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Tony Fadell is a “Lebanese American” entrepreneur, innovator, designer and angel investors. He’s considered the father of the iPod and he served as the Senior Vice President of the iPod division at Apple. He’s also the co-founder of Nest Labs, a home automation company, which was recently acquired by Google for $3.2B in January 2014.
With a Bachelor in Computer Engineering, from the University of Michigan, Tony went firstly to work for Philips Electronics, where he led the Mobile Computing Group, in 1995 and then was hired by Apple in 2001 as the guy who was designing the iPod and planning Apple’s audio strategy. During his time at Apple, Tony Fadell led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and also the first three generations of the iPhone.
As he states on his Nest’s profile, he’s the author of more than 300 patents. In 2010, Tony decided to gather all the experience he got from years of learning and putting it in Nest Labs, the company he co-founded with Matt Rogers, a former Apple colleague. The aim of the company was to “reinvent the unloved things in your home”. The first product they released was a learning programmable thermostat, the Nest Thermostat, which is now in its second generation.
Tony Fadell doesn’t belong to the dropout generation, he’s one of those guys who decided to learn before starting something. As he also underlines in his keynotes, he has spent his first two decades, learning from those who had previously innovated. After that long and intensive experience, he decided to take all that knowledge and start a company.
He’s a perfectionist. He doesn’t understand the hardware companies that run Kickstarter campaigns and he’s definitely the guy you want to listen to if you want to build hardware. He probably accepted Google’s offer because to him, it meant getting into a playground, without having any financial problems, with the freedom to reinvent things and innovate.
