Tony Fadell
Creator of the iPod and co-creator of the iPhone at Apple, founder of Nest, and author of Build.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 23 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
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A version 1.0 has no data to be driven by, so one or two people must make the opinion-based decisions and own them.
And so, if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, you have to have one or two or a very, very small set of people who are in charge with making the opinion-based decisions
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
You cannot get real feedback on a new consumer product before shipping the whole thing; feedback starts when somebody spends their own money on it.
And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen you, you're not going to get that from consumers, ever. You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness so that when they do the evaluation and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Micromanagement should be aimed at the few decisions that matter, never at how people carry the work out.
And when I mean micromanaging, it means micromanage the decision, not necessarily operations of doing it.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Show 20 more
A home assistant is only as good as its context, and context comes from sensors placed around the house rather than from a better model.
the way you get best context is by having sensors properly placed around the home that don't necessarily invade privacy, but allow you to pick up a lot of comings and goings and who's who in the room and your voice and these kinds of things.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
What is worth building is found by starting from a long-standing pain and asking which new technology has just made it solvable.
And so, I always kind of start with okay, where's our current pain and are there new technologies to solve that pain?
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
What you have to invent is the whole system around a product, including how it is sold, bought and installed, not the one piece people remember.
So, you have to think about the full the full thing you're trying to build not just the one piece even though that's what you might remember. You have to remember it's it's a it's a system that you're going to innovate with.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Nothing works the first time: the first generation makes the product, the second fixes it, and only the third fixes the business.
make the product, fix the product after you get customer feedback and then make the business which means make the margins.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
You only fail if you stop; iteration that keeps going is not failure, it is learning.
You got to fail a few times till you get to till you find your way. And um and uh but that you only fail if you stop. If you keep iterating and keep going, well, then that's not failure. That's called learning.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
A product's real price is everything a customer has to buy in order to use it, not the number printed on its box.
if we don't have Windows connectivity, the iPod doesn't cost $349. It costs $3,000 because you got to buy a Mac.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
A customer only ever sees a product through the lens of its marketing and sales, which makes marketing part of the product rather than something done to it afterwards.
the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing and sales, right?
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
The press release should be written before the project starts, not after the product ships.
you should really make the press release before you you before you more or less start the project.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Agent-written code that runs and passes its tests is not enough: security, maintainability and being able to roll it back still need humans in the loop.
you can have an agent make code for you and it could work and it could test, but is it secure? Is it maintainable? If there's something going wrong, can you roll things back and understand what's going on?
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Fast software is fast fashion: it does not survive a season, and a company meant to last cannot be built on throwaway code.
So, you know, like what's called fast fashion, we got fast software. But software, if you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
AI coding works when a person owns the architecture and scopes the agent to small pieces of it, and fails when the whole thing is handed over.
What's proven is if you properly architect it and have co- cloud code go into certain sub segments or have cloud help you build the architecture, you modify, refine it, lock it in and say just work on these few things
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
A model can produce version two of a product that already exists, but the genuinely new version one still has to be made by people.
Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative, differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You got to You still need the very version one to be done.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Technology-led teams talk about what a product is and never about why it matters, and the why is where the whole story lives.
because too many times when we're technology-led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
No AI gadget replaces the screen: short of a jack into the brain, a display is still the best way to show visual information.
we're still going to need a display cuz sorry people, unless we're plugging it into our brain like a BCI brain computer or there's some laser thing going into our retina, we're going to need a display.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Devices should be built voice-first, with keyboard and touch demoted to second and third, the exact reverse of how the smartphone was layered.
We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it, and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do with Nest, which is I want to remove displays, and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature, and you build around voice.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Software cannot reach its next level until somebody builds the next level of hardware underneath it.
we can't get to the next level of software if we don't make the next level of hardware.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
By the time a technology is hot it is already too late to start in it.
there's too many people who chase their tail and chase whatever the hottest thing is. When it's already hot, it's already too late to be in it.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Incumbents are unseated by a fundamentally different product, never by better features or better marketing.
I invest in the deep technologies that are going to unseat the incumbents because it's going to change the market or the product in such a dramatic way that customers will choose this.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
A builder asked to addict users should leave, because there are always other jobs and no amount of money is worth tearing up the fabric of a society.
Make sure you're not trying to addict your users. And if anybody is, there's always other jobs, and there's always other better companies. And don't chase the money for tearing apart what it is, the fabric of the society that we built.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
Making your customers unhealthy is a short-term gain that ends with having no customers.
Sure, you could have a short-term gain in your customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, you're not going to have customers.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more) Said 7 Jun 2026
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