if you’re not, you should be.
02:21:25 So what, in terms of picking a career,
02:21:28 you have advice on this point.
02:21:29 What advice would you give to a person
02:21:32 on how to pick a career?
02:21:35 What is it you want to learn?
02:21:37 And who is it you want to learn from?
02:21:39 Just like you pick a university.
02:21:42 You’re like, I wanna go here for this expertise.
02:21:44 I’ve heard about these programs, especially graduate,
02:21:47 graduate studies, you go for a certain program
02:21:51 with a certain set of people.
02:21:52 Why don’t you do that when it comes to a job?
02:21:56 You just don’t go, or in a career,
02:21:58 you just don’t go and say,
02:21:59 I just wanna go work at Google,
02:22:00 or I just wanna work at Apple.
02:22:02 You wanna go to a certain team
02:22:04 with a certain set of people
02:22:05 and work with them on something
02:22:07 that you’re really curious about
02:22:08 and you wanna learn about.
02:22:10 That’s such, I just wanted to comment that,
02:22:12 that’s such a, it’s a subtle but a brilliant framing
02:22:17 of just ask the question, what do I want to learn?
02:22:22 And then see what career path is going to maximize that.
02:22:29 That’s so interesting.
02:22:31 It’s the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me.
02:22:35 When I say I’m gonna bring somebody on the team,
02:22:36 first question is, what do you wanna learn?
02:22:39 I don’t want the expert, like we talked about earlier,
02:22:41 says, I’m the expert in this.
02:22:43 You’re gonna hire me as the expert.
02:22:46 We’re doing something new.
02:22:47 You’re not an expert,
02:22:48 cause we’re not an expert either.
02:22:50 What is it you wanna learn?
02:22:53 And on the topic of learning,
02:22:58 what is the best way to learn?
02:23:02 What, starting, you go into this new place,
02:23:06 into this new world, into maybe V1,
02:23:10 you said you’re building V1.
02:23:12 I mean, the whole world is late, is full of V1s
02:23:17 or V0s waiting for the V1 to come along.
02:23:20 Zero to one.
02:23:21 Zero to one.
02:23:22 What’s the process of that look like?
02:23:25 What’s the process of learning?
02:23:27 How do you learn?
02:23:29 Well, let me put a framing
02:23:31 and then we’ll talk about that last piece.
02:23:34 I have now looking back, especially writing this book,
02:23:37 I have a version one of myself, a version two,
02:23:40 a version three, a version four.
02:23:43 I had a lot of opinions about myself
02:23:46 and what I wanted to do.
02:23:47 Sometimes those opinions for certain people,
02:23:50 those opinions are formed
02:23:52 and they get the data from their parents
02:23:54 and they go do what their parents told them to do
02:23:55 or their surroundings.
02:23:57 My opinions was like, I wanna go and learn this.
02:23:59 I’m curious about that.
02:24:00 I made the zero to one move.
02:24:02 And then over time by doing,
02:24:05 I was refining those things
02:24:06 and learning what I was really curious about
02:24:08 and what I was really good about
02:24:10 because I was getting data.
02:24:11 And then I was like, then I had another set of opinions
02:24:14 to create version two of me.
02:24:16 And then I would go and do it.
02:24:17 So I was learning by doing,
02:24:19 starting with the opinion,
02:24:21 you’re not gonna get any facts.
02:24:22 Most people are like,
02:24:24 where do I make the most money for my position?
02:24:27 They’re trying to start with data.
02:24:30 Start with the why, what’s your curiosity?
02:24:33 What do you wanna learn?
02:24:35 And then follow that.
02:24:37 I took the lowest job on the totem pole at General Magic
02:24:42 because I wanted to get in there
02:24:43 to work with the right team.
02:24:44 I didn’t even know what they were doing, right?
02:24:47 But I thought that it felt right, right?
02:24:51 I was barely living above the poverty line working there,
02:24:54 working 80 hours a week
02:24:55 because it was so amazing to learn
02:24:57 just like a college student, right?
02:24:59 That’s what I was doing.
02:25:00 And then I learned more from that
02:25:03 and then changed those opinions into data.
02:25:06 And then I found other opinions.
02:25:07 So it’s the same thing, but it was by doing, right?
02:25:11 The way you find out what you wanna do in life
02:25:13 is by figuring out what you don’t wanna do.
02:25:16 And the only way you find that out
02:25:17 is by doing a bunch of stuff.
02:25:19 Doing a bunch of stuff and refining it.
02:25:21 That’s hilarious.
02:25:22 Yeah, that’s brilliant.
02:25:24 So in terms of the career path
02:25:27 of leaping into the startup world and launching a startup,
02:25:31 what does it take to successfully found a startup,
02:25:35 to have a chance to succeed?
02:25:37 And maybe how do you decide to take that leap?
02:25:46 Is there sort of having founded,
02:25:49 having been part of many V1s,
02:25:52 many of some of the most successful V1s ever,
02:25:57 what’s it take to take that leap?
02:25:58 Maybe leave your job, cushy job at a company
02:26:03 and do the startup.
02:26:06 What does it take?
02:26:08 It takes belief in yourself.
02:26:10 That’s the first thing.
02:26:12 Belief that you can do it.
02:26:13 Not, but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around you
02:26:17 or coaches around you to make sure you know
02:26:19 you’re not crazy.
02:26:21 It’s a crazy smart idea, but you’re not crazy
02:26:24 and you’re just working on something
02:26:26 as like a lone mad man or woman.
02:26:31 You have a great idea.
02:26:32 And like I said, great ideas chase you.
02:26:36 In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas
02:26:39 than they have time to implement.
02:26:41 I used to be like that.
02:26:42 I would like, oh my God, if this idea, this idea,
02:26:44 and you try to do all of them,
02:26:47 but the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on
02:26:50 and you shut out all those other things
02:26:52 and you bring them other ideas
02:26:53 into the thing you’re trying to do.
02:26:54 So I try to run away from a great idea
02:26:58 and then it stalks me.
02:26:59 It hunts you down because you’re like,
02:27:01 ah, that’s gonna have this problem.
02:27:03 I’m gonna put it aside.
02:27:05 And then all of a sudden, you know, a few days later,
02:27:08 oh, I think I know how to solve that problem.
02:27:10 Or I talk to somebody and you’re just always kind of
02:27:13 niggling around the edges of it.
02:27:15 And then at some point it’s like,
02:27:17 it just becomes like this black hole
02:27:19 that just sucks you in and you’re like,
02:27:20 I can’t think about anything else but this.
02:27:23 It’s almost like a relationship in the world, right?
02:27:26 You know, when you have it with a, you find your partner.
02:27:29 You know, you’re like, mm, mm, wait, mm, something.
02:27:33 And then you’re trying to like,
02:27:34 and then all of a sudden it just,
02:27:35 it comes together, right?
02:27:36 It’s kind of like that.
02:27:37 Ultimately achieved focus.
02:27:38 See, I’m different.
02:27:39 I just dive right in.
02:27:41 I used to do that too.
02:27:42 I used to dive right in.
02:27:43 Yeah.
02:27:44 But I learned that you’d need time.
02:27:45 It’s more effective to run away from it.
02:27:47 Run away from it.
02:27:48 And so it chases you because it makes you think harder
02:27:51 about that story.
02:27:52 This is not dating advice.
02:27:53 We’re talking about stardom.
02:27:54 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:27:57 But ultimately, so you have achieved a focus on it.
02:28:03 But you also said to believe in yourself.
02:28:05 So it’s not necessarily even the idea.
02:28:06 It’s the human that believe in the human being.
02:28:11 You have to believe in yourself and the idea that you have.
02:28:15 Because if you don’t have that belief,
02:28:17 then you can’t project that to other people
02:28:20 to say, join the team.
02:28:24 Let me ask you on, because you mentioned mentors
02:28:26 and you’ve talked about having had incredible mentors
02:28:30 in your life.
02:28:30 You’re also a mentor to a very large number of people.
02:28:34 What does it take to find a mentor?
02:28:36 How do you find a great mentor?
02:28:40 Usually they also find you.
02:28:42 Is it like with the ideas?
02:28:44 No, no, no, no, no, no.
02:28:46 No, what happens is you’re in the right,
02:28:48 you have a community around you, okay?
02:28:51 And because you’ve been building a network,
02:28:53 because you can’t do it alone.
02:28:55 So you have to create this network around you
02:28:57 of relationships, not transactions,
02:29:00 but relationships over time that you really cherish
02:29:02 and people you talk to, okay?
02:29:04 And you share vulnerable or nascent ideas with
02:29:09 or crazy opinions with, and then you argue them through.
02:29:13 But you start to see resonate, and it’s not about age.
02:29:18 It’s just about this connection, right?
02:29:20 I have mentors.
02:29:21 Obviously when I was young, all my mentors were older.
02:29:23 And as I get older, I have mentors who are younger than me
02:29:27 or the same age, right?
02:29:28 They’re not all just older, right?
02:29:30 And so it’s about that connection.
02:29:32 It’s about being on that same wavelength,
02:29:35 but they also, they can counterbalance you.
02:29:39 They compliment you in some way.
02:29:41 Like my best mentors had nothing to do with technology.
02:29:43 They didn’t know anything about technology, right?
02:29:46 The way we know it.
02:29:47 They were all about human nature and they could reflect that
02:29:49 and help me get more human focused and more empathetic
02:29:53 because I was so detailed in the technology.
02:29:56 I needed to see from other perspectives,
02:29:58 but then they wanted to learn more about the technology,
02:30:01 right?
02:30:01 Or they thought that this idea was so great
02:30:03 that it should exist.
02:30:04 Now let’s work together on that.
02:30:06 So it’s really, they have to find you
02:30:08 and you have to find them.
02:30:10 And that’s by sharing.
02:30:11 You just don’t go and look it up on the internet
02:30:14 and say, who are the best mentors in the world?
02:30:16 It just doesn’t work that way.
02:30:18 So form a network of people and see where,
02:30:21 I mean, it’s like finding relationships, finding love,
02:30:23 all that kind of friendship.
02:30:24 Human nature.
02:30:27 Venture capitalists, money.
02:30:29 Do VCs help or hurt a business in general?
02:30:33 So like in those early stages in the chase
02:30:35 of developing a V1, just what’s the constructive
02:30:39 and destructive power of money
02:30:42 in the development of a brilliant idea
02:30:45 and the deployment of a brilliant idea?
02:30:47 I have seen brilliant venture capitalists.
02:30:50 I have seen horrible ones.
02:30:53 Ones that care about their LPs more
02:30:56 than they care about the entrepreneurs.
02:30:58 Of course, everyone’s in it, at the end of the day,
02:31:01 especially venture capital, they have to give a return
02:31:03 to their limited partners, the people who invest in money
02:31:07 that they have to shepherd that money
02:31:09 and make sure it’s watched over properly.
02:31:12 But when there’s not a balance, a pushback
02:31:14 in a venture capitalist between what the LPs
02:31:17 needs and what the entrepreneur needs,
02:31:20 and that the entrepreneur might be trying really hard,
02:31:23 but if they don’t see, the VC doesn’t see,
02:31:25 the exit’s gonna happen in two years
02:31:27 and they just leave them hanging,
02:31:29 when there’s no, the value exchange is only money
02:31:33 and not mentorship or ideas or other things,
02:31:37 when there’s not a relationship, but really a transaction,
02:31:40 that’s when money is toxic.
02:31:43 Because you can get money everywhere.
02:31:44 Maybe it’s a little harder today,
02:31:46 over the last month, but you can still find people
02:31:49 with money who are on that, who wanna enable your mission
02:31:54 and can be mentors, not always, not all of them,
02:31:57 but some of them can be mentors, but they’re on your side,
02:32:01 then it’s incredibly powerful
02:32:03 because it’s not just one plus one equals two, right?
02:32:06 It’s something bigger than that
02:32:07 because then they can bring their networks of people
02:32:09 and their networks of companies
02:32:11 and other people they worked with
02:32:12 that might wanna join your mission, right?
02:32:17 That’s the kind of venture capitalist
02:32:19 and smart money that’s out there, right?
02:32:22 But you have to build a relationship.
02:32:23 People go, oh, look at that valuation.
02:32:26 Oh, it’s the brand name of the VC that’s investing me.
02:32:29 No, it boils down to who’s that partner
02:32:32 and how experienced are they?
02:32:34 Don’t just give me the brand, give me the person
02:32:37 because that’s the person I’m gonna be interacting with.
02:32:40 I have to, there’s a million questions I wanna ask you,
02:32:42 but we’re on season five already.
02:32:46 But let me ask you, it seems like
02:32:50 out of all the brilliant things you write about,
02:32:51 it seems like not an important question,
02:32:53 but it’s a fascinating one to me as lawyers.
02:32:55 You write about this.
02:32:56 So does the company need lawyers and why?
02:33:03 And what kind?
02:33:04 So you write about sort of the value of this game, I guess.
02:33:07 Right, the legal game.
02:33:09 It’s…
02:33:13 Why do we need lawyers?
02:33:14 You sound exasperated by lawyers.
02:33:16 I don’t have a good question, I guess.
02:33:19 Well, because…
02:33:20 The why of lawyers is what you’re asking.
02:33:21 The why of lawyers, yes, exactly.
02:33:23 Okay, the why of lawyers.
02:33:25 Thank you.
02:33:26 You even do the question.
02:33:29 We just have to put why in front of everything you ask
02:33:32 and then we’ll be there.
02:33:33 Lawyers, why, why?
02:33:34 Even mafiosos had lawyers.
02:33:37 Okay, you know, Tony Soprano, you know, Scarface,
02:33:44 all of them had lawyers, right?
02:33:46 Why?
02:33:47 Because there are things in this world
02:33:49 that you don’t always consider in the government,
02:33:53 in laws, in competitors,
02:33:57 because you’re so focused on what you’re doing,
02:34:00 they have to watch out for you, right?
02:34:03 Now, the best kind of lawyers are the ones
02:34:05 who try to work with you to enable what you’re doing
02:34:08 and see gray areas.
02:34:11 Law is not black or white, it’s how it’s interpreted, right?
02:34:15 And so they can help interpret things a certain way
02:34:17 or help push on things a certain way
02:34:19 to get change to happen or allow change to happen.
02:34:22 Because if you have lawyers who are always,
02:34:24 just like you were talking about PR people,
02:34:26 if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything,
02:34:28 because their job is to really say no or maybe,
02:34:30 they’ll never say yes.
02:34:32 And you also say their job is to say no
02:34:35 and bill you by the hour.
02:34:36 Exactly, exactly.
02:34:38 Depressing.
02:34:39 Right?
02:34:40 Yeah.
02:34:41 If you don’t wanna know, don’t ask them,
02:34:42 because you’re gonna get a no,
02:34:43 maybe a maybe.
02:34:44 And you’ll get charged for it.
02:34:45 And you’ll get charged for it anyways, right?
02:34:47 So to have a partner, to have them on your team,
02:34:52 to help you see maybe some of the things you don’t see,
02:34:55 some consequences, they help to rein that in
02:34:58 or change your language.
02:35:00 Like, are you gonna get sued for this ad?
02:35:02 Just change this one word and it helps.
02:35:05 Right?
02:35:06 So you need to have a partner.
02:35:07 Most of the times, especially engineers or designers,
02:35:10 they see lawyers as only stifling.
02:35:13 Lawyers can actually, if you do it right
02:35:15 and you have the right type,
02:35:16 they can actually open up a whole new world for you
02:35:19 because of the interpretation
02:35:20 and how we go about doing things.
02:35:22 So.
02:35:23 And they help you not get bogged down
02:35:25 in the pain of little mistakes that didn’t mean anything.
02:35:28 Exactly, you shot yourself in the foot
02:35:29 and you didn’t even know it.
02:35:30 You didn’t even know you were carrying the gun.
02:35:33 Just to jump around, Charles Bukowski once wrote,
02:35:36 “‘Find what you love and let it kill you.’”
02:35:40 So the question is about work life balance.
02:35:44 That’s like finding an idea and let it chase you.
02:35:46 Yes, but a little more aggressive.
02:35:50 So what does work life balance look like
02:35:54 that maximizes success and or happiness?
02:35:59 Is there such a thing as work life balance?
02:36:02 Is, can you speak to this?
02:36:05 When your work is your life,
02:36:07 and I mean that in the positive sense.
02:36:10 When you’re on a mission that really matters
02:36:12 and you know that you can really affect,
02:36:15 not just yourself, but other people’s lives,
02:36:18 and then that is very rewarding, right?
02:36:21 That’s not work.
02:36:23 That’s, like I said, a mission, right?
02:36:25 You adopt that.
02:36:27 But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself.
02:36:30 At General Magic, wonderful documentary,
02:36:32 if no one’s seen it, you gotta see that.
02:36:34 It’s amazing.
02:36:35 I was physically and mentally unhealthy,
02:36:37 socially unhealthy as well,
02:36:38 because I put every waking minute into this thing,
02:36:43 every ounce of me into it.
02:36:45 And when it was a spectacular disaster,
02:36:48 we were making the iPhone 15 years too early,
02:36:53 the bottom fell out.
02:36:54 I had nothing left.
02:36:55 I had to get healthy socially, emotionally, physically
02:36:59 after that, that trauma.
02:37:03 I let everything go.
02:37:04 I learned from that that you have to,
02:37:06 even though you might put everything into your work,
02:37:09 you need to find balance outside of it.
02:37:11 Now that doesn’t mean you’re always,
02:37:14 you know, it’s three days a week working
02:37:16 and four days a week or whatever it was.
02:37:19 You’re still working as hard as ever,
02:37:21 but what you’re doing is you’re making sure
02:37:23 when your thinking time is during work,
02:37:26 that you’re not ruminating at three in the morning.
02:37:28 You use the tools that you have to put those ideas
02:37:31 into databases or on pages or somewhere else
02:37:34 so you can go back and look at them.
02:37:36 So you’re not always having to remember,
02:37:37 because what happens is most people
02:37:39 don’t write this stuff down.
02:37:40 So they just sit here and got to remember this,
02:37:41 I got to remember this, I got to remember this.
02:37:43 If you just put it into the tools
02:37:45 and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh.
02:37:48 A lot of the time is about ruminating
02:37:49 about what I need to get done and remembering everything
02:37:52 instead of doing the work.
02:37:55 That’s fascinating.
02:37:56 So if you just put it down on paper,
02:37:58 you can actually escape it.
02:38:00 Escape it for a time, to have peace for a time.
02:38:03 You mentioned General Magic.
02:38:08 Let me ask you the Russian question.
02:38:11 The Russian question.
02:38:13 What’s been the darkest moments of your life?
02:38:20 Where are some of the darkest places
02:38:21 you’ve got in your mind?
02:38:22 You talked about if you’re doing these kinds of things
02:38:26 with startups, you’re gonna have to face a crisis.
02:38:28 Right, absolutely.
02:38:29 If you’re doing it right, you’re gonna face it.
02:38:31 So for you personally, where were some
02:38:34 of the tougher moments in your life?
02:38:37 Growing up, I went to 12 schools in 15 years.
02:38:43 I was always the new kid.
02:38:47 Put yourself in those shoes, right?
02:38:49 You picked on, what were you picked on?
02:38:51 Well, absolutely, but even more so,
02:38:53 I was the geek with the computer.
02:38:55 Remember the nerds in the 80s?
02:38:57 You probably don’t know this, but believe me,
02:38:59 we were made fun of.
02:39:01 What were these computers?
02:39:02 What were these things?
02:39:03 You’re off in a cold.
02:39:04 They’re all off partying or going, whatever it was,
02:39:07 and I’m sitting there like,
02:39:09 and they’re like, this guy is just this alien, right?
02:39:12 Who’s this new guy who just showed up and,
02:39:15 and then you would ask the smart questions
02:39:17 and you couldn’t be the smartest in the,
02:39:20 because then you get picked on too.
02:39:22 And you’re the new kid.
02:39:23 So you’re in this environment that’s ever changing.
02:39:26 You don’t fit in and you are just asking questions
02:39:29 because you think they’re the right questions to answer,
02:39:32 but then they like, you’re making us look bad.
02:39:34 Don’t ask these smart questions
02:39:35 because you’re gonna make us do more work.
02:39:37 So right there, it’s pretty tough.
02:39:40 And I’m moving cities, right?
02:39:41 And I didn’t have the internet
02:39:42 to stay connected to people.
02:39:44 There was no internet.
02:39:45 Phone calls were $2 a minute.
02:39:47 So it was lonely too.
02:39:49 It was lonely, right?
02:39:51 Right?
02:39:52 I was a latchkey kid, right?
02:39:54 I had my brother, but he was a skateboarder
02:39:56 and he had a different social way of working.
02:40:00 He loved to do that stuff and be outside.
02:40:02 I loved the computer.
02:40:03 So even in the computer, you were alone in the family.
02:40:06 With the computer in the family, you were alone.
02:40:09 I was absolutely alone.
02:40:09 That was just me.
02:40:10 But then, then you could find the other geeks, right?
02:40:15 But there were just a few of us
02:40:16 and we made this little thing.
02:40:18 But then when you moved away,
02:40:20 you know, then I had to use a BBS
02:40:22 and a bulletin board system and a dial up modem.
02:40:24 And then I started hacking the phone system
02:40:27 to get free codes on MCI and Sprint back in the day
02:40:32 to get long distance, to get free codes to call my friends,
02:40:35 the geeks on the other side, right?
02:40:37 Or to dial into a BBS cheaply
02:40:39 that was in another part of the world.
02:40:41 So this was this subculture
02:40:43 and that was not accepted in any way.
02:40:45 And not the heroes that you see today
02:40:47 that are on the richest people in the world and everything.
02:40:52 So that was the first set of trauma.
02:40:54 And then the next one really was general magic.
02:40:56 You know, the end of that, like I described before.
02:40:59 And pulling yourself out and going just,
02:41:01 cause I got so insular in that world
02:41:03 of geeking out and building stuff
02:41:07 that I just tore all the social ties, right?
02:41:11 Because it was just, it was a drug.
02:41:12 I was hooked on that.
02:41:13 I was a junkie.
02:41:15 I had to get clean.
02:41:17 Yeah, and that made you who you are.
02:41:23 Tempered, tempered.
02:41:28 So Steve Jobs is no longer with us.
02:41:32 One day you also will no longer be with us.
02:41:36 That’s the thing about this life, it ends.
02:41:41 So no matter how many incredible things
02:41:43 you brought to this world,
02:41:44 no matter how many inventions you built,
02:41:48 you too shall perish.
02:41:49 Do you think about this?
02:41:51 Are you afraid of your death?
02:41:57 I am not afraid of my death.
02:42:00 I am an atheist.
02:42:04 And I think about the soul.
02:42:06 Because I do, even though I’m an atheist,
02:42:08 I think about the soul.
02:42:09 And the soul is the thing that you instill in others
02:42:14 when you go that lives on.
02:42:16 It’s not this thing that’s magically in space.
02:42:20 It’s the thing that you’ve imparted onto people
02:42:23 that you worked with and those relationships you’ve had.
02:42:26 And that soul lives on in the stories that they tell, right?
02:42:31 And through Build, I’m hopeful that those stories
02:42:34 stay relevant because they’re human nature.
02:42:36 They’re not about who knows what the next iPhone thing is
02:42:39 or the next iPod thing is.
02:42:40 The stuff that I have been able, the privilege to make
02:42:45 and work with people, those are all ephemeral.
02:42:48 The iPod’s gone now, right?
02:42:49 This week, it was announced iPod’s dead after 21 years.
02:42:56 It is those human connections.
02:42:59 It’s that growth that you’ve helped someone
02:43:00 just like they helped me.
02:43:02 Just like Bill Campbell or Steve Jobs is gone,
02:43:04 but they made me be better.
02:43:06 That’s the soul that I believe in.
02:43:09 That’s fascinating that you say that.
02:43:11 Yeah, so many of these products,
02:43:14 I mean, to push back a little bit,
02:43:16 so even though the iPod is an end of an era.
02:43:19 Using it every day.
02:43:22 I think that, I mean, the number of people that impacted
02:43:26 is just, so I suppose the soul is carried by the people.
02:43:32 Exactly.
02:43:33 Sometimes the products you create
02:43:34 is the sort of the transport mechanism.
02:43:36 It’s the vessel.
02:43:38 It’s the vessel.
02:43:38 They felt the love, and they felt that love,
02:43:41 and it transformed them,
02:43:42 even if they don’t have the vessel anymore.
02:43:44 Yeah, and in that way, the soul lives on.
02:43:46 Just like the body is the vessel.
02:43:48 That’s beautifully put.
02:43:50 Why do you think we’re here?
02:43:52 What’s the meaning of life, Tony?
02:43:54 Jesus Christ.
02:43:56 And death, man.
02:43:58 We’re going all around.
02:43:58 Meaning of life?
02:44:00 Why, why?
02:44:01 Because you said it’s important to have a press release.
02:44:03 I did.
02:44:07 Okay.
02:44:08 If humanity, if life on earth,
02:44:09 if this thing, the consciousness,
02:44:11 the falling in love, and building bridges,
02:44:15 and iPods, and rockets,
02:44:18 and trying to extend out into the cosmos, why?
02:44:22 Why do you think we’re doing it?
02:44:25 Is there any meaning to it?
02:44:27 We are naturally curious.
02:44:30 We’re, we are naturally curious individuals.
02:44:35 And we are always looking for meaning.
02:44:39 We’re always trying to ascribe meaning to something,
02:44:42 or understanding of something, right?
02:44:46 And through that, it’s just like evolution, right?
02:44:49 And Darwinism.
02:44:50 It’s just that thing that’s baked into our being
02:44:53 at the most fundamental level.
02:44:55 Driven by curiosity.
02:44:56 Driven by curiosity.
02:44:58 You’re creating some pretty cool things along the way.
02:45:01 Tony, you, and speaking of cool things,
02:45:03 you’ve created some of the coolest things ever.
02:45:06 And on top of that, you’re just an amazing human being.
02:45:09 It’s a huge honor that you’ll sit and talk to me today.
02:45:11 This is fun.
02:45:12 Lex, this is great.
02:45:14 I didn’t know where I was going,
02:45:16 and I’m, let’s talk, I’m looking for season.
02:45:18 I would love to.
02:45:19 Seven, eight, nine.
02:45:20 Six, seven, yes.
02:45:21 Let’s go hang out and have dinner,
02:45:22 and just rap about all kinds of crazy,
02:45:24 I’d love to continue this.
02:45:26 I would too.
02:45:27 Thank you so much, Tony.
02:45:28 Thanks, man.
02:45:29 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tony Fadal.
02:45:32 To support this podcast,
02:45:33 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:45:36 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:45:39 from Tony Fadal himself.
02:45:41 The most wonderful part of building something together
02:45:43 with a team is that you’re walking side by side
02:45:46 with other people.
02:45:48 You’re all looking at your feet
02:45:49 and scanning the horizon at the same time.
02:45:52 Some people will see things you can’t,
02:45:54 and you will see things that are invisible to everyone else.
02:45:58 So don’t think doing the work just means
02:46:00 locking yourself into a room.
02:46:02 A huge part of it is walking with your team.
02:46:06 The work is reaching your destination together
02:46:09 or finding a new destination
02:46:11 and bringing the team with you.
02:46:13 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.